The Surveyors of Imagination: Russia in Three British Travel Books

This chapter is an analysis of the image of Novosibirsk’s Akademgorod in three British travel books: Colin Thubron’s In Siberia, Susan Richards’ Lost and Found in Russia and Jonathan Dimbleby’s Russia. A cutting-edge academic centre in the Soviet era, Akademgorod became neglected after the fall of Communism. The three books focus on a particular phenomenon in post-Soviet Russian science—the turn towards pseudoscientific theories associated with the so-called cosmist movement. The three accounts presented in the books, spanning the period from the 1990s to 2008, show the changing attitude of British travel writers towards Russia. In all three cases they fulfill a role described by Vesna Goldsworthy in her book Inventing Ruritania—that of surveyors, viewing the land they explore as a possible source of exploitable cultural commodities.