In the Lands of the Romanovs: An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of the Russian Empire (1613-1917)/Reign of Alexander III (1881-1894)

10. REIGN OF ALEXANDER III (1881-1894) edit

 
Fig. 44 Alexander III (n.d.), photograph by Félix Nadar.


See also H13, H41, H48, H81, H87, I5, I79, I90, I103a, I111, I180


J1 edit

Cox, Samuel S., Arctic sunbeams: or from Broadway to the Bosphorus by way of the North Cape. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1882. 347pp.

Offered as the product of “the simple and harmless egotism of the author, and not the pretension of an archaeologist or discoverer”, it is the record of eight months’ travel round the world that takes the American tourist via Scandinavia into Russia in August 1881. Cox enlists as his guide a veteran English resident, a Mr Pilley (see J57), who shows him the sights in the capital and in Moscow, where Cox takes the train south to Odessa en route to Constantinople (pp. 216-337).


J2 edit

Macpherson, Georgina E., Upheaval!: reminiscences of Russia before and after the revolution. Cowley: for the author, n.d. 72pp.

Writing primarily to inform her family of their Russian ties, Georgina (b. c.1871), one of fifteen children born to Scottish parents in St Petersburg, where her father had founded the Baltic Iron Works and Shipbuilding Yard in the reign of Nicholas I, covers various aspects of Russian life and customs, but without any specific dates (pp. 7-40). Then follows the text of a lecture she used to give about her vicissitudes during the revolutions of 1917 and a long stay in the Kuban, first under Bolshevik, then White rule, before she eventually managed to get to Britain in 1920.


J3 edit

Newcomb, Raymond Lee, Our lost explorers: the narrative of the Jeannette Arctic expedition as related by the survivors, and in the records and last journals of Lieutenant De Long with graphic descriptions of Arctic Siberia, the Lena and its Delta, the native and exiled inhabitants of the country, etc.; and Mr. Newcomb’s narrative of a winter overland journey from the Arctic Ocean to St. Petersburg. Compiled by Richard W. Bliss and revised by Raymond Lee Newcomb. With an introduction by Rev. W.L. Gage. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co.; San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co., 1882. 479pp.

The ill-fated U.S.S. Jeannette, funded by the owner of the New York Herald to explore northwest of the Bering Strait, left San Francisco on 8 July 1879 and became entrapped in ice which crushed and sank it on 12 June 1881. This publication brings together various documents and journals by members of the expedition, some of which subsequently appeared separately. Newcomb (1849-1918), who collaborated on this composite publication, was the ship’s naturalist and astronomer and included his own journal of events up to and including his journey back across Siberia to St Petersburg, where he arrived on 1 May 1882, meeting the tsar at Gatchina (pp. 277-365).


J4 edit

De Long, George Washington, The voyage of the Jeannette: the ship and ice journals of George W. De Long, lieutenant-commander U.S.N., and commander of the Polar expedition of 1879-1881. Edited by his wife, Emma De Long. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1883. 2 vols.

The logs of the commander of the expedition (1844-81) whose conduct during and after the voyage was the subject of a posthumous enquiry and who was fully vindicated. Only two of the men in his boat that made land in Siberia survived, De Long dying of starvation. For Siberia, see [vol. II, continuous pagination] pp. 725-862.


J5 edit

Melville, George Wallace, In the Lena delta: a narrative of the search for Lieutenant-Commander De Long and his companions; followed by an account of the Greely relief expedition and a proposed method of reaching the North Pole. Edited by Melville Philips. London: Longmans & Co., 1885. 510pp.

Melville (1841-1912), who rose to be a rear-admiral, was the Jeannette’s chief engineer during its fateful expedition and in charge of the only one of the three small boats to make the Lena delta and safety on 17 September 1881. He then travelled back over a thousand miles in search of De Long and his men only to find them dead but retrieved the expedition’s records. He received the Congressional gold medal for his bravery.


J6 edit

Danenhower, John Wilson, Lieutenant Danenhower’s narrative of the “Jeannette”. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1882. xii+102pp.

The expedition’s executive officer, Lt. Danenhower (1849-87) was in Melville’s boat that reached the Lena delta. Virtually blind from an eye infection, he arrived back in the United States on 28 May 1882. This is a revised version of the account he had dictated in Irkutsk to John Jackson, special correspondent of the New York Herald, where it first appeared.


J7 edit

Ambler, James Markham, The private journal of James Markham Ambler, M.D., passed assistant surgeon United States navy and medical officer of the Arctic exploring steamer “Jeannette”. Introductory note by J.S. Gatewood. Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1917. 38pp.

Markham (1848-81), the ship’s doctor, remained on the ship tending the sick and wounded and died there.


J8 edit

Muir, John, The cruise of the Corwin: journal of the Arctic expedition of 1881 in search of De Long and the Jeannette. Edited [with an introduction] by William Frederic Badè. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1917. xxxi+278pp.

The revered Scottish-born American naturalist and advocate of wilderness (1838-1914) joined the USS Corwin, sent in early May 1881 to find the Jeannette and two missing whaling ships, to pursue his interests in botany and glaciation. He spent much time ashore among the Chukchis in June-July 1881 and was in the landing party that claimed Wrangel Island for America on 12 August 1881. The book was pieced together from Muir’s newspaper correspondence, scientific articles and unpublished journals by his literary executor.


J9 edit

Gilder, William Henry, Ice-pack and tundra: an account of the search for the ‘Jeannette’ on a sledge journey through Siberia. London: Sampson L, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1883. xii+344pp.

Gilder (1838-1900), explorer and correspondent of the New York Herald, sailed on the Rodgers in the search for the Jeannette between July 1881 and August of the following year. When his ship burnt down, he travelled nearly 2,000 miles across Siberia to telegraph news of the disaster to the American government.


J10 edit

Gallenga, Antonio Carlo Napoleone, A summer tour in Russia. London: Chapman and Hall, 1882. xii+426pp.

Gallenga (1810-95) arrived in St Petersburg on 1 July 1881. Four months later, he returned home via Kiev and Warsaw, having travelled from Moscow down the Volga to Astrakhan and then through Georgia to Batumi and on to the Crimea and Odessa. Inspired by Mackenzie Wallace’s Russia, he offers a sympathetic update, despite his suspicions of “a corrupt and tyrannical priesthood”.


J11 edit

Huntly, Charles Gordon, 11th Marquis of, Travels, sport, and politics in the east of Europe. London: Chapman and Hall, 1887. xii+311pp.

Huntly (1847-1937), accompanied by his wife, reached Sevastopol on 14 July 1881 after a gentle journey down the Danube and on to Constantinople. They visited the battle sites before sailing from Yalta to Feodosia and then on to Batumi and Poti before taking the train to Tiflis and on to Vladikazkaz. They then proceeded to Taganrog and sailed to Kerch and, finally on their Russian leg, to Odessa, which they reached in October 1881(pp. 46-207).


J12 edit

Scheutze, William Henry, William Henry Scheutze. Edited by Charles Deering. Chicago: R.R. Donnelly & Sons, 1903. [For private circulation.] x+165pp.

Scheutze (1853-1902), a lieutenant-commander in the U.S. navy, was sent in 1882 to recover the bodies of victims on the Jeannette. He describes his journey in letters to his mother as well as a return visit in 1885, with gifts for the Russians who had helped the survivors.


J13 edit

Phillipps-Wolley, Clive, Savage Svanêtia. London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1883. 2 vols.

Two years after returning from the Crimea, Sir Clive (see I133) was tempted back to one of “the least known corners of the Caucasus”, a region far inland from the Black Sea coast. He and a friend set out from London in the summer of 1882, travelling to Odessa and thence to Poti, before they went in search of game to shoot and scenery to admire among the mountains around Elbruz.


J14 edit

Lansdell, Henry, Russian central Asia: including Kuldja, Bokhara, Khiva, and Merv; with appendices on the fauna and flora of Russian Turkestan, and a bibliography of Russian central Asia, including 700 titles, chronologically and topically arranged. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1885. 2 vols. [Revised and abridged version: Through central Asia; with a map and appendix on the diplomacy and delimitation of the Russo-Afghan frontier (1887).]

Rev. Lansdell’s second venture into the Russian empire (see I171), taking him and his tracts on this occasion by rail, water, carriage, horse and, indeed, camel some 12,000 miles into Siberia as far as Omsk. He then turned south towards Tashkent, Samarkand, and Baku, whence to Tiflis and eventually to Odessa, leaving London on 26 June and returning on 21 December 1882.


J15 edit

Guillemard, Francis Henry Hill, The cruise of the ‘Marchesa’ to Kamschatka & New Guinea with notices of Formosa, Liu-Kiu, and various islands of the Malay archipelago. London: John Murray, 1886. 2 vols.

Cambridge naturalist and F.R.G.S., Dr Guillemard (1852-1933) set sail from England on the newly commissioned schooner yacht on 8 January 1882 and, sailing from Japan, reached Kamchatka, its furthest destination, on 13 August. Until 27 September they explored the eastern side of the peninsular, recording the flora and fauna of the area (vol. I, pp. 66-228). There is an appendix on the birds of Kamchatka (vol. I, pp. 274-78).


J16 edit

Noble, Edmund, The Russian revolt: its causes, condition, and prospects. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1885. 269pp.

Glasgow-born, Noble (1853-1937) emigrated to America in 1872, but it was as correspondent for the London Daily News that he twice visited Russia in 1882-84. Noble was later to write Russia and the Russians (1900), based almost exclusively on secondary sources and not revealing any personal experiences.


J17 edit

Vogüé, Marie Eugène Melchior de, and Child, Theodore, The tsar and his people or social life in Russia. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891. 435pp.

