Trans-Siberian, ‘58

The place of my second encounter with the Empire: far away, in the steppes and snows of Asia, in a barely accessible land whose entire geography bears alien and strange names — rivers called Argun, Unda, Chaykhar; mountains called Chingan, Ilchuri, Dzhagdy; and towns called Kilkok, Tungir, and Bukachacha. From these names alone one could compose resonant, exotic poems.

The Trans-Siberian Railway train, which set out the previous day from Beijing on its nine-day journey to Moscow, approaches from the direction of Harbin and enters the Soviet border station of Zabaikalsk. Drawing near any border heightens tension in us and stirs emotion. Human beings are not made for life in border situations; they avoid them or try to free themselves from them as quickly as possible. And yet a person encounters them everywhere, sees and feels them everywhere. Take an atlas of the world: nothing but borders. Of oceans and continents. Of deserts and forests. Of rainfall, monsoons, typhoons, arable land and wasteland, permafrost and peat bogs, shale and conglomerate. Add the distribution limits of Quaternary sediments and volcanic flows, basalt, chalk, and trachyte. We can see the boundaries of the Patagonian Shield and the Canadian Shield, the tropical and arctic climate zones, the erosional forms of river basins, the Adige and Lake Chad. The ranges of various mammals. Of various insects. Of various reptiles and amphibians, including the highly dangerous black cobra and the fearsome yet fortunately lethargic anaconda.

And the borders of monarchies and republics? Of ancient kingdoms and lost civilisations? Of pacts, treaties, and alliances? Of Black and Yellow peoples? Of migrations? The borders to which the Mongols advanced. To which the Khazars advanced. To which the Huns advanced.

How many victims, how much blood and pain are bound up with the question of borders! The cemeteries of those who died defending borders have no end. Equally boundless are the cemeteries of the bold who tried to extend them. One might assume that half of all those who have ever passed through our planet and given their lives in the field of glory breathed their last in battles provoked by the question of borders.

This sensitivity to the matter of borders, this tireless zeal for constantly demarcating, extending, or defending them, is a trait not only of human beings but of all living nature, of everything that moves on land, in water, and in the air. Various mammals, defending the borders of their pastures, will allow themselves to be torn to pieces. Various predators, in order to win new hunting grounds, will bite their adversaries to death. But even our quiet, docile little cat — how it exerts itself, strains, toils to squeeze out a few drops here and there and mark with them the boundary of its territory.

And our brains? An infinite number of every kind of boundary is encoded in them. Between the left and right hemispheres, between the frontal and temporal lobes, between the hypothalamus and the pituitary. And the borders between chambers, membranes, and convolutions? Between the medulla oblongata and the spinal cord? Notice how we think. We think, for example: up to this border it is permitted, and beyond — it is not. Or we say: be careful not to go too far, for you will cross the line! Moreover, all these borders of thought, feeling, command, and prohibition are constantly shifting, intersecting, interpenetrating, piling up. In our brains there is incessant movement — border movement, frontier movement, supraterritorial movement. Hence the temple headaches and migraines, hence so much confusion in people’s heads; but occasionally pearls are produced: visions, flashes of illumination, sparks of thought and — though unfortunately rarely — of genius.

A border is stress, even fear (far more rarely: liberation). The concept of a border can contain in itself a kind of finality; a door may slam shut behind us forever — such is the border between life and death. The gods know of these anxieties and therefore try to win the faithful by promising that as a reward they will enter God’s kingdom, which will be precisely without borders. The paradise of the Christian God, the paradise of Yahweh and of Allah, have no borders.

Zabaikalsk — Chita

Barbed wire. Barbed wire is what you see first. They protrude from the snow, as if hovering above it — lines, trestles, fences of barbed wire. What strange combinations, constrictions, tangles, whole constructions of wire bracing sky and earth, dug into every scrap of frozen field, into the white landscape, into the icy horizon. At first glance this thorny, predatory barrier stretched along the border looks like a pointless and surrealistic idea — who could be trying to cross here, when as far as the eye can see there is a snowy desert, no roads, no people, and the snow two metres deep, impossible to move even a step — and yet this barbed wire wants to tell you something, to communicate something. It tells you: careful, you are crossing the border of another world. From here you will not slip away, will not escape. This is a world of deadly seriousness, of command and obedience. Learn to listen, learn humility, learn to take up as little space as possible with your person. Best do what you must. Best be silent. Best ask no questions.

