The Adventures of Tintin. Tintin in Tibet

While on holiday in the mountains, Tintin receives a letter from his Chinese friend Chan, who writes that he will soon fly to London and they will finally be able to see each other after a long separation. Chan's route to Europe lies through Kathmandu, where the young Chinese plans to visit his adoptive father's cousin. However, the joyful news is followed by tragic news: Chan's plane crashed in the Himalayas. According to newspaper reports, there were no survivors in the crash, but, contrary to common sense, Tintin is convinced that his friend is alive - after all, he dreamed of him yesterday! Sinking in the snow, the exhausted Chan stretched out his hands to Tintin and begged for help. Tintin decides to fly urgently to Kathmandu, from there to the place where the plane crashed. Of course, Captain Haddock cannot let him go alone...

Magazine publication of the anniversary, 20th volume of The Adventures of Tintin began in September 1958 and ended in November 1959 (the album version was published in 1960).

The work on the next story coincided with a difficult period in the author's personal life, which cost him a deep depression. Hergé was on the threshold of a long-overdue, but extremely painful decision about divorce. For him, an extremely conservative person, who values ​​reliability and constancy above all else in relationships, the need to make such a decision seemed like a complete disaster. Creativity once again became an island of safety for Hergé: no wonder, because he had long understood that Tintin was his best psychotherapist.

The original idea for the 20th album came to the author at the end of work on the previous volume (The Red Sea Sharks, 1958): it would be based on a crime story, the main character of which would be Nestor, the permanent majordomo of the Moulinsart castle. However, the more Hergé thought about it, the less he liked it. At the same time, a completely different idea came to him, which he described in a few words: "Tibetan wisdom - lamas - yeti" (the entry was preserved in the archives - as well as a mention that 20 years before this, Hergé had already considered the idea of ​​a "Tibetan" adventure). It seemed quite fruitful to the author. All that was left was to find a compelling reason to send his heroes to Tibet. Tournesol was the first to come to the rescue: after all, why wouldn't the restless professor want to find yeti and, thus, uncover another scientific secret? For this purpose, he could well go to Tibet – and his friends would follow him, of course. However, Hergé almost immediately dismissed this idea as absolutely untenable: Tournesol was too materialistic, too “mathematical” to become the main driving force of a story that the author saw not as an ordinary adventure, but rather as a kind of spiritual quest, an initiation. And then Hergé remembered Chan, the character from The Blue Lotus! The seed of the idea sprouted, the rest was a matter of technique: the painstaking preparatory work began.

The main sources of inspiration for Hergé were the works of Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969), a French opera singer and tireless explorer of Tibet; the testimonies of the first Europeans to conquer the Himalayan peaks – Edmund Hillary (Chomolungma) and Maurice Herzog (Annapurna), as well as the works of Bernard Heuvelmans (1916–2001), one of the pillars (and the actual creator) of cryptozoology. Hergé considered it necessary to meet Herzog and Heuvelmans personally, and these acquaintances only strengthened the author’s belief in the correctness of the chosen plot. Incidentally, both of them had no doubt about the existence of the yeti: Herzog claimed that he had seen footprints in the snow that could not belong to any living creature known to science.

"Tintin in Tibet" stands apart in Hergé's work. Almost all Tintinologists consider this album to be the best. It was this album that finally cemented Hergé's status as one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, as evidenced by the flow of articles, studies, dissertations, philosophical treatises, parodies, lampoons (where would we be without them!) devoted to the most diverse aspects of the series, which continues even now, 40 years after Georges Remi's death. "Tintin in Tibet" is an absolutely intimate, smooth album. It's a joke, in fact, there is not even a conflict in it; moreover, there is not a single negative character! The number of characters here is kept to a minimum. There are three at the center of the narrative - Tintin, the captain and Milou. For the first time in many years, we do not see the Dupondts on the pages. Tournesol's appearances can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There are almost no references to previous albums and characters familiar to the reader that Hergé loves so much (except perhaps the all-pervading voice of Bianca Castafiore still carries the eternal "Aria with jewels" throughout the surrounding area). Nothing - only the blinding whiteness of the endless snows of Tibet, in which researchers (taking into account the drastic changes in the author's personal life) see an allegory of a "clean slate", a new beginning. In other words, "Tintin in Tibet" is an album-initiation, an album-immersion (first of all, into oneself). Did Captain Haddock, for example, know that in him "lives a faith capable of moving mountains"?

Recommended reader age: 7+

Author: Hergé
Artist: Herge
Translation: Mikhail Khachaturov
Number of pages: 64
Publisher: Melik-Pashayev
Cover type: Hardcover
Dimensions: 290 × 217 × 10 mm
ISBN: 978-5-00041-557-3
Series: The Adventures of Tintin