A very interesting collection of nine essays without any editorial introduction or precise dating. The first two, ‘Social life in Russia’ (pp. 1-98) and ‘Through the Caucasus’ (pp. 101-47), were written by the vicomte de Vogüé (1848-1910), diplomat, writer, and member of the Académie française, and reflect his own experiences and travels, when he was attached to the French embassy in St Petersburg from October 1776 to 1882. The next five, ‘Palatial Petersburg’ (pp. 151-97), ‘The fair of Nijnii-Novgorod’ (pp. 201-42), ‘Holy Moscow’ (pp. 245-88), ‘The Kremlin and Russian art’ (291-337), and ‘Modern Russian art’ (pp. 341-90), were the work of the American traveller and artist Child (1846-92), that equally reflect his visits to Russia and his wide knowledge of Russian art. The first of the remaining two essays, ‘Russian bronzes’ (pp. 393-414) by Clarence Cook, deals with Russian exhibits at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, while ‘A Russian village’ (pp. 417-35) was the contribution of the Russian artist Vasilii Vereshchagin.


J18 edit

Vogüé, Marie Eugène Melchior de, Russian portraits. Translated by Elisabeth L. Cary. New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons (The Knickerbocker Press), 1895. xii+143pp.

Famed above all for his Roman russe (1886), Vogüé also published after his return from Russia Histoires d’hiver, which formed the basis for this translation of five sketches that reflect his sympathies for the Russian peasantry.


J19 edit

Buel, James William, Russian nihilism and exile life in Siberia: a graphic and chronological history of Russia’s bloody nemesis, and a description of exile life in all its true but horrifying phases, being the results of a tour through Russia and Siberia made by the author, who carried with him letters of commendation from both the American and Russian governments. San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co., 1883. 547pp. [Re-issued as A nemesis of misgovernment … Philadelphia: Historical Publishing Company, 1899.]

A prolific author and journalist, Illinois-born Buel (1849-1920) left America on 24 June 1882, reaching Cronstadt via Hull. The first third of his book is devoted to a potted history of Russia with much detail on the nihilists (pp. 51-236). He then embarks on his travels through Siberia to inspect the exile system and take issue with the “Munchausen stories”of Lansdell (pp. 237-452). His impressions of life in St Petersburg (pp. 452-92) are followed by a visit to Warsaw and a general indictment of Russia’s treatment of the Jews (pp. 492-535).
J20 edit

Brown, John Croumbie, Finland: its forest and forest management. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd; London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co. and William Rider & Son; Montreal: Dawson Bros., 1883. xvi+290pp.

Rev. Dr Brown (1808-95), F.R.G.S., was pastor to the British and American church in St Petersburg between 1833 and 1839, but returned, after many years in Cape Province as Colonial Botanist, as summer locum for the then incumbents in the 1870s, visits that also allowed him to travel widely in Russia in pursuit of his interests in forestry and conservation. In connection with moves to establish a national school of forestry in Scotland from 1883, he embarked on a series of books on forestry throughout Europe that included four titles on Russia. In this, the first to be published, he begins with a description of a trip in June 1882 from St Petersburg to Kuopia, on the Saima See and to the Imatra Falls (pp. 3-30), before embarking on forestry matters.


J21 edit

Brown, John Croumbie, Forests and forestry in northern Russia and lands beyond. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd; London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co. and William Rider & Son; Montreal: Dawson Bros., 1884. viii+279pp.

Brown refers to a specific trip in the summer of 1882 to the provinces of Olonets, Vologda and Archangel to gather material for this, the second of his Russian works, as well as following his customary practice of quoting extensively from other printed accounts.


J22 edit

Brown, John Croumbie, Forests and forestry in Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, and the Baltic provinces of Russia, with notices of the export of timber from Memel, Dantzig, and Riga. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd; London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co. and William Rider & Son; Montreal: Dawson Bros., 1885. viii+276pp.

Brown published as his third contribution Forestry in the mining districts of the Ural Mountains in Eastern Russia (1884), but, as he admits, he did not travel to the Urals and relied on other sources for his information. His fourth volume, however, is based on frequent travels through western Russia and Poland, recalling specifically visits in 1836, 1873 and “my last”, in 1878, that provide the personal element to his studies.


J23 edit

Waddington, Mary King, Letters of a diplomat’s wife 1883-1900. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1903. vii+417pp.

American-born wife of a French citizen, Mme Waddington, née King (1845-1923), accompanied her husband to Moscow in May 1883 on his appointment as French ambassador extraordinary to attend the coronation of Alexander III. They left for home from St Petersburg on 21 June (pp. 26-127).


J24 edit

Little, Anna P., The world as we saw it. By Mrs Amos R. Little. Boston: Cupples, 1887. 476pp.

Account of a family’s world tour, east to west, in 1883. They reached Moscow via Poland and left from St Petersburg for Finland, eventually returning home via England.


J25 edit

Wolseley, Garnet Joseph, The letters of Lord and Lady Wolseley. Edited by Sir George Arthur. London: William Heinemann, 1923. x+464pp.

Field-marshal Viscount Wolseley (1833-1913) was invited in May 1883 to accompany as general officer the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh to Moscow to attend the coronation of Alexander III. In a series of letters to his wife he describes their arrival in Moscow on 21 May and the various events they attended before returning to England via St Petersburg (pp. 95-106).


J26 edit

Marvin, Charles, The region of eternal fire: an account of the petroleum region of the Caspian in 1883. London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1884. viii+413pp. [Popular edition of 1888 revised with additional chapter.]

One of the most prolific authors on questions of Russian expansionism in central Asia during the 1880s, Marvin (1854-90) after attending Alexander III’s coronation in Moscow, decided to investigate the petroleum industry at Baku. His book is both a travelogue and a history of Baku and the region.


J27 edit

Hunt, William Henry, The life of William H. Hunt, by his son Thomas Hunt. Brattleboro, Vermont: for the author, 1922. 360pp.

Hunt (1823-84), formerly U. S. secretary of the navy, was appointed ambassador to Russia on 7 April 1882 and attended the coronation of Alexander III in May 1883. He died in St Petersburg on 27 February of the following year. The biography includes the text of a letter he sent on 6 November 1883 with his assessment of the relationship between autocracy and the people (pp. 271-83). See also the letters of Hunt’s wife to her sister about their life in St Petersburg (pp. 284-355).


J28 edit

Wells, Sara Furnas, Ten years’ travel around the world, or, from land to land, isle to isle and sea to sea, embracing twenty tours in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Prussia, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Greece, Russia, Turkey, Holy Land, Syria, Egypt, India, Singapore, Java, Australia, South America, Central America, Sandwich Islands and North America. Introduction by Rev. E.J. Scott. West Milton, Ohio: Morning Star Publishing Co., 1885. xxiv+653pp.

Her eighteenth tour took Mrs Wells, M.D., formerly of the Women’s Medical College in New York, from Finland to St Petersburg and on to Moscow in May 1883 for the coronation of the tsar, then back to the capital. She sailed from Cronstadt for England on 17 June (pp. 593-609).


J29 edit

Raum, George Edward, A tour round the world, being a brief sketch of the most interesting sights seen in Europe, Africa, Asia, and America, while on a two years’ ramble. New York: William S. Gottsberger, 1886. ii+430pp.

What is very much a matter-of-fact guidebook to the sights, although apparently based on letters to his mother, suddenly is personalized with the description of the coronation of Alexander III in May 1883 that the artist and traveller Raum (1846-1935) and his wife Mary (1856-1947) witnessed during their stay in Moscow. They had travelled from St Petersburg and would seem to have gone on to the Crimea (pp. 74-96).


J30 edit

[McCagg, Ezra Butler], Six weeks of vacation in 1883. Chicago: McDonnell Brothers, 1884. 152pp.

A Chicago lawyer (1825-1908), identifying himself only by the initials E.B.McC. in his preface, travels from Moscow in the summer of 1883 down the Volga to the Caspian and on to the Caucasus and Constantinople before returning to Sistova (pp. 5-113).


J31 edit

Sessions, Francis Charles, From the land of the midnight sun to the Volga. New York: Welch, Fracker Co., 1890. 167+xi pp.

President of the Ohio Historical and Archaeological Society (1820-92) and his wife were members of a tourist group, who, having “done” Scandinavia, were shown the sights of St Petersburg, Moscow and Nizhnii Novgorod in August 1883 (pp. 98-167 + appendix).


J32 edit

Taft, Alphonso, Life of Alphonso Taft. By Alexander Leonard Lewis. New York: Hawke Publishing Co., 1920. 307pp.

American attorney-general under Ulysses S. Grant, Taft (1810-91) was appointed ambassador in St Petersburg by President Arthur in July 1884 and left a year later. His brief impressions of the imperial family and life in the Russian capital were originally given in an interview to a reporter from the Tribune (pp. 183-88).


J33 edit

Hare, Augustus John Cuthbert, Studies in Russia. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1885. x+504pp.

When Hare (1834-1903) visited Russia in the summer of 1884, he was already the author of numerous biographies and travel books. He followed his usual practice of incorporating large doses of texts from other travellers’ works as he visited – and sketched – St Petersburg, Novgorod, Moscow and Kiev, travelling home via Poland.


J34 edit

Buckley, James Monroe, The midnight sun: the tsar and the nihilist; adventures and observations in Norway, Sweden and Russia. Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886. xi+376pp.

The American clergyman Dr Buckley (1836-1920), his eighteen-year old son, and a family friend set sail from New York on 19 June 1884 on a grand tour of northern Europe that would take them by the end of the summer from Scandinavia to St Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhnii Novgorod and home via Poland. Committed to “an animated narrative”, Buckley ends his account with a series of essays, including one on nihilism, “the controlling cause of my visit to Russia” (pp. 149-376).
J35 edit

Ninde, Mary Louise, We two alone in Europe. Chicago: Nansen, McClurg, & Co., 1886. 348pp.

