Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"I am not cosmophobic; I'm just English: Space and Spaciousness in Colin Thubron's Travel Writings"
Jim Schramer
Department of English, Youngstown State University
jjschram@cc.ysu.edu
In a recent essay on Siberia for Granta (64, Winter 1998), Colin Thubron writes about his visit to Akademgorodok, a Russian scientific community near Novosibirsk. Planned during the heady days of Soviet ascendancy in the sciences, Akademgorodok was to be a city "dedicated to science." Now, some forty years after the Sputnik years, it is a city of dreamers who belong more to the mystical Russia of the nineteenth century than to the troubled Russia of the Yeltsin years. Among these dreamers is Sasha, who convinces Thubron to try one of his hypomagnetic chambers -- which, he assures Thubron, will "open up psychophysical recesses not normally explored" (30). Sasha tells him that most people respond to the machine -- unless they are cosmophobic. Thubron dutifully lies down in the apparatus and feels nothing. He climbs out, vaguely disappointed that he didn't feel himself opening up. "I am not cosmophobic," he tells himself grumpily, "I'm just English." (32)
In this paper I propose to examine Colin Thubron's conceptualizing of space and spaciousness, especially as that concept develops in his writings about Russia and the interior world of the Asian steppes. In Among the Russians (1983), as he nears the end of his travels through Russia, Thubron writes about his growing fear, in Kiev, that he is being followed and watched. In Kiev his hosts are a Georgian agronomist, Mehrab, and his Russian fiancee, Vera. She has "a puritan love of Siberia, where she had been born, and of all northern Russia" (207). Vera tells Thubron that she prefers Leningrad and the north to Kiev because the people in the north "are more open-hearted" (208). In Kiev the people are "enclosed, they live in their own circles" (208). In some ways, Thubron shares Vera's conclusions. In Kiev, in the Ukraine -- the Russian state closest to western Europe -- he too feels most closed-in and watched. Yet, he is hesitant to embrace Vera's love of spaciousness. The vastness of Russia is difficult to take in. In his latest essay on Siberia (Granta: 64), he writes, "Space is the sterile luxury of Novosibirsk" (21). The tension between the claustrophobic feeling Thubron gets when he is in peripheral space, as he is in Kiev, and the emptiness he feels in Siberia or the deserts of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan marks his writing about this part of the world.
In this paper, I argue that Thubron's movements back and forth between peripheral and centric space constitute the structural framework of much of his travel writing. Because of his appreciation for and deprecation of English insularity, Thubron is the perfect writer to explore a landscape dominated by space and spaciousness.
jjschram@cc.ysu.edu
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