Tent Life in Siberia, by George Kennan

A little downtime between bingo years, and kind of figured "the only way out is through" when it comes to being weird about polar exploration fandom, so...wandered around a used bookstore and picked up some random titles that looked interesting, there may be more where this came from.

Expedition: the 1865-67 Russian-American Telegraph Company. People had tried to lay a telegraphic cable under the Atlantic Ocean, it didn't last, so another company was like "what if we go up the North American west coast, across the Bering Strait*, then across all of Russia and connect up with the existing telegraph system in Moscow?" So this was part of the exploration/research/preliminary scouting for that. It kind of ends abruptly with "okay never mind, they got the Atlantic Ocean route working after all, let's stop," but hey, that's just capitalism.

This is more of a humorous travelogue with lots of droll tongue-in-cheek, culture shock, wedding-crashers type stuff. Seasickness:

Mahood pretends that he is all right, and plays checkers with the captain with an air of assumed tranquillity which approaches heroism, but he is observed at irregular intervals to go suddenly and unexpectedly on deck, and to return every time with a more ghastly and rueful countenance. When asked the object of these periodic visits to the quarter-deck, he replies, with a transparent affectation of cheerfulness, that he only goes up "to look at the compass and see how she's heading." I am surprised to find that "looking at the compass" is attended with such painful and melancholy emotions as those expressed in Mahood's face when he comes back; but he performs the self-imposed duty with unshrinking faithfulness, and relieves us of a great deal of anxiety about the safety of the ship. The Captain seems a little negligent, and sometimes does not observe the compass once a day; but Mahood watches it with unsleeping vigilance.

(When my grandpa was writing up his recollections of his military experience, decades after the fact, he had some creative euphemisms for seasickness too, maybe this is just a travel literature staple.)

Many of the place names and Russian loanwords didn't have their spelling standardized by this point. Stuff like "yourt" and "toondra" are always in scare quotes, ditto his spelling for balalaika and sastrugi (which is admittedly not a super common word unless you're in polar nonsense fandom...) *And the body of water between Asia and North America is "Behring's Straits" at this point. Early on he complains about Russian transliteration, why is there a "W" in "Wrangell" [Island] or "Wladimir," why would you want to spell this province name "Kamtchatka," nobody pronounces the first "T." So that aged well! (Most of my knowledge of Kamchatka comes from playing, or at least setting up, games of Risk with my brother, who had a line about 'Kamchatka will never forgive you!!') 

Nitpick: there are maps in the endpapers, which is great, but it's very zoomed out, a lot of it is the proposed route of the telegraph across the rest of Russia, and the map goes as far south as India and the Arabian Peninsula. Would have been better zoomed in on the area that's actually the focus, but maybe a lot of the smaller settlements didn't have their coordinates mapped...

Obviously Kennan is not a professional anthropologist so take the cultural observations with a grain of salt. I thought the contrast between "the nomads' culture can seem kind of ruthless and harsh to us, but that's a byproduct of the circumstances under which they live, they're as honest and hospitable as anyone else" versus "their cousins who live in settlements are just the worst, most lazy, and terrible" was an interesting parallel to the worldbuilding in cultures like the Outskirters from the Steerswoman series. The details of "these people live in their summer habitations for three months, damming up the river and catching lots of salmon, then go back to their winter village for most of the year," and "the central government of Russia is trying to tax people's fishing harvests so that they have insurance for years when there isn't a good catch" also seem like neat worldbuilding concepts. Maybe for future origfic.

One evening, soon after we left Shestakova, they [dogsled drivers] happened to see me eating a pickled cucumber, and as this was something which had never come within the range of their limited gastronomical experience, they asked me for a piece to taste. Knowing well what the result would be, I gave the whole cucumber to the dirtiest, worst-looking vagabond in the party, and motioned to him to take a good bite. As he put it to his lips his comrades watched him with breathless curiosity to see how he liked it. For a moment his face wore an expression of blended surprise, wonder, and disgust which was irresistibly ludicrous, and he seemed disposed to spit the disagreeable morsel out; but with a strong effort he controlled himself, forced his features into a ghastly imitation of satisfaction, smacked his lips, declared it was "akhmel nemélkhin"--very good, and handed the pickle to his next neighbor. The latter was equally astonished and disgusted with its unexpected sourness, but, rather than admit his disappointment and be laughed at by the others, he also pretended that it was delicious, and passed it along. Six men in succession went through with this transparent farce with the greatest solemnity; but when they had all tasted it, and all been victimized, they burst out into a simultaneous "ty-e-e-e" of astonishment, and gave free expression to their long-suppressed emotions of disgust. The vehement spitting, coughing, and washing out of mouths with snow, which succeeded this outburst, proved that the taste for pickles is an acquired one, and that man in his aboriginal state does not possess it. What particularly amused me, however, was the way in which they imposed on one another. Each individual Korak, as soon as he found that he had been victimized, saw at once the necessity of getting even by victimizing the next man, and not one of them would admit that there was anything bad about the pickle until they had all tasted it. "Misery loves company," and human nature is the same all the world over.

There's also a description of "Anadyr sickness" that's especially common in women, and that's really intriguing in light of what our culture would describe as "mass psychogenic illness." Low temperatures are survivable, but wind is a drag; nobody associates Siberia with mosquitoes, but mosquitoes suck. Many of the cultural allusions went over my head, but hey, he would probably say the same thing about our literature. There are a lot of John Franklin jokes. The Eastern Orthodox liturgy is very moving and they sing Christmas carols too.

A ball at the house of a priest on Sunday night struck me as implying a good deal of inconsistency, and I hesitated about sanctioning so plain a violation of the fourth commandment. Dodd, however, proved to me in the most conclusive manner that, owing to difference in time, it was Saturday in America and not Sunday at all; that our friends at that very moment were engaged in business or pleasure, and that our happening to be on the other side of the world was no reason why we should not do what our antipodal friends were doing at exactly the same time. I was conscious that this reasoning was sophistical, but Dodd mixed me up so with his "longitude," "Greenwich time," "Bowditch's Navigators," "Russian Sundays" and "American Sundays," that I was hopelessly bewildered, and couldn't ahve told for my life whether it was to-day in America or yesterday, or when a Siberian Sunday did begin. I finally concluded that as the Russians kept Saturday night, and began another week at sunset on the Sabbath, a dance would perhaps be sufficiently innocent for that evening. According to Siberian ideas of propriety it was just the thing.