Cesty na Sibiř

The hero of Journeys to Siberia is a young man who longs to become "a man with qualities"; he therefore abandons his scientific career and family life and embarks on a distant journey, in whose seemingly chaotic trajectory he slowly recognises the logic of a deeper order. Martin Ryšavý presents his hero's tortuously winding life journey in a matter-of-fact, at first glance ineffectively "traditional" style, which is in fact a sophisticated fictional composition bound together by a purposefully artificial language. Journeys to Siberia can thus be seen as a developmental novel in which the style and genre of the narrative itself becomes the "shaped subject": the book, which can be read as a travelogue, a love story, or even a documentary about contemporary living conditions in the Russian Far East, becomes in its entirety a "classic" novel composition about the meaning of man's longing to achieve spiritual certainties.

Czech edition.