The Future at the End of the Line: The Nostalgia of Syberia and The Last Express

Ștefan Ionescu Ambrosie

Space is at the heart of memory, not time; Gaston Bachelard makes it clear in his Poetics of Space that our daydreams have no real duration, but are instead nourished by that sense of place with which we have psychically invested the past.¹

Bachelard might have been right on the money, since I actually struggle to see anything like a movie in my head. All I see are static snowglobes of pure memory, like winter in Moldavia, abandoned factories, and the stately and decrepit manor houses that punctuate the landscape. They have the flatness of a GIF, just an infinite loop that gets more uncanny with each revisitation. Beyond that, a void. 

I wasn’t alone in this. Other people’s memories of these places were just as flat, and eerily disconnected from what we might think of as history with a capital H. Folks couldn’t string together a coherent narrative that explained away the decay. All I knew was that my hometown and its environs seemed like relics of a lost world before I was even born. I did not experience the Fall, only its stale afterparty, and the urge to recover those memories that I saw as my birthright would haunt me well into adulthood.

In those halcyon days, video games acted as a stopgap. Knowledge of what it took for everything to turn to ruin came only later, but the inchoate notions I had formed as a kid glued to his PC were what informed the daydreams about the outside world. Reading up on my country’s history and its economic upheavals dispelled the mist and sobered me up, albeit to the detriment of my imagination. Since then, virtual spaces like City 17² started hitting a bit too close to home with its bleak representation of a post-socialist landscape. 

Most of the games I played also reflected a preoccupation with lost worlds. This was the adventure game boom of the 1990s and early aughts, capitalising on a still-fresh influence from the Indiana Jones franchise. That or Agatha Christie’s quaint world of murder and mystery. My computer back then couldn’t support the latest games, so all I could do was indulge in a passé genre that had more in common with nineteenth-century novels than its peers. From the comfort of my Soviet-style apartment block, with the screen as my crystal ball, I took the plunge and by chance stumbled upon something extraordinary. 

I was twelve or perhaps thirteen when my friend at the time gave me one of those freebie CD-ROMs that LEVEL³ used to give out every now and then. He told me that this game had made him cry, a curious statement that I had never heard before. I can still see the design on the CD: a couple of heads looking wistfully in the distance with a steampunk-looking train as their backdrop. I popped it inside my laptop and was instantly greeted by a menu replicating the CD cover and playing music somewhere between Debussy and Shostakovich.

1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 31.
2 Dystopian city in Valve’s Half Life 2.
3 Gaming magazine sold in Romania between 1997 and 2013. Originally from the Czech Republic.

Syberia was unlike any other adventure game I had played. There was nothing wacky or funny about this adventure; the first-ever cutscene was a funeral march. The game’s protagonist, an American lawyer aptly named Kate Walker, shows up to search for the deceased’s long-lost brother and initiate a corporate takeover of their estate, a toy factory in a fictional French village. The brother, Hans, is now an old man hidden away in a spa resort and obsessed with woolly mammoths ever since a childhood incident in a cave strewn with rock paintings. This incident stunted his mental development and sparked a life-long dream of finding the last remaining mammoths. Kate Walker, despite being in the throes of a crumbling marriage and beholden to the legal obligations that brought her there in the first place, decides to embark on a mysterious train journey with Hans to the end of the line: the lost world of Syberia, home of the last woolly mammoths.

The story shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. Part of its emotional appeal for me was the journey and the way it progressed. As Hans’ beautifully-crafted wind-up train made its way east to its prelapsarian destination, time itself seemed to cave in. With each pit stop, the architecture slowly morphed from Art Nouveau to something more primaeval, as though modernism’s flirtation with ‘primitive’ art was reaching its logical consummation. The last stop before the formless landscape of the mammoths appeared to be a Siberian Yupik village, where Kate Walker watches as Hans undergoes the final preparations needed in order to commune with these creatures of myth.

The ending did make me tear up. It was the first time that had ever happened to me with a video game. Days and even weeks later I would think back to the train ride and the cosy feeling of escorting an old man to his dying wish. In real life too, trains somehow enhance reverie. Inside, as Michel de Certeau put it, “there is the immobility of an order. Here rest and dreams reign supreme.”⁴

4 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 111.

A train is also a heterotopia, essentially a deviation from the normal paradigm outside, exempt from its rules, and in it Kate Walker, the wayfaring stranger in a strange land, acts as the quintessential outsider whose unprejudiced gaze allows us to see this world anew even while it decays before our eyes. The non-specific places she visits have “something of the uncertain charm of the waste lands, the yards and building sites, the station platforms and waiting rooms where travellers break step, of all the chance meeting places where fugitive feelings occur of the possibility of continuing adventure, the feeling that all there is to do is to ‘see what happens.’”⁵ Swept away as if compelled by what lies at the end of the line, Kate Walker gets to experience an East whose uncertain charm is the stuff of burning nostalgia.

Many years later, I would come upon a travel log detailing a different kind of voyage to the East, one undertaken more than a century ago and more out of scientific curiosity than phenomenological daydreaming. English explorer Harry de Windt charted a course through the Balkans and then north towards Ukraine and European Russia in order to experience ‘savage Europe’ and write the travelogue bearing the same name. In Bucharest, de Windt remarked that “the first things that strike a stranger here are the brightness and gaiety of the streets and lavish display of wealth, not only in the daily life of the people but in public and private buildings, hotels, and shops,” as well as the startling notion that one “will have to pay Monte Carlo prices for everything… be it a rivière of diamonds or a mutton chop” in what is “certainly the most immoral city in the world.” Here, contrary to Saint Petersburg where “Midas squanders his millions within four walls,” the ostentatious living is out in the open, practically in one’s face.⁶

Reading these kinds of outsider perspectives can render the familiar alien; it takes you out of the everyday reckoning with your surroundings. Easy nostalgia is then complicated by a legacy not readily apparent, particularly when the usual romanticising of said era⁷ does not include visions of libertinism and wanton expenditure reminiscent of the Weimar Republic. Australian writer Gerald Murnane even observed that “the people of pre-war Romania were credited with a fondness for sexual perversions.”⁸ As wary as I am of any exotic othering coming from a Western gaze, I remain convinced that the ruins of home are physically, even erotically, charged with past revelry and merry-making. A party must have once raged here with the intensity of a thousand suns before the eventual dying of the light. And perhaps the soot is our only witness.

This obsession with bygone worlds that spell danger and glamour is something that, at first glance, might appear diametrically opposed to the softer nostalgia of Syberia, and yet it features much of the same elements. There is almost always a foreigner flung far from the comfort zone of the West into an incomprehensible world of Eastern arcana and backwater modernism, whose main task becomes making sense of the strangeness all around them. But whereas Syberia’s quasi-fictional universe had already experienced a Fall, and Kate Walker is simply there to see it go out with a whimper, I remember another game from my teenage years where the world does go out with a bang. Jordan Mechner’s The Last Express presented me with a different American pilgrim on a foolhardy journey onboard a train, a passage as infuriating and nail-biting as Syberia’s was sweet and melancholy.

9 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays: Volume 1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), 321.

megalomaniacal imagination that recreates the past as a time of mythical giants. It does not propel historical reflection or individual longing but rather shapes a totalising nostalgia for eternal grandeur. Megalomania often covers up sites of destruction and calls for rebirth, not reconstruction.¹²

10 Matei Călinescu, Faces of Modernity (Toronto, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside Limited, 1977), 67.
11 Winfried Georg Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (Cambridge, MA: New Directions, 2016), 24.
12 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2016), 100.

Instead, beyond the obvious images of prosperity and leaps forward in the arts and sciences that such a term evokes, a Golden Age also presents itself, crucially, as a state of mind. It is present in each of us in incipient form in our daily lives, with names like salad days, halcyon days, red-letter days, etc. These moments are the sparks that come out of nowhere in our fluctuating emotional states, which cannot even be traced to personal victories we may claim. Because we are so atomised nowadays, we do not realise the extent to which happiness is actually collective, and not an individual affair as we have been taught through decades of neoliberal dogma.¹³ Experiencing a Golden Age collectively: this was what my nostalgia was mainlining, though I could not put my finger on it until a global cataclysm knocked on my door and yours.

The ruins of Modernism, present both on my way to school and in the games I played, are not simply the reminder of ‘good times’ that were had, never to come again. The cliché that one can feel nostalgia for times they didn’t experience speaks volumes, since it is here that aesthetic contemplation can lead directly into ethics. The doomed spaces of my youth are practically seared into my retina, and impact the way I envision hope for a future we find hard to believe in anymore. Nostalgia for a metanarrative of boundless striving for the new can act as a catalyst; thinking ahead may hurt right now, but looking back to a less cynical era can fuel the kind of daydreaming that leads to action.

13 See Marcello Tarì’s There is No Unhappy Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2021).

Ștefan Ionescu Ambrosie was born in Bacău, Romania. He is a graduate of Rijksuniversiteit Groningen’s MA in North American Studies. He lives in Barcelona.