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

by Donald Rayfield

  Fortunately for Russia, the Foreign Minister was now Girs, a tough, realistic and moderate man, who had the diplomacy to praise Przhevalsky and the sense to disregard him. Russian sinologists were appalled by Przhevalsky’s total ignorance of China’s culture and by his callousness. The European Herald (Vestnik Yevropy) was to respond in July and August with denunciation and refutation. Przhevalsky protested in the conservative paper New Times (Novoye Vremya); privately, he cared little, writing to Fateyev: ‘What can come of it?—threshing the wind. Our views are quite opposite—they have armchair humanitarianism, I have the conclusions drawn from harsh, practical life. They have soap bubbles they call ideals, I have force as the only recognized criterion of right.’

  In July 1886 he was again free to leave Petersburg. He was hardly back at Sloboda when, unwillingly, he sought medical advice. A diet of confectionery and game, and sedentary months in Petersburg had made him very stout; his leg swelled up and hurt. He went to Moscow to see the distinguished Dr Ostroumov—who was later to treat Chekhov for tuberculosis. Ostroumov tactfully told him he was suffering from an excess of health and ordered him to diet. Przhevalsky tried to forget his anxieties in bear-hunting and hare-coursing. At Sloboda he had sown oats in the fields solely to entice the bears out of the woods and nearer the house.

  Kozlov spent only ten days and Roborovsky just a month with Przhevalsky that summer. Teleshov had left for his native Transbaykalia. The grenadiers Nefedov and Bessonov stayed on; so, for a while, did Yegorov, one of the expedition’s N.C.O.’s. Przhevalsky wrote long, frequent letters to Teleshov, asking after the other Cossacks, and particularly after young Mikhail Protopopov, who had returned to Kyakhta. He felt the lack of a focus for his affections. On a neighbouring estate he discovered a boy, Kostya Voyevodsky, who had lost his father. Przhevalsky made himself a second father to Kostya and put him down for cadet college in Petersburg the following autumn. Makaryevna still ran the household with her usual vigour and devotion, so much so that she dislocated her shoulder and Przhevalsky sent her under Yegorov’s escort to Moscow for treatment.

  By autumn the house was nearly finished. A room upstairs was set aside for Teleshov. Przhevalsky courted his favourite Cossack by letter: ‘How are things at home? I can tell in advance: at first happy and fine; then you got fed up. The family was kind and attentive at first. Then they asked for money. You didn’t give them any—they got huffy and reproachful. You’re not thinking of marrying? Look out, be careful with that sort of business. You can’t undo mistakes …’

  Teleshov was hesitant about settling in Sloboda. He moved to Kyakhta and became a butler for Lushnikov. Przhevalsky lured him with descriptions of sport and promises of action in future wars and future expeditions; he told him how much the servant girls, Liza and Aleksandra, in his Petersburg rooms admired Teleshov; he sent him medals and photographs.

  Friendship and reverence still surrounded Przhevalsky. Many Warsaw friends—Fateyev and Feldman for instance—were now important military figures in Moscow and Petersburg and, when they were free, would come to stay with him. Kozlov and Roborovsky wrote with news of their examinations and expressed their gratitude. Przhevalsky spent night after night in the open, to the dismay of his driver, camped by the lake, shooting duck, fishing, lying in wait for bears. He had bought new pointers and hounds. This was his idyll. He evaded all invitations, even from Sofia, his sister-in-law in Moscow. He wrote to her:

  I’ve got very used to Sloboda, I’m quite happy to be alone; the sport is excellent, the area wild. In a word, all I require is to hand. I do my best with the diet, I bathe twice daily. As for the swelling on my leg, only the desert will cure it, as happened on my last expedition. Like a free bird in a cage I too cannot get on with ‘civilization’ where everyone is first and foremost a slave to social life. The open spaces of the desert—that’s what I dream of day and night. Give me mountains of gold and I still wouldn’t sell my wild freedom … Thank you again for your attentiveness. At times even a wild animal likes kindness.’

