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Prin taigaua Extremului Orient #1
Across the Ussuri Kray: Travels in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains
In Russia's Far East sits the wild Ussuri Kray, a region known for its remote highlands and rugged mountain passes where tigers and bears roam the cliffs, and salmon and lenok navigate the rivers. In this collection of travel writing by famed Russian explorer and naturalist Vladimir K. Arsenyev (1872-1930), readers are shuttled back to the turn of the 20th century when the Russian Empire was reeling from its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and vulnerable to its Far Eastern neighbors. What began as an expedition to survey the region s infrastructure for the Russian military turned into an adventure through one of the most ethnically and ecologically diverse territories on the continent. Encountering the disappearing indigenous cultures of the Nanai and Udege, engaging the help of Korean farmers and Chinese hunters, and witnessing the beginning of indomitable Russian settlement, Arsenyev documents the lives and customs of the region s inhabitants and their surroundings. Originally written as "a popular scientific description of the Kray," this unabridged edition includes photographs largely unseen for nearly a century and is annotated by Jonathan C. Slaght, a biologist working in the same forests Arsenyev explored. Across the Ussuri Kray is a classic of northeast Asian cultural and natural history."
488 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1961
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612 people want to read
About the author
Vladimir K. Arsenyev
23 books21 followersVladimir Klavdiyevich Arsenyev (Russian: Влади́мир Кла́вдиевич Арсе́ньев) (10 September 1872 – 4 September 1930) was a Russian explorer of the Far East who recounted his travels in a series of books - "По Уссурийскому Краю" ("Along the Ussury land") (1921) and "Дерсу Узала" ("Dersu Uzala") (1923) - telling of his military journeys to the Ussuri basin with Dersu Uzala, a native hunter, from 1902 to 1907. He was the first to describe numerous species of Siberian flora and lifestyle of native ethnic people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir...
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
January 2, 2021
What a remarkable book. It's hard to believe an exploration like this took place just in the last century, right around the same time my grandparents were immigrating to America. While civilization was busy adding electricity to cities, Arsenyev, Dersu Uzala and crew were bush-whacking their way through miles of forests (including one that was on fire), wading through swamps with grass growing so far overhead you couldn't see where you were going, and dealing with a sometimes dangerous mix of wild animals and wild-west-like humans.
Arsenyev undertook this months-long journey to survey the eastern Siberia for Russia. At the time, it seems more Chinese and Korean nationals had more of a foothold in the area than the Russians did. Often these rugged settlers were running away from something. The natives of the area often suffered greatly from contact with them, from disease, violence and enslavement. Some of the situations Arsenyev came across were pretty grim. Settlers often harvested resources such as trees and wild animals in a terribly wasteful way. These human rights and environmental issues were as much part of Arsenyev's report as the somewhat dull descriptions of river systems and listings of flora and fauna. And in fact after this expedition he worked throughout the rest of his life to address the issues he saw.
There are more than enough adventures throughout the journey to make up for any tedious bits. How about being lost all night alone in a pitch-dark forest and having to keep moving to avoid a stalking tiger! Or left alone while your guide goes for help, having to lance your own infected foot while hiding out in a stream to avoid getting burned up by a raging forest fire! Or running out of food when a part of the trip takes twice as long as expected because you've hired a guide who has no idea where he's going! Arsenyev not only made it through these and many more harrowing experiences, he was also ready to get back out there again as soon as his company was recovered. And even when the rest of his crew was resting, he'd go out for a few hours to document wild birds or whatever. His enthusiasm is infectious.
One thing that confused me was how people with so many different language backgrounds were able to communicate. Arsenyev must have been able to speak passable Chinese. Dersu Uzala seems to have been able to speak enough Chinese and Russian to get by, though the translator makes it clear that his grammar wasn't perfect. When it came to the native languages of indigenous people, it appears Arsenyev spoke very little, and relied on Dersu Urzala to translate. I doubt the enlisted men travelling with them understood much of this, but that's just my guess, as it's not explained in the text.
The translation from the Russian is very readable. In fact, the translator has had his own recent adventures in eastern Siberia (looking for giant owls!), so I'll be reading his book sometime this year.
Arsenyev undertook this months-long journey to survey the eastern Siberia for Russia. At the time, it seems more Chinese and Korean nationals had more of a foothold in the area than the Russians did. Often these rugged settlers were running away from something. The natives of the area often suffered greatly from contact with them, from disease, violence and enslavement. Some of the situations Arsenyev came across were pretty grim. Settlers often harvested resources such as trees and wild animals in a terribly wasteful way. These human rights and environmental issues were as much part of Arsenyev's report as the somewhat dull descriptions of river systems and listings of flora and fauna. And in fact after this expedition he worked throughout the rest of his life to address the issues he saw.
There are more than enough adventures throughout the journey to make up for any tedious bits. How about being lost all night alone in a pitch-dark forest and having to keep moving to avoid a stalking tiger! Or left alone while your guide goes for help, having to lance your own infected foot while hiding out in a stream to avoid getting burned up by a raging forest fire! Or running out of food when a part of the trip takes twice as long as expected because you've hired a guide who has no idea where he's going! Arsenyev not only made it through these and many more harrowing experiences, he was also ready to get back out there again as soon as his company was recovered. And even when the rest of his crew was resting, he'd go out for a few hours to document wild birds or whatever. His enthusiasm is infectious.
One thing that confused me was how people with so many different language backgrounds were able to communicate. Arsenyev must have been able to speak passable Chinese. Dersu Uzala seems to have been able to speak enough Chinese and Russian to get by, though the translator makes it clear that his grammar wasn't perfect. When it came to the native languages of indigenous people, it appears Arsenyev spoke very little, and relied on Dersu Urzala to translate. I doubt the enlisted men travelling with them understood much of this, but that's just my guess, as it's not explained in the text.
The translation from the Russian is very readable. In fact, the translator has had his own recent adventures in eastern Siberia (looking for giant owls!), so I'll be reading his book sometime this year.
July 3, 2017
I give this five stars because it is the kind of book that I would think about when I was not reading it. The many high points of the book frequently happen when the author is writing about Dersu Uzala, an indigenous person who the author describes as of the Gold people. I believe that the term Gold has been replaced by the term Nanai. Dersu's knowledge of the forest seems almost mystical but when questioned by the author, the seemingly mystical knowledge is always based on a lifetime of living in the forest and the accompanying sensitivity to minute details.
The book is based on Aresenyev's notes on his explorations of the Russian Far east in the first years of the twentieth century. There are two negative elements that result from this. Sometimes I longed for more detail about an event or person but the author provided only a 'snapshot' that seemed like a brief note in a journal. Additionally, the author was prone to providing lists of things encountered: lists of birds, lists of rocks and minerals, lists of tributaries, etc.
Nonetheless, this is an excellent tale of adventure and exploration.
The book is based on Aresenyev's notes on his explorations of the Russian Far east in the first years of the twentieth century. There are two negative elements that result from this. Sometimes I longed for more detail about an event or person but the author provided only a 'snapshot' that seemed like a brief note in a journal. Additionally, the author was prone to providing lists of things encountered: lists of birds, lists of rocks and minerals, lists of tributaries, etc.
Nonetheless, this is an excellent tale of adventure and exploration.
January 2, 2017
I really enjoyed this book. Unlike many travel logs this one had a great plot, interesting characters and enough tension to move the book along. A great book of you are interested in nature, exploration, or records of how the wild places of the world used to be
July 12, 2025
If you like travel books then you will like this. Interesting stories about a Russian soldier who explores the area of Siberia near Vladistock.
May 13, 2019
I love this book so much, it has been one of my favorite reads for the last couple of years. I especially was touched by Arsenyev's account of his friendship with Dersu Uzala, who sounds like a particularly enlightened and wise being. I also enjoyed reading Arsenyev's recounts of landscape, plants, animals and the overall natural area he was surveying. He bore witness to a place which was changing and is likely unrecognizable now.
June 4, 2022
This describes Arsenyev’s journeys in 1902 and 1906 to survey the land and natural resources for an expanding Russian empire butting up against the Chinese empire in the area now called Primorski kray, maritime region. This translation of the 1921 uncensored version was written for a mass audience so Arsenyev changed the sequence of events for dramatic effect but also perhaps to try to describe his own transition from naturalist and imperial agent to someone deeply impressed by social injustice. He still surveyed and categorised the woods by their value to different degrees of profitability but he witnessed and grew sensitive to the injustices faced by vulnerable people in the area.
Arsenyev was made Battalion Commander for the duration and equipped with Cossack soldiers, horses, riflemen and local guides as necessary. Dersu Uzala, the indigenous Nanai hunter he met in 1906 became a strong influence on Arsenyev and appeared to have helped changed how Arsenyev understood the world and the peoples of the Russian Far East whether indigenous or transplanted.
The diseases brought by colonialists, Chinese and Russian, to the Primorsky kray were as devastating to the indigenous peoples as they had been in the Americas. Dersu Uzala lost his family to smallpox and many of the scattered surviving remnants of the Nanai and Udege people were enslaved in trading posts, always in “debt”. They had lost their language, independence and ability to survive on the land.
Arsenyev described his contempt for the squalor these people lived in, but questioned their conditions and learnt how they had been brutalised. "I used to think….I asked around and discovered….". He goes on to describe the racism, poverty and how some people escaped into opium.
The indigenous people had been an intrinsic part of the ecosystem, living by fishing and hunting in season with woods full of edible mushrooms and fruit. Arsenyev describes how the coniferous and mixed forest on the Iman River now Bolshaya Ussurka, "Gives the natives an inexhaustible source of material for skis, yurts, fish spears, sleds and so on."
People in specific areas had finely honed skills, so when they had to navigate a river, Dersu said in his rough Russian, "Udege think like fish, awful understand how boat go. We not able to do that."
The Nanai had other skills; once when he had been attacked by a tiger, Dersu’s wife tracked him for several days to find him. He had lost a lot of blood but she rescued him and hunted for the family while he recovered. Time and again Uzala saved the Russians’ lives when the weather suddenly changed or they had accidents.
Colonialists opening up the land to farming, logging and railways for mining reduced human and nonhuman life, changed the climate and contributed to floods and wild forest fires. They came for different reasons, some were exiled, or sent or escaped other invaders, so there were Cossack, Old Believer and other Russian villages, Chinese and Korean villages. There were ginseng hunters who managed the landscape to nurture small ginseng plants where they appeared in the woods. They built low protecting walls, removed competing plants and transplanted nearby ginseng plants to the new "plantation". Areseyev noted the difference between professional hunter's and promyshlennik (traders), "The promyshlennik isn't in the forest for the sake of the hunt; rather his primary goal is profit. In addition to a rifle, such people carry a Sapper shovel and a sack with acids. They are looking for gold, but should the opportunity arise, are not averse to hunting "grouse" (Chinese) or "swans" (Koreans), stealing another man's boat, or butchering a cow to sell the meat as wild game.”
Arsenyev "dried plants, prepared bird specimens, packed insects into boxes and catalogued geological material." He described vast migrations of birds and salmon, forests and tigers in woods and mountains roamed by Amur leopards, enormous wild boar, bears and thousands of other species. He noted the wastefulness of pearl diving when shells were destroyed and the animals not eaten, even in the early 20th century, Dahurinaia dahurica was a seriously depleted species.
He described the Cossacks’ extraordinary relationship to horses when Kozhevnikov, a Cossack took the horses across the river, by riding the leader until it was in the water then swam beside it, encouraging and reassuring. But seemed less able to understand the soldiers' ability to switch off and relax! “That evening, the riflemen and Cossacks sat by the fire, singing songs. One of them pulled a small accordion out from somewhere. As I watched their carefree faces, it was hard to believe that just two hours prior they had been fighting through the marsh… it was evident that these men didn't think about the future and lived in the present."
This is a wonderful book and hopefully will lead to much more of Valdimir Arsenyev’s work being translated into English. There is also a bigger story to tell about Arsenyev himself who stayed in the region during the Russian Civil War and became Commissar for Ethnic Minorities of the independent Far Eastern Republic that joined soviet Russia in 1922.
Arsenyev died in 1930 so ecaped Stalin’s murderous attacks on the rest of his family. Margarita Arsenyeva, his wife, was executed in 1938 accused of belonging to an organisation of spies and saboteurs led by Arsenyev. In 1941 their daughter Natalya was sentenced to a forced labour camp.
This book shows something of Arsenyev's changing ideas about human liberation and self-determination that became such a threat to the dictator. It also shows how destructive relationaships to land driven by profit can be and alternatively how people have─and in future could live as part of convivial ecosystems.
Arsenyev was made Battalion Commander for the duration and equipped with Cossack soldiers, horses, riflemen and local guides as necessary. Dersu Uzala, the indigenous Nanai hunter he met in 1906 became a strong influence on Arsenyev and appeared to have helped changed how Arsenyev understood the world and the peoples of the Russian Far East whether indigenous or transplanted.
The diseases brought by colonialists, Chinese and Russian, to the Primorsky kray were as devastating to the indigenous peoples as they had been in the Americas. Dersu Uzala lost his family to smallpox and many of the scattered surviving remnants of the Nanai and Udege people were enslaved in trading posts, always in “debt”. They had lost their language, independence and ability to survive on the land.
Arsenyev described his contempt for the squalor these people lived in, but questioned their conditions and learnt how they had been brutalised. "I used to think….I asked around and discovered….". He goes on to describe the racism, poverty and how some people escaped into opium.
The indigenous people had been an intrinsic part of the ecosystem, living by fishing and hunting in season with woods full of edible mushrooms and fruit. Arsenyev describes how the coniferous and mixed forest on the Iman River now Bolshaya Ussurka, "Gives the natives an inexhaustible source of material for skis, yurts, fish spears, sleds and so on."
People in specific areas had finely honed skills, so when they had to navigate a river, Dersu said in his rough Russian, "Udege think like fish, awful understand how boat go. We not able to do that."
The Nanai had other skills; once when he had been attacked by a tiger, Dersu’s wife tracked him for several days to find him. He had lost a lot of blood but she rescued him and hunted for the family while he recovered. Time and again Uzala saved the Russians’ lives when the weather suddenly changed or they had accidents.
Colonialists opening up the land to farming, logging and railways for mining reduced human and nonhuman life, changed the climate and contributed to floods and wild forest fires. They came for different reasons, some were exiled, or sent or escaped other invaders, so there were Cossack, Old Believer and other Russian villages, Chinese and Korean villages. There were ginseng hunters who managed the landscape to nurture small ginseng plants where they appeared in the woods. They built low protecting walls, removed competing plants and transplanted nearby ginseng plants to the new "plantation". Areseyev noted the difference between professional hunter's and promyshlennik (traders), "The promyshlennik isn't in the forest for the sake of the hunt; rather his primary goal is profit. In addition to a rifle, such people carry a Sapper shovel and a sack with acids. They are looking for gold, but should the opportunity arise, are not averse to hunting "grouse" (Chinese) or "swans" (Koreans), stealing another man's boat, or butchering a cow to sell the meat as wild game.”
Arsenyev "dried plants, prepared bird specimens, packed insects into boxes and catalogued geological material." He described vast migrations of birds and salmon, forests and tigers in woods and mountains roamed by Amur leopards, enormous wild boar, bears and thousands of other species. He noted the wastefulness of pearl diving when shells were destroyed and the animals not eaten, even in the early 20th century, Dahurinaia dahurica was a seriously depleted species.
He described the Cossacks’ extraordinary relationship to horses when Kozhevnikov, a Cossack took the horses across the river, by riding the leader until it was in the water then swam beside it, encouraging and reassuring. But seemed less able to understand the soldiers' ability to switch off and relax! “That evening, the riflemen and Cossacks sat by the fire, singing songs. One of them pulled a small accordion out from somewhere. As I watched their carefree faces, it was hard to believe that just two hours prior they had been fighting through the marsh… it was evident that these men didn't think about the future and lived in the present."
This is a wonderful book and hopefully will lead to much more of Valdimir Arsenyev’s work being translated into English. There is also a bigger story to tell about Arsenyev himself who stayed in the region during the Russian Civil War and became Commissar for Ethnic Minorities of the independent Far Eastern Republic that joined soviet Russia in 1922.
Arsenyev died in 1930 so ecaped Stalin’s murderous attacks on the rest of his family. Margarita Arsenyeva, his wife, was executed in 1938 accused of belonging to an organisation of spies and saboteurs led by Arsenyev. In 1941 their daughter Natalya was sentenced to a forced labour camp.
This book shows something of Arsenyev's changing ideas about human liberation and self-determination that became such a threat to the dictator. It also shows how destructive relationaships to land driven by profit can be and alternatively how people have─and in future could live as part of convivial ecosystems.
March 14, 2019
Arsenyev is endearing in his earnestness and straightforwardness. Cannot say if the same feeling is conveyed in the original Russian. Dersu the trapper of course is a man of the ages. No wonder he was immortalized in movies and lore. Arsenyev travels through the remote, completely isolated borderland surrounded by Russia, Korea, China - an area that is part of what was once Manchuria. Documenting the Sikhote Alin mountains, the streams that flow from it, the nature of the forests on the seaward and leeward side - he was an exceptionally talented naturalist, despite being an army man. And the book is as much about a nature book as it is about his adventures with Dersu. Most incredible passage was him being lost, disoriented in the forest inhabited by Amur tigers on a rainy night.
Great book to know a little more of literally a corner of the world. None of the places he mentions in the book you can find on google maps excepting 2/3 of the big cities and some bays.
Great book to know a little more of literally a corner of the world. None of the places he mentions in the book you can find on google maps excepting 2/3 of the big cities and some bays.
October 6, 2013
Mare noroc când într-o singură persoană se întâlnește călătorul și scriitorul. Dersu Uzala e realmente zen - izvor de liniște sufletească și comuniune cu natura.
May 23, 2024
A politically coloured foreword and excessive footnotes with an ideological bias - sadly, common in English-language editions of Russian works. No criticism of the author's text whatsoever. The story is pure gold.
This is an extended version that the foreword calls "uncensored". In reality, the text was not censored but abridged due to its lengthy, repetitive passages, which many complain about even in the shorter, originally published version. Not all edits and cuts are bad, especially when an unprofessional writer gets published. The shorter original is absolutely fine and nothing essential is missing.
Disappointed.
This is an extended version that the foreword calls "uncensored". In reality, the text was not censored but abridged due to its lengthy, repetitive passages, which many complain about even in the shorter, originally published version. Not all edits and cuts are bad, especially when an unprofessional writer gets published. The shorter original is absolutely fine and nothing essential is missing.
Disappointed.
October 23, 2025
6,5/10 Czuje że to nie do końca moja książka, kwieciste opisy przyrody i zwierząt bardziej doceniliby ci którzy się na tym rzeczywiście znają, nie pomagało mi też to że czytałem po angielsku. Zdecydowanie najlepszymi momentami książki były sceny z Dersu, to one najbardziej mi się podobały i na nie głównie czekałem. Polecam nawet dla samych scen z Dersu oraz przez opisy ludności i ich sposobu życia, jeśli ktoś ma wiedzę o roślinności to pewnie z przyjemnością będzie czytał także opisy przyrody i terenu
May 6, 2022
I read this book because the translation of these Russian journals, written 1902 and 1906, is by Jonathan C Slaght whose own book on Blakiston fish owls, Owls of the Eastern Ice, I read right after Christmas 2021. The exploration of the Ussuri Kray region of Russia's Far East is fascinating.
Vladimir Arsenyev, the author, records everything he comes across, the people, the animals, the birds, the terrain of rivers, valleys, mountains, forests, bogs, and meadows. He is not driven by the same obessions as, say, Alexander von Humboldt (he doesn't yearn to climb a mountain while it is erupting), but he is every bit as meticulous in his observations and he also sees that continued harvesting of the wild will inevitably cause extinctions.
This is my favorite passage in the whole book (p. 327 of my edition).
"By habit as both a Cossack and a hunter, Murzin raised his rifle and took aim at the closest sea lion, but Dersu stopped him by quietly angling the rifle away.
'Do not shoot,' he said. 'Cannot carry. To shoot just to shoot--evil. A sin.'
It was only then that we noticed the haulout was basically impossible to access. It was framed on both sides by steep escarpments, and inland by sheer cliffs...the only way to reach those sea lions was by boat. Since we could not take any sea lion we killed with us, it truly would have been a waste to shoot one only to abandon it there."