So. The barbed wire gives you a lesson throughout the time the carriages roll toward the station, laying into your head everything you ought henceforth to remember — insistently, but for your own good — drumming into your memory a long litany of restrictions, prohibitions, and instructions.

Then come the dogs. Alsatians, enraged, trembling, frenzied — the moment the train barely halts, they hurl themselves under the carriages, barking, yelping; but who could possibly travel under such a carriage, at forty degrees of frost? However many sheepskin coats one had, one would freeze within the hour, and we have been travelling non-stop all day. The sight of the sniffing dogs is so compelling that only after a moment does the next image make itself felt: as if grown from the earth, soldiers have materialised and instantly formed a line on both sides of the train. They stand so that between them visual contact is maintained, so that a continuous line of sight runs the length of the carriages — and if some passenger-madman (or perhaps agent, saboteur, spy) were to leap from the carriage and fling himself into the boundless snowy-frozen expanse, he would be instantly spotted and shot.

But who could shoot him so immediately, on the spot? The sentries on the watchtowers could — without a second’s delay — since they stand with rifles aimed at the doors and windows of the carriages. (Because I happen to be looking out the window, one rifle is aimed at me — yes, at me precisely!) On the other hand, no madman (or agent, saboteur, or spy) could leap out and fling himself into the snowy-frozen expanse, since all the carriage doors and windows are tightly, thoroughly sealed.

In short, the continuous line of sight evidently performs the same persuasive function as those layered, dense tangles of barbed wire: it is simply a silent but emphatic warning not to let any absurd idea enter your head.

But that is not the end. For no sooner has a pack of nervous and perhaps hungry Alsatians coursed under the rails, no sooner have soldiers positioned themselves alertly along the tracks and sentries on the watchtowers trained their rifle barrels on us, than patrols enter the carriages — a torch in one hand, a long steel spike in the other — driving all passengers into the corridor. The searching of compartments begins: rummaging on shelves, under seats, in storage spaces, in ashtrays. Tapping of walls, ceiling, floor. Examining, inspecting, touching, sniffing.

Now the passengers take everything they have — suitcases, bags, parcels, bundles — and carry it into the station building, where long, metal-topped tables stand. Red banners everywhere, cheerfully welcoming us to the Soviet Union. Under the banners, rows of customs officers, every one of them stern, severe, and with an air of grievance — yes, unmistakably a grievance. I search among them for a face with features even slightly softened, relaxed, open, since I myself would like to relax a little, to forget for a moment that I am surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, by enraged dogs and petrified sentries — because I would like to make some contact, exchange pleasantries, talk; I always need that enormously.

— And what are you grinning at? — a customs officer asks sharply and suspiciously.

I froze. Authority is seriousness: in contact with authority a smile is a breach of etiquette, evidence of disrespect. Similarly one should not stare too long at someone who holds authority. But I knew this already from the army. Our corporal Jan Pokrywka punished anyone who looked at him for too long. — Come here! — he would call. — What are you all staring at me for? And as punishment he sent them to clean the latrines.

Now it begins. Unbuckling, unfastening, unknotting, disembowelling. Rummaging, plunging, withdrawing, shaking. What’s this? And what’s that? What’s this for? What’s that for? This? That? The other? This one? That one? Which way? Why? The worst is books. What a curse, to be carrying a book! You could carry a suitcase of cocaine, with a book on top. The cocaine would arouse no interest — all the customs officers throw themselves on the book. And God forbid you’re carrying a book in English. Then the running about, the checking, the leafing through, the reading.

Yet, despite my carrying several books in English (mainly language textbooks for Chinese and Japanese), I am not the worst offender. The worst have been placed at a separate table — a table of the second class, as it were. These are locals, Soviet citizens — thin, slight people in tattered khalats and holed felt boots, swarthy, slant-eyed Buryats and Kamchadals, Tungus and Ainu, Oroqen and Koryak. How they were let into China I do not know. In any case they are returning, and returning they are carrying food. I notice out of the corner of my eye that they have bags full of grain.

