Our Notes & References

First edition of this important and finely illustrated guide to St. Petersburg, the first ever focusing on this city alone and with a wealth of wide-ranging material.

As the introduction emphasises, this Guide innovates one several fronts: the format (pocket for travellers and not bulkier for a library), the language (in French for visitors and not in Russian “ignored by foreigners”) and the content, which aims to be both practical, informative and positive.

This last characteristic is especially remarkable, as most existing travel accounts were rather polemical and “quickly became key forums for partisan attacks and debates” (Johnson, 57) in the ongoing debate between Slavophiles and Westernisers. Frenchmen in particular tended towards “systematic criticism of imperial Russia and its institutions” (Lin, 127), which they saw as the antithesis of their own post-revolutionary France.

Bellizard’s important Guide deliberately stays away from political commentary – in fact, this was a precondition of the French publisher being allowed to operate in Saint Petersburg! (see Meyer, 17). His foreword proudly states that the capital can “rightfully place itself at the head of the most beautiful cities in Europe”, while lambasting the insufficiency of the few similar existing publications. An earlier English-language guidebook they suggest is “incomplete, inaccurate, full of commonplaces”, and local Russian books they believe to be “overloaded with details, long and difficult to consult”.

Saint-Julien focuses instead on the practical information a foreign tourist might require, from passing through customs to arriving at the hotel, currency exchange, ordering at a restaurant, and most importantly, on the many ways to spend leisure time in the new, European-style capital — itineraries are provided for walks along the Neva, and guides for going to the theatres, museums, and bookstores (the best of which, of course, is said to be Bellizard’s own establishment); Pushkin’s publisher, Smirdin, is also positively mentioned. The overall effect is to present Saint Petersburg as full of opportunities to spend time in a cultivated, European fashion.

To Saint-Julien well-written and wide-ranging text, Bellizard added a detailed folding plan of the city, and fine plates showing the most celebrated views of the city, such as Nevsky Prospect, St. Isaac Cathedral with Falconet’s monument to Peter the Great, the Stock Exchange, the Winter Palace and the Admiralty with an animated scene during the local carnival, among others.

Charles de Saint-Julien (1802-1869) was a French writer, poet and academic who fled France after the July Revolution (1830) due to his support for Charles X. Thereafter he became a professor of French literature at the University of St Petersburg and played an important role in familiarising the Russians with French literature, inculcating “a generation with different literary views and tastes” to their predecessors (Russian Biographical Dictionary). Saint-Julien would later go on to write his well-known Voyage pittoresque en Russie (1854).

Interestingy, we handled a copy of this Guide some years ago with a slightly different title page, not mentioning the author at all – a fact which may explain that many catalogue entries in libraries don’t credit Saint-Julien.

A major French-language publisher in Russia, Bellizard on the whole had a “significant role in the history of Russo-European literary relations” and published the Revue étrangère, a literary magazine in French, for Russian consumption, in which appeared some of the early works of great French authors like Balzac (Meyer, 15). Pushkin was an avid consumer of Bellizard and his personal library contained the first eight volumes of the Revue étrangère, which are thought to have inspired The Bronze Horseman (ibid., 17).

Bibliography

Sen-Zhul’en, Sharl’. Russkii Biograficheskii Slovar’. Saint Petersburg 1912. Vol. 20, 269—270; Johnson, Emily D. 2006. How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie. Penn State Press; Lin, Stephanie. 2003. ‘Image (and) Nation: The Russian Exotic in 19th-Century French Travel Narratives’. Dialectical Anthropology 27 (2): 121–39; Meyer, Priscilla. 2008. How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. University of Wisconsin Press.