Young Miss Ninde (1858-1947) and her friend “L.R.P.” spent a year (1884-85?) on a grand tour that took them beyond Europe to Egypt and Turkey. To go to Russia was a spur-of-the-moment decision and they sailed from Sweden to see the sights of St Petersburg and Moscow before proceeding to Paris via Warsaw (pp. 169-200).


J36 edit

Kennan, George, Siberia and the exile system. London: J.R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1891. 2 vols. Vol. 1 | Vol. 2

Sponsored by the Century magazine and accompanied by the Boston artist and photographer George Frost, Kennan (see I59, I93) arrived in Russia for his fourth visit in May 1885. He came prepared to give a favourable assessment of the penal system in Siberia, but subsequent meetings and events in Siberia radically changed his views and, through his subsequent book and lectures, those of America. In the course of eight months, between June 1885 and March of the following year, they covered some 8,000 miles within Siberia.
J37 edit

Reynoso, Francisco de, Reminiscences of a Spanish diplomat. Recorded by Alice Pentlarge Kleeman. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1933. 287pp.

Reynoso (b. 1856), diplomat and one time ambassador to the Quirinal, was second secretary in the Spanish Legation in St Petersburg between June 1885 and sometime in 1886, when he was transferred to London. He describes diplomatic and high society life in the Russian capital (pp. 105-15).


J38 edit

Leland, Lilian, Travelling alone: a woman’s journey around the world. New York: American News Company, 1890. viii+358pp.

A young American woman (b. 1859) travelled alone on a journey of some 60,000 miles around the globe, begun in February 1884 and lasting over two years. She arrived in St Petersburg on 13 July 1885, did the sights, and then went to Moscow before departing a week later for Warsaw (pp. 269-77).


J39 edit

Lothrop, Almira, The court of Alexander III: letters of Mrs. Lothrop, wife of the late honorable George Van Ness Lothrop former minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary of the United States to Russia. Edited by William Prall. Philadelphia: John C. Winston Company, 1910. vi+208pp.

Mrs Lothrop, née Strong (d. 1894), her husband, and daughters arrived in St Petersburg at the end of July 1885 and were to remain, long vacations in Italy, Paris, Berlin, and London apart, until 11 August 1888. Posthumously published letters to members of the family, full of social chit-chat with occasional interesting pen pictures of notable Russians.


J40 edit

Ponafidine, Emma Cochran, Russia – my home: an intimate record of personal experiences before, during and after the Bolshevist revolution. Preface by William Lyon Phelps. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1931. 312pp.

Daughter of an American missionary in Persia, Emma Cochran (1863-1958) married the Russian consul general in Tabriz, Petr Ponafidin (d. 1919) in 1885 and soon afterwards paid her first visit to Russia and the family estate of Bortniki on the shores of Lake Seliger near Ostashkov. Although they returned many times in subsequent years it was only after her husband’s retirement in 1912 that they resided permanently in Russia and were to live through WWI and the revolutions of 1917 (pp. 17-88). The larger part of the book is devoted to the Soviet period up to 1921, when Emma and two sons escaped from Petrograd into Finland and on to New York.


J41 edit

Yate, Arthur Campbell, England and Russia face to face in Asia: travels with the Afghhan Boundary Commission. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1887. viii+481pp.

Lt. Yate (b. 1853) of the Bombay staff corps also acted as special correspondent of the Daily Telegraph and other papers and his book included virtually unrevised the articles already published. It was intended to be not only a record of the movements of the Afghan Boundary Commission, but also a description of travels through country that is “practically unknown to the civilized world”. After leaving the Commission, he travelled from Herat to the Black Sea. Period covered 31 August 1885 to June 1886.


J42 edit

Yate, Charles Edward, Northern Afghanistan; or, letters from the Afghan Boundary Commission. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1888. viii+430pp. [See also North Afghanistan by Major C.E. Yate. Introduction by Rudolph Abraham. London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2000.]

Colonel Sir Charles (1849-1940), elder brother of Lt. Yate, covers the period from the summer of 1885 until the return of the Commission to India in October 1886 and then follows the subsequent negotiations up to February 1888. He also recounts his return in February 1888 through Transcaspia to Ashkabad and by train to Tiflis and to the Black Sea (pp. 398-419).


J43 edit

Hedin, Sven Anders von, My life as an explorer. [Translated from the Swedish by Alfhild Huebsch.] London: Cassell and Co., 1926. xii+498pp.

Famed Swedish geographer, photographer, polyglot, and travel writer (1865-1952) first went to Russia in 1885, travelling via St Petersburg through the Caucasus to Baku, where he spent seven months as a tutor (pp. 2-8). In 1890-91 he travelled through Transcaspia from Krasnovodsk and on to Bokhara and Samarkand before returning through European Russia to Stockholm (pp. 65-84). October 1893 saw him off again through Russia to Tashkent and then through Russian to Chinese Turkestan (pp. 85-110). He seems to have covered every blade of grass in Central Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia, before a comparatively sedate return home on the Trans-Siberian at the end of 1908 (pp. 476-77).


J44 edit

Hedin, Sven Anders von, From Pole to Pole: a book for young people. London: Macmillan and Co., 1914. xvi+407pp.

An abridged translation of Från Pol till Pol that includes much from Hedin’s numerous travels through the Russian empire: the Caucasus, 1885-86 (pp. 34-37), the Kirghiz steppe, 1893-95 (pp. 55-71), the Trans-Siberian and home via St Petersburg, 1908-09 (pp. 202-11).


J45 edit

Spottiswoode, Robert Collinson D’Esterre, Reminiscences. Edinburgh and London: Edinburgh Press, for private circulaion, 1935. 158pp.

Career officer, born in India, Colonel Spottiswoode (b. 1841) decided soon after his marriage in 1885 to qualify as a Russian interpreter. He and his wife left for Moscow in early December. His “rough notes” touch on life in the English community and impressions of Moscow, “the queer eccentric looking town”. Sending his wife home, he spent his last months with a Russian family in Khimki (“Heemká”), returned to London in April 1887 to pass his Russian examination, but instead of receiving a posting to Central Asia, spent the next forty-five years of his life in Ireland (pp. 119-35).


J46 edit

Meriwether, Lee, A tramp trip: how to see Europe on fifty cents a day. New York and London: Harper and Bros., 1886. 276pp.

“Desirous of seeing something of low life”, Meriwether (1862-1966) followed a year tramping from Gibraltar to the Bosphorus by sailing from Constantinople to Odessa early in 1886 and immediately pronounced “Russia is like a vast prison”. He travelled via Kiev to Moscow and reached St Petersburg, combining remarks on the way of life of the peasants with conventional tourist descriptions (pp. 203-30).


J47 edit

Bateson, William, Letters from the steppe written in the years 1886-1887. Edited with an introduction by [his wife] Beatrice Bateson. London: Methuen & Co., 1928. xvi+222pp.

Biologist and Cambridge don, Bateson (1861-1926) resolved to pursue his study of evolution and specifically of variation as observed at the Aral Sea and other salt lakes in the Kirghiz steppe. His letters, mainly to members of his family, begin in St Petersburg, where he arrived on 7 May 1886, and end in Petropavlovsk on 16 September 1887.


J48 edit

Baddeley, Welbore St Clair, Tchay and chianti; or, wanderings in Russia and Italy. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1887. xvi+260pp.

Seeking no connection between Russia and Italy other than “merely aesthetic and naturalistic”, Baddeley (1856-1945) visited St Petersburg in July 1886, made an excursion to the Imatra falls in Finland, before taking the train to Moscow and soon departing for Italy (pp. 1-112).


J49 edit

Davis, Sarah Matilda Henry, Norway nights and Russian days. New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1887. 325pp.

Mrs Davis visited St Petersburg and Moscow in the summer of 1886, sightseeing and shopping (pp. 213-325).


J50 edit

Bouton, John Bell, Roundabout to Moscow, an epicurean journey. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1887. xii+421pp.

Bouton (1830-1902), American novelist and writer, visited Petersburg and Moscow in July 1886 (pp. 203-349, 419-21).


J51 edit

Michell, Thomas, Russian pictures: drawn with pen and pencil. London: Religious Tract Society, 1889. 224pp.

Michell (see I56) left Russia in 1874 after fourteen years in St Petersburg. For the present work, which was designed to give a succinct historical cum geographical overview of the vast Russian empire, he used some material from his Murray’s Handbook. The chapter on the Crimea and the Caucasus was written by Captain J. Buchan Telfer (pp. 140-69). Many of the 124 illustrations are by Whymper.


J52 edit

Wight, Orlando Williams, People and countries visited in a winding journey around the world. Detroit: Raynor and Taylor, 1888. xiv+518pp.

Detroit physician and noted translator from French (particularly Balzac), Wight (1824-88) spent 1887 in extensive travels “to observe every country in which an Aryan people has established civil government. One looks in vain elsewhere for progress and liberty”. In June-August he travelled from Batumi to Tiflis and through the Caucasus to Rostov, where he took the train to Moscow and on to St Petersburg. Adds long chapter on ‘place of Russia in the European system’, acknowledging Americans may feel he had “treated Russia too leniently”. Impressed by the journalist Mikhail Katkov whom he met in Moscow a few days before his death (pp. 220-95).


J53 edit

De Windt, Harry, From Pekin to Calais by land. London: Chapman and Hall, 1889. xii+656pp.

The first of the several forays into the Russian empire by De Windt (1856-1933) (see J54, J98, J129, J134, J135, K91, K162, K377). The journey from Pekin, which he and his companion Lancaster left in May 1887, through Siberia, which they reached on 10 August, and ending in Paris in late October 1888, he described as “sadly devoid of interest” (Irkutsk excepted). (Russia, pp. 322-647).
J54 edit

De Windt, Harry, My restless life. London: Grant Richards, 1909. 366pp.

De Windt’s relaxed autobiography includes his first journey across Siberia in 1887 (pp. 137-44), and his subsequent return in 1890 on the prompting of Mme Olga Novikova to inspect Russian prisons (see I94) (pp. 174-88). Finally, invited by the Prison Department at St Petersburg to resume his investigations in Siberia, he went for a third time, proceeding to Sakhalin, in late 1893 (see I131) (pp. 207-25).


J55 edit

Ballou, Maturin Murray, Due north, or glimpses of Scandinavia and Russia. Boston: Ticknor & Co., 1887. xii+373pp.

The Boston publisher, journalist, and author Ballou (1820-95), having “done” due south and due west, crossed the Atlantic in the summer of 1886 to start his northern tour in Copenhagen and proceeded via Norway and Sweden to St Petersburg. Moscow and Nizhnii Novgorod followed and he exited to Warsaw (pp. 201-352).


J56 edit

Ballou, Maturin Murray, Footprints of travel; or, journeyings in many lands. Boston: Ginn, 1889. 360pp.

Written for young readers, this round-the-world trip contains material from his various travels, including his 1886 visit to Russia (pp. 279-303).


J57 edit

Guild, Curtis, Britons and Muscovites, or, traits of two empires. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1888. xii+230pp.

Editor of the Boston Commercial Bulletin and author of the travel accounts Over the ocean and Abroad again, Guild (1827-1911) travelled from London to Russia in 1886 and visited St Petersburg, Moscow and Nizhnii Novgorod, enlisting the help of James Pilley, a long-time British resident, as his guide and interpreter. Guild provides very much a tourist guide rather than a searching Anglo-Russian comparison (pp. 89-230).


J58 edit

Stevens, Thomas, Around the world on a bicycle: from Teheran to Yokohama. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1888. xiv+477pp.

This was in fact the second volume of the account of the monumental journey on a penny farthing by the American Stevens (b. 1855) that began on 22 April 1884 in San Francisco and ended on 17 December 1886 in Yokohama. His only time in Russia was bike-less, when he left Persia on a Russian steamer for Baku on 3 June 1886, then took the train to Tiflis and on to Batumi, before taking a steamer to Constantinople (pp. 250-64).


J59 edit

Richardson, David N., A girdle round the earth: home letters from foreign lands. Chicago: McClurg and Co., 1888. xii+449pp.

Owner of the Iowa State Democrat and an accomplished writer, Richardson (1832-98) set out from San Francisco on 18 August 1886, heading for China and Japan. He eventually got to Russia in the summer of the following year, reaching Moscow via Berlin and Warsaw and ending in St Petersburg, “the Chicago of northwestern Europe”, before departing for Finland (pp. 380-405).


J60 edit

Barnes, Demas, In search of summer breezes in northern Europe. Revised letters to the “Brooklyn Eagle”. New York: Charles F. Bloom, 1887. 141pp.

Journalist and U.S. congressman, Barnes (1827-88) after spending the early summer of 1886 in England departed on a tour that took him from Finland to Russia, “fortified on all sides, not alone by fortresses and guns, but by a secret espionage”. Travels from St Petersburg to Moscow and visits Smolensk on his way to Poland. Writes less about sights than about general historical and social problems (pp. 47-102).


J61 edit

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Reminiscences of a student’s life. London: Hogarth Press, 1925. 90pp.

Classical scholar, linguist, noted feminist, and Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, Harrison (1850-1928) provides a very brief account of her trip to St Petersburg in September 1886 to study at the Hermitage, but mainly chides herself for not having immersed herself in Russian culture and society while she had the chance (pp. 76-79).


J62 edit

Gaussen, William Frederick Armytage, Memorials of a short life: a biographical sketch of W.F.A. Gaussen with essays on Russian life and literature. Edited by G.F. Browne, canon of St Paul’s, bishop of Stepney. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895. 263pp.

Gaussen (1863-93), who was to achieve recognition in his short life for his translations from Potapenko, first went to Russia in September 1886 in pursuit of his scientific interests, visiting the oil-fields of Baku. He later delivered a lecture about his journey from St Petersburg to the Caspian (pp. 61-108). He returned to Russia in June 1890 to stay with a family in Moscow for ten months and study the Russian language. Letters from that visit are also included (pp. 181-216).


J63 edit

Walker, Bettina, My musical experiences. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1890. iv+330pp.

A young English pianoforte student travelled to Germany, Italy and Russia to study under eminent teachers in the 1880s. She was in particular influenced by the German composer and pianist Adolf Henselt (1814-89), who in 1861 had been given Russian citizenship and ennobled and who divided his time between Germany and Russia. Miss Walker seems to have studied in St Petersburg on three or four occasions from about 1886, on the first occasion under a Miss Henrickson, who taught Henselt’s method for twenty-five years in imperial institutes. She is much more informative on the Henselts and their flat than she is about life in St Petersburg (pp. 226-52, 280-85, 289-306).


J64 edit

Gowing, Lionel Francis, Five thousand miles in a sledge: a mid-winter journey across Siberia. London: Chatto and Windus, 1889. xix+257pp.

Gowing (b. 1859) offers “a truthful record of a journey in which no English author has preceded the present writer”, at least in winter. Sides with Kennan in the dispute with Lansdell over penal conditions, but is intent on recording the facts of a journey that took him and his companion, Charles Uren, from Shanghai to Vladivostok in early November 1886 and some 4600 miles by sledge to Tiumen, where they arrived on 18 February 1887.


J65 edit

Wilkinson, T.E., Twenty years of continental work and travel. With a preface by Sir Edmund Monson. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906. xxiv+438pp.

Anglican bishop for central and eastern Europe, the Right Reverend Wilkinson (d. 1914) relates his constant travels throughout Europe over the preceding twenty years. These included many visits to Russia (which he had first visited as a young man in 1859), mainly through the Baltic provinces to St Petersburg and Moscow, in 1887 (pp. 33-47), 1890 (pp. 127-47), 1893 (pp. 190-98), 1896 (pp. 238-61), 1900 (pp. 325-29), 1902 (pp. 338-47), and 1905 (pp. 396-417).


J66 edit

Brandes, Georg Morris Cohen, Impressions of Russia. Translated from the Danish by Samuel C. Eastman. London: Walter Scott, 1889. x+353pp.

Brandes (1842-1927), a highly influential literary critic and professor at the university of Copenhagen, was invited to St Petersburg and Moscow to deliver a series of lectures. He stayed in Russia for three months during 1887, spending some time on an estate south of Moscow. His book is divided into two parts, the second of which is an informed assessment of Russian literature, and even in the first, literary and cultural matters dominate.


J67 edit

Hapgood, Isabel Florence, Russian rambles. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1895. xi+369pp.

Hapgood (1851-1928), a leading American translator and writer on Russian literature, visited Russia on several occasions between 1887 and 1889. She spent much time with Tolstoi in Moscow and Iasnaia Poliana (pp. 148-202), travelled down the Volga to Nizhnii Novgorod, and “much attached to the Russian Church”, resided in the “holy city” of Kiev. Her book was offered as “a collection of detached pictures”, offering a sympathetic account of ordinary Russians.


J68 edit

Colbeck, Alfred, A summer’s cruise in the waters of Greece, Turkey, and Russia. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887. xii+416pp.

A detailed account of a Cornishman’s leisurely voyage on the Treloske from Newport in south Wales through the Mediterranean and Aegean to Constantinople and then through the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, where he visited Taganrog and made an excursion by train to Rostov, in the summer of 1887. His Russian account is padded out by chapters on the church and nihilism. (Russia, pp. 221-354.)


J69 edit

Curtis, William Eleroy, The land of the nihilist: Russia; its people, its palaces, its politics. Chicago: Belford, Clarke, 1888. 323pp.

A correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, Curtis (1850-1911) and wife journey to St Petersburg and Moscow in 1887. (For his journey, twenty-three years later, to the Black Sea area, see K220-21.)
J70 edit

Heath, Perry Sanford, A hoosier in Russia: the only white tsar – his imperialism, country and people. New York, Baltimore, Chicago: Lorborn Publishing Co., 1888. 152pp.

Indiana editor and publisher (1857-1927) tells “in a natural way, what I saw in a summer’s travel, through a remarkable country, among a strange and interesting people”, including the “promiscuous osculations of the natives” (pp. 7-138). There is much in his account about nihilists and on leaving Russia in August 1887 he met Stepniak in London, whose views he counters with those of a pro-tsarist Russian in Washington (pp. 139-52).
J71 edit

Aldrich, Herbert Lincoln, Arctic Alaska and Siberia, or, eight months with the Arctic whalemen. Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1889. 234pp.

As part of his research into the New Bedford whaling industry, Aldrich (b. 1860) joined a fleet seeking whales off Cape Bering and spent a few days in June 1887 with Siberian native tribes (pp. 42-62).


J72 edit

[Brown, Elizabeth], In pursuit of a shadow. By a lady astronomer. London: Trübner & Co., 1888). 129pp.

Director of the Solar Section of the Liverpool Astronomical Society, Elizabeth Brown (1830-99) and her companion “L” travelled to Russia via Sweden “to see the great Solar eclipse of August 19” (1887). They arrived in St Petersburg on 28 July, saw the sights there and in Moscow, and reached Kineshma on the Volga on 13 August. They were to stay at Pogost, the nearby summer home of a leading Russian astronomer, Professor B[redikhin], where two British members of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr. C[Copeland] and Father P[erry] had also been invited to observe the eclipse, which duly took place, but in conditions that left them disconsolate. They journeyed home down the Volga to Nizhnii Novgorod and by train via Warsaw (pp. 39-125).


