The Last of Siberia

This afternoon I finished Tent Life in Siberia. This last segment saw the reunion of the original surveying expedition, who had been divided up and who had jointly found a route from the Amur River to the Bering Sea where the telegraph line could be put up. Labour and logs for the telegraph poles had been organized, and supplies gradually and belatedly arrived from America. Then, after two years, the news came, by newspaper and then by a proper message, that the second Atlantic cable had been laid, and that the first, unsuccessful cable had even been fished out and repaired in addition. The Western Union Telegraph Company lost something like $3,000,000 in the venture, and decided to stop the project. So the large wooden poles were left to freeze unused, the glass insulators were sold for teacups, and the Americans and Russians of the expedition left either by ship for America or by sleigh for St. Petersburg. The book ends quite abruptly, after a description of Irkutsk, which, as an outpost of civilization that had so many houses that numbers were needed to identify them, was the first and rather difficult station on the road back to the life to which Mr. Kennan had been used.

I liked the book. I'm not sure how truthful it is, but it is well-written (though in a somewhat unindividual style of the time, and though the author sometimes repeats sentences), detailed, and certainly interesting. Since the author is an American, he is not as condescending to the Kor(y)aks and other Siberian natives as one might expect, and he seems to have had a good understanding with them. At the same time, it doesn't take a crusading "p.c.-fascist" to detect a racist undercurrent, or at least a strong distinction between employer and employee. And there are incidents of cruelty to animals, though not mean-spirited ones.

Besides reading, I made my bed and washed two of the window frames and dusted the top of my Sekretär (which is a desk with a bookshelf or drawers on top of it), then played some piano. Though spring has never had this effect on me before, it has inspired me to spring cleaning this year, much like it inspired Mr. Mole in The Wind in the Willows. As for the music session, it included accompanying T. as she played Marcello and Telemann on her recorder.