Page 81 - Litteratteur Redefining World December issue

Litterateur redefining world December 2020

The villages outside, however, seem to be mirrored onboard in the
hallways and sleeping quarters, each cabin a cottage, each passenger a
resident, safe inside this vein running through Europe into Asia. The
balance of inside and out, of engineering and wilderness, simply means
we are as much a part of what we pass at fifty miles-an-hour as we are a
part of conversations in the dining car. It may be the twenty-first century
in the cabins, but something older and weathered waits in the lands
stretching across the Urals and the Steppe. They lay out as dioramas of
decades in decline, a wilderness witness to slaughters, pogroms,
transports, exiles, and dissidents, and this train has been an accomplice
in this tragic history.

Old Irkutsk home
of dissidents in
front of modern
Irkutsk

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