The Dream of Lhasa: The Life of Nikolay Przhevalsky (1839?1888), Explorer of Central Asia

by Donald Rayfield

  At Sogtu-khüre (‘drunken temple’) three men from Ting-yüan-ying came out to escort the expedition to the town. The lama Baldyn Sorji was still friendly and passed on letters sent to Przhevalsky from Peking. But much had changed. The old prince was dead and Przhevalsky was disappointed to see that his sons had turned out as degenerate as any of the Mongol feudal princes. The abbot no longer hunted foxes; he had taken to the theatre and put on plays in which, much to Przhevalsky’s disgust, ‘he is not ashamed of acting women’s parts’. Nothing saddened Przhevalsky more than to see an adventurous and friendly boy become a tyrant or an actor. But he stayed nine days to sell his mules, which were useless for desert treks, and to hire twenty-two camels and six Mongol drivers for the six week’s journey to Urga.

  Once again he kept east of the carriage road and followed his old route, hiring guides for a few days at a time, since to miss a well would cost the members of the expedition their lives. It was an eventful, tiring journey, more tolerable as the expedition passed into autumn. At last, on 19/31 October 1880, for the third time Przhevalsky greeted Shishmaryov at the Russian consulate in Urga. In touchingly banal verse, which marks the beginning and end of each of Przhevalsky’s diaries, he mused:

  Dreaded, the storms have passed,

  The sailor has swum to shore,

  But nobody’s told the sailor

  There would be storms no more.

  The expedition disbanded at Urga. In a triumphal entry to Russia, Przhevalsky and his companions galloped to the border town of Kyakhta, their wagon and Chinese cart escorted by outriders. Lagging behind were the heavy transports with their loads of specimens of flora and fauna, and rocks from Tibet, the Nan Shan and Mongolia. Ahead lay glory, thanksgiving, lectures, banquets, writing and the snow-covered countryside of Smolensk. But, as Przhevalsky concluded in his account of this, his most fruitful expedition:

  A sad, yearning feeling always comes over me as soon as the first bursts of joy on returning home have passed. The further time flies amid ordinary life, the more this yearning grows, as if something unforgettable, precious, had been abandoned in the wilderness of Asia which could not be found in Europe … an exceptional bliss—freedom, which may be savage but is infringed by nothing, almost absolute …

  7

  The Eagle’s Nest

  I sometimes feel now it is just possible that, setting off on his journeys he was not looking for something so much as running away from something …

  NABOKOV

  There were banquets and lectures in Verny (Alma-Ata), ovations in Semipalatinsk, then a fourteen-day sledge journey across Siberia to the railhead at Orenburg. Przhevalsky spent Christmas with his brothers in Moscow and the New Year with his stepfather, stepsister and Pyltsov at Otradnoye. It was a brief respite. By mid-January 1881, Przhevalsky was in Petersburg for a frenzy of celebration. Russia was elated. Przhevalsky had returned from the dead; General Skobelev had just stormed Gök Tepe and completed Russia’s conquest of all the lands north of the Oxus; the British were suffering reverses in Afghanistan and in southern Africa; Tsar Aleksander II was, it was rumoured, about to announce a constitutional form of government.

  The Tsar and Milyutin received Przhevalsky and, later, Eklon, Roborovsky and two of the soldiers. Members of the imperial family and the government went to Przhevalsky’s lectures. He was besieged by visitors and flooded with correspondence; his loathing for Petersburg grew hysterical.

  Petersburg’s euphoria was cut short. On 1/13 March Sofia Perovskaya’s group finally blew up not just the Tsar’s servants but the Tsar himself, and thus ended a relatively liberal man and a relatively moderate era. The new Tsar, Aleksander III, would have no truck with constitutions or liberalization; he brought in a new government. Milyutin, suspect for all his patriotism as the man who had helped emancipate the serfs and build a modern, professional army, was toppled from power in a few weeks. (His successor, Adjutant-General Vannovsky, was distinctly cooler to Przhevalsky.) Russia was plunged into a vicious decade of repression and stagnation—a time of the first progroms, of economic doldrums, hesitant foreign policies, and cultural philistinism, presided over by two reactionaries, the Tsar’s former tutor Konstantin Pobedonostsev and the new Minister of the Interior, Count Dimitri Tolstoy.

  The rot had set in earlier. As the American ambassador in Petersburg reported in November 1880, a country whose paper currency had fallen fifty per cent below par, with famine, a trade deficit and political discontent, was in no state to expand its empire abroad. The new Chinese envoy, Tseng Chi-tse, who had come to renegotiate the return of the Ili Valley, knew this. Despite Przhevalsky’s contemptuous reports, the Russian General Staff rather feared General Tso-tung-t’ang’s army. Thus Milyutin finally conceded, by the Treaty of St Petersburg at the end of February 1881, all but the west of the Ili Valley to China, giving Russia only limited indemnities and trade rights. It was China’s first diplomatic success against Russia since 1689.

  Despite the death of her father-in-law, the new Tsarina was so taken with Przhevalsky and his exhibition of zoological specimens in the Academy, that she invited him out to Gatchina for ‘conversations’ with the heir to the throne, the future Nicholas II, then a boy of thirteen. The first of these conversations—or lessons—took place in May and they forged a link in a long chain of events and influences that involved Nicholas so deeply in Asia and interested him in ruling the non-Chinese peoples of China. Przhevalsky had perhaps struck a spark that Nicholas, twenty years later, would blow up into a conflagration—the Russo-Japanese war.

  The talks with Nicholas were Przhevalsky’s last duties in Petersburg; he was impatient to be off. Heginger, the Riga nurseryman, was pestering him for seeds; geographers wanted information and lectures. All that Przhevalsky conceded to the public was to dictate an Autobiographical Story to Russkaya Starina (Russian Antiquities) on condition that it was not printed until his death. Then he took Roborovsky and one of his N.C.O.’s, Rumyantsev, to Smolensk (Eklon had gone back to military college).

  The estate at Otradnoye no longer pleased him. The railway had come; the whistles of locomotives and the new proletariat obtruded on the countryside. Otradnoye, in any case, was not his. It had passed from the Przhevalsky to the Tolpygo family. It was time to find an estate of his own; officer’s pay, pensions, awards, royalties, and shares had made Przhevalsky a modestly rich man. On his return to Russia he had asked Ivan Tolpygo to put an advertisement in the Smolensk Herald. Tolpygo’s wording was tactless, but honest: ‘Colonel Przhevalsky is looking for an estate with fewer neighbours and more game and fish.’

  Among the estates offered was Sloboda, in the north of the province, as far as was physically possible from a railway line, at a price of 26,000 roubles. Przhevalsky was enchanted by it: set deep in the forest, with a fine large lake (Sapsho) and a chain of islands, teeming with lynx, wild boar, foxes, hares, bears, duck and fish, it was, and is, unbelievably beautiful, the wilderness of the Siberian taiga in miniature. He bought it outright and set about making it a sportsman’s paradise. He brought to it his nurse Makaryevna, his cook Arkhip, and a manager, Denisov. The villagers—for Sloboda was a village of about 100 peasants, with a parish school and even plans for a post office—were to become gamekeepers and beaters.

  Sloboda had three drawbacks, which Przhevalsky set about remedying. First, the previous owner had given a lease to a distillery which stood right next to the house. Przhevalsky began persecuting the distiller, Pashetkin, and drew up plans to build a new house on the steep banks of the lake. Secondly, the village priest was obstreperous over his rights to some of the land. Przhevalsky, who went to church only at Easter and Christmas, began to hound the poor priest and make fun of him to the villagers. (Once he showed them a dead fox and shocked them by saying the difference between the hunter and the priest was that the hunter skinned only the dead, while the priest skinned the living and the dead.) Lastly, the estate included only half of Lake Sapsho and Przhevalsky would not share its solitude with anyone.
He went to the part-owner, Minchenko, agreed on a price, only to come back time and time again with the cash in his pocket to find Minchenko roaring drunk and the price upped by another 1,000 roubles.

  Sloboda was delightfully neglected and Przhevalsky lived rough. He slept in the open and lived off the land. Roborovsky and Rumyantsev gave him company; he wrote letters full of awkward tenderness and solicitude to his Cossacks and, especially, to Eklon. Only Eklon gave him cause for concern; by Autumn Przhevalsky was reproaching him:

  I’ve heard from Volka [Vsevolod Roborovsky’s pet-name] that you’ve been under arrest in the guard-room … don’t waste time on trifles, swot something up … Carriages, fast horses, beaver coats, familiarity with ladies from the demi-monde—all this, by progressive stages, can lead to an undesirable, if not lamentable, end. Your love of nature, sport, travel, all your hard work will be wasted … I gave you your start; it will be sad for me to see you go another road …

  That autumn Przhevalsky made a brief trip to Petersburg. He was already thinking of a new expedition to Lhasa, and a chance to rescue Eklon from the temptations of settled life; but his main purpose was to persuade the Imperial Geographical Society to award Roborovsky and Eklon gold medals for their loyalty and work.

