RUSSIA’S OUTER LIMITS

Siberia overflows with excess. It reaches from the Mongolian steppes to the Arctic Ocean, from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific; it’s larger than Europe and North America combined. The summers are scorching; in winter, the land is scoured raw by blizzards.

And then there are the speeches. Even speeches, it seems, can be extreme in Siberia.

I was standing on a Yenisei River quay in the industrial city of Krasnoyarsk with more than 180 other hungry, thirsty, tired travelers (mostly Western Europeans) who had crossed four time zones during the previous night’s flight from St. Petersburg.

We were waiting to board a 315-foot-long, Swiss-managed cruise ship, the M.S. Anton Chekhov, for a 10-day, 2,600-mile river voyage through the heart of central Siberia to Dudinka, a small port city 240 miles above the Arctic Circle.

But before we could climb the gangway, we were captive listeners to representatives of governing bodies, local associations and the ship’s crew, who welcomed us at great length. After that, we stood through translations of each welcome in six languages.

When we finally boarded, another ceremony awaited us. Local girls in folk costumes passed out braided loaves of bread and invited us to eat a morsel dipped in salt. This is a Russian tradition, Tanya, our dimpled, English-speaking guide, told us.

I had few sybaritic reasons for embarking on this cruise. Siberia conjured up images of little more than frigid wastelands and firing squads. I didn’t expect exotic mementos, local delicacies or precision dance groups (though I did find all of these before the voyage ended).

I was here partly out of curiosity about this remote area and partly because of my fondness for Russian literature--Chekhov, in particular. I wanted to see where so many of the great author’s stories and plays were set. That the cruise ship was named the Anton Chekhov was a bonus.

We weren’t scheduled to embark until the following day, so I made plans to join Gillian, a fellow passenger from England, in exploring Krasnoyarsk. After a three-course lunch of spicy bean soup, roast veal and flaky pastry blanketed with chocolate sauce, we climbed a narrow concrete, weed-framed staircase to the riverbank. The air was heavy with the smell of garbage, sweat, gasoline and rotting wood.

Few pedestrians were in sight. Along one stretch of sidewalk, vendors sat behind makeshift tables with displays of spotted apples and oversized, yellowing cucumbers. Small shops draped what little merchandise they had across back walls. On the ground floor of a half-empty department store, tables heaped with used clothing and cheap costume jewelry attracted a few browsers.

We had walked a few blocks when Gillian exclaimed: “Look--it’s straight out of a short story by Chekhov.” Before us was an ornate, decaying mansion built for a wealthy landowner more than a century ago. Its wooden exterior once had been painted lavender-blue; an intricately carved border reached around its decaying eaves, a faded reminder of the country’s feudal past.

A few minutes away, the gilt domes of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception rose over freshly painted pink clay walls. The Russian Orthodox church, one of Krasnoyarsk’s most famous landmarks, covers almost an entire city block and was only recently reinstated as a house of worship. The murmur of Divine Liturgies said simultaneously in different parts of the church mingled with the smell of incense.

Krasnoyarsk was founded in 1628 by Cossacks who built a prison on a Yenisei River spit called Krasny Yar. A city grew up around the prison, but no road or railway connected it to the rest of the world until the Trans-Siberian Railroad began service in 1898. Krasnoyarsk, at about the same latitude as Sitka, Alaska, was once known for its chain gangs and exiled revolutionaries, including Lenin. Today, it’s an industrial center with museums and universities.

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Before lunch the next day, we eased from the Krasnoyarsk quay into the swiftly flowing river. Sometimes we spotted a riverboat, but for the most part the glorious Yenisei was ours alone. Ninety-degree August weather baked the sun deck, so I moved to a shady spot where I could watch the high clay riverbanks glide by. Ivory thunderheads bordered the sky like a line of stately dowagers waiting to receive.

The Anton Chekhov is comfortable but not luxurious. My compact cabin, on the aft middle deck, had a wide window that opened and overlooked the river. Russian folk carvings and fresh flowers decorated the attractive dining salon. The ship seemed crawling with staff: Waitresses in folk costumes were never more than a whisper away at dinner. But “luxury” items were in short supply. For example, the ship’s beauty parlor asked clients to bring their own shampoo and fingernail polish. And though a doctor was on board, passengers had been asked, in pre-trip literature, to bring their own medications.

The word “Yenisei,” of Turkish origin, means “mighty water,” and over the years the river has been called “Father” by the Russians. The entire river system is more than 3,400 miles long. From a width of 15 miles at Krasnoyarsk, it grows to more than 40 miles at its Arctic gulf. It is the major transportation corridor for people living near its banks.

