The Proletarian Tourist in the 1930s 125
travels, “just in case, to avoid trouble” from prying police eyes. Not until
the late 1950s did a journalist covering stories in the Far East begin to hear
rumors about the amazing exploits of Gleb Travin. The writer Aleksandr
Kharitonovskii apparently met Travin and heard his story, from which he
reconstructed a narrative, fi rst published in Kamchatka in 1960 and later in
an edition of twenty-fi ve thousand in Moscow. This revised work, The Man
on the Iron Reindeer , appeared in 1965 at a time when tourism was begin-
ning to take on massive proportions in the Soviet Union. Like many tran-
scribed personal narratives of this time, the account has been substantially
embroidered with imagined dialogues and amplifi ed with extensive geog-
raphy and history lessons relating to the territories Travin passed through.
Yet it contains photographs that Travin must have provided, and it seems
to be based in part on other documentary evidence. The book ends with a
series of testimonials from eyewitnesses who read the 1960 account of the
trip and volunteered their stories.^92 Stranger than fi ction, implies the book,
the journey of Gleb Travin was a true story. Travin would tell his own ver-
sion, much abbreviated, ten years later, in an article in the travel magazine
Around the World.
Everything we know about this journey, consequently, is fi ltered through
these two questionable sources, one a highly embellished popularized travel
account, the other a personal narrative, “as told to” a journalist, published
forty-fi ve years after the fact. Yet such documents can combine with our other
knowledge about Soviet tourism, whether in independent groups or by rug-
ged individuals, to convey a sense of the private geographic imaginings of the
solo cyclist Travin. In 1975 Travin could say that his heroes were Faust (he of
the thirst for knowledge), Odysseus (who splendidly bore the blows of fate),
and Don Quixote (known for pointless service to beauty and justice): not one
a proletarian or a part of a collective. (The mathematicians P.S. Aleksandrov
and A. N. Kolmogorov, fl oating down the Volga at the same time as Travin
began his bicycle tour, also found inspiration in The Odyssey , which was the
only book they brought to read on their tour.) In contrast to those of the model
independent tourist, Travin’s goals were profoundly personal and inner-
directed: in tracing the borders of the Soviet Union, as he wrote, he was testing
himself, every day his life was on the line. He identifi ed with the romantic
gaze, as he explicitly admitted later in life. “I was a romantic! They should
have put me on the Turksib or the White Sea Canal,” referring to the two big
construction projects of that era. Nor were his knowledge-gathering desires
so closely linked to encountering his own country: his initial ambition had
been to circle the globe on his bicycle, and in 1932, having just completed
his arduous journey around his own country, he applied unsuccessfully for
- Kharitonovskii, Chelovek , 198. The original and shorter version by A. Kharitonovskii,
Chelovek s zheleznym olenem: Povest' o zabytom podvige (Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka, 1960),
was sent as a gift by Travin to astronaut John Glenn, inscribed “From one world traveler to
another.” Glenn donated the book to the Ohio State University Library. All citations here are
from the 1965 edition.
