OUTLANDS
THE MAN WHO LOVED SIBERIA The adventures of a natural historian ROY JACOBSEN AND ANNELIESE PITZ, EDITORS Translated by Seán Kinsella 304pp. MacLehose Press. £25.
F ritz Dörries, who died in 1953 at the age of 100, was a German naturalist and adventurer. His memoirs of exploring eastern Siberia – transcribed and translated by Roy Jacobsen and Anneliese Pitz into Norwegian, then by Seán Kinsella into English – offer stories of almost unimaginable hardship and brutality, as well as glimpses into an austerely beautiful world.
There is much in these extraordinary adventures that feels otherworldly, alien, even inhuman. When Dörries shipped out east at the age of twenty-five, he was already an ex-soldier and a trained biologist. His voice is that of a practical and hardwearing man, plain and candid in relating tales of physical suffering and outright horror. The outlands are rife with bears and bandits. Men are horrifically mauled, a seven-year-old boy empties both barrels of a shotgun into the face of an intruder, an Indigenous man is bound to a tree and left to the biting insects, Russian Cossacks battle with roving killers. An old friend in Vladivostok relates the horrendous murder of his wife and young children (“[the killers] had done a thorough job”, Dörries says, morally impenetrable as ever). The only real notes of sentimentality are heard when beloved dogs die (drowned or eaten by tigers).
Through it all Dörries is a scientist. At one point he spends three nights by the side of a river, waiting for a tiny summer butterfly. His rapacity as a collector is typical of his time, but it’s still extraordinary to read his account of trapping a host of birds by leaving a poisoned carcass in a mountain pass: Not in my wildest imaginings had I dared to dream of this: a grand total of thirteen birds of prey lay strewn around … I did not know what else to do but take off my fur hat and throw it in the air like an idiot.
But there’s also, here and there, room for reflection. “We were … struck by that heavy feeling which can sometimes overcome a hunter when he has torn such a perfect creature out of existence”, he writes after killing a tiger (one of many).
Dörries is joined on many of his journeys by his brothers, who seem cut from the same cloth (and very much their father’s sons: he relates with glee “the story of our father arriving late to his wedding because he had been detained by some birds along the way, and when he finally did show up at the church, the pockets of his morning suit were stuffed with wild sparrows”).
Only extreme seasickness prevents Dörries Sr joining his boys in Siberia. But his philosophy appears to underpin Fritz’s indefatigable work as a scientist. “What is more interesting than the incomprehensible?”, he remembers his father asking. “The day everything lies open to our eyes, we