J73 edit

Cutting, Charles F., Glimpses of Scandinavia and Russia. Boston: Thomas Groom & Co., 1887. 94pp.

American tourist “glimpses” St Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhnii Novgorod during “a rapid journey in the summer of 1887”, arriving at Cronstadt on 31 July and departing a fortnight later (pp. 54-94). Privately printed in 100 copies.


J74 edit

Wardrop, John Oliver, The kingdom of Georgia: notes of travel in a land of women, wine and song; to which are appended historical, literary and political sketches, specimens of the national music, and a compendious bibliography. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1888. ix+202pp.

For many years British consul in Kerch and later consul-general in St Petersburg until his transfer to Bucharest and retirement in 1910, Sir Oliver (1864-1948) travelled extensively through Georgia in 1887. He subsequently devoted himself to the study and promotion of Georgian culture and was in 1919-21 the British Chief Commissioner of Transcaucasus in Tbilisi.


J75 edit

Lansdell, Henry, Chinese Central Asia: a ride to little Tibet. London: Sampson Low, Marston, & Co., 1893. 2 vols.

Lansdell’s (see I171) last “ride” took him initially across Russia and Russian protectorates, mainly by rail, before he entered Chinese Mongolia on 20 June 1888. He left London on 17 February for St Petersburg, where he stayed for a week before resuming a journey that took him to Moscow (for tea with Tolstoi) and through Ukraine to Sevastopol, Batumi, Tiflis, and Baku, and then to Bokhara, Samarkand and Tashkent (vol. I, pp. 3-151).


J76 edit

Waters, Wallscourt Hely-Hutchinson, “Secret and confidential”: the experiences of a military attaché. London: John Murray, 1926. xiv+388pp.

Brigadier-General Waters (b. 1855) as a young officer studied Russian with a family in St Petersburg for a few months in early 1888 (pp. 3-13) and returned for a further visit in 1892 to observe military manoeuvres at Krasnoe selo (pp. 40-51). In 1893 came his appointment as military attaché at the British embassy which lasted for five years during which he travelled widely through the empire, including Siberia and Turkestan (pp. 61-241). After duty in South Africa he was sent in 1904 as the War Office representative with the Russian army in Manchuria, travelling across Russia (pp. 256-91). His final visit before the October Revolution came in October 1916, when he had an audience of the tsar at his headquarters at Mogilev (pp. 318-61).


J77 edit

Waters, Wallscourt Hely-Hutchinson, Russia then and now. London: John Murray, 1935. xvi+308pp.

In 1934 Waters was granted a visa to visit Soviet Union. In this account of his reaction to Russia under the Soviets he recalls in the opening chapter his earlier encounters with imperial Russia (pp. 1-8).


J78 edit

Stead, William Thomas, Truth about Russia. London: Cassell & Co., 1888. viii+464pp.

Editor of Pall Mall, the journal in which much of his material appeared as articles, the campaigning “new journalist” Stead (1849-1812), anxious about the prospects of a general war, left England in the early spring of 1888 to visit Paris, Berlin, and St Petersburg. From Petersburg he went to Moscow and spent a week in early June at Iasnaia Poliana with Tolstoi, writing at the latter’s desk the chapters of his own book entitled War or peace? (pp. 38-457).


J79 edit

Dobson, George, Russia’s railway advance into Central Asia: notes of a journey from St. Petersburg to Samarkand. London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1890. xxiv+436pp.

The first eight chapters comprise re-written letters originally sent to The Times in the spring of 1888, when Dobson (1850-1938) attended the opening of the Transcaspian railway. The last seven new chapters carry his reflections up to the time of writing (preface dated St Petersburg April 1890).


J80 edit

Harrison, Carter Henry, A race with the sun; or, a sixteen month’s tour from Chicago around the world through Manitoba and British Columbia by the Canadian Pacific, Oregon and Washington, Japan, China, Siam, Straits settlements, Burmah, India, Ceylon, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Roumania, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Transcaucasia, the Caspian sea and the Volga river, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Prussia, Paris, London and home. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons; Chicago: W.E. Dibble & Co., 1889. xiv+569pp.

Five-times mayor of Chicago and assassinated in office, Harrison (1825-93) took his son and a friend on the tour described in the title. His book is based on the detailed letters he sent back to newspapers. They arrived in Moscow from Poland on 12 June 1888 and then proceeded via Voronezh and Rostov to Vladikavkaz and on to Tiflis and Baku. They ascended the Volga from Astrakhan as far as Rybynsk before taking the train to St Petersburg. After a week of sight-seeing they took the train to Vyborg on 26 July. Russia had been for Harrison “a revelation in many things” and his letters are intelligent and full of interesting observations (pp. 380-470).


J81 edit

Abercromby, John, A trip through the eastern Caucasus, with a chapter on the languages of the country. London: Edward Stanford, 1889. xvi+376pp.

Soldier and archaeologist Abercromby (1841-1924), later 5th Baron, styling himself a corresponding member of the Finno-Ugrian Society, retained “nothing but pleasant recollections” from a six-week tour that began in Tiflis at the end of June 1888. Tiflis was the starting point for a first expedition over little-known passes of the Caucasus (pp. 1-206). Back in Tiflis, he then made his way to Baku, whence he sailed to Derbent and made a journey into the interior to Kubaichi and back (pp. 207-96).


J82 edit

Birkbeck, William John, Birkbeck and the Russian church, containing essays and articles by the late W. J. Birkbeck, M.A., F.S.A., written in the years 1888-1915. Collected and edited by his friend Athelstan Riley. London: published for the Anglican and Eastern Association by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1917. xii+372pp.

Birkbeck (1859-1916), the leading British authority on the Russian church and author of Russia and the English church during the last fifty years (1895), visited Russia on numerous occasions from 1888, when he went to Kiev for the 900th anniversary of Russia’s conversion to Christianity, until just before his death. Many of the articles in this collection refer directly to his travels.


J83 edit

Blackstock, Emma Moulton Frazer, The land of the Viking and the empire of the tsar. New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons (The Knickerbocker Press), 1889. 213pp.

American wife (b. 1860) of a leading Canadian lawyer, Mrs Blackstock travelled in the summer of 1888 with a group of friends from Stockholm to St Petersburg and on to Moscow, before leaving for Paris via Poland and Germany. “Russia impressed me as too vast to comprehend” (pp. 27-209).


J84 edit

Mummery, Alfred Frederick, My climbs in the Alps and Caucasus. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895. xii+360pp.

The famous climber and political economist (1855-95) visited the Caucasus in 1888 and made the first ascent of Dych Tau, which brought his election to the Alpine Club (pp. 258-323).


J85 edit

McConaughy, David, Jr., Rambles through Russia and in Norway and Sweden. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888. 128pp.

McConaughy (b. 1860), who was soon afterwards to become the Y.M.C.A.’s first foreign secretary in India, attended the Y.M.C.A. congress in Stockholm in August 1888 and also visited St Petersburg and Moscow, described in three letters originally published in the Lutheran Observer of Philadelphia. His emphasis is on the splendours of the churches and the piety of the people (pp. 8-16).


J86 edit

Curzon, George Nathaniel, Russia in central Asia in 1889, and the Anglo-Russian question. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1889. xxiii+477pp.

Soon after becoming an M.P., Curzon (1859-1925), later 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston and viceroy of India from 1899, left London at the beginning of September 1888 for St Petersburg and headed south to Tiflis in order to embark on “a journey, taken under circumstances of exceptional ease and advantage” along the newly-constructed Transcaspian railway and through Russian possessions in Central Asia. His aim was to provide an up-to-date and objective political assessment (i.e up to 1889), without undue attention to matters of history or scenery. His book was dedicated “to the great army of Russophobes who mislead others, and Russophiles whom others mislead”.


J87 edit

Maude, Aylmer, Tolstoy and his problems. London: Constable & Co., 1901. viii+220pp.

Maude (1858-1938), manager of the Anglo-Russian carpet company in Moscow until 1897 but best known as the leading English translator of Tolstoi, recalls his first visit to Tolstoi in Moscow in 1888 and subsequent meetings in the 1890s in his essay ‘Talks with Tolstoy’ (pp. 188-213). See also his diatribe ‘The tsar’s coronation’ (of Nicholas II, which he attended in Moscow in 1896) (pp. 109-25) (see K25).


J88 edit

Stone, Melville Elijah, Fifty years a journalist. Garden City, New York: Country Life Press, 1921. xiv, 371pp.

Founder of a number of newspapers and later general manager of the Associated Press, Stone (1848-1929) describes several visits he made to Russia, the first of which was part of an extended European tour in 1888-89. He travelled as far as Nizhnii Novgorod and was a guest of the tsar at a military review at Tsarskoe selo (pp. 183-94). During the winter of 1903-04 he was in St Petersburg, negotiating the abolition of censorship on American journalists based in Russia. He records his dealings with numerous key figures within the Russian government and his frequent conversations with Nicholas II. In 1904-05 he was responsible for organizing American reporting of the Russo-Japanese War and he himself reported on the subsequent peace negotiations at the Portsmouth Conference (pp. 278-96).


J89 edit

Lanin, E. B. [pseudonym of Dillon, Emile Joseph], Russian characteristics reprinted, with revisions, from the “Fortnightly review”. London: Chapman and Hall, 1892. x+604pp.

