Joanna Kavenna
Tracks in the Snow
Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia
By Piers Vitebsky
HarperCollins 464pp £20 order from our bookshop
Siberia is the great white blankness in the Russian imagination, a place of emptiness and darkness, associated with disappearance and abandonment. In his seminal account of his northern travels, In Siberia (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1999), Colin Thubron describes it as a place where humans and animals are dwarfed by the vastness of the ice-fields, rendered little more than smudges on the snow; a land, he adds, of ‘bleak beauty, and an indelible fear … the ultimate, unearthly Abroad. A place from which you will not return.’ It is a blankness into which millions of Russians disappeared during the last century, left to decline, lost in the snows. For Dostoevsky Siberia was a ‘House of the Dead’, its whiteness like suspense, a gruesome holding place for prisoners; a land where people cast away their identities, trading their names and fates with other prisoners, a sense of self increasingly meaningless against the vastness.
The Eveny nomads of Siberia exist at the opposite end of the symbolic spectrum from the ice-bound prisoners: they are endlessly peripatetic, ranging over the snows. The Eveny are a reindeer-herding people, one among around thirty indigenous minority peoples officially recognised in the Russian north. A recent census placed their
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘We know that Ballard was many things – novelist, fabulist, one-time assistant editor of “British Baker”, seer of Shepperton, poet laureate of airports. But, it seems, he was not a fan of Mrs Dalloway.’
Joanna Kavenna - Unlimited Dream Company
Joanna Kavenna: Unlimited Dream Company - Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 by J G Ballard (Edited by Mark Blacklock)
literaryreview.co.uk
“Remember when being Bono was uncool?” I’m back in my favourite lit mag @Lit_Review for their Christmas special, writing about Lou Reed and his new biography: https://literaryreview.co.uk/walks-on-the-wild-side
'Lord of the Flies meets The 120 Days of Sodom.' Some thoughts on the decline and fall of India’s Princely States for @Lit_Review: