Between Two Worlds

Travel literature has the capacity to mold opinion and change minds. At the very least, we discover ourselves through our encounters with others.

In Russia, this has been particularly true. During the tsarist era, Russians’ perceptions of themselves were powerfully shaped by travelogues about the world that lay beyond the empire’s borders. And this continued through the Soviet period to the present day.

As a literary genre, travel writing is rarely just gratification for wanderlust. It can serve multiple political or personal agendas, and it can be witty, documentary and even subversive (and sometimes all three in one). In fact, one need not even travel to foreign lands to produce travelogues that inform or irritate.

In 1790, Alexander Radishchev used the cover of a journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow to write a polemical account of the inequalities and injustices of everyday life in 1790s Russia. Yet Radishchev was no revolutionary. He merely did what all good travel writers do: held up a mirror so that society might view itself from a different angle. Yet the radical tone of his writing introduced Russian readers (the few who could get their hands on a copy[1]) to the spirit of the French Revolution. Catherine the Great was not amused (“Here we have a rebel worse than Pugachyov,” she exclaimed, on reading his work) and sentenced Radishchev to death (later commuted to 10 years exile in Siberia). Only after Catherine’s death in 1796 was Radishchev permitted to leave Siberia.[2]

When Russian writers ventured abroad, and particularly when they traveled to far-flung lands, their typically critical reports revealed more about tsarist Russia than about the foreign territories through which they traveled. In particular, they reflected on the perennial Russian dilemma over geographical identity. Is Russia of the East or West? Is it European or something more exotic?

Russian travelers to the South were inevitably rewarded with evidence that reinforced Russia’s European credentials. Many of the accounts of journeys to Persia[3] were penned by officers in the tsarist army on expeditions or longer-term postings. Their travelogues reveal a Persia in a miserable state of decay.

Pavel Ogorodnikov was too independent a spirit to be influenced by the often elitist perspective on Persia that prevailed in Russian military circles. In his mid-twenties, he had been thrown out of the army and imprisoned for his radical ideas. Upon his release, he developed a new career as a travel writer. Yet Persia and Persians still disappointed him. “It is difficult to find a good person among the Persians,” Ogorodnikov complained. He found little that “could meet the needs of a European.” Ogorodnikov was thus too western a spirit to fit into Persia, but when, a decade earlier, he had visited the United States, he felt equally uneasy there.[4] He was disquieted by America’s progressive attitudes towards women. He judged the wholehearted participation of women in diverse fields of public life to be “unnatural.” “More Russians should come to America,” Ogorodnikov famously wrote. “They would go back home as true patriots.”

Ogorodnikov’s view of Persia is echoed by at least a dozen other writers. Lieutenant-General Maksud Alikhanov was a Muslim from Dagestan who married the daughter of an Azeri prince. He knew the ways of the Caspian region and Central Asia. Yet his journeys into Persia served only to remind him of the righteousness of Russia. He saw a land of moral turpitude that might yet be rescued by Russia – and, as evidence of Russian benevolence towards its southern neighbor, Alikhanov described good-spirited Russian physicians who gave free medical care to residents of Teheran.

In fact, the quality of local health care was often a key indicator for Russian travel writers as to a country’s level of development. It was a health worry that impelled the Russian Enlightenment playwright Denis Fonvizin to visit France – not worries on account of his own well-being, but for the sake of his wife, who suffered from tapeworm. She was evidently cured by a blend of walnut oil and local herbs in Montpellier, and we should all be grateful to Madame Fonvizin’s tapeworm for having prompted a journey that inspired a very fine sequence of récits de voyages.

Fonvizin’s Letters from France don’t tell us a lot about France, but they do a fine job in reinforcing Russian cultural authority. Fonvizin was evidently irritated by certain elements of French sophistication, although he could not himself resist the temptation to dress up in a frock coat and wear make-up when strolling through the streets of Paris.

Deep down, in his heart of hearts, Fonvizin knew that even the most sophisticated Russian city couldn’t quite compete with Paris, so his mission in Letters from France was to shape the opinions of his compatriots back home and reassure them that there might be benefits to Russia in not being so assertively western as France. Ultimately, Fonvizin presented an unsympathetic view of France, a country that he judged to have poor service, evil odors and loose morals.[5] Fonvizin visited France in 1777 and 1778, and he thus experienced the closing years of the ancien régime. Yet Russian writers who visited after the French Revolution were no more impressed by French mores and culture.

Over the ensuing century, such an “anxiety of difference” marked Russian travelers’ accounts of their trips to Western Europe. They were beset by feelings of cultural inferiority or a need to prove themselves equals to the Other world they were visiting. If they found themselves (or their autocratic society) wanting, the natural reaction was to insist that “this is all fine and well, but Russia is different, it has a different reality, a different culture.” Russia was like Europe, but separate from it. (Have cake, eat it too.)

Russian writers recording experiences far from home were also naturally influenced by preconceptions about their travel destinations. Fyodor Dostoyevsky captured the problem when he set out for France in 1862.[6] With his usual acid irony, he posed the rhetorical question: “Is there anything original I can say? Does there exist a Russian... who does not know Europe twice as well as Russia?” If the reader inferred from the phrasing that Russia is thus not part of Europe, Dostoyevsky was quick to put them right: “We have matured. We are now completely European,” he reminded.

“Marfa Petrovna, who, seeing me bored, wanted to take me abroad on a couple of occasions. No thanks! I’d traveled abroad before and I’d always been miserable. It’s all right, I suppose, but you look at the sunrise, the Gulf of Naples, the sea, and you can’t help feeling sad. And the most disgusting thing is that you really are sad! No, you’re better off in the motherland: here, at least, you can always blame everything on someone else.”

Arkady Svidrigalov, in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment
(Oliver Ready, trans., Penguin 2015)

With the question of Russian identity thus completely settled, one might expect Dostoyevsky to tell us about France, but the author’s Winter Notes essay is thin on documentary detail and long on judgment. “To amass a fortune and possess as many things as possible has become the Parisian’s main moral code, his catechism,” Dostoyevsky averred. Thus, in reading France and the French, Dostoyevsky looked for evidence to support his assertion that “It is Russia which will be the fulfillment of Europe and her destiny.”[7]

Russian readers looking for re-assurance that the tsarist empire was most certainly western needed only to turn to the growing corpus of Russian travel writing about Japan that followed the Treaty of Shimoda in 1855, which liberalized commerce and navigation between the two countries.[8] The standards of “normality” that prevailed in Russia (or for that matter in Western Europe) simply did not apply in Japan. Writers like Ivan Zarubin, a ship’s engineer who penned excellent accounts of his journeys to Asian ports, were mightily impressed by the serene beauty of Japanese landscapes.[9] “Everything here caresses the eye,” he declared on sailing into Nagasaki harbor in 1881. But he, too, had good news for readers back in Russia. There was, he reported, no great affection in Japan for Americans and Europeans, yet visitors from Russia were assured of a warm welcome.

It was a rare case of a Russian travel writer extolling the merits of a far-flung land. But Japan was so distant from the salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg that there was no need to conjure up images of barbarians nudging up against the borders of Russia. The barbarians were, and perhaps still are for modern Russia, what the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy called “a kind of solution.”

Indeed, travel writers have always been exceptionally good at documenting any trace of barbarians. Russian travel writers of the tsarist period were no exception, and did not hesitate to provide plenty of good reasons for staying in the motherland. But of course some Russians still traveled. And they often discovered, to paraphrase the nineteenth-century Russian historian Alexander Turgenev, that however sick you may be of Russia while in the country, there’s nothing better than a journey beyond its borders to induce a real sense of homesickness. RL

NOTES

1. Catherine ordered all copies to be rounded up and destroyed. Just 17 of the original print run of 650 survived.

2. He returned home a broken man, for whom a reprimand by the authorities and an empty threat of another term of exile was enough to lead him to take his own life during the liberal reign of Alexander I.

3. See Elena Andreeva’s monograph, Russia and Iran in the Great Game, published by Routledge in 2007.

4. Pavel Ogorodnikov’s account of his US journey, From New York to San Francisco and Back to Russia, was serialized in the journal Zaria (Dawn) in 1870.

5. See Derek Offord’s Journeys to a Graveyard, published by Springer in 2005.

6. The journey is recalled in Dostoyevsky’s essay Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, first published in 1863 under the Russian title Зимние заметки о летних впечатлениях.

7. From a 1856 letter Dostoyevsky wrote to the Russian poet Apollon Maikov.

8. There is an excellent collection of texts in David Wells’ Russian Views of Japan 1792-1913: An Anthology of Travel Writing, published by Routledge Curzon in 2004.

9. In 1881 Zarubin became the first Russian to receive Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun.