SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 776 Arsenyev, Vladimir K. Across the Ussuri Kray: Travels in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains. Translated with annotations by Jonathan C. Slaght. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2016. xxvii + 454 pp. Map. Illustrations. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $35.00: £28.99 (paperback). The books of the Russian explorer and naturalist V. K. Arsen´ev have commanded a loyal Russian readership since they were first published in the 1920s. The detailed accounts of his expeditions in the Russian Far East, which he led whilst serving as an officer in the tsarist army in the years before the 1917 Revolution, appealed to a readership mesmerised by descriptions of the exotic inhabitants and unfamiliar landscape of the remote taiga. The popular success of the 1975 Soviet film, Dersu Uzala, loosely based on the life of one of the Nanai (Goldi) hunters who accompanied Arsen´ev on some of his travels, reflected the continuing fascination exercised by the idea of wilderness on audiences across the world. Arsen´ev’s books were not published in full during the Soviet period. The censorship took issue with some of the author’s views even during the comparatively liberal 1920s (Arsen´ev was deemed to practise non-Marxist science and was perhaps fortunate to die a natural death before the purges of the 1930s). The handful of English translations of Arsen´ev’s books were inevitably based on the abridged Soviet versions and, perhaps surprisingly, have never made much of an impact beyond Russia. ThistranslationbythebiologistJonathanSlaght,whohimselfworksinRussia’s Far East, is based on the full 1921 Russian text of Arsen´ev’s Across the Ussuri Kray (itself first published in Russian a decade ago). The two useful introductory essays — by Slaght himself and by Ivan Yegorchev of the Society for the Study of the Far East — provide the reader with helpful background information both about Arsen´ev and the vexed history of his books. A comparison of the texts with Arsen´ev’s own field journals shows that he was inclined on occasion to alter the sequence of events in his books in order to improve the narrative. He did not, for example, meet Dersu Uzala until his 1906 expedition, although the Nanai hunter makes an appearance here in Arsen´ev’s description of his earlier 1902 visit to Lake Khanka on the Russo-Chinese border. Nor was Arsen´ev content to limit himself to a purely scientific discussion of the flora and fauna he found in the Russian wilderness that lay between the Chinese border and the Sea of Japan. Metaphors and similes recur through the text. Rows of trees are likened to a ‘long colonnade’ (p. 16) and ‘a tangled mess of birds’ to a ‘spider’s web’ (p. 41). Feeling for the ‘beauty of nature’ survives the hardships of travel across the taiga (p. 106). The appeal of Arsen´ev’s writings to generations of readers has, indeed, partly rested on the fact that he was more than a simple chronicler of the things he saw on his travels. Both the narrator and his subjects — whether human or non-human — are a vivid presence in his books. REVIEWS 777 Arsen´ev’s penchant for a quasi-Romantic language is most striking in his description of Dersu Uzala himself, who emerges from the text as an almost Rousseauian figure, a primitive man untouched by the corruption of city life. Across the Ussuri Kray contains numerous descriptions of the hunter’s ability to follow invisible tracks and predict weather patterns long before they have become apparent to others less in tune with nature. Arsen´ev also details Dersu’s description of animals and inanimate objects as ‘people’, doubtless an echo of a native spiritual tradition that had no sense of a binary division between human beings and the world around them. The Russian describes how Dersu repeatedly left provisions at rest-places for those who might follow him, evidence of a spontaneous morality based on an instinctive fellow-feeling for others faced with the dangers of the forest, albeit in a remote setting where strangers are as likely to be dangerous as sympathetic. Arsen´ev’s description of the complex ethnic mosaic...
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