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Thomas, Lucy and Alatau: The Atkinsons’ Adventures in Siberia and the Kazakh Steppe
Thomas, Lucy and Alatau is the first full biography of an unjustly forgotten Thomas Witlam Atkinson (1799–1861), architect, artist, traveler extraordinaire, and author.
Famous in his lifetime as “the Siberian traveler’, Atkinson spent seven years travelling nearly forty thousand miles through the Urals, Kazakhstan, and Siberia with special authorization from the Tsar. During his travels he produced more than five hundred watercolor sketches—many published here for the first time—of the often dramatic scenery and exotic peoples. He also kept a detailed daily journal, extensively quoted in this book for the first time.
But this is also the story of Lucy, his spirited and intrepid wife, and their son, Alatau Tamchiboulac, named after their favorite places and born in a remote Cossack fort. They both shared Atkinson’s many adventures—enduring extremes of heat and cold, traveling on horseback up and down precipices and across dangerous rivers, escaping a murder plot atop a great cliff, and befriending the famous Decembrist exiles. Their true live adventures are sure to appeal to history and travel enthusiasts in equal measure.
Famous in his lifetime as “the Siberian traveler’, Atkinson spent seven years travelling nearly forty thousand miles through the Urals, Kazakhstan, and Siberia with special authorization from the Tsar. During his travels he produced more than five hundred watercolor sketches—many published here for the first time—of the often dramatic scenery and exotic peoples. He also kept a detailed daily journal, extensively quoted in this book for the first time.
But this is also the story of Lucy, his spirited and intrepid wife, and their son, Alatau Tamchiboulac, named after their favorite places and born in a remote Cossack fort. They both shared Atkinson’s many adventures—enduring extremes of heat and cold, traveling on horseback up and down precipices and across dangerous rivers, escaping a murder plot atop a great cliff, and befriending the famous Decembrist exiles. Their true live adventures are sure to appeal to history and travel enthusiasts in equal measure.
302 pages, Hardcover
Published September 15, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 18, 2018
A dense, and physically very heavy, book, which took a while to read. However, the Atkinsons' non-stop amazing, exciting, and hair-raising experiences in their travels to frontier lands of Russia in the 1850s kept me reading. The book is one great story after another.
April 7, 2019
This is a beautiful book, both aesthetically and narrative-wise. Using the journal entries of the nineteenth-century architect and artist Thomas Atkinson, and (from Chapter Two) those of his wife, Lucy, this book follows their seven year-long travels which start in St Petersburg and take them as far as the Chinese Border. The purpose of this journey was for Thomas to ‘sketch the scenery of Siberia – scarcely at all known to Europeans’ (22) – a trip that would ultimately lead to much acclaim on his return to England in the late 1850s. Reading very like a travelogue, the dense but accessible narrative takes the reader into the harsh but scenic environment of Russia, from Thomas’s sublime but terrifying climb in the Urals up the ‘highly magnetic pinkish-coloured rock’ of Blagodash Hill during a ferocious storm, to the forbidding beauty of the Alatau mountains (after which Thomas and Lucy’s son is named): ‘The View from this place […] was exceedingly beautiful; on each side Large Masses of rock rose up to a great Hight [sic]. Between these was seen some of the High peaks of the Alatou partly covered with snow while around us the Vegetation and the Flowers were most luxuriant. The rocks at this place are yellow and purple marble [also] exceedingly beautiful’ (147).
This poetic narrative continues throughout the book accompanied, on many pages, by reproductions of the watercolour paintings Atkinson produced throughout his trip. In employing this colour-rich, descriptive narrative in conjunction with both Thomas and Lucy’s journal entries, the author successfully engages the reader in this voyage across dangerous and unforgiving territory. As Thomas and Lucy arrive at settlements in different areas, their journal entries abound with the cultures and customs of the people they meet; indeed at times Thomas and Lucy feel under scrutiny for their very ‘civilised’ way of eating using cutlery. Some of these tales are humorous, and others poignant as they tell of the squalor in which some of these hardy people live. However, despite the lengthy descriptions of the people and the landscape, the author points out that nothing is mentioned about Lucy’s pregnancy; the birth of baby Alatau is only intimated through one of Lucy’s diary entries several months later.
In a nutshell: the narrative is dense but poetic and is enhanced by the inclusion of some of Thomas’s watercolour artworks. There are occasions where reading it felt like I was re-reading Don Quixote as Thomas and Lucy travel from place to place, have an ‘adventure’, meet some local people, and then travel onwards again (this isn’t a bad thing – I love Don Quixote!). The density of the narrative makes the book moderately slow-going (which I guess reflects the trudging aspect of the 40,000-mile journey the Atkinsons undertook).
This poetic narrative continues throughout the book accompanied, on many pages, by reproductions of the watercolour paintings Atkinson produced throughout his trip. In employing this colour-rich, descriptive narrative in conjunction with both Thomas and Lucy’s journal entries, the author successfully engages the reader in this voyage across dangerous and unforgiving territory. As Thomas and Lucy arrive at settlements in different areas, their journal entries abound with the cultures and customs of the people they meet; indeed at times Thomas and Lucy feel under scrutiny for their very ‘civilised’ way of eating using cutlery. Some of these tales are humorous, and others poignant as they tell of the squalor in which some of these hardy people live. However, despite the lengthy descriptions of the people and the landscape, the author points out that nothing is mentioned about Lucy’s pregnancy; the birth of baby Alatau is only intimated through one of Lucy’s diary entries several months later.
In a nutshell: the narrative is dense but poetic and is enhanced by the inclusion of some of Thomas’s watercolour artworks. There are occasions where reading it felt like I was re-reading Don Quixote as Thomas and Lucy travel from place to place, have an ‘adventure’, meet some local people, and then travel onwards again (this isn’t a bad thing – I love Don Quixote!). The density of the narrative makes the book moderately slow-going (which I guess reflects the trudging aspect of the 40,000-mile journey the Atkinsons undertook).
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews