George Kennan e a escrita do distante em tent life in Siberia (1870)

Abstract

In 1870, a young American named George Kennan published a book named Tent Life in Siberia. It was a travel narrative concerning his experience as an employee of the Russian American Telegraph, which aimed to construct a line in Northeast Asia and Northwest America, connecting the systems of communications of the two continents, and eventually wiring the whole northern hemisphere together. Kennan worked as an explorer in the Siberian arm of the expedition from 1865 to 1867, surveying the area, meeting the native populations and assessing how reliable were their services and cooperation, and generally identifying the best possible route for the telegraph to pass through. The Russian American Telegraph, however, was never completed, having lost the race to its subaquatic competitor, the Atlantic Cable. The explorer left the enterprise with almost nothing, except for his travel diaries and annotations. With those in hand, he quickly started to insert himself in the huge American market for travel writing and lecturing, and soon had a book published. It would be his first of a list of written works that got him moderate attention from historians over the last fifty years. In writing this piece, Kennan did not count only with his experience and notes, but also with a vast literary tradition that presented standards for him to follow or deviate from in order to connect with his perceived public. His writing reflects the dialogs engaged with these traditions and with the society of nineteenth century USA. He had the complex task of translating for a Western audience his perceptions of distant lands and peoples, and to fulfill it he leaned on many conventions of discourse. These same conventions, in turn, had also taught him how to perceive nature, wilderness, otherness, adventure and other aspects of his journey that he relayed to his readers.