JEFFREY TAYLER (Morocco 1988–90; PC/Staff Poland 1992, Uzbekistan 1992–93) is the author of Siberian Dawn, and, just out, Facing the Congo. He has published numerous articles in such magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Spin, Harper’s, and Conde´ Nast Traveler, and is a regular commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Two of Tayler’s travel essays were selected by Bill Bryson for the 2000 inaugural edition of The Best American Travel Writing 2000. Today Tayler lives in Russia. I interviewed him by email about his new book and his writing career.

What was your Peace Corps assignment?

I was a Volunteer in Marrakech, Morocco, from 1988 to ’90. In mid 1992, after a stint as a sort of assistant administrative officer in Warsaw, Peace Corps sent me to Uzbekistan, with several other staff members, to open a program there. I left Tashkent in 1993.

As a Volunteer, were you a teacher?

At first, I was an instructor in blind mobility, but the school was not interested in having me do that (they wanted me to teach English, for which I was not trained). After a major mess and brouhaha with my supervisor in Rabat and sharp words with my school director, who was a tyrannical dolt, I was allowed to teach blind mobility. But that only lasted the first year. At the start of the second year, the director ordered me to teach English. I promptly reassigned myself elsewhere in the community: I worked as the administrative assistant for a local association of parents of handicapped children, and enjoyed it.

Have you published much (or anything) about your Peace Corps experience?

I’ve written a few stories for Salon.com about, well, I wouldn’t say about the Peace Corps, but rather, about things that happened to me as a Volunteer and a staff member. They are “Save Me, Wild Qahba!,” “Perils of the Harem,” and “Escape from Tashkent” — all concern failed love and deceit and lust, mixed in with clashes of cultures.
     My time with the Peace Corps in Tashkent figured in the opening of my first book, Siberian Dawn. It was in Tashkent (and Moscow, which I had to visit frequently while working in Uzbekistan) that I conceived of the journey recounted in the book, after realizing that my participation in any sort of Peace Corps program in the former Soviet Union was untenable and wrong.

What was the first article you sold to a national publication?

To The Atlantic Monthly [September 1996], I sold “Vessel of Last Resort.” an account of part of my time on the Congo River in Zaire. That sale was the start of both a very gratifying and instructive relationship with that magazine and my professional career as a writer.

How did your first book come about?

Ever since I was a teenager, Russia, Russians, Russian literature, and Russian history have played a role in my life that no one else or nothing ever would equal. Most of my heroes were Russian — Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov among them; many of my favorite writers and works of literature were Russian; my favorite poets and bards were Russian. Soviet émigrés to the United States I met in the 1980s taught me what the words “risk” and “courage” really meant — these friends were not much older than I was, but what they had gone through before and after leaving the Soviet Union made them far wiser and mature than I could ever have hoped to be. They also instilled in me the belief that you must be willing to risk everything for what you believe in.
     All of that prompted me to set out across Russia on the trip described in Siberian Dawn — a book that was not a travelogue per se, but an account of a dream fulfilled, if a very traumatic and poignant one involving a long journey. When I reached Poland after some 8,000 miles of wandering across Russia and Ukraine, I turned around and came back to Moscow, rented an apartment, and started writing. I had not been an avid reader of travelogues before, so I just wrote about what I saw and felt, without much regard to genre.

Do you see yourself as a travel writer or a political/social commentary writer?

I write about what interests me. Depending on the subject, there may be politics or travel or social commentary involved, or themes better explored in fiction. These days, I’m working on the outlines of a novel.

You said that the Peace Corps program in the former Soviet Union was untenable and wrong. Why that opinion? Should the Peace Corps pull out of Eastern Europe?

I will speak only to the program in Uzbekistan, but the problems all over the former USSR (but not in Eastern Europe, which does not belong to the same historical sphere) are the same. The formerly Soviet states possess a population that is often more educated, and in certain crucial ways, more sophisticated, than the Americans, be they staff or Volunteers, who are sent to man Peace Corps programs. The system that the Soviets devised created a population for whom education was sacred and deceit a matter of survival, so Americans learn more from the formerly Soviets (especially about deceit, definitely about deceit), than the other way around — which makes a program of American aid here consisting of less than crack specialists a farce of sorts.
     The root problems here in the former USSR are those of nihilism and cynicism — everything is being stolen, people are raped with impunity by any number of actors, killed for nothing and perishing through negligence, and no one here responds, at least in a meaningful or effective way. This is poisoned earth, and we should not deny this because we don’t want to believe it. Living here, one cannot escape the notion that the formerly Soviet states are slipping into extinction, rotting away, losing people to demographic trends caused by an utter and pervasive failure of their civilization. In view of all that, the Peace Corps (and most other foreign aid) is at best irrelevant here.
     That said, I’m all for Americans getting out and seeing the world and living abroad; that is the principle benefit Peace Corps offers, and it is a vital one, given how powerful the United States has become since the end of the Cold War. Also, learning about fundamental, and at times unbridgeable, cultural and historical gaps between peoples is essential (such a gap exists between Americans and all the formerly Soviet peoples, with the exception of the Balts and western Ukrainians) — one must not delude oneself that we are all alike or destined to be members of some sort of global family, and we must not participate in or facilitate the delusion of others. I have never regretted quitting the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan.