And here it is the grain that will now be the matter. For evidently grain, alongside books, ranks among the most suspicious of products. There is apparently something in grain, some ambiguity, some devious, underhanded property, some deceptiveness, some illusion — because yes, it seems to be grain, but one cannot be entirely certain it is grain through and through, it is grain but perhaps not one hundred per cent grain. Hence the customs officers pour all the grain out onto the table. The table begins to turn golden and brown, it looks like a scale model of the Sahara spread before us. The sifting of the grain begins. Careful, meticulous sifting through the fingers. The officers’ fingers allow thin streams of grain to pass through — let it through, let it through — but suddenly: stop! The fingers halt and go still. The fingers have sensed a strange kernel. They have sensed it, sent a signal to the customs officer’s brain; the brain responded — stop! The fingers stand and wait. The brain says: try once more, carefully and attentively. The fingers gently, almost imperceptibly — gently and almost imperceptibly, but very carefully, very alertly — turn the little kernel. They examine it. The practised fingers of the Soviet customs officer. Experienced, ready at any moment to press the kernel down, catch it in a snare, imprison it. But the kernel is only what it is — that is to say, an ordinary kernel of ordinary grain, and what distinguished it from the million other kernels scattered on the table at Zabaikalsk border station is an unusual, peculiar shape — the result of some roughness of the millstone, which turned out to be warped and uneven. So no smuggling, no deception — concludes the customs officer’s brain; but it does not give up. On the contrary, it orders further sifting, further examining, further sensing, and even at the shadow of a doubt: immediately — stop!

We must bear in mind, however, that these are the 1950s and that the mills in China are already very old and inefficient. We must consider the problems this creates for the customs officers at Zabaikalsk. An infinite number of kernels has an atypical, suspicious shape. Every second the fingers send a signal to the brain. Every moment the brain raises an alarm — stop! Kernel by kernel, handful by handful, bag by bag, Buryat by Buryat.

I could not tear my eyes from this spectacle. I watched fascinated, forgetting the barbed wire and watchtowers, forgetting the dogs. These are fingers that should be sculpting in gold, polishing diamonds! Their microscopic movements, their sensitive trembling, their delicacy, their customs-officer virtuosity!

We returned to the carriages in the dark, snow falling, frost crunching underfoot. At Zabaikalsk I received one more lesson, since the border here is not a point on a map but a school. The pupils who leave this school will be divided into three groups. Group one — quietly furious. The most unhappy, for everything around them will cause stress, will drive them to states of fury and madness. It will irritate, provoke, exhaust them. Before they even realise that nothing in the surrounding reality will be changed or improved, they will be felled by a heart attack or a stroke.

Group two — these will observe Soviet people and imitate their way of thinking and behaving. Its essence is reconciliation with existing reality, even the ability to draw a certain satisfaction from it. In this case a very helpful saying is one that must be repeated to oneself and to others every evening, regardless of how dreadful the day just passed: Rejoice in this day, for life has never been as good as it was today, and never will be again! Finally, group three are those for whom everything is above all interesting, extraordinary, improbable — who want to know, examine, and penetrate this other, previously unknown world. These are capable of arming themselves with patience and maintaining distance (but not aloofness!), a calm, attentive, sober gaze.

Such are the three attitudes characteristic of foreigners who find themselves in the Empire.

Chita — Ulan-Ude

Gazing from the window of the rushing train, I think: Siberia — so this is what it looks like! I first heard this name when I was seven years old. The strict mothers of our street warned: — Children, behave yourselves, or they will take you to Siberia! (They said it in the Russian fashion — Sibir — because that sounded more menacing, more apocalyptic). The gentle mothers were indignant: — How can you frighten children like that!

One could not really imagine Siberia. Then one of my schoolmates showed me a picture in a book: a column of ragged, hunched figures trudging through a dense, snowy blizzard. Heavy chains attached to iron balls were fastened to their hands and feet, which they dragged along the ground behind them.

Siberia, in its sinister, cruel guise, is frozen, icy space + dictatorship.

Many countries have icy zones, lands frozen for most of the year, dead. Such are the vast expanses of Canada, for example. Take Danish Greenland, or American Alaska. And yet it occurs to no one to frighten children: wash your hands, or they will send you to Canada! Or: play nicely with that girl, or they will take you to America! In those countries there is simply no dictatorship; no one claps anyone in irons, no one imprisons people in camps, no one sends them to work in a damning frost, to certain death. There, a person has one adversary — the cold. Here, three: cold, hunger, and armed violence.

In 1842, in Paris, Adam Mickiewicz delivered two lectures at the Collège de France about the memoirs of General Kopeć. Kopeć fought alongside Kościuszko at Maciejowice and was taken prisoner there by the Russians and condemned to Siberia. Kopeć was transported some 10,000 kilometres along the trackless wastes of Russia and Siberia — to Kamchatka.

