Our Notes & References

First edition of these rich and entertaining notes, including great comments on Londoners (vs Parisians especially!).

Rare: Apparently only one copy in the UK (British Library). WorldCat locates 5 other copies:NYPL (incomplete), Columbia, Cornell, Berkeley, and Library of Congress – but the latter is in fact a photocopy ‘made by the British Museum from another issue of the same year’. Interestingly, the title-page in the British Library copy is a completely different (later?) setting, with a quotation from Rousseau rather than Chateaubriand. We could also locate three holdings in Russian libraries, and only two copies at Western auctions in recent decades.

Artist, collector, writer, an acquaintance of Pushkin and Gogol and the founder and editor of the famous journal Otechestvennye zapiski [Fatherland Notes], Svinin (1787–1839) published the present account of London life in the wake of his earlier Sketches of Moscow and St Petersburg (Philadelphia,1813; his first book), and Opyt zhivopisnago puteshestviia po Severnoi Amerike (‘A picturesque voyage across North America: an essay‘, St Petersburg, 1815). A member of the first Russian diplomatic mission to the US (1811-13), Svinin is considered “one of the best known and most influential observers of life in the United States” (Bolkhovitinov, our translation here and below) for his work about America.

In the summer of 1813, Svinin served at the headquarters of the Russian army in Germany and was repeatedly sent to London with dispatches. One of his tasks was to deliver a pension from tsar Aleksandr I to the widow of General Moreau, Napoleon’s main rival, whom Svinin met in America. Svinin’s observations of London during this trip begin, as a sort of introduction with separate pagination, with amusing comparisons between London and Paris. He then focuses on various elements of the city (such as post offices and roads), with chapters on the Congreve rockets at Woolwich, Greenwich Hospital, the astronomer William Herschel, the British Museum (and its Library: ‘the best in Europe’), London’s theatres, Newgate Prison, Kew and Windsor. The final chapter offers an account of Aleksandr I’s visit in 1814.

Among a great variety of subject matters, Svinin pays also attention to the “strangeness of English morality”: “I observe also that the very laws of England and the charitable institutions give some excuse for the debauchery of the girls. Nothing can be stranger and more unjust than the law on this subject, which is very strictly enforced in England and America! A girl’s oath is preferable to all man’s oaths and is more respected, therefore, if a girl swears on the Gospel that so-and-so caused her pregnancy, regardless of all denials and arguments, he must either marry her or provide a known sum for raising the child”.

He also discusses theft issues on the streets: “The beggars in London constitute a class of artisans unknown anywhere else, for sanctimony here is not a sign of poverty, but a kind of industry […] The swindlers have their own Academy in this quarter, where young candidates are trained – to unload other people’s pockets, according to some systematic rules”.

This is the first extensive Russian work about London, and the UK in general, and the first Russian book focusing exclusively on the subject. The only works published before Svinin’s observations were parts of larger travel accounts, and were few. The first may well be Nikita Demidov’s Zhurnal puteshestviia… [Diary of a Travel…] in 1786 with only about 25 pp. on London and parts of the UK; then came Nikolai Karamzin’s Pisma russkogo puteshestvennika [Letters of a Russian Traveller] (Moskovskii zhurnal [Moscow Journal], 1791-92), which included notes about England. His “Puteshestvie v London” [“Trip to London”] — an additional fragment from The Letters — was then published in his almanack Aglaia in 1794. And lastly Petr Makarov’s article “Rossiianin v Londone, ili pisma k druziam moim” [“A Russian in London, or Letters to my Friends”] was included in Karamzin’s Vestnik Evropy [Messenger of Europe] in 1804.

Several fragments of Svinin’s work were published in Syn Otechestva [Son of the Fatherland] magazine in 1815. This complete edition of 1817 was followed by multiple other travel accounts of England as the 1820s saw a new surge of anglomania among the nobility: “the aristocrats were fascinated by the English language and literature, borrowed the principles of the household, and most of all admired the polity of the distant island country” (Grigorieva).

Provenance

Duke Vsevolod Dolgorukii (ownership inscription to lower pastedown; most likely Vsevolod Alekseevich Dolgorukii (also Dolgorukov, 1845-1912) – writer and publisher, author of a celebrated travel guide to Siberia (1895). Without substantial financial means, Dolgorukov was involved in various small scams individually and as part of The Jack of Hearts Club (that mainly consisted of Russian nobility). He was imprisoned several times and eventually was exiled to Tomsk. There he resumed his literary work and was an editor of a number of magazines and actively published in Tomsk, Moscow and St. Petersburg periodicals)

Bibliography

Sm.-Sok. I, p. 424 (added by the editor) but absent from his collection.

Bolkhovitinov N. N., “Obraz Ameriki v Rossii” // Amerikanskaia tsivilizatsiia kak istoricheskii fenomen. Vospriiatie SShA v amerikanskoi, zapadnoevropeiskoi i russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli. Moskva, 2001, p. 434.

Grigorieva, Tatiana, Zapiski puteshestvennika: Obraz Velikobritanii v russkom iskusstve, Minkultury Rossii.

Chikalova I. R., “Nabliudeniia ob Anglii i anglichanakh v egodokumentakh i otchetakh rossiiskikh puteshestvennikov (konets XVIII-nachalo XIX vv.)”, Zapad-Vostok, #6, 2016.