  The distillery was now closed; Pashetkin had removed it and he was restored to Przhevalsky’s favour as a useful business man. But Pashetkin continued to run the village pub; the drunken peasantry upset Przhevalsky. He wrote to his half-brother, Nikolay Tolpygo, who was then building the railway from the Caspian Sea to Samarkand:

  You’re lucky to be in Asia where European civilization has not yet penetrated—it’s a great thing in itself, but quite unfit for our wild places and its ideas are quite inapplicable to our Russian savages … The peasants, as everywhere, are drunks and idlers; it gets worse every year. Where will it all end? The Cossack Teleshov very shrewdly remarked to me once: ‘we were looking for savages in Asia but this is where they live’.

  It was time to be off to Asia again; the pendulum of revulsion in Przhevalsky’s soul had swung. He went to Petersburg, hoping that in Stolyarnaya Street there would be no distractions, for he had to finish the account of the fourth Central Asian journey before he could plan the fifth. Here his only relaxation was to meet Kostya Voyevodsky at weekends and during school holidays. He ordered himself a giant-calibre rifle from Tula (Russia’s famous town of gunsmiths); he kept writing to Teleshov:

  Give my regards to Misha [Mikhail Protopopov]; thank him for his letter; write to him asking whether he’d like to become a soldier. Won’t he be coming to Petersburg? Give my regards to the Cossacks: praise Solovikov for not marrying. If you follow his example and don’t get married, that will make me very pleased. As soon as I get the rifles from Tula I’ll send you the one I promised. I’ve ordered the picture magazine Nov’ [Virgin Soil] for you for the New Year …

  After a month’s work Przhevalsky presented his collection of birds to the Academy of Sciences and returned to Sloboda for five days at Christmas. He went back to Petersburg for the annual general meeting of the Academy and sat through a long account and a eulogy of his work by the secretary. ‘There’s a nice obituary all ready for me,’ was his comment. Przhevalsky had to remain in Petersburg: the Academy of Sciences had arranged a spectacular display of Przhevalsky’s zoological specimens and he had to show the Tsar around, while Roborovsky took the Tsarina and Kozlov the Tsarevich Nicholas. The catalogue of mammals—and the scientific work—was handed over to a self-taught Cossack zoologist, Polyakov, to whom fell the honour of first describing and naming Przhevalsky’s horse from the skull and skin Przhevalsky had brought from Zaysansk.

  A month later, in time for the 1887 spring migration, Przhevalsky was back at Sloboda, by Lake Sapsho, with his grenadiers, Nefedov and Bessonov. He spent the long evenings in his three-roomed ‘hut’, writing. The days were spent superintending the plasterers in the new house, shooting snipe, planting cherry and plum trees. But both book and house were moving ‘at tortoise pace’. Przhevalsky’s driver, Zakhar, took to drink with the coming of spring and the long nights spent waiting in the open while his master fished or shot. Przhevalsky got rid of him. Other servants turned out to be idlers or crooked; they too were dismissed. The estate was nevertheless slowly taking shape. Przhevalsky described it to Nikolay Tolpygo: ‘The view from the house over the lake and forests is splendid, there’s a spring right by the porch … I’ve ordered furniture to be made in Petersburg for the Sloboda house, it’s cost 1,800 roubles with delivery. Only don’t think I now wish to settle down—no, I think that’s a long way off yet.’

  Przhevalsky looked after his peasants in a patriarchal way. His farm labourers were paid about forty roubles a year and had a sack of flour and other provisions every month. The poor received gifts of flour at Christmas and Easter. The parish schoolchildren were often taken away from classes and hired as beaters at twenty kopecks a day each. The neighbouring gentry and the priest received scant respect. Przhevalsky’s dispute over land rights with the clergy became so acrimonious that the local arbitrator was called in. The arbitrator refused to adjudicate: with the church on one hand and a major-general on the other, he decided the disputants were too high-ranking
for his powers.

  Przhevalsky invited his brothers Vladimir and Yevgeni and his nephews, Vladimir junior and Kolya Pyltsov, to come and shoot. But he was scathing about any guest who missed a bird or spoilt the sport. He took no trouble to conceal his contempt for his city brothers, particularly Vladimir. One peasant, Gromov, whom Przhevalsky used as a huntsman and gamekeeper, recalled Przhevalsky summing up his brother as a second-rate defence lawyer who ‘just has a fat pocket. That’s all he can boast about.’

