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Across Central Asia
These 101 photos were made on
four trips to China's Far West, the provinces of Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai and
Xinjiang, in 2000, 2003, 2005 and 2006, mostly in August and September. They are arranged in a way to follow the last
collecting expedition of Vladimir Nabokov's naturalist and explorer Konstantin
Godunov-Cherdyntsev whom he created in his big last Russian novel Dar (The
Gift), written in Berlin between 1934 and 1938, first published in English
in 1963.
In Chapter 2, the
storyteller (a young Russian émigré writer in Berlin by the name of Fyodor
Godunov-Cherdyntsev) tells about his father, and what he tells reflects
Nabokov's admiration for his own father, the statesman, criminologist and
publicist Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov who in 1922 had been assassinated in
Berlin by Russian tsarists. But Fyodor's father is something altogether
different: the leading Russian entomologist of his time, author of the first and
only Russian butterfly atlas and forever in search of "new" butterflies. Mainly
because of them he travels to remote regions of the Russian Empire and to
Central Asia. His son surprises his readers with a very vivid and detailed
account of his father's last trip to Central Asia from which he never returned.
Fyodor clearly is imagining this trip. So was Nabokov. As a youth he had dreamed
of going on a similar expedition to Central Asia, perhaps with the famous
Russian explorer Grigorii Grum-Grzhimailov. But he had never been there.
Now what Nabokov as a
writer always cherished was detail. He did not care for generalities and
abstract facts and figures. But even the slightest detail had to be right. For
him it would not have done to assemble a few general facts about the regions he
wanted his character to traverse and to fake whatever detail his report required.
He needed true and telling details – and gleaned them from those who actually
had been there, the European explorers between 1850 and 1915. When sick in bed
in the winter of 1932-33, Nabokov studied the travelogs of Grigorii
Grum-Grzhimailo, Nikolai Przhevalski, Pyotr
Kozlov, Mikhail Pevtsov, Vsevolod
Roborovski, A.E. Pratt, Hamilton Bower, Thomas Allen, Régis-Évariste Huc,
Gabriel Bonvalot, Sven Hedin and probably many others. From them he borrowed a
little over 100 telling details, and out of those he created Konstantin
Godunov's imaginary expedition. Still it is more than a mere collage. It is an
intensely colorful travelog in its own right. Nabokov was forced to proceed in
this way (and he did so only once in all his life) to impregnate his imaginary
voyage with what in his eyes it required, "the amazing music of truth".
It is possible to extract
enough information from Chapter 2 of The Gift to roughly understand
where Konstantin Godunov went. But with the help of Nabokov's sources, it is
possible to deduce his exact itinerary. He set out from Tashkent in the summer
of 1916. In Przhevalsk on Lake Issyk (today Karakol in Kyrgyzstan), he bought
horses, mules and camels for his caravan and in company of an assistant and
probably several Kossack helpers entered into China at Gulja (Yining). They went
along the Borohoro range of the Tian Shan into the desert-and-steppe plains of
southern Jungaria, occasionally advancing into the high mountains, crossed them
eventually into the westernmost parts of the Gobi in the region of Hami,
K'u-shui and Sazhou (today Dunhuang), continued through the Hexi Corridor to the
sands of Alashan (today Badain Jaran Shamo) and into central Mongolia, turned
back, spent the spring of 1916 in the "Nanshan" (the mountain ranges north and
south of the salty "Blue Sea" of Kokonor), went up to the Tibetan plateau and
then east into China, followed the Yangtze River down as far as Ichang, turned
back and reached Kangding (formerly known as Tatsienlu), the Chinese border town
facing the Tibetan province of Kham, went into Tibet at least as far as the
sources of the Yellow River and resolved to return to Russia via the Lop Nor in
the Tarim basin. Somewhere between Kangding and Lop Nor his son lost track of
him. Konstantin Godunov was last seen by a French missionary in the vicinity of
"Chetu" (i.e., Zheduo) near Kangding.
All the correspondencies
between Nabokov's text and its sources have been traced in an English language
article [1] and a German language hardcover book [2].
The photos show what
Godunov and his author would have seen if they had traveled almost a century
later. Conspicuously missing is Tibet and Lop Nor, less conspicuously Kyrgyzstan
and Mongolia.
15 February 2007
Dieter E. Zimmer
IMPORTANT NOTICE: The photos
of this album are public in so far as they may be freely downloaded and used for
strictly private purposes. However, if these private purposes include some sort
of distribution, in print or online, the names of the photographers must be
given. Every sort of commercial distribution, in print or online, requires their
written permission, to be obtained from Dieter E. Zimmer, Claudiusstrasse 6,
D-10557 Berlin, Germany.
[1] Dieter
E. Zimmer & Sabine Hartmann: "The Amazing Music of Truth: Nabokov's Sources for
Godunov's Central Asian Travels in The Gift." Davidson, NC: Nabokov
Studies, vol.7, 2002/2003, pp.33-74
[2] Dieter E.
Zimmer: Nabokov reist im Traum in das Innere Asiens. Reinbek: Rowohlt,
2006, ISBN 3 498 07663 9
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