Sylvain Tesson suggests that there is a quality to vodka that sets it off from other drinks and which may explain why pyschotherapy has not taken hold in Russia. Instead of engaging in talk therapy with a stranger for pay, the Russian, at least in Siberia, will simply barge into a hut uninvited, share his vodka, and pour out his inner soul.
"Some midlife crises are more charming than others. To change wives, apartment, Rolex, to begin to find that the Right Wing is after all more responsible than the Left, to start eating more vegetables that come exclusively from your own garden and replace psychoanalysis with spiritual retreats, nothing is more banal now in the cities. But to retreat from this asphyxiating society, reduce needs to extreme necessities, cease to flee in order to face the passing hours, days and seasons next to an immense and deserted lake deep in the Siberien forests, alone, virtually without ties to the rest of the world, that is an attractive personal challenge. Especially if it results in a superb book.
"Journal of a voluntary solitude, of a stillness lived as a stripping of the soul, an intimate exploration of being."