  Not until August could Kozlov, Roborovsky and young Kostya Voyevodsky leave their colleges and stay at Sloboda. When they came they were overwhelmed with hospitality. Przhevalsky weighed his guests at the beginning and the end of their stay, and woe betide them if they did not put on weight. These three protégés gave Przhevalsky more joy than his brothers, nephews and army colleagues. Kozlov’s letters from college show his dedication, written, unlike Roborovsky’s, in the polite vy form; he signed himself ‘your Kizosha’, and told his ‘Psheva’ of his affection: ‘I see in you a father in the full sense of this great word.’ ‘You,’ he wrote to Przhevalsky, ‘are a man to whom people must bow down and say, “You’re a genius! Seek your own judgment.”’ The family reunion was clouded only by the death of Roborovsky’s sister.

  But Teleshov would not come. In February Przhevalsky wrote, ‘Upstairs there is a room for you which you can move into whenever you want.’ He offered him twenty-five roubles a month to come and work for him. He ordered a three-piece suit for Teleshov’s birthday, but did not send it to Siberia, hoping that Teleshov would come to Sloboda to fetch it. In July 1887 the house was finished. Teleshov’s room remained empty. Przhevalsky ordered him a new rifle and gave graphic accounts of the field sports in Sloboda. With each letter he begged Teleshov not to marry. Summer drew to a close and the rainy autumn halted the sport. In September, no longer hoping to see Teleshov that year, he sent him the three-piece suit.

  While it rained Przhevalsky was able to get on with his book; the new expedition was simultaneously taking shape in his mind. Letters came from the Tsar, Tsarina and Tsarevich, enquiring when he was going to glorify Russia again in Tibet. After a day spent writing in his ‘hut’, Przhevalsky would move into his new house; it was chilly, for not all the stoves worked and the inner walls needed more timber cladding. But it was an impressive building: six rooms, with a mezzanine, all wood, furnished in the solid style Przhevalsky had ordered. As visitors came into the hall, they were greeted by a stuffed Tibetan bear. Bilderling’s portrait of Przhevalsky hung above it, showing the hunter returning laden with game. The walls of the drawing room were lined with signed portraits of Tsarevich Nicholas and his brother, Grand Duke George. Red pheasants sat in glass cases in the dining room; the study contained a large glass case, full of hunting guns. A door led from the study to a bedroom where Przhevalsky had an iron bedstead and a mattress made of hair from the tails of the wild yak he had shot. Upstairs were two bedrooms and the library, full of textbooks on ornithology and zoology, the accounts of rival explorers and unbound sets of sporting magazines such as Nature and Field Sports (Priroda i Okhota). The garden was full of fruit trees. There were clumps of medicinal rhubarb from Kansu and greenhouses where melons from Khotan grew. Ivy clambered all over the ‘hut’, and eventually Przhevalsky had nightingales singing to him from the leafy bower while he worked.

  The nearer he brought Sloboda to perfection as a sportsman’s heaven, the more his thoughts turned towards the new expedition. Przhevalsky wrote to Fateyev in November: ‘I’m thinking of taking another trip to Tibet to have a look at the Dalai Lama. It needs only twenty to thirty sharpshooters and I’ll guarantee I’ll get to Lhasa. Let sinologists with their Chinese documents and weepy sermons of peace try to make the journey.’ News came of Potanin’s return from China, after three years’ exploration of Kansu and Szechwan, having made spectacular botanical discoveries. Przhevalsky had little time for civilians, even an ex-Cossak like Potanin. But his appetite was not only whetted, but perturbed by news of British explorers. Carey and Dalgleish had followed up his explorations of the Kun Lun and mapped the northern barriers to Tibet with great precision. True, Dalgleish was murdered by an Afghan as he was returning to India, but the British—who were soon to attack the Tibetan army in Sikkim—had made a bold inroad into a potential Russian sphere of influence.

