On his first trip abroad, an American traverses the brutal landscape and history of Kazakhstan in search of a house in Semey, where Dostoyevsky endured Siberian exile for choosing truth over censorship.
The sleeper train rocked with the sure unsteadiness of its Soviet advent. It smelled of feet and cigarettes. I pulled my hooded sweatshirt further over my head, trying desperately to get some rest in the final hours before arriving in Karaganda. Just as I was starting to doze off, the Kazakhs on the bunks below roused me. They suggested cards with the payment of a steaming cup of tea and a toothy smile. I nodded a drowsy nod, and they eagerly began dealing. With only a couple of hours left on our fourteen-hour journey from Almaty, this wasn’t a terrible way to pass the time. I looked out the window: iced-over plains, wind-broken grass, and stunted shrubbery. The sky was a thick sheet of impenetrable gray.
We rocked into the station and met up with a university friend who gave us a ride to her family’s home. We entered the small apartment adorned with dark brown embroidery hanging from the walls and thin, floral-printed rugs to soften the parquet floors. My friend introduced us to her extended family and the cat. The surgery her mother insisted on to shorten her daughter to the appropriately attractive height left my friend to hobble around the apartment, offering cookies with the same soft grace that curled her broken English.
After her mother’s gracious provisions of tea and cookies, an unexpected marriage offer from her father visiting from Dagestan, and a quick rest, we were given a ride to the bus station. On the way, we took a quick detour to see the frozen snow that covered KarLag. Over a million people had been sent there during Stalin’s savage reign. For thousands of these souls, they would die looking out over the tundra of that Kazakh steppe, not entirely sure why they were even there.
We shuffled our way through the cold station, thick with cigarette smoke and bleary-eyed passengers staring ahead, fixed on the immediate. These Kazakhs teamed with an ordered, mechanical purpose coursing toward that which was practical and inevitable. After a circuitous set of nighttime bus rides near the Russian border, we stepped down onto the early-morning streets of Pavlodar. Frigid and poor, we sought out the terminal’s café that served cheap coffee in small waxy cups and rolled up blinis with a side of yogurt. Our hunger and successful arrival in the small northern town gave us permission to eat with abandon and even a smile. Navigating the largely empty streets, we made our way to the town’s central attraction: the mosque often described as Darth Vader’s helmet. The Mashkhur Jusup Mosque featured a prominent, deeply ribbed green dome that rose amid four pillars affixed with speakers to amplify reminders for the faithful to pray. Still cold, we sauntered back to the station to catch our next bus.
We finally screeched to a halt on the frozen asphalt of Semey. Cold, eyes raw with exhaustion, we stepped off the bus, breath pluming into the early morning air. After some more blini and tea, we stepped outside and trod toward our destination. There was a pall on that frozen town. Unseen, unheard, a veil of sadness and of loss hung heavy. This was due in part to the alarmingly high radiation levels still lingering from the 456 Soviet nuclear tests conducted at the nearby Semipalatinsk Nuclear Testing Site, “The Polygon.” Cancer remained alarmingly prolific even now more than a half-century since the steady thrumming of nuclear bombs began just up the road. Blamed by the Soviet officials on Semey citizens’ over-drinking of tea, no real restitution was ever had for that tumorous, metastasized people.
We ambled toward the “Stronger than Death” monument that stood defiant in the town—a looming reminder of human resilience enduring even unto death. I thought of the millions of people affected by the decades of drifting radiation, drinking water from aquifers tainted with fallout. Yet, standing at the base of the monument, I looked up into the mushroom cloud-shaped hole cut out of the tall, dark obelisk. It stood tall and silent. It harkened to visitors that mass death would not shake local resolve. The stone woman chiseled in the cut-out leaning over her child amid the hollow blast shape told of sacrifice and injustice. Stark cruelty exacerbated by gnawing impunity.
We walked to the frozen Irtysh River. What looked like a large trash bag anchored upside down to the ice whipped fiercely in the wind. There was a man inside. Fishing.
I’m not sure if it was the cold, or the feeling of isolation, or simply my doe-eyed Americanism on this, my first trip abroad and in such a foreign place, but I began to think. To ponder big questions. This still happens from time to time when I travel, though to a far lesser extent these days. Being uprooted from comfort and familiarity, I find myself spinning, grasping futilely for a fixed point, for a firm footing. While this tends to subside as the jet lag wears off, it was especially pronounced and disconcerting in my early travel days in Central Asia. Yet like the in-between consciousness of a semi-dream state, this disorientation prompts a new perspective on tired explanations that have lost their potency due to ritual and habit.
I had grown up in the church. I knew of God and of his ordering of the world. The sin of Adam and its damning reverberation throughout humanity. The impulse of fear and reverence in the presence of God and his messengers. The beauty of creation in all its divine minutia, insects that, as Father Zossima put it, “have not intelligence, yet bear witness to the mystery of God.” Like that monk from the masterpiece, I have fragments of memories attesting to the early seed of the Gospel in my own life. Punctuated with sharp, nostalgic recollections of southern worship spaces, fellowship halls, covered dish dinners, and juvenile attempts to resist what felt newly wrong. Earnestness and disillusionment. Joy and despondency. Pro and Contra.
Then, we crossed the river. We trudged up the farther bank, and there it was. Looming large before us, Dostoyevsky’s house of banishment. Its riven pine beams were out of place amid the many concrete cubes. It stood starkly in that cement-laden, peri-urban landscape. This is where he was sent. This is what his philosophic proffering earned him. Like his exilic abode, Dostoyevsky’s mode of thinking and questioning stood stubborn in the erosive tidepool of Czar Nicholas’ Russia. It remained beautiful in the concretized radiation of the Soviet era. The very perspectives and opinions that landed him in that forsaken town on the Kazakh tundra still resist and inspire, beautiful in their natural-wonder-amid-fabrication.
We entered and ascended the steps to his writing room. A reprieve from his physical expulsion, the desk where he likely mapped out Humiliated and Insulted and The House of the Dead. He likely looked over his desk through the window onto that frozen river that cut through acres of tundra. He likely reflected on the injustice and incongruity he’d witnessed. The anguish he felt seeking truth amid subjective tyranny. Purpose in a world defunct. He would draw his pen, scratch a maxim, build a world, and usher in the curious. And he did it all believing that choosing truth against punishment, kindness against injustice, love against despair was worth writing because it was right.
There, in that inner sanctum of his place of punishment, I stood, unsheathed my digital camera, and sullied the place with a flash of misunderstanding.