Published under a pseudonym, this volume brought together a series of highly perceptive and wide-ranging articles written in the period September 1889 and October 1891 by Dr Dillon (1855-1933) (see also I157, K5), who had also been since 1886 Russian correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. Published in USA under the title Russian traits and terrors: a faithful picture of Russia today.


J90 edit

Howard, Benjamin Douglas, Life with trans-Siberian savages. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1893. x+209pp.

English-born, but achieving his reputation as a surgeon in America, particularly during the Civil War, Dr Howard (1836-1900) left London in the autumn of 1889 on “leisurely meanderings” that took him to China, Tibet, and through Russia to Vladivostok, where he conceived his plan to visit Sakhalin and study the life of the aboriginal inhabitants of the island, the Ainus.


J91 edit

Howard, Benjamin Douglas, Prisoners of Russia: a personal study of convict life in Sakhalin and Siberia. New York: Appleton & Co., 1902. xxx+389pp.

In 1890 Howard returned to Sakhalin as a guest of its governor to research and write this posthumously published account of the Siberian penal system. His work is primarily a study of the prison camp at Korsakovsk on the island, in which he records his exchanges with prisoners, penal officials, exiles and their families. He describes in considerable detail the conditions, diets, physiology, punishment and occupations of the prisoners but also the socio-economic situation of Sakhalin.
J92 edit

Cumberland, C.S., Sport on the Pamirs and Turkistan steppes. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1895. x+278pp.

Major Cumberland published his diary of his 1889 journey immediately after his return in the journal Land and Water, but increased British and Russian interest in the area prompted him to turn it years later into a book. He had travelled from India via Kashmir, Chinese Turkestan, the Pamirs, and Asia Minor, compiling his “descriptions of scenery and sport” and gathering specimens he had shot. Towards the end of his journey he crossed the Karaart Pass at 15,800 feet and entered into territory claimed by Russia. He eventually made his way via Samarkand, Baku, and Tiflis to Odessa, which he reached on 9 July (pp. 239-74).


J93 edit

Newton, William Wilberforce, A run through Russia: the story of a visit to Count Tolstoi. Hartford: Student Publishing Co., 1894. 211pp.

Sitting in a Russian church in Dresden, Newton (1843-1914), episcopal clergyman and author of religious tracts, decided under “the true impulse of the tourist-fit” to visit Russia with two fellow Americans between 2 and 15 April 1889 and to seek out Tolstoi, whom they located on the estate of Count Urusov at Sergiev Posad outside Moscow (pp. 8-211).


J94 edit

Birse, Arthur Herbert, Memoirs of an interpreter. Foreword by the Earl of Avon. London: Michael Joseph, 1967. 254pp.

Born to Scottish parents in St Petersburg, Birse (1889-1981) was educated in the Russian capital and joined the merchant bankers Baring Bros. in 1906. In the first part of his autobiography he describes his business and family life in Russia up to 1917, when he went to England to enlist in the British army (pp. 18-35). Birse ultimately became famous as Churchill’s Russian-English interpreter during WWII.


J95 edit

Cook, Charles, The prisons of the world: with stories of crime, criminals, and convicts. With an introduction by C.H. Spurgeon. London: Morgan and Scott, 1891. xii+195pp.

Hyde Park evangelist and lecturer Cook arrived in St Petersburg with two objectives – “to distribute the Word of God among the prisoners of Russia” and to investigate the abuses and cruelties of which he had heard. His first visit to St Petersburg and Moscow in 1890 (pp. 160-72) was followed by a second in 1892, when he was accompanied by his wife (pp. 190-05).


J96 edit

Norman, Henry, The peoples and politics of the Far East: travels and studies in the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese colonies, Siberia, China, Japan, Korea, Siam and Malaya. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895. xvi+608pp.

Norman (1858-1939), journalist, later M.P. and knighted (see K76), set off in 1887 on a four-year tour on behalf of several newspapers that took him briefly in c.1890 from Japan to Vladivostok, where he reflected on its strategic importance and progress on the Trans-Siberian railway (pp. 141-66).


J97 edit

Morris, Isabel, A summer in Kieff: or sunny days in southern Russia. London: Ward and Downey, 1891. 205pp.

An intrepid Scottish lady’s solo visit to Kiev in 1890, travelling by train via Vienna, and amusing herself by observing Russian mores in town and country. Generalized account, enlivened by the drawings of Cochrane Morris (pp. 26-191).


J98 edit

De Windt, Harry, Siberia as it is. With an introduction by her excellency Madame Olga Novikoff (‘O.K.’). London: Chapman & Hall, 1892. xxiv+504pp.

De Windt (see J53-54), now sporting F.R.G.S., left England on 21 July 1890, bound for Siberia via St Petersburg and Moscow to inspect the prisons. His route took him to Tobolsk, Tomsk and, finally, Tiumen. His aim to show that Siberia was “not so black as it is painted”, principally by the American George Kennan, was achieved, he believed, with facts and statements “made with the utmost caution and deliberation”. He includes in appendices letters about the state of prisons by other travellers, most interestingly on prisons in Tashkent, Samarkand, and Tiflis, by Captain E. St. C. Pemberton of the Royal Engineers (pp. 498-504).
J99 edit

Stevens, Thomas, Through Russia on a mustang. London, Paris & Melbourne: Cassell & Co., 1892. xiv+334pp.

Commissioned by the New York World to write articles about European Russia, Stevens (see J58) bought a mustang from a “wild west” show performing in Moscow and set off with a young Russian student as interpreter to travel down to the Crimea (visiting Tolstoi en route) and returning via the Don and Volga to Nizhnii Novgorod in the summer of 1890.


J100 edit

Stoddard, Charles Augustus, Across Russia: from the Baltic to the Danube. London: Chapman and Hall, 1892. xii+258pp.

American clergyman’s conventional travelogue of his journey from Paris via Sweden and Finland to St Petersburg, where he arrived in July 1890, Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, and out via Warsaw and on to Budapest (pp. 27-231).


J101 edit

Price, Julius Mendes, From the Arctic Ocean to the Yellow Sea: the narrative of a journey, in 1890 and 1891, across Siberia, Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, and north China. London: Sampson Low & Co., 1892. xxiv+384pp.

Price (1857-1924), F.R.G.S. and special artist for the Illustrated London News, in which many of his drawings originally appeared, sailed the route via the Kara Sea to the Enisei river pioneered by Wiggins. He was invited to accompany members of the Anglo-Siberian Trading Syndicate (an enterprise made redundant by the Trans-Siberian railway, as he explains in the preface to the 1893 edition). They sailed from London in the Biscaya on 18 July 1890, went up the Enisei as far as Krasnoiarsk, before proceding to Irkutsk (much on prisoners), and thence in February 1891 into Mongolia and China (pp. 1-248).
J102 edit

Marsden, Kate, On sledge and horseback to outcast Siberian lepers. London: Record Press, 1892. xv+243pp.

A trained nurse, Marsden (1859-1931) left England in September 1890, travelling via Constantinople and the Crimea to Moscow. In February 1891 she set out for Siberia and travelling via Omsk and Irkutsk, visited the leper colony at Viluisk and searched in vain for a herb reputed to cure the disease. Back in Moscow in December 1891, she eventually left St Petersburg for England in May 1892. The same year she was elected to the Royal Geographical Society in London, but met widespread scepticism about what she had accomplished.


J103 edit

Biddulph, Cuthbert Edward, Four months in Persia, and a visit to Trans-Caspia. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1892. vi+137pp.

Biddulph (1850-99), F.R.G.S. and a member of the Indian civil service, visited Transcaspia in 1890 and contributed articles to Indian and British journals. His view of the region was sober, less enthusiastic about the splendours of Samarkand and Bokhara than other travellers, critical of the trustworthiness of e.g. Vambéry’s observations, and prepared to give the Russians their due for “right good work” in the region.


J104 edit

Biddulph, Cuthbert Edward, From London to Samarcand. Bombay: The Times of India Steam Press, 1892. 53pp.

Another version of his journey from London in September 1890, when he travelled by train to Odessa, by boat to Batumi, train to Tiflis and Baku, across the Caspian to Uzun Ada, in order finally to take the Transcaspian line to Bokhara and Samarkand and end in Merv.


J105 edit

Hapgood, Isabel Florence, The great streets of the world. London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine, & Co., 1892. xiv+253pp.

Hapgood (see J66) was one of seven authors contributing to this collection (lead author Richard Harding Davis). Her article ‘The Névsky Prospékt’ (pp. 211-53), which was to re-appear in Russian rambles, is here illustrated by twelve drawings, dated 1891-92, by Il’ia Repin.


J106 edit

Allen, Thomas Gaskell, Jr. and Sachtleben, William Lewis, Across Asia on a bicycle: the journey of two American students from Constantinople to Peking. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895. xvi+234pp.

The two young graduates of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri set out in June 1890 to circle the globe. Their journey to Peking and return took three years and covered 15,000 miles, during which they took more than 2,500 photographs. They climbed Mount Ararat, and eventually entered Russian territory from Persia, reaching Samarkand on 6 November 1890, and exiting into China (pp. 111-44).


J107 edit

Allen, Henry Tureman, ‘Wolf-hunting in Russia’, in Hunting in many lands. The book of the Boone and Crockett club. Edited by Theodore Roosevelt and George Grinnell. New York: Forest and Stream Publishing Co., 1900. 447pp.

Allen (1859-1930), who was U.S. military attaché in Russia in 1890-95, contributes a chapter on his pursuit of the Russian wolf (pp. 151-86).


J108 edit

Boddy, Alexander Alfred, With Russian pilgrims: being an account of a sojourn in the White Sea Monastery and a journey by the old trade route from the Arctic Sea to Moscow; also an appendix, giving a full history of the Solovetsk obitel, by the Venerable Archimandrite Melétii. London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., 1892. xiv+347pp.