Midafternoon, passengers had a choice of Russian-language classes, videos of Siberia’s plant and wildlife or lectures on the region’s history--all scheduled to accommodate our many languages. Leaving my shady vantage on deck, I joined the Russian language class, where I quickly learned that vodka is derived from vadi, Russian for water.

In the afternoon, we docked at Yeniseisk, the Krasnoyarsk region’s original capital. A sandy trail led up the riverbank to the town of 18,000, once famous for its sables and gold. Most passengers visited the town’s folklore museum and 200-year-old church, but I wandered off to explore on my own.

Yeniseisk looked relatively prosperous and well-cared-for. Its small clapboard houses were painted soft blues or greens, with an occasional renegade pink. Poppies and golden sunflowers alternated with rows of cabbages and cucumbers in tidy gardens. I walked for 15 minutes or so to the outskirts of town, where a black dirt footpath stretched to a barren horizon.

The only road to Yeniseisk heads south. With air transportation limited, towns farther north are completely isolated when ice makes the Yenisei impassable, which can happen as early as September.

Back on the Anton Chekhov, I compared experiences with my table mates over barley soup and broiled chicken flavored with rosemary. Most of the ship’s food was imported from Holland, and serving sizes were calculated so that no food would be wasted in a country where there was a severe food shortage (though seconds were available). One evening, the kitchen served broiled sturgeon, caught that afternoon by crew members.

Most passengers spruced up in neckties and silky dresses for dinners, and afterward wandered out on deck or into one of the lounges (the Panorama, for dancing; the Lido, adjacent to the swimming pool) for drinks and conversation.

On our first night, a five-piece band in the Panorama lounge launched into a march, and the dance floor filled. Whenever the orchestra took a break, members took turns singing haunting Russian folk songs. Because nights became steadily shorter as we proceeded north, twilight fell shortly before midnight. Morning light was enveloping the river when I finally went to my cabin.

Among the Communist regime’s grandiose ideas was a fantastic project to reverse the direction of some of Russia’s largest rivers. If the Yenisei flowed south, a vast irrigation system could be dug. Nature, the bureaucrats asserted, had thoughtlessly arranged the water to be carried away from the steppes to the Arctic Ocean. Communist blueprints for reversing the Yenisei’s flow may still exist in some dusty archive, but pursuit of the idea has gone the way of the workers’ paradise.

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Our days aboard the Anton Chekhov were played out under blue skies, though Tanya admitted that several drizzly days had dampened previous voyages. We dropped anchor almost every day for land excursions. On the fourth day of the trip, for example, we went ashore at Sumarokovo to visit vacant forest rangers’ quarters. A squat, unpainted log cabin sat by a meadow of muted purple, maroon and gold Arctic weeds and flowers. Inside, a primitive kitchen with old-fashioned utensils on wall hooks served as a passageway to a room with four bunk beds on high stilts, each heaped with straw functioning as both mattress and cover.

Tanya invited us to hike into surrounding birch forest, but determined mosquitoes forced me to return to the riverbank, where the galley crew stirred caldrons of fish soup suspended over two bonfires. Even the smoke didn’t deter the mosquitoes, and after a few sips of spicy soup, I retreated to the ship.

On Day 7, we visited Turukhansk, where the Monastery of the Holy Trinity once was the home of a great library, treasured relics and the remains of Basil, Siberia’s first saint--as well as a brewery erected and operated by the monks. The monastery had been shut down by the Communists, who also disposed of the monastery’s valuables. Reopened in 1991, the church within the monastery lacks the opulence of former years, though its thick walls and arches still stand. That afternoon we crossed the Arctic Circle, and the forest began to turn to tundra.

The next morning we stopped at the city of Igarka, where buildings are built on pilings because of permafrost--a condition in which the earth is permanently frozen within a few inches of the surface. There’s a Permafrost Institute in Igarka, with a small museum.

Later, when I was standing back on deck, Tanya suddenly pointed into the distance. “A wolf!” I leaned against the rail to follow her gaze. Finally I saw the gray-brown animal loping into a thick stand of trees.

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Siberia offers no sophisticated cities or famous landmarks. It does have an amazing assortment of landscapes, and the Yenisei River trip sampled them all. The southern tier, around Krasnoyarsk, is steppe: a dry, rumpled prairie matted with grass, brush, wildflowers and endless wheat fields ripening to gold at summer’s end. At first glance, the steppe looks desolate and dun-colored, but a closer look reveals a spectrum of subtle hues.