It was a true journey through hell.

He was transported, as the General writes, in a kibitka “shaped like a trunk, wrapped on all sides in hides, lined inside with sheet iron, with only a small window on one side through which water or food could be passed.”

“This trunk,” Kopeć continues, “had no seat; and since I had not recovered from my wounds, they gave me a sack of straw, and I was given the title of secret prisoner, with a number only, without a name. Such is their classification for the most serious criminal, with whom no one, under the severest penalty, may speak, nor may anyone know what he is called or why he was arrested.”

“Transported in the kibitka, as in a coffin with the lid nailed down, he could only guess from sounds where he was. Hearing the rumble of paving stones, he judged they were in a city: ‘On the sixth day I heard the rumble of paving stones — it was Smolensk.’” From the dark kibitka they transfer him directly to a dark cell, so that Kopeć can never tell whether it is day or night: “There were two windows with iron bars, blocked with black boards so that no daylight could enter anywhere. One had to guess night from day; the guard would never speak a word to me.” Tormented by the journey, Kopeć cannot sleep — the halt on the road into the depths of Siberia is a place of torment: “I could not sleep: it seemed to me, beyond other walls nearby, I could hear various beatings, torturings, and the clanking of chains.”

The general is dragged to an interrogation. “They ask Kopeć, Mickiewicz writes, what was the cause of his rebellion. The love of his fatherland — he answers. The commission is outraged by this answer and breaks off the interrogation, unable to bear the prisoner’s pride.”

They transport Kopeć further eastward. “From Smolensk to Irkutsk,” the General recalls, “three soldiers of my guard perished, others broke arms or legs falling from the top of my kibitka. When they were drunk and inattentive, coming down hills, it happened often that when the horses were set galloping, the kibitka would overturn and the horses drag it for a quarter of a mile, and I, locked inside, was knocked about like a herring in a barrel — but as I was wrapped in a sack, straw, and hay, that saved me.”

Though transported in a kibitka-coffin, the General is aware of a certain privilege — he is being transported; others are marched on foot for years: “On the road I would meet several hundred people of both sexes, driven to exile toward Irkutsk, under very light guard, passed from colony to colony, barely arriving in the third year’s end from Europe to Irkutsk. None can escape, for there are no side colonies anywhere… and if any of the prisoners wanted to make for the woods to the side, he would be eaten by animals…”

This wandering of the exile is not merely displacement in space and time. It is accompanied by a process of dehumanisation: whoever reaches the end (if he has not died along the way) has already been stripped of everything human. He has no name, does not know where he is, does not know what will be done with him. His language has been taken from him: no one wishes to speak to him. He is a parcel, he is a thing, he is a plaything.

Then the General is deprived even of the kibitka, and driven on foot:

“We walked always from morning till evening without a rest stop.”

And he adds: “no road — only terrifying mountains and ravines.”

Ulan-Ude — Krasnoyarsk

“No road — only terrifying mountains and ravines.”

I had dreamed of seeing Baikal, but it was night — a black blotch in the frosted frame of the window. Only in the morning did I see the mountains and ravines. Everything in snow.

Snow and snow.

It is January, the depths of Siberian winter.

Outside the window everything seems stiffened with cold; even the firs, pines, and spruces look like enormous, petrified icicles — dark-green stalagmites rising from the snow.

The stillness, the stillness of this landscape — as if the train were standing still, as if it were part of the landscape — itself motionless.

And white — everywhere white, blinding, fathomless, absolute. A whiteness that draws one in, and if someone lets it seduce him, lets himself be caught in its trap and goes further, into the depths of the whiteness — he will perish. Whiteness destroys all who try to approach it, to learn its secret. It hurls them from mountain heights, abandons them frozen on snow-covered plains. The Siberian Buryats regard every white animal as sacred; they believe that to kill one is to commit a sin and bring death upon oneself. They look upon white Siberia as a temple in which God dwells. They bow to its plains, pay homage to its landscapes, constantly terrified that from there, from the white depths, death will come.

White is often associated with finality, with an end, with death. In those cultures where people live in fear of death, mourners dress in black — to frighten death away from themselves, to isolate it and confine it to the dead. But where death is regarded as another form, another mode of existence, mourners dress in white and the deceased is dressed in white: here white is the colour of acceptance, of agreement, of submission to fate.

