clearly shifted away from village life. During a brief visit home, a Nanai
hunter named Vasily Dunkai summed up the tayozhnik’s dilemma: “The
taiga is my home,” he said. “When I come back to my house, I feel like a
guest. That’s how most hunters feel. I’ve been home for a week now, and
I am sick and tired of it.”
Vasily Solkin, a fifty-year-old filmmaker, magazine editor, and
leopard specialist, is also an experienced hunter and a friend of Dunkai’s.
Like him, he has spent months on his own in the taiga. Originally trained
as a war journalist and propagandist with the Pacific Fleet, Solkin
resigned from the Party in the late 1980s and became a dissident
folksinger. He is a restless whip of a man with long hair and a full beard
who comes to work at the Far Eastern Institute of Geography, outside
Vladivostok, wearing jeans, vest, and cowboy boots. Solkin’s unique
combination of education and experience has enabled him to articulate
the tayozhnik mind-set better than most, and he was sympathetic to
Markov’s situation. “The most terrifying and important test for a human
being is to be in absolute isolation,” he explained. “A human being is a
very social creature, and ninety percent of what he does is done only
because other people are watching. Alone, with no witnesses, he starts to
learn about himself—who is he really? Sometimes, this brings staggering
discoveries. Because nobody’s watching, you can easily become an
animal: it is not necessary to shave, or to wash, or to keep your winter
quarters clean—you can live in shit and no one will see. You can shoot
tigers, or choose not to shoot. You can run in fear and nobody will know.
You have to have something—some force, which allows and helps you to
survive without witnesses. Markov had it.
“Once you have passed the solitude test,” continued Solkin, “you have
absolute confidence in yourself, and there is nothing that can break you
afterward. Any changes, including changes in the political system, are not
going to affect you as much because you know that you can do it yourself.
Karl Marx said that ‘Freedom is a recognized necessity.’* I learned this
in university, but I didn’t understand what it meant until I’d spent some
time in the taiga. If you understand it, you will survive in the taiga. If you