Asian Odyssey is a remarkable book. Beginning sometime after the February Revolution of 1917, it opens to the narrator riding a Siberian pony across the Lake Baikal coastline. He has been an officer in the Imperial Russian army for three years, and is now fleeing the civil war to return to his family in Harbin, on the frontiers of the Russian empire. He is alone, but war is close behind, and we soon learn that Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the Russian Provisional Government, is organizing an army in Eastern Russia under the unscrupulous General Semenov in order to protect his new government.

The narrator, Dmitri Alioshin, is unable to resist getting swept up in all of this, and soon after returning to Harbin joins General Ivanov’s newly formed White Army as an adjutant. Baron Ungern-Sternberg looms over the narration, but like Mikhail Lermontov’s Pechorin does not appear directly until the later half of the book. Instead, we are introduced to Ungern-Sternberg through oscillating descriptions of his cruelty and his courage, scenes of carnage caused by his troops, and their almost messianic devotion to him.

Who was Dmitri Alioshin?

In an article published in the Guardian on Thu 15 Sep 2011, The vanishing fascination of truly anonymous authors by Daniel Kalder it’s claimed that “Alioshin disappeared after the first world war, and since his publisher’s records were destroyed by a bomb, it is unknown what became of him, or whether in fact that was his real name.” Almost since it was published, the author of Asian Odyssey has been shrowded in mystery. In the past several decades however, new research has uncovered surprising new details about the enigmatic life of Dmitri Alioshin; including another book written by him and intended as a prequel to Asian Odyssey.