Something in this January, Siberian landscape overpowers, oppresses, strikes. Above all its vastness, its boundlessness, its oceanic limitlessness. The land has no end here; the world has no end. A person is not made for such immeasurability. What is comfortable, graspable, manageable for him is the measure of a village, his field, a street, a house. At sea, the measure will be the size of the ship’s deck. A person is made for such a space as he can cross in one go, in one effort.

Krasnoyarsk — Novosibirsk

After Krasnoyarsk (the fourth day of the journey already?) it began to grow light (at this time of year darkness prevails for the greater part of the day). I drink tea and look out the window. The same snowy plain as yesterday. As the day before (and already it would rush forward to add: as the year before. As centuries before). The same forest massifs. The same densities and clearings, and in the open spaces high snowdrifts sculpted by the wind into the most extraordinary shapes.

Suddenly I remember Cendrars and his “Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France.” In that poem, written before the First World War, Cendrars describes a journey on the same line but in the opposite direction — from Moscow to Harbin. The refrain of this poem is a question, constantly repeated by his frightened companion Jeanne:

“Blaise, tell me, are we very far from Montmartre?”

Jeanne feels what overcomes everyone who plunges into the white boundlessness of Siberia — the feeling of sinking into nothingness, of fading away.

The author has nothing to console her with:

“We are far away, Jeanne, you have been travelling seven days,

you are far from Montmartre.”

Paris is the centre of the world — the point of reference. How to measure the sense of distance, of remoteness? To be far from what, from which place? Where is the point on our planet from which people moving away feel they are approaching the edge of the earth? Is this point merely emotional in meaning (my home as the centre of the world)? Or cultural (say, Greek civilisation)? Or religious (say, Mecca)? Most people, asked what they consider the centre of the world — Paris or Mexico City — will answer: Paris. Why? Mexico City is larger than Paris and also has a metro, magnificent monuments, great painting, excellent writers. Yet they will say — Paris. Or let someone declare that for him the centre of the world is Cairo. After all, it is larger than Paris, and has monuments, a university, painting. Yet will many people support Cairo? So Paris remains (at least it remained when frightened Jeanne rode through Siberia with her heart in her mouth). Europe remains. European civilisation is the only one that has had and (almost) realised global ambitions. Other civilisations either could not satisfy such ambitions for technical reasons (the Maya, for instance) or simply had no such interests (China, for example) — convinced that they themselves encompassed the entire world.

Only European civilisation proved capable of breaking through its own ethnocentrism. Within it arose the desire to learn other civilisations and the theory (formulated by Bronisław Malinowski) that world culture is constituted by a constellation of equally valid cultures.

Novosibirsk — Omsk

A day, a night, and a day.

The clatter of the wheels — monotonous, insistent, growing ever harder to bear. It rings out loudest at night: a person is imprisoned in this clattering as in a shuddering, vibrating cage. We have fallen into some kind of storm, for suddenly snow plastered the window and the howling of the wind could be heard even inside the compartment.

“No road — only terrifying mountains and ravines.”

Omsk — Chelyabinsk

The sixth, or perhaps seventh, day of the journey. In these vast, uniform spaces the measure of time is lost, ceases to apply, ceases to mean anything. Hours become misshapen, formless, elastic as the clocks in Salvador Dalí’s paintings. What is more, the train passes through different time zones and one ought to keep moving the hands of one’s watch — but why, what is gained by it? The sense of change weakens here (the main determinant of time), even the need for change; a person lives in a kind of torpor, a numbness, an inner motionlessness. Now, in January, the nights are very long. Even for the greater part of the day a dark-grey, stubborn dusk prevails. Only occasionally does the sun appear: then the world becomes bright, blue, drawn with a sharp, decisive line. But then the darkness is all the deeper and all the more pervasive.

Travelling the Trans-Siberian, what of the country’s so-called reality can one see? Nothing, really. Darkness conceals the greater part of the route, and even by day one sees little beyond the snowy void that extends in every direction. Some small stations; at night — solitary, faint lights; some figures staring at the rushing train, swathed in plumes of snow, which immediately vanishes, sinks away, hidden by the nearest forest.

I have a two-person compartment in which I travel alone throughout. A wearisome solitude. One cannot read, for the carriage pitches in every direction; letters jump, blur, and in a moment the eyes are aching. There is no one to talk to. One can go out into the corridor. And then what? All the compartments are closed; I cannot even tell whether anyone is travelling in them, for they have no little windows to peer through.

— Is anyone travelling in these compartments? — I ask the conductor.

— It varies — he answers evasively and disappears.

