La rencontre de l’Europe et de l’Asie en Sibérie et Mongolie dans L'Asie fantôme (1923) de Ferdynand Ossendowski

traduction en polonais d’Elzbieta Koziolkiewicztraduction du titre de l'ouvrage en français : Rencontre de la polonistique des Trois Pays — Chine, Corée, Japon; Colloque international, Université de Canton Chine; International audience; Europe meets Asia in Siberia through W ludzkiej i leśnej kniei by Ferdynand Ossendowski (1923)Ferdynand Ossendowski (1876 – 1945) traveled through Mongolia and Siberia . He was a Polish scientist, a geologist, who was doing some research with a Russsian team. His book, Man and Mystery in Asia, relates his scientific missions and his adventures between 1898 and 1905 in the Iénissei region, the Sakhaline Island, the Altaï Mountains, Mongolia and Sinkiang. The first part of this study deals with the representation of the Asian peoples in this text. The traveler meets Mongolians, Chinese, Corean and Japanese people. The diversity of the population (there were also Europeans : Russians, Cossacks, Poles,) is explained by the historical, political and economic situation of the region at the time. The analysis is not limited to portraits and descriptions. The aim is also to understand the interactions between these different populations. From a literary point of view, does the writer relate his own experience of otherness ? Or is it ethnocentrism that prevails ? In fact, his testimony is as close to an adventure story as to the narration of a scientific mission, a travel narrative or a report. The Far West - like atmosphere that reigns over the steppe and in town, in Vladivostok for example, reminds the readers of the North American adventure stories that were very popular between World War I and World War II in Poland as well as in western Europe. And the specialists of this writer have already underlined the influence of this genre (Sienkiewicz, but also Karl May and Jack London) as well as that of the first westerns, on Ossendowski's fiction. The second part of this article therefore aims to show that Ossendowski has written an anticolonial western, where the local people play the role of the Indians and the Russians that of the settlers. This model contributes to the “westernization” of the reality of Central Asia and the Russian Far East that is described. It unveils a short-lived and exciting time, that of the birth of capitalism, very much like what the United States had experienced just before the Chinese (1912, 1949), Russian (1917) and Mongolian (1920-21) revolutions burst out and made Ossendowski a fugitive under the threat of death penalty by the bolcheviks.