Sylvain Tesson

I already knew that one must never travel with books related to one’s destination; in Venice, read Lermontov, but at Baikal, Byron

The Romans built for the ages; a Russian just wants to get through the winter

When you have misgivings about the poverty of your inner life, it’s important to bring along good books to fill that void in a pinch. The mistake would be to choose only difficult reading on the assumption that life in the woods would keep your spiritual temperature at fever pitch, but time drags when all you’ve got for snowy afternoons is Hegel

Volodya watches us in consternation. He does not see that the bare, amber-coloured wood is more beautiful to the eye than oilcloth. He listens as I explain this to him. I am the bourgeois defending the superiority of a parquet floor over linoleum. Aestheticism is a form of reactionary deviance.

Russians make a clean sweep of the past, but not of their refuse. Throw something away? I’d rather die, they say. Why toss out a tractor engine when the piston might make a good lamp base? The territory of the former Soviet Union is littered with the crud of Five-Year Plans: factories in ruins, machine tools, the carcasses of planes. Many Russians live in places that resemble building sites and car scrapyards. They do not see rubbish, ignoring the spectacle before them. When you live on a dump, you need to know how to edit things out

Russians always build things with a sense of urgency, as if fascist soldiers were about to pour over the hill at any minute

LIST OF IDEAL READING MATERIAL CAREFULLY COMPOSED IN PARIS FOR A SIX-MONTH STAY IN THE SIBERIAN FOREST

Living in the forest next to the world’s largest reserve of fresh water is a luxury. One day, the Saudi oilmen, the Indian nouveaux riches and the Russian businessmen who drag their ennui around the marble halls of palaces will understand this.

Robert Baden-Powell’s advice should be made a universal principle: ‘When through with a campsite, take care to leave two things behind. Firstly: nothing. Secondly: your thanks

Retreating to the forest cannot be everyone’s course. Eremitism is elitism