Boddy (1854-1930), vicar of All Saints’, Monwearmouth, Sunderland, F.R.G.S., and one of the founders of Pentecostalism in England, begins his account with his departure from Lapland for the White Sea in mid-May 1891. From Archangel he travelled with Russian pilgrims by steamer to the Solovetskii monastery, where he learnt much about the British bombardment during the Crimean War. His return to England was by way of Velikii Ustiug, down the Sukhona to Vologda, and on to Iaroslavl and Moscow.


J109 edit

Frederic, Harold, The new exodus: a study of Israel in Russia. London: William Heinemann, 1904. 304pp.

The American novelist and journalist Frederic (1856-98) visited Kiev and Odessa on a brief visit from 23 July to 14 August 1891 to investigate the persecution of the Jews. His articles under the title ‘An indictment of Russia’ began to appear in the New York Times on 5 September 1891. His sympathetic portrayal was questioned by Joseph Pennell (see J110-11).


J110 edit

Pennell, Joseph, The adventures of an illustrator, mostly in following his authors in America & Europe. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1925. xxii+372pp.

The noted illustrator and artist Pennell (1857-1926), born in America but living in London from 1881, visited Kiev and Berdichev in 1891 to draw and photograph the Jewish community, but was detained in Berdichev as a spy and soon escorted out of the country (pp. 222-36).


J111 edit

Pennell, Joseph, The Jew at home: impressions of a summer and autumn spent with him in Russia and Austria. London: William Heinemann, 1892. 130pp.

First appeared as a series of controversial articles in the Illustrated London News in December 1891. Pennell in his preface protests that he was neither “a Jew hater nor a Jew lover”, but “what I did see I have simply put down in black and white” (pp. 82-130).


J112 edit

Steveni, James William Barnes, Through famine-stricken Russia. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1892. xi+183pp.

Steveni (1860-1944), professor of English at St Petersburg’s college of Peter the Great since 1887, journeyed to the areas suffering from the great famine of 1891-92 as special correspondent of the Daily Chronicle.


J113 edit

Hodgetts, Edward Arthur Brayley, In the track of Russian famine: the personal narrative of a journey through the famine districts of Russia. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892. viii+237pp.

Hodgetts (see I79, K6) reported for Reuters on the famine and met Tolstoi in Moscow.


J114 edit

Stadling, Jonas Jonsson, In the land of Tolstoi: experiences of famine and misrule in Russia. Edited by Will Reason. London: James Clarke & Co., 1897. xiv+286pp.

The Swede Stadling (1847-1935) describes his first meeting with Tolstoi at Riazan in March 1892 and his work to alleviate the plight of the starving. Stadling then travels down the Volga, visiting Samara and Saratov, describing the settlements of German colonists and of Russian religious sects. Adapted from the Swedish original Från det Hungrande Ryssland.


J115 edit

Edgar, William Crowell, The Russian famine of 1891 and 1892: some particulars of the relief sent to the destitute peasants by the millers of America in the steamship Missouri; a brief history of the movement, a description of the relief commission’s visit to Russia, and a list of subscribers to the fund. Minneapolis: Millers and Manufacturers Insurance Co., 1893. 74pp.

Edgar (1856-1932), editor of the Northwestern Miller and organizer of the relief effort, met the Missouri at Libau at the beginning of April 1892 and personally supervised the unloading and distribution of the flour. He then journeyed to Moscow and on to see the famine-affected areas, before returning to St Petersburg and an audience with the future Nicholas II.


J116 edit

Reeves, Francis Brewster, Russia then and now, 1892-1917: my mission to Russia during the famine of 1891-1892 with data bearing upon Russia of today. New York and London: C.P. Putnam’s Sons, the Knickerbocker Press, 1917. xiv+186pp.

Reeves (1836-1922), a commissioner of the Citizens’ Russian Famine relief of Philadelphia, arrived in Riga on 12 May 1892 to meet the S.S. Indiana which had arrived from America with food supplies. He describes the junketings in Riga and St Petersburg and, eventually, the distribution of the supplies in fifteen districts, including Riazan, where he met Tolstoi (pp. 1-112). Also included are letters from another commissioner, Rudolph Blenkenburg (pp. 129-34), as well as a long description by the Rabbi Joseph Krausdorf of his visit to Tolstoi in July 1894 (pp. 83-95). Other material from various sources including Reeves himself, purporting to discuss subsequent events leading to the “triumph of democracy over aristocracy”.


J117 edit

Talmage, Thomas De Witt, T. De Witt Talmage: his life and work: biographical edition. Edited by Louis Albert Banks, in conjunction with Benjamin J. Fernie, and George H. Sandison. London: O.W. Binkerd, 1902. 501pp.

In June 1892 Rev. Dr Talmage (1832-1902), one of America’s most influential clerics and preachers of the late nineteenth century, sailed to St Petersburg with his colleague Dr Klopsch to meet the steamship Leo, chartered by the Christian Herald, of which he was the editor, and bringing a consignment of food for famine relief. They were to receive the freedom of the city of Moscow and to meet the tsar during their visit (pp. 199-224).


J118 edit

Lent, William Bement, Gypsying beyond the sea from English fields to Salerno shores. New York: Anson D.F. Rendolph & Co., 1893. 2 vols.

Lent (d. 1902), author of several chatty but informative guide books, presents the major sights of St Petersburg, where he arrived by train from Berlin, and Moscow, from where he returned to exit to Finland, during a recent visit, seemingly in the summer of 1892 (vol. II, pp. 4-118).


J119 edit

Bigelow, Poultney, The borderland of Czar and Kaiser: notes from both sides of the Russian frontier. London: Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1895. vi+343pp.

New York lawyer and author Bigelow (1855-1954) visited Russia in June 1892 with the artist Frederic Remington, who was to illustrate his book. They were apparently sent by the U.S. government to investigate how the Baltic coast was being protected from erosion, but were regarded with suspicion and ultimately expelled. The book is curiously structured with little connection between chapters (several of which had appeared in Harper’s in 1892-93) and moves between Poland, Germany, the Baltic, and St Petersburg. It includes long chapters on religious persecution and russification in the Baltic provinces. The book is, incidentally, dedicated to George Kennan for his “truth without malice” (pp. 1-130, 237-343).


J120 edit

Bigelow, Poultney, Seventy summers. London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1925. 2 vols.

In his rambling autobiography Bigelow recalls his first trip to Russia with Remington in June 1892 (vol. I, pp. 320-32). In 1896 he visited the south of Russia, crossing from Romania and making his way to Odessa. More concerned with his difficulties with Russia passport control and praise for George Kennan’s book about Russia than providing any geographical or chronological information (vol. II, pp. 100-07).


J121 edit

Neave, Joseph James, Leaves from the journal of Joseph James Neave. Edited, with notes, by Joseph J. Green. London: Headley Bros., 1911. 228pp.

In March 1890 the Quaker Neave (1836-1913) received the call “Thou must go to Russia” to plead for liberty of conscience. He travelled from Australia to London and set out on 12 October 1892 for St Petersburg with his companion John Bellows (see J122). They met Pobedonostsev and then journeyed to Moscow, where they met Tolstoi. They travelled on to Vladikavkaz, where they met persecuted Stundists, and on to Tiflis, visiting the exiled Tolstoyan Prince Khilkov, and beyond to Shusha, near the Persian border, before returning to the capital, which they left on 28 March 1893 (pp. 113-51).


J122 edit

Bellows, John, John Bellows: letters and memoir. Edited by his wife [Elizabeth]. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1904. vi+392pp.

The letters of Bellows (1831-1902), printer, scholar, and compiler of a noted French-English dictionary, provide a much fuller picture of the itinerary of the two Friends in 1892-93 and of the people they encountered. After their return to St Petersburg, Bellows, without Neave, went again to Moscow to see Tolstoi (pp. 107-238). Bellows was to pay another visit to Russia in December 1899 with Edmund Brooks to petition the tsar to allow a group of Dukhobors, exiled to Siberia, to join the rest of their community in Canada. He travelled once again to Moscow to see Tolstoi (pp. 330-04).


J123 edit

Dunmore, Charles Adolphus Murray, 7th Earl of, The Pamirs: being a narrative of a year’s expedition on horseback and on foot through Kashmir, western Tibet, Chinese Tartary, and Russian Central Asia. London: John Murray, 1893. 2 vols.

Dunmore (1841-1907) arrived in India on 12 February 1892 to begin a journey that would take him and his companion, a Major Roche, across the Pamirs as far as Kashgar, near the Russian-Chinese border. On 13 December, Roche having been refused entry into Russian territory, Dunmore departed alone on the last leg of his journey that took him through the Alai mountains to Khokhand, Tashkent, and Samarkand, where he arrived at the beginning of February 1893. He then went via Baku, Tiflis and Batumi to Constantinople (vol. II, pp. 236-340).


J124 edit

Burton, Reginald George, Tropics and snows: a record of travel and adventure. Illustrated by Miss Clare Burton from photographs and from sketches by the author. London: Edward Arnold, 1898. 349pp.

During a year’s leave in England, Captain Burton (1864-1951) of the Indian Staff Corps and late of the 1st West India Regiment, decided to learn Russian as “an accomplishment of something interesting and useful” and was sent to Moscow, arriving via Odessa, in November 1892. In February 1893 he was invited to stay for a week on an estate near Vitebsk, before returning to his studies in Moscow, which included surprisingly wide reading in Russian literature. In August he paid a visit to Nizhnii Novgorod by train and down the Volga to Astrakhan (pp. 125-80). He added two further general chapters on superstition versus civilization (pp. 181-96) and on the fighting qualities of the Cossacks (pp. 196-211).