There is no way to strike up a conversation with anyone. People (even if they appear somewhere) either immediately walk around me or, when nearly caught by the sleeve, mutter something and are gone. If they answer, it is vaguely, ambiguously, monosyllabically, so that nothing really emerges from the answer. They say: we’ll see; they say: well, yes; or: who can know; or: absolutely! But most often they say something that might indicate they have already understood everything, that they have penetrated to the very heart of the truth — they say: such is life.

If there is such a thing as the genius of a people, the genius of the Russian people is expressed, among other things, precisely in this saying.

Such is life!

Much will be understood by anyone who reflects on the meaning of these words. But I want to learn something more — and I cannot. Around me is emptiness; around me is scorched earth; around me is a wall. The reason is obvious: foreigner. A foreigner stirs mixed feelings: curiosity (which must be suppressed!), envy (a foreigner always has it better — just look at how well dressed he is), but above all fear. One of the pillars supporting the system is isolation from the world, and a foreigner, by the mere fact of his existence, undermines that pillar. Stalin sent to the labour camp for five or ten years, and often had executed, anyone who had contact with a foreigner — so how to be surprised that people fear a foreigner like fire.

I too am travelling in a kibitka — one incomparably more comfortable than the one in which General Kopeć was transported. And I have no sentence; I am not a deportee. But the principle of isolation is the same. This emphasis that one is here an outsider, an other, an intruder, an imposition, an inconvenience. That at best! For a foreigner is something far more threatening — a saboteur and a spy! What is he staring at out that window, what does he want to see? He will see nothing! The entire Trans-Siberian route has been cleared of everything that might catch a spy’s eye. The train rushes as if through a plastic tunnel — bare walls and walls: the wall of night, the wall of snow. And why does he keep trying to ask questions? Why is he interested? What does he need to know for? He was making notes? He was making notes. What was he noting? Everything? Where does he keep those notes? On him all the time? That’s not good!

What was he asking? He was asking whether we’re far from Sima. From Sima? But we don’t stop at Sima. Exactly. But he was asking. And you? I? Nothing. Well, how’s that — nothing! You must have said something. I said it was far. That’s not good! You should have said Sima had already gone by — that would have misled him!

Precisely! Better to avoid questions, for one never knows how to answer. It’s easy to blurt out something stupid. There is something in a person that makes it hard to give the right answer. The worst is that whoever has met a foreigner and exchanged a word with him is already suspect, already marked. One must live that way, walk through the city, along the streets, along the carriage corridors, so as to avoid it, not to bring misfortune down on one’s head.

Chelyabinsk — Kazan

Ever closer to old, deep Russia — though Moscow is still a long way off.

“No road — only terrifying mountains and ravines.”

While still a student I read an old book by Berdyaev in which he reflected on the influence of the Empire’s vast spaces on the Russian soul. Indeed, what does a Russian think about somewhere on the bank of the Yenisei or in the depths of the Amur taiga? Every road he takes seems to have no end. He could walk it for days and months and Russia would surround him still. Plains have no end, forests nor rivers. To rule such boundless spaces, says Berdyaev, it was necessary to create a boundless state. And so the Russian fell into a contradiction: to maintain Russia’s vast spaces, the Russian must maintain a vast state; on the maintenance of a vast state he expends his energy, which he has left for nothing else — for organisation, for thrift, and so on. But he expends that energy on the state that enslaves and oppresses him.

Berdyaev holds that this vastness, this immensity of Russia, has a negative effect on the thinking of its inhabitants. It demands of them neither concentration, nor tension, nor the channelling of energy, nor the creation of a dynamic, intensive culture. Everything just spreads out, thins, and sinks into that immense formlessness. Russia — a space at once limitless, expansive, and so crushing in its magnitude that it takes one’s breath away.

Kazan — Moscow

Fatigue, an ever more oppressive, ponderous, drowsy fatigue, a kind of adhesiveness and numbness. In rare surges of energy — the urge to leap from this hurtling, shuddering cage; my admiration for the endurance of Kopeć and of the thousands like him; my homage to their suffering and torment.

First green, snow-covered copses and copses, then copses and small houses, then more and more houses, then houses and apartment buildings, finally apartment buildings alone, growing ever taller.

The conductor comes into the compartment and takes away the sheets, the pillow, two blankets, and the glass holder.

The corridor fills with people.

Source: www.gazeta.pl/kapuscinski

source: kapuscinski.info