Lets go back to your latest book. Were you the first person to go down the Congo since Stanley?

A team of adventurers descended the river in the mid 1980s, before Zaire came apart, on high-speed motorized rafts, and of course barges and ferries were going up and down it. But my aim was to do it by pirogue, and concerning that I could only find evidence of failure — the Zairean authorities told me no one had succeeded. I still wouldn’t exclude the possibility that someone managed it and published nothing about it, or did it without being detected by the authorities.

Describe how you went about writing the Congo book. Did you keep a journal? Do you write on a computer, long hand?

I kept a journal during the trip, which served me well when it came time to write, as did the copious collection of 35mm slides I shot along the way and other memorabilia I retained. I write, however, only on a computer, with some minor exceptions, so the book was written later. In any case, I think one needs some time away from an event to understand what has really happened, or at least what it means.

Looking back, what was harder, dealing with the corruption of the country or the river?

I would say the hardest thing of all was dealing with fear and feeling exposed. Fear is very corrosive. In one way, the most terrifying moments came out on the river in the pirogue, in confronting robbers, though my guide, a Zairean named Desi, was superb in handling them. I owe him everything. He was a born diplomat, even as afraid as he was, and he got us through. In another way, the most frightening moments came at night, when the mosquitoes kept us in our tent and we felt — and were — blind to what was going on around us. I have to add that Desi’s fear enhanced my own — when your guide gets scared it doesn’t do much for your moral. But as he got sick, his fear waned into apathy and resignation, then a sort of dread settled over my heart like a rock.

Was there any moment when you thought you would not make it out of the Congo alive?

After the incidents with the would-be robbers occurred, and when we hit the most threatening stretch of river, after Lisala, I thought we were all at grave risk, and that our end would be a sorry and slow one, rather than a dramatic and agonizing one.

How long was your trip and how long did it take to write the book?

The actual trip described in Facing the Congo — the Congo Republic and Congo/Kinshasa segments — took a little more than two months. I finished the book a year and a month after I began writing it (but I was often away on assignment and had to interrupt the process). However, the book covers time in Moscow at the beginning and the end, and altogether spans a five-year period.

How did you find a publisher for the book, or did you have one before you started?

The same publisher, Ruminator Books, formerly Hungry Mind, published both Siberian Dawn and Facing the Congo. My agent found them for me, and I have been very satisfied. I wrote the first book with neither agent nor publisher; the second I did on contract.

You said you were working on a novel. What is it about?

It has to do with Moscow in the early- and mid-nineties, but that’s about all I can say at the moment.

Who are some of your favorite writers?

I would prefer to cite favorite works rather than writers, since even geniuses stumble. As far as long fiction goes, my favorites are Anna Karenin, Lolita, A Bend in the River, Great Expectations, In a Free State, The Quiet American, and Moby Dick, to name more than a few. Among short stories, I never tire of Chekhov’s “A Lady and Her Dog,” or almost anything by Maupassant. I also like Ivan Bunin’s work.
     I realize these are all recognized classics, and I’m not saying anything new by citing them here. But so much journalism and fiction shows that too many writers are not reading the classics any more, when there is nothing better in print. Dickens is probably the only novelist who never disappoints, and I think he is a good one to read for aspiring writers.

If you were to select a place for RPCVs to visit, where would it be?

Assuming you’re referring to aspiring RPCV writers, I can only say that unless they want to follow the path typically trodden by foreign journalists, who move in clumps from one crisis point to another, or who are simply assigned to a “post” where they often speak little of the local language, they should travel to places to which they feel an enduring emotional bond.
     Don’t get me wrong: We need people to tell us in frank concise terms what this dictator has said or how many acres of rain forest were logged illegally, but we should not confuse precision and impartiality with perspective and meaningful writing, the kind of writing that speaks to people decades after it was penned. Decisions about where to travel and what to write about may, thus, be personal, emotional, and possibly even dangerous and irrational, but it has always seemed to me better to fail at a great endeavor than prosper in something banal. So I have no one answer, and would leave it to the intuition of the RPCVs themselves.

Do you think of yourself as an expatriate?

I think of myself as myself. Questions of nationality arise only when others bring them up, which at times happens in Moscow as a result of bumps in Russian–US relations. But I think you mean do I belong to the expatriate community here; no, I don’t. But I don’t feel I’m Russian, either.

Are you going to keep Russia as your base, or will you be moving somewhere else?

My wife is Russian, so I will always keep returning to Moscow, even if I leave to live somewhere else.