Our Notes & References

The deluxe version this great work: with the large folding table of coats of arms and uniforms in vivid contemporary hand-colour – similar to the Beckford copy (sold in 1980), and rare so: the plate, like the folding maps, are usually in black and white.

First English edition of “one of the first geographic descriptions of Russia” (O’Neill), and “perhaps the first work of general importance on Russia written by a Russian to be published in an English translation” (Anderson).

The Russian geographer and vice-admiral Sergei Pleshcheev (1752-1802) received his maritime training in England; in 1765-70 he travelled on ships of the English fleet along the coast of North America. When back in Russia, Pleshcheev was appointed to serve the heir to the throne Paul I. He taught geography to Paul’s wife (and famousbook collector), Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna, to whom he dedicated the present book.

Plescheef’s Survey contains the most accurate and significant geographical description of the Russian Empire by 1790, “according to its present newly regulated state, divided into different governments” (title). Catherine the Great’s reform of 1775-85 structured the Russian Empire into 42 governments (gubernii) and one Tavrida province; Pleshcheev’s work “reflects this emerging spatial logic [of the new] fundamental organising principles of the administrative system” (O’Neill). He divides the governments into three zones (northern, middle and southern) and shows “their Situation and Boundaries, the Capital and District Towns of each Government; Manners, and Religion of the various Nations that compose that extensive Empire; Seas, Lakes, and Rivers; Climates; Commerce, Agriculture and Manufactures; Population and Revenues; Mountains, Minerals, Metals, and other Natural Productions” (title).

This work is an “extraordinary testimony to the way in which scholars were by now assembling a general understanding of Russia’s geography, with some comprehension of what was eventually to become known as geographical or natural zonation becoming apparent” (Oldfield).

The book also gives a detailed account of many different ethnic peoples who made up the population of the Russian Empire, including the indigenous people of the Far East (Kamchadals, Koryaks, Kurill, Aleut, Yukaghirs, Chukchi), different tribes of Samoyeds, “the nations which are supposed to descend from the Finns” (such as the Laplanders, Zhiryane, Votians, Mari, Chuvash, Mordva, Voguls, Ostyaks), Caucasian nations (including Circassians, Abkhaz and Ossetians), “The Lettonian, or Livonia Nations”, the Tartarian (Nagai, Crimean, Mishar, Bashkir, Kirghiz, Yakut, Teleuts), Mongolian, Tungusic, Germanic nations (Germans, Swedes, Danes), and colonists from foreign nations (including Persians, Indians, Albanians, Valakhians and Jews).

This first English edition was translated with considerable additions by James Smirnove (also Iakov Smirnov, 1759-1840), a Russian Orthodox priest and diplomat of the Imperial Russian delegation to Great Britain. The title page states “The Third Edition, Published at St. Petersburg”, apparently referring to the third Russian edition from which it was translated: Obozrenie Rossiiskoi Imperii (1790), which followed the Russian editions of 1786 and 1787. There was no English edition published before ours. Curiously however, there was also another English edition with the same indication of St. Petersburg and “the third edition”, but of a smaller format, with fewer pages and without folding plates, printed by J. Moore in Dublin the same year (1792). The preface of the London edition states: “as there was no correct geographical account of Russia in the English language, it would be an agreeable offer to the public”. This edition also appears to be the only Western production of Pleshcheev’s work at that time (besides the Dublin edition): the German (1787 and 1790) and French translations (1796 and 1804) were published in Moscow.

Provenance

George Attwood[?], October 1887 (inscription on title); Prof. Philip Longworth (1933-2021, historian and writer, esp. on Russian history).

Bibliography

Cat. Russica P-783; Anderson, Matthew S. “Samuel Bentham in Russia, 1779-1791.” American Slavic and East European Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 1956, pp. 157–72; Jonathan Oldfield, Denis J. B. Shaw, The Development of Russian Environmental Thought: Scientific and Geographical Perspectives on the Natural Environment, Routledge, 2015; Kelly O’Neill, Claiming Crimea: a history of Catherine the Great’s southern empire, New Haven and London, 2017.