  Eklon drifted further away. In November 1881 Przhevalsky learnt that Eklon’s mother was dying, as had Yelena, of stomach cancer: he wrote a letter of commiseration, but its stoic tone did little to bring them closer: ‘… have the courage to bear the fateful blow. It is inevitable—it will come sooner or later … Thus for each of us it gets harder every year to believe in happiness as we imagined it in childhood and youth. But blessed is the man who as well as the sad experience of life can keep his inner warmth to the grave …’ Przhevalsky soon found a new outlet for his frustrated affection. In the Sloboda distillery that gave him so much annoyance there was a young clerk, Pyotr Kozlov, who had just left school in the nearby village of Dukhovshchina. Makaryevna, always on the look-out for someone to help her master, pointed him out to Przhevalsky as a bright boy. Przhevalsky walked over to the distillery; he asked the dreaming clerk what he was thinking about.

  ‘I was thinking,’ Kozlov replied, ‘how much brighter those stars must shine in Tibet.’

  That was enough for Przhevalsky. He took the boy from the distillery to live with him, enlisted him as a volunteer in the army, bought textbooks and, with Roborovsky’s help, began to train him as an assistant and an officer. Pyotr Kozlov felt an adoration for Przhevalsky which lasted the whole of his long life; he was to be the most faithful and most successful of Przhevalsky’s disciples. He recalled in 1928: ‘At the sight of that man from afar, having him close to me, something extraordinary used to happen. His figure, his movements, his voice, his aquiline head were not like other people’s; the deep gaze of his strict, handsome blue eyes seemed to penetrate right into your soul.’ A miracle had plucked Kozlov from obscurity. Very soon Przhevalsky was ‘Psheva’ to him and he was ‘Kizosha’ to Przhevalsky. It did not matter that Kozlov’s brother still did the rounds of the villages, selling roast lamb to the peasants, annoying the gentry with his drunken bouts. In Pyotr Kozlov Przhevalsky had found the young man who had been eluding him all his life: alert, submissive, loyal and handsome.

  Sloboda gave Przhevalsky the all-male family he had enjoyed with his pupils in Warsaw; no woman was allowed to stay in the house—not even Makaryevna. Old friends from Smolensk and Warsaw, his brothers Yevgeni and Vladimir, his nephews (Vladimir’s and Pyltsov’s sons) turned the summers into a long shooting party full of boyish humour and sporting dedication. But these visitors had families to go back to; they could not give Przhevalsky the permanent male ambience he had had in Warsaw and in Central Asia. Roborovsky and Kozlov had to leave to resume their officer’s training. The local peasantry seemed to Przhevalsky to be rotten with drink and women. The only solution was to have his favourite Cossacks come and live with him.

  Przhevalsky’s letters to one of his Cossacks, Panteley Teleshov, are touching. All his shy, sometimes bullying, sometimes confused affection comes out in his concern for Teleshov, his favourite after the faithful but ageing Dondok Irinchinov. Teleshov’s first extant reply, dictated to a military clerk, dates from January 1882; it thanks Przhevalsky for gifts of money and ammunition, then runs:

  I will practise shooting and will try to learn to prepare animals and plants and also as you say to study reading and writing, for which I am going on 15 January to a relative who lives in the country about forty miles from where I live and there, in between studying reading and writing, I shall be shooting birds too. I have the honour of thanking you for your fatherly advice to me; I do not intend under any circumstances to get married before the next expedition.

  By March 1883 Teleshov was literate and had learnt arithmetic and how to prepare specimens. He had now only to await his leader in Kyakhta for the next expedition; Przhevalsky asked only one thing of him, to stay single. Teleshov reassured him: ‘I can hardly wait for you to come, I think day and night about setting off as soon as possible after blue and golden pheasants. I wasn’t even thinking of marriage …’

