Our Notes & References

“The most comprehensive account of St. Petersburg in the last years of Catherine’s reign” (Cross): “extremely thorough and accurate description of the Russian economic and cultural system of that time” (Ananieva).

A crisp example of the first edition, with all attractive plates by Chodowiecki.

“The first academician-economist of the Russian Academy of Sciences” (Iakutin), Heinrich Storch (also Andrei Karlovich Shtorkh, 1766-1838) was “a talented and prolific writer whose career stretched from the last years of Catherine’s reign through the turbulent first decade of Nicholas I. Taken together, his writings form a comprehensive theory of development based on progressive economics, and include an extended review of Russia’s achievements as well as recommendations for the empire’s future growth […] He won, and still retains, a recognized place in the history of political economy” (McGrew).

In 1799 Storch was appointed teacher of the daughters of Paul I, and from 1809, at Empress Maria Feodorovna’s request, taught a course on political economy to the Grand Dukes Nicholas (future tsar Nicholas I) and Mikhail Pavlovich.

“When Storch arrived in Petersburg, descriptive studies of the Russian empire were very much in vogue” (McGrew). In this, one of the first guidebooks to the Russian capital, Storch creates “a very engaging narrative” (Ananieva) about St. Petersburg’s inhabitants, lifestyle, popular entertainments, geographic location, industry, climate, science and arts, combining anecdotes, historical sketches, descriptions of streets, monuments, and governing institutions with demographic and economic information. “The book is still informative and a pleasure to read. It is also an early example of the attempt to use statistical methods in analyzing social structures” (McGrew).

Storch includes extensive data on the ethnic composition and professional groups of the population, adding his own reflections on the trends of the city’s development and demonstrating the further possibilities of scientific and statistical studies of the subject. “In this sense, the description of the city and its surroundings is fundamentally different from the Descriptions of the Capital City of St. Petersburg by Johann Gottlieb Georgi [publ. in 1790] who only collects, lists and organises different facts in paragraphs” (Ananieva).

The edition includes four plates and two titles with vignettes, all engraved by the celebrated German painter and director of the Berlin Academy of Art Daniel Chodowiecki (1726-1801), after G. von Mayr (active c. 1790). The plates show the famous department store Gostinyi Dvor, popular city entertainments with large and intricate merry-go-rounds (sometimes titled as “The Swing Festival in a Public Square in St. Petersburg”), and two fine chiaroscuro tavern scenes, one described by the British Museum as “An old landlady returning a sack of money which a Dutch sailor had lost in her inn seven years earlier” and by Rijksmuseum as “Well-to-do lady spends a night in an inn”. The engraved titles bear attractive vignettes, one with a port scene with Peter the Great, and another with Catherine the Great’s ceremony of unveiling of the Bronze Horseman statue to Peter I in St. Petersburg.

There seems to have been a first issue with letterpress titles dated 1793 (cf. copy kept in St. Petersburg’s NLR); however we couldn’t find any engraved titles dated 1793, nor any letterpress title dated 1794. Our copy doesn’t have any letterpress title, as most copies we could trace with the frontispieces and the 1794 engraved titles. It could belong to a second issue of the first edition, bound without the outdated letterpress title.

The work was translated into English for the London edition of 1801.

Scarce in institutions: although a couple of copies can be traced at auctions in recent decades, OCLC locates no copies in the US or the UK.

Provenance

From the estate of Prof. Philip Longworth (1933-2021, historian and writer, esp. on Russian history).

Bibliography

Cat. Russica S-2799 (dated 1794); Rümann 1113 (erroneously 5 plates); A. V. Ananieva, “Kultura Rossii v nauchnoi i khudozhestvennoi proze Andreia Karlovicha Shtorkha (1766-1835)” // XVIII vek, Sbornik 25, Nauka, 2008, pp. 243-255; Anthony Cross, In the Land of the Romanovs, Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, 2014 (for the English edition); McGrew, Roderick E. “Dilemmas of Development: Baron Heinrich Friedrich Storch (1766—1835) on the Growth of Imperial Russia”, Jahrbücher Für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 24, no. 1, 1976, pp. 31–71; Iurii Iakutin, “Znachenie rabot A. K. Shtorkha – pervogo russkogo akademika-politekonoma”, Nauchnye trudy Volnogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva Rossii, #4, 2015.