North of the steppe lies the birch taiga, or forest. Thousands of miles of thin birch trees stand branch-to-branch in a 200-mile tier across the province. In summer, the birch taiga appears from a distance to be a tangled green mat; winter photographs show a salt-and-pepper beard. The taiga is a haven for wolves, ermine, bears, lynx, as well as trappers who sell the animals’ valuable pelts. When melting snow leaves pools of water in spring, the air is dense with black flies and mosquitoes ravenous for blood.

Farther north, the taiga is made up of conifers. Both birch and coniferous taiga produce vast amounts of lumber. In spring, logs are floated upriver and then shipped by train or truck to cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. Beyond the taiga the endless tundra begins.

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Our most northern stop was Ust Port, a bedraggled village of sagging huts. Pools of water lay everywhere because this far north permafrost comes to within inches of the surface and water has nowhere to drain. The villagers, ethnic Nenets related to North American Inuits, showed little interest in us interlopers.

After leaving Ust Port, the Anton Chekhov entered the Yenisei estuary, where the river looks like the sea. Occasional chunks of ice floated on its surface. Here the tundra stretches to the horizon on both sides. It is a dramatic, desolate landscape mottled with marshes, ponds, moors and meadows. A few soft snowflakes floated down in the chilly air.

During the night the ship turned back south to Dudinka, our last river stop. We anchored not long after breakfast, giving us hours to explore the port town. Dudinka is a relatively prosperous and commercial town. A department store stocked with clothing and household items tempted me with fur-lined boots, but the temperature had climbed, so I resisted.

A government-supported dance group performed for us in Dudinka’s 200-seat theater. The 30-plus member troupe kicked with a clockwork precision worthy of the Rockettes. Their frequent costume changes displayed the Nenets’ traditional colorful clothing.

After the fast-paced concert, cassettes and other memorabilia were offered for sale in the theater’s foyer. One woman showed me a mammoth-bone pendant.

“This cures sickness and brings good luck,” she said, pointing out how the dense marrow of the mammoth bone compared to a similarly carved reindeer bone. I chose a pendant carved in the likeness of a grimacing human face--probably a shaman’s, the seller told me.

Next morning, we traveled to Norilsk for a flight to Moscow. As we took off, I caught a glimpse of a house painted lavender-blue. In an instant it was lost in the vast surrounding wilderness. I thought of the Siberia I had seen, a place where nothing was quaint, or luxurious. A place haunted by ghosts of marauding Cossacks and murdered dissidents whose blood, no doubt, still lay frozen in some pocket of tundra.

I fingered my mammoth bone pendant and focused on the return trips I would make. Siberia’s limitless sweeps include much more than a traveler can absorb in a single visit.

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GUIDEBOOK

Cruising Siberia

Getting there: Depending on your cruise itinerary, either fly LAX-St. Petersburg, returning Moscow-LAX, or vice versa. There is connecting service LAX-St. Petersburg on Lufthansa and Aeroflot, a-nd connecting service to Moscow (changing planes on the continent); round-trip fares begin at about $1,500.

The Anton Chekhov: The 184-passenger ship is operated by the Swiss firm Mittelthurgau, Weinfelden, Switzerland. The U.S. representative is EuroCruises, 303 W. 13th St., New York, NY 10014-1207; telephone (800) 688-3876, fax (212) 366-4747. The Chekhov has one dining room (with two dinner seatings), two bars and a swimming pool. U.S. dollars are accepted on board.

Cruises: No more cruises are available this year. Next year, 12-day itineraries depart Krasnoyarsk for Dudinka June 17-28, July 8-19, July 29-Aug. 9, Aug. 19-30 and Sept. 9-20. Eleven-day packages make the reverse trip from Dudinka to Krasnoyarsk June 28-July 8, July 19-29, Aug. 9-19, Aug. 30-Sept. 9 and Sept. 20-30. Other companies offering cruises in Russia include Cruise Marketing International, tel. (800) 578-7742; Quark Expeditions (Arctic trips), tel. (800) 356-5699; and Unique World Travel, tel. (800) 669-0757.

Prices: Per-person rates on the Anton Chekhov, based on double occupancy, begin at $1,740 for an 11-day cruise, $1,880 for 12 days. Air fare within Russia, transfers and excursions are included. EuroCruises will arrange flights from U.S. and help with visas.

For more information: Russian National Tourist Office, 800 3rd Ave., Suite 3101, New York, NY 10022; tel. (212) 758-1162, fax (212) 758-0933.