  Teleshov’s fidelity contrasted with Eklon’s betrayal. In the summer of 1883 Eklon plucked up courage to inform Przhevalsky that he was getting married and would therefore not be coming on the next expedition. Przhevalsky was in Moscow for the coronation of Aleksander III. He headed home and stopped off on neutral territory, at Otradnoye, to have it out with Eklon. There was a blazing row. Przhevalsky locked himself away from Eklon. From Moscow, Fyodor Eklon wrote a lame goodbye letter: ‘When I was leaving Otradnoye I did not have any chance of saying goodbye to you, although I looked for you in the garden and the copse. Let me thank you with all my heart for everything you have done for me during our eight years’ acquaintance …’ Przhevalsky wrote Eklon out of the expedition, inventing the pretext of his father’s ill health as a reason more satisfactory than marriage. Coldly using the vy form of address, instead of their wonted intimate ty, he informed Eklon: ‘The belongings you got ready for the expedition will be taken over as the expedition’s baggage at the price they cost you.’ Eklon disappears from history as a married lieutenant in a grenadier regiment.

  Wounded, Przhevalsky returned to his nest at Sloboda. But he dreamt of wilder scenes. Winter evenings were spent writing; during 1882 Przhevalsky composed the best of his books, the account of the third Central Asian expedition From Zaysan via Hami to Tibet and the Upper Reaches of the Yellow River. The book was finished in January 1883 and Przhevalsky was able to set his mind to forming a new plan. The next expedition was to combine the mighty armed force of the last with the light mobility of the first Central Asian journey. The main party would establish bases on the approaches to Tibet; ‘raiding parties’ would cover wide areas of the Tibetan plateau and head for Lhasa. Plans had to be made carefully. Przhevalsky had the support of Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky and of the young Tsarevich. But the new government ministers were colourless men and Aleksander III and Girs were anxious not to offend European powers by too overt incursions into China.

  In February 1883 Przhevalsky was in Petersburg. He stayed not in Demuth’s hotel, but in slummy lodgings on Stolyarnaya, now Przhevalsky, Street, an area where nobody would notice him. He saw his book through the printers and drew up plans for the next expedition. He listed the journeys of Indian pandits who had crossed Tibet from north to south and east to west on behalf of the British; a new Russian expedition was needed to redress the balance. He proposed, as was his habit, to make his departure from the point of his last return: to begin at Kyakhta where an admirer, the merchant Lushnikov, had turned his house into a virtual headquarters for Russian explorers. The sources of the Huang Ho would be the first goal, then as much of Tibet as was possible, before the expedition returned to Russia through the oases of Kashgaria to Lake Issyk-Kul’ in Russian territory. The two-year expedition would comprise twenty men and thirty-five camels and would cost over 43,000 roubles.

  The plan m
ade its way through the ministers, and the state council, to the Tsar. He assented and ordered that Przhevalsky should be paid in silver, rather than in paper, effectively increasing the expedition’s funds by fifty per cent. Przhevalsky was to have government munitions and scientific equipment, and the right to promote his Cossacks and soldiers for bravery in any armed clashes. Muted voices of criticism, however, could be heard in the general approbation. Some geographers, for instance the German Marthe, were struck on reading Przhevalsky’s new book by the dissipation of energy as well as the energy itself. What was the point, they wondered, of an all-out effort to reach Lhasa, followed by a survey of part of the Huang Ho and eastern Nan Shan, when science needed a systematic coverage of one area? Przhevalsky had mapped parts of the Nan Shan, parts of the Kun Lun but had broken off both surveys to head for Lhasa or to find a lake and shoot migrating birds. A more serious complaint was that Przhevalsky would not take civilians, let alone specialists, who might fill the gaps in his own competence. His expeditions brought back meagre information on geology, languages and archaeology and, with certain exceptions like Lob Nor, native populations did not seem to be objects of anthropological interest to Przhevalsky, but sources of supply or obstacles to surmount.

  On one point Przhevalsky gave way. The fourth Central Asian journey was to consolidate the results of the earlier journeys, to explore from Tsaidam to Lob Nor and complete the survey of the Kun Lun system of mountains, as well as tracing the Huang Ho to its sources. Lhasa was to be a secondary goal. But Przhevalsky refused to take on any assistants except the young men he had chosen and trained himself—Roborovsky and Kozlov. Criticism antagonized him; Petersburg revolted him He wrote to Lushnikov in Kyakhta: ‘There’s no space, light or air. Stone prisons are called houses, disfigured life called civilization, foul morals called everyday tact, corruption, heartlessness, indifference, debauchery, in a word, all man’s nasty instincts, true, dressed up some way or another, figure as the main factors in all strata of society from the lowest to the highest …’