Interesting, too, were the various villages they came to. Some were Russian, others Chinese or Korean, and some were native populations. Often there was overwhelming generosity and help, especially near the end of the last journey when winter is closing in and their hosts take them down the swollen and ice-bound river by canoe...but this episode I will not quote. You have to read it for yourself, squealing with vicarious fear and excitement all the way.
Vladimir Arsenyev, the author, records everything he comes across, the people, the animals, the birds, the terrain of rivers, valleys, mountains, forests, bogs, and meadows. He is not driven by the same obessions as, say, Alexander von Humboldt (he doesn't yearn to climb a mountain while it is erupting), but he is every bit as meticulous in his observations and he also sees that continued harvesting of the wild will inevitably cause extinctions.
This is my favorite passage in the whole book (p. 327 of my edition).
"By habit as both a Cossack and a hunter, Murzin raised his rifle and took aim at the closest sea lion, but Dersu stopped him by quietly angling the rifle away.
'Do not shoot,' he said. 'Cannot carry. To shoot just to shoot--evil. A sin.'
It was only then that we noticed the haulout was basically impossible to access. It was framed on both sides by steep escarpments, and inland by sheer cliffs...the only way to reach those sea lions was by boat. Since we could not take any sea lion we killed with us, it truly would have been a waste to shoot one only to abandon it there."
Interesting, too, were the various villages they came to. Some were Russian, others Chinese or Korean, and some were native populations. Often there was overwhelming generosity and help, especially near the end of the last journey when winter is closing in and their hosts take them down the swollen and ice-bound river by canoe...but this episode I will not quote. You have to read it for yourself, squealing with vicarious fear and excitement all the way.
December 21, 2022
Across the Ussuri Kray and Dersu the Trapper are the only two books written by Vladimir K. Arsenyev to be translated into English. They are both, for the most part, the same story, though at times different, particularly the ending, despite being non fiction. The third expedition involving a tiger entering camp is only in Dersu the Trapper, which also includes the final period of Dersu's life, a bit of which is in Kurosawa's film version of the story. Across the Ussuri Kray also has stories you will not find in Dersu the Trapper and the footnotes are extensive. Some of those footnotes are fascinating such as that though Dersu was a real person and there is a photo of him in the book, the character was based on more than one person. Most of the footnotes, though, would only be of interest to naturalists and ornithologists as the translator, Jonathan C. Slaght, quibbles with Arsenyev's observations of bird species and the like. I don't have a preference between the two books, both are exceptional. The several months I spent reading them were thoroughly rewarding.
July 29, 2020
Written by one of Russia's great cartographers and natural historians. Arsenyev spent the last few decades prior to the collapse of Tsarist Russia charting and mapping the Russian Far East. For me, the RFE is one of the most beautiful regions of the world, where man's encroachment has been kept at bay by geography and climate. There, tigers, leopards, bears and assorted species still roam. But Arsenyev explained the greatest danger to man in the wilderness was when you came upon another man. He wrote, "the instinctive reaction is to hide oneself behind a tree." Arsenyev befriended a local Goldi guide and they became fast friends. This experience is touchingly related in his other famous work, "Dersu Uzala." The renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa made a beautiful film of the same name in 1975, winning for himself an Oscar for best foreign film. One of my all time favorite movies.
December 31, 2020
A wonderful translation of the Russian account of Arsenyev's travels in far eastern Russia in the very early 1900's. The descriptions of the landscape, wildlife, and people are wonderful and the annotations by the translator Jonathan Slaght are very interesting and add a lot to the narrative. I especially enjoyed reading of the author's relationship to the native Dersu. What a fascinating person!
October 29, 2022
I read this book in Chinese at least 15 years ago, and still often think about the writing from time to time. Finally looked up the name of this book in English, and I'm looking forward to re-reading it!
December 19, 2025
The story is gripping by the guy that was actually there. Sometimes I feel like a good book is just a luxury. This book made me feel like I was on an actual trip but without the almost freezing to death and other close calls. Learned a lot. Needs a better map.
June 16, 2015
Dálný východ přelomu 19. a 20. století, mně známá tamější tajga a ta snad vůbec nejkrásnější kniha, příběh, autor a Děrsu.
March 31, 2018
Очень увлекательно. Жаль что неприлагаются карты.
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