L'Axe du loup - Sylvain Tesson in the steps of escapees from the Gulag - The solution could be to carry in your gear an inexhaustible book

In May, I wrote about French travel writer Sylvain Tesson’s In the Forests of Siberia (2011), the book on his long, lonely stay in a cabin on the west shore of Lake Baikal.  Now I have read an earlier Tesson book that is a germ for Forest, a crazy mostly-solo walking / bicycling / horseback trip from Yakutsk to Calcutta, Wolf Axis: From Siberia to India in the steps of the escapees from the Gulag (L'Axe du loup: De la Sibérie à l'Inde, sur les pas des évadés du Goulag, 2004, all translations mine).

The steps are: south across the Siberian taiga, down the east shore of Lake Baikal, onto the Mongolian steppe, across the Gobi desert, up into Tibet, across the Himalayas.  Plus some detours.  Six thousand kilometers, eight months.  And he only takes one book with him!

The “wolf axis” of the title is the north-south axis, contrasted to the east-west flow of people, history and war between Europe and Asia.

Tesson is nominally following the route of Slawowir Rawicz, a Polish officer who claimed to have escaped from a Siberian prison and walked to India, the subject of his 1956 book The Long Walk.  That Rawicz’s book is some mix of fiction and accounts from other escapees is of interest to Tesson, but not of great relevance.  He is skeptical of Rawicz when he starts, and more skeptical when he finishes.  “A lesson here: when publishing a story floating on the edge of credibility, never say that you saw a yeti” (250).  But Rawicz describes a journey Tesson, whose specialty as a travel writer is Russia and central Asia, wanted to do for himself.  He thinks of his own book as a tribute to all of the escapees from the Gulag, and for that matter other refugees along the way, Mongolian, Chinese, or Tibetan.  Many of the most interesting parts of the book are Tesson’s encounters with people who had been in the Gulag themselves, or who were descended from the criminals, Old Believers, Decemberists, and other people sent into the Siberian forests by various Russian governments.

The French love these “in the steps of” travel books.  Who doesn’t.  Tesson bicycles from Lhassa to Darjeeling in the company of his friend Priscilla Telmon, who makes travel documentaries.  She crosses Tesson’s path because she is walking in the steps, from Vietnam into the Himalayas, solo, of the great traveler Alexandra David-Néel.  The French really love this kind of traveling.

Tesson ends the book with a list of everything he brings with him.  There is one book, “An Anthology of French Poetry (Jean-François Revel, Bouquins),” a seven hundred-page brick.  He says it took him ten years of hard traveling to come to this solution to the bookish backpacker’s great problem:

The solution could be to carry in your gear an inexhaustible book.  When I went around the world on a bicycle, I left with religious texts (Bible, Koran, etc).  These are inexhaustible texts, but they exhausted me.  During my long hike in the Himalayas I had novels which eat themselves (Melville, Wells, Hemingway): I devoured them in three days in the light of yak butter candles, and my soul remained hungry during the seven remaining months.  At the base of the Asian steppes, in the company of Priscilla Telmon, I had bound in our horse’s panniers old accounts of voyages (Rubrouck, Marco Polo, Fleming), but I found it too cruel to compare the description of the past to the sad reality of today, and too depressing to enter Samarkand through a post-Soviet industrial suburb while reading, in the pen of Ella Maillart, the evocation of “a blue village, soaring towards the sky.”  (119)

That passage, besides all of the fun book stuff, gives a good example of Tesson’s sensibility and humor.  I intentionally kept one enjoyable Frenchism in the translation, the books that “eat themselves (se mangent)”; we know those books.

A true French writer, Tesson has a habit of reaching for aphorisms that I take as an aspect of his literary culture.  A French thing.

In Darjeeling, I take the time to do two or three important things.

I visit the zoo to see the red pandas, one of the beasts of Creation to which I attach the most value.  The two Darjeeling specimens chew on their carceral despair in a concrete enclosure.  The difference between animal and man is that when they are imprisoned, the first remains beautiful while the second becomes a beast.  (256)

I don’t think British or American travel writers aphorize so strongly.  Few of them would really go for that last sentence.

I don’t think L’Axe du loup is in English.  Maybe someday.

Sylvain Tesson's six months in a cabin on shore of Lake Baikal - I take eighteen bottles: three per month.

Since I was promised a book about solitude in Bosco’s Malicroix and did not really get one, I thought I would mention a real one that I read last year, Sylvain Tesson’s In the Forests of Siberia (Dans les forêts de Sibérie, 2011).  The book exists in English under the embarrassing title The Consolations of the Forest, I assume to attract some of the readers of that recent bestseller about trees.  The German one?  Am I imagining that?  “Bestseller about trees” does not sound plausible.

Tesson is France’s most prestigious travel writer, and France has an audience that takes its travel writers, living and dead, seriously.  He has developed a special interest in Russia, visiting the country in many books.  By chance, earlier today Kaggsy wrote about another of his Russian books, Berezina (2015), in which he recreates Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow on a Soviet motorcycle.

In Forests, Tesson sits still for a while.  He spends February through July of 2010 in a cabin (the one to the upper left) on the shore of Lake Baikal, where he can be alone with himself, watch the weather and the lake, climb the nearby mountains, read, and drink.  There is a human being in another cabin a day’s walk to the north, and a couple of people a day’s walk to the south, and that’s it, at least until the lake thaws.  I was surprised how many visitors Tesson starts to get when the lake thaws. By then, though, the neighbors to the south have given Tesson a pair of dogs, and the nature of Tesson’s “solitude” has completely changed.  Forests kinda turns into a dog book.

Still, there is as much solitude, or more, than he wants.  Why is Tesson performing the experiment, other than to write this book?  In the first paragraph, he is shopping in Irkutsk.  “I had already filled six carts with pasta and Tabasco.”  He has trouble with the ketchup, because there are fifteen varieties.  “I choose ‘super hot tapas’ Heinz.  I take eighteen bottles: three per month” (p. 21).  This, he thinks, “fifteen kinds of ketchup,” is reason enough “to leave this world” for a while.

He says he told people in France that he was isolating himself “because I had fallen behind in my reading” (32), and I am including the contents of Tesson’s box of books, to which he gives a lot of thought.  “List of Ideal Reading Composed in Paris with Great Care in Anticipation of a Sojourn of Six Months in the Siberian Forest,” is the label up above.

When one is wary of the poverty of his internal life, it is necessary to carry some good books: one can always fill one’s own void.  The error would be to choose exclusively from difficult books, imagining that life in the woods maintains in you a very high spiritual temperature.  Time passes slowly when one has nothing but Hegel for a snowy afternoon.  (32, all translations are obviously mine)

Some philosophy, some crime novels, of course Robinson Crusoe, of course Walden, lots of American nature writing, remembering that the French for some reason do not produce their own nature writing, although Tesson’s book counts.  I am just assuming that people wandering by Wuthering Expectations are more curious about what Tesson reads than what he sees when the seasons change, although that is awfully interesting, or heaven forbid what he discovers about himself, which will not surprise many readers.  But as usual I prefer a writer’s irony to his sincerity.  Anyways, lists of books, everyone like those.