Tent Life in Siberia: A New Account of an Old Undertaking; Adventures Among the Koraks and Other Tribes in Kamchatka and Northern Asia
1870
Tent Life in Siberia: A New Account of an Old Undertaking; Adventures Among the Koraks and Other Tribes in Kamchatka and Northern Asia
1870
In the 1860s, the Russian-American Telegraph Company dreamed of spanning the world with a single wire, running cables through the Bering Strait and across the infinite emptiness of Siberia. George Kennan was among the first explorers sent to survey the route. What followed was a grand catastrophe: years of brutal cold, starvation, impossible distances, and encounters with peoples whose ways of life had remained unchanged for centuries. Kennan records it all with sharp humor and genuine wonder, capturing the midnight sun bleeding across tundra that seems to stretch forever, the terrifying silence of a landscape that offers no mercy, and the stubborn resilience of men determined to conquer the unconquerable. His account stands as both adventure narrative and historical artifact, a window into the Koraks and other Siberian tribes as they existed before the modern world arrived to transform them.
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“The bride wore a dress of that peculiar style of calico known as "furniture prints," without trimming or ornaments of any kind. Whether it was cut "bias" or with "gores," I'm sorry to say I don't know, dress-making being as much of an occult science to me as divination.””
— George Kennan
“It was one of those warm, still, almost tropical nights, so rarely seen on the northern waters, when a profound calm reigns in the moonless heavens, and the hush of absolute repose rests upon the tired, storm-vexed sea. There was not the faintest breath of air to stir even the reef-points of the motionless sails, or roughen the dark, polished mirror of water around the ship. A soft, almost imperceptible haze concealed the line of the far horizon, and blended sky and water into one great hollow sphere of twinkling stars. Earth and sea seemed to have passed away, and our motionless ship floated, spell-bound, in vacancy - the only earthly object in an encircling universe of stars and planets.””
— George Kennan
“I remember that a Korak once brought to me an old tattered fashion-plate from "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper," containing three or four full-length figures of imaginary ladies, in the widest expansion of crinoline which fashion at that time prescribed. The poor Korak said he had often wondered what those curious objects could be; and now, as I was an American, perhaps I could tell him. He evidently had not the most remote suspicion that they were intended to represent human beings. I told him that those curious objects, as he called them, were American women. He burst out into a "tyee-e-e-e" of amazement, and asked with a wondering look, "Are all the women in your country as big as that at the bottom?" It was a severe reflection upon our ladies' dress, and I did not venture to tell him that the bigness was artificial, but merely replied sadly that they were.””
— George Kennan
“Im not romantic””
— George Kennan
