Free Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier

tell you Khlebnikov’s years of birth and death (1885–1922) but not much more. Russian friends have said he often uses obscure language and colloquialisms, and is hard to translate even for someone who knows how. I still remain convinced that there must be something great about Khlebnikov, based on the passion that Sasha had.
    My trip back to Moscow went off without complications, luckily. When the ticket taker at the Omsk airport briefly questioned the Omsk–Moscow leg of my ticket, I glimpsed the complete nowhere in which I would have found myself had any explanation been required of me. In Moscow, Stas picked me up at the airport and took me again to the apartment of the ever-kind Chuda and Kolya, who must’ve had about fifty houseguests that summer. Being now mostly without translators among all-Russian speakers threw me even farther into shock. Chuda later told Katya I had looked panicked and pale. At my departure for New York, Stas drove me to Sheremetyevo Airport and explained (I think) in careful detail what I should do at the customs inspection if they asked about silver jewelry I’d bought in Ulan-Ude. When I didn’t understand, he explained more slowly and carefully than before.
    On the flight from Helsinki to New York, I sat next to a Swedish building contractor. Previously I had heard Swedish accents only in movies or comedy routines, and had half doubted that such an accent couldbe real. This contractor was big and curly haired, with a single uninterrupted eyebrow. He told me stories of the building trade, and when descriptions of distance were required he tried to be as accurate as possible. He would stop, think, and then say that so-and-so had been about as far as from us to the cabin’s movie screen, or to a particular seat three rows away. A Haitian taxi driver brought me from Kennedy Airport to Brooklyn and home. Because of stomach trouble, I had been eating nothing but black bread and tea for the last few days. When I told the Haitian this and described my many meals of only bread and tea, he shook his head repeatedly and expressed his sympathy. While we were stopped at a cash machine so I could get the money to pay him, the driver went across the street to a Baskin-Robbins and bought himself the largest ice cream sundae they had.
    In my adult life, no trip had ever made such a change in me. I couldn’t get over where I’d been and what I’d seen. I talked about the trip a lot, and when Alex and Katya came back I sat around with them and reviewed it down to the smallest detail. I began to read all kinds of books about Russia, at first ones about Lenin, and then moving on to Russian authors—Zoshchenko, Kharms, Bulgakov, and others—I hadn’t heard of before. I found a recently emigrated tutor in Brighton Beach and went back and forth on the subway in order to study Russian with her. I started putting notes about Siberia in folders. In a sense, this book is the distant result of an initiative for cross-cultural exchange proposed originally by Sasha Khamarkhanov of the Ministry of Culture of Buryatia in 1993.

Chapter 4
    One of my all-time heroes is a man I consider almost a relative, George Kennan. I’m not talking about George Frost Kennan, who died in 2005 at the age of a hundred and one. George Frost Kennan was a diplomat, an author, an expert on Russia, and the main architect of the policy of containment used against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. I admire him, but I think the other George Kennan, who I sometimes call the original George Kennan, was a cooler and wilder guy. The original George Kennan was born on February 16, 1845, in Norwalk, Ohio. The reason I feel I’m almost related to him is that many of my relatives on my father’s side back to 1815 lived in that town. It’s safe to say that most of them from there knew or knew of George Kennan. A relative named Sam Wildman was George’s childhood friend. My three-greats grandfather, the editor of the local paper, was