  The ‘family’ reassembled for Christmas, together with Aleksandra, Przhevalsky’s half-sister, and her son, Kolya Pyltsov. The latest book was all but complete. Kozlov had passed his officer’s examinations with distinction and, although he had to wait for a vacancy to be commissioned, everyone was buoyant. They celebrated the New Year of 1888 by killing three wolves. At the end of February Przhevalsky once more went to Petersburg. His book had to be seen through the press, and his new expedition had to win the assent of the Imperial Geographical Society, the Tsar and his ministers. The book was published by the Academy of Sciences with funds donated by the Tsarevich Nicholas. The new expedition, Przhevalsky proposed, would retrace the route of the last, from Karakol in Russia through Kashgaria to the Gas oasis and then—with or without a Chinese passport—force its way south to Lhasa. If the Tibetans gave way gracefully, Przhevalsky intended to explore the eastern, river-gorge zone of Tibet around Chamdo. If the Tibetans remained adamant, he would return westwards through Ladakh.

  But there were embarrassments. The Geographical Society discreetly insisted that Przhevalsky’s expertise, broad though it was, did not quite match the expense of the expedition. They dared not make him take on a civilian scientist. Instead, as tactfully as they could, they arranged for Przhevalsky to meet the geologist Mushketov for lessons in geology. A witness has described the confusion of Mushketov and the ill-suppressed impatience of Przhevalsky during their first ‘lesson’. The great teacher was, as is often the case, the worst of pupils. They compromised and Mushketov offered to write a treatise on glaciers for Przhevalsky.

  While in Petersburg, Przhevalsky came to realize that his companion through all four Central Asian journeys, Dondok Irinchinov, would not be coming this time. Dondok was ageing and, after a few months’ pondering, decided to remain a camel-herd. Przhevalsky commended his wisdom, but this was a bitter blow. In the General Staff committee room Przhevalsky had an ominous encounter. He met Lieutenant Artamonov who had a reputation as a palmist. He studied Przhevalsky’s hand and said: ‘You think in images, you never forget friends, but your life will be short.’ The prophecy darkened Przhevalsky’s mood; he talked it over with Fateyev.

  He sensed the angel of death hanging over Makaryevna, who was now succumbing to a kidney disease. Przhevalsky wrote to Denisov, trying to soften the blow of his imminent departure for Asia: ‘Put it as gently as possible to Makaryevna that I am going for two years. Assure her, and this is quite right, that war could break out here during this time, so that I shall be safer in the deserts of Asia. We must just arrange for Makaryevna not to be lonely. I’ll spend whatever is necessary. Let her send for a companion or bring in one of her relatives—I don’t mind what, as long as my beloved old woman can live peacefully…’

  Petersburg imprisoned Przhevalsky for the spring of 1888. The arrangements for the new expedition dragged on. The Russian envoy in Peking, Kumani, was having great difficulty in securing Chinese consent to another attempt on Lhasa, with such a large and heavily-armed escort for an ostensibly scientific expedition. Kumani was dealing with no less a negotiator than Tseng Chi-tse, who had wrested the Ili Valley from the ‘tiger’s mouth’ seven years ago. Tseng granted a passport in the end, but his letters to Kumani have a polite, stinging irony:

  In a word, this time, despite the unwavering desire of the learned traveller [Przhevalsky] to penetrate from Khotan [to Lhasa] it is positively difficult to guarantee that he will not meet with dangers. Therefore the Chinese government disowns responsibility for any incidents.

  In any case, foreign travellers are not allowed to have armed escorts. But in your Excellency’s letter of 14 April it was
said that there will be two officers, one interpreter and a team of twenty-four men with Mr Przhevalsky … It is not actually quite clear to us whether the Russian officer Przhevalsky is taking soldiers or servants with him. If they are soldiers, the ministry would find it difficult to give their consent. If they are servants, then a score seems too many, for when there are a lot of people it arouses astonishment and can very easily lead to unpleasant affairs … Why is it necessary to take servants in such numbers and thus awaken suspicions in observers? It seems to us more correct to limit the number to sixteen, the number of servants in Przhevalsky’s last journey. From a lengthy stay in China, your Excellency has no doubt become convinced that it is hard to go against the morals of the Chinese people and local customs.

  Przhevalsky had his passport; though he had told the Tsarevich he would go regardless, he was now less defiant—in fact, as he said, he was spiritually weak though physically strong. He went to Sloboda for a month’s stay before setting off for Lhasa. Kozlov and Roborovsky were waiting for him, as well as his grenadiers; Teleshov at last came from Siberia to join the élite of the expedition.