Echoes of the Past and Siberian Nature’s “Radical Otherness”: An Ecocritical Reading of Contemporary Travel Writing

Abstract

"This article investigates the relation of the self and the environment in two travelogues-one British, one French-that narrate and describe journeys to Siberia: Colin Thubron’s In Siberia (1999) and Sylvain Tesson’s Dans les forêts de Sibérie (2011), translated into English in 2014 as Consolations of the Forest. It examines the narrative strategies that these travellers use in order to engage with the land and fine-tune their senses to perceiving the “voice” of Siberia. The analysis is framed by Lawrence Buell and Greg Garrard’s ecocritical theories, specifically their analysis of the discourses of the pastoral and toxicity, and Arnold Berleant’s concept of “aesthetic engagement”. Within this framework, this study demonstrates how Tesson and Thubron negotiate between the echoes of the past they bring to Siberia, through intertextual and historical references, and the foreign frequencies they discover on their journeys. Both their journeys are informed by previous knowledge of the history and geography of Siberia, and are oriented by a quest for a predefined object."