Prose  |  English sample translation available

The hero of Journeys to Siberia is a youth who longs to become a “man with qualities”; he therefore renounces a scientific career and family life and sets out on a long pilgrimage whose apparently chaotic trajectory gradually reveals a logic of a deeper order. Martin Ryšavý depicts his hero’s faltering, meandering journey through life in a timeless and initially unremarkable “traditional” style, which is in fact a subtle piece of storytelling deliberately linked to a restrained use of language. Journeys to Siberia can thus be perceived as a developmental novel in which the “formed subject” is primarily the style and genre of storytelling itself: the book, which can be read as a piece of travel writing, as a love story or even as a document of contemporary life in the Russian Far East, taken as a whole becomes a “classic” novelistic composition about the sense of human longing for spiritual certainties.