J125 edit

Garnett, Constance, Constance Garnett, a life. By Richard Garnett. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991. xiv+402pp.

The most famous of English translators of Russian literature, Mrs Garnett, née Black (1861-1946), paid her first visit to Russia in January-February 1893, visiting St Petersburg, Moscow, where she met Tolstoi, and Nizhnii Novgorod. The account of her visit is reconstructed from her letters (she did not keep a diary) by her grandson (pp. 115-30).


J126 edit

Wenyon, Charles, Across Siberia on the great post-road. London: Charles H. Kelly, 1896. xii+240pp.

Wenyon (1848-1924), a doctor in practice in China, considered himself one of the last Englishmen to undertake the journey across Siberia “in the old-fashioned way”, travelling in the spring of 1893 from Vladivostok by tarantas, steamer, and rail as far as the column in the Urals marking the division of Asia and Europe (pp. 8-230).
J127 edit

Jackson, Frederick George, The great frozen land (Bolshaia zemelskija tundra): narrative of a winter journey across the tundras and a sojourn among the Samoyeds. Edited from his journals by Arthur Montefiore. London: Macmillan & Co., 1895. xviii+297pp.

The arctic explorer (1860-1938), F.R.G.S., completed a sledge journey of 3,000 miles across the Siberian tundra between the rivers Ob and Pechora in 1893.


J128 edit

Welzl, Jan, Thirty years in the golden north. Translated by Paul Selver. With a foreword by Karel Capek. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1932. 336pp.

The Moravian eccentric (1868-1948), “around whom questions hover like mosquitoes on a warm Yukon day”, relates his colourful account of his life and Munchausen-like adventures, which included a period from 1893, working on the Trans-Siberian and travelling through Siberia, to two journalists Bedrich Golombek and Edvard Valenta (pp. 19-149).


J129 edit

De Windt, Harry, My note-book at home and abroad. London: Chapman & Hall, 1923. 288pp.

De Windt’s final, haphazardly presented reminiscences from his adventure-filled life include a visit to Gatchina, c.1893, specially to present a copy of his second book on Siberia to Nicholas II (then still Tsarevich), an earlier meeting with Rasputin in Tomsk (pp. 78-87) and a voyage on a Russian prison ship from Odessa to Sakhalin (pp. 109-14).


J130 edit

Peel, Agnes Helen, Polar gleams: an account of a voyage on the yacht ‘Blencathra’. With a preface by the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, and contributions by Joseph Wiggins and Frederick G[eorge] Jackson. London: Edward Arnold, 1894. xviii+211pp.

Helen (Nellie) Peel (b. 1870), daughter of Sir Robert and a London débutante in the 1892 season, suddenly decided the following year to sail to Siberia. She and her companion, exhibiting “the audacity of our modern maidens” (Lord Dufferin), embarked at Appledore on 25 July 1893 and returned to Dundee on 7 November after an adventurous voyage that took them to the Kara Sea and the mouth of the River Enisei with various stops at Samoed settlements and on the return journey, at Archangel (pp. 1-143). Various appendices include (pp. 147-82) Wiggins’ account of his homeward journey through Siberia after leaving the Blencathra.


J131 edit

Butterfield, Daniel Adams, A biographical memorial of General David Butterfield including many addresses and military writings. Edited by [his wife] Julia Lorrilard Butterfield. New York: Grafton Press, 1904. xii+379pp.

Union general in the Civil War, Butterfield (1831-1901) paid two visits to Russia in an unsuccessful attempt to secure a concession to build a railway in Siberia: the first took place in the late 1880s, when he was accompanied by his wife (pp. 17-19); the second in 1893, which gave him material for a lecture he delivered on 9 April 1894 in New York in which he expressed the view that “statements of Russian despotism and cruelty are wildly exaggerated” (pp. 294-301).


J132 edit

Lynch, Henry Finnis Blosse, Armenia: travels and studies. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901. 2 vols.

The English (but with an Armenian maternal grandmother) traveller, Persia-based businessman, and, later, Liberal politician (1862-1913) mixes travel account with historical, archaeological, geographical and sympathetic political analysis of Armenia. The first volume focuses on a journey Lynch made through Russian Armenia between 14 August 1893, with his arrival in Batumi from Trebizond, and 23 October 1894, when he enters Turkish territory near Kagyzman. Notable are the account of his ascent of Mount Ararat on 20 September 1893 and his extensive description and numerous photographs of a trip to the abandoned medieval city of Ani, near Kars.


J133 edit

Hedin, Sven Anders von. Through Asia. Translated from the Swedish by J.T. Bealby. London: Methuen & Co., 1898. 2 vols.

The great Swedish geographer and travel writer (1865-1952) offers “a plain account”, but a very weighty one, of his travels in Asia between 1893 and 1897. He travels from St Petersburg to the Kirghiz steppe and to the Russian Pamirs – and beyond. (Russia, vol. I, pp. 1-201; II, pp. 653-704.)


J134 edit

De Windt, Harry, The prisons of Siberia: lecture delivered to the Foreign Press Association in London, March 5th, 1895. London: T. Brettell & Co., 1895. 23pp.

De Windt continues his polemic with Kennan in a lecture which he divided into two. In the first part he spoke of the great Siberian road, the mines, and the forwarding prison at Tomsk, which he had visited in August 1890 to take issue specifically with the American; in the second he spoke of Sakhalin. His conclusion: that Kennan should re-visit and see the improvements made since 1885.


J135 edit

De Windt, Harry, The new Siberia: being an account of a visit to the penal island of Sakhalin, and political prison and mines of the Trans-Baikal district, eastern Siberia. London: Chapman & Hall, 1896. xiv+324pp.

“The probability of the total abolition of exile to Siberia in favour of deportation by sea to the Island of Sakhalin has suggested the title of this work, which contains little more than a series of sketches illustrative of life and travel in the remoter regions of Asiatic Russia.” De Windt travelled from Japan in April 1894 on a Scottish-built Russian convict ship with nearly 800 prisoners for Sakhalin. After exploring the island he moved to Vladivostok to visit Siberian prisons and mines.
J136 edit

Shoemaker, Michael Myers, Trans-Caspia: the sealed provinces of the czar. Cincinnati: the Robert Clarke Co., 1895. viii+310pp.

Shoemaker (1853-1924) with his companion J. de Bylandt reached St Petersburg from Berlin in May 1894 and proceeded by rail to Vladikavkaz to begin their 10,000 mile tour that included a trip on the Transcaspian railway to Bokhara and Samarkand and a brief excursion into Chinese territory. Sailed from Batumi for Turkey at the end of July (pp. 1-287).


J137 edit

Trevor-Battye, Aubyn Bernard Rochfort, Ice-bound on Kolguev: a chapter in the exploration of Arctic Europe; to which is added a record of the natural history of the island. Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1895. xxviii+458pp.

The naturalist and traveller Trevor-Battye (1855-1922) and his assistant Thomas Hyland travelled to Kolguev Island in the Barents Sea to survey its flora and fauna in June 1894. They were marooned there until September, when Samoed reindeer herders aided their escape.


J138 edit

Pray, Eleanor Lord, Letters from Vladivostok, 1894-1930. Edited with introduction and notes by Brigitta Ingemanson. Biographical sketch by Patricia D. Silver. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2013. xxxi+276pp.

Eleanor “Roxy” Lord (1868-1954), soon after her marriage to Frederick Pray (d. 1923), left America and travelling via Japan, arrived in Vladivostok in late June 1894. She was to remain until December 1930, during which time she wrote some 2,000 letters to her family and friends. From this archive Prof Ingemanson has woven a rich tapestry, organized into three parts, each chronological and entitled ‘The people’, ‘The city’ and ‘The history’ (pp. 5-216).
J139 edit

Crosby, Ernest Howard, Tolstoy as a schoolmaster. London: Arthur C. Fifield, 1904. 94pp.

The year after publishing Tolstoy and his message, the American educational reformer (1856-1907) describes the count’s views on education and the teaching methods employed at the village school which he observed during his visit to Iasnaia Poliana in 1894.


J140 edit

Trevor-Battye, Aubyn Bernard Rochfort, A northern highway of the Tsar. Illustrated by the author. Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1898. xiv+256pp.

In this volume Trevor-Battye (J136) describes the escape from Kolguev and the hazardous 1,000-mile, five-week journey back to Archangel in September-October 1894, during the rasputnia, the season of impassable roads.


J141 edit

‘Oriental Widow’, Light thrown on a hideous empire. By an oriental widow. London: Neville Beeman, 1897. xii+154pp.

Internal evidence suggests that the author was an American, probably female, whose knowledge of Russia extended from the last years of Alexander III’s reign to the early years of Nicholas II’s. Preface speaks of “the compiler and associates” of what is termed an “exposé of a monstruous government” for which “the deluge” is imminent. Attacks on church, censorship, bureaucracy, followed by chapter on ‘Trans-Kaukasia’ (pp. 113-43) that is informed and remarkably temperate.


J142 edit

Freshfield, Douglas William, The exploration of the Caucasus. London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1896. 2 vols.

Two truly mountainous volumes offer the état present of climbing and exploration in the Caucasus, essentially taken up to the end of the reign of Alexander III. Freshfield draws heavily on his three journeys in 1868 (see I80), 1887, and 1889 for a systematic account of the various regions of the Caucasus, arranged not chronologically but geographically. He includes contributions by other climber-explorers – J.G. Cockin, (vol. II, pp. 38-58), H.W. Holder (vol. II, pp. 2-37), Hermann Woolley (vol. II, pp. 93-114), and Maurice de Déchy (vol. II, pp. 174-90), but the overall authorship and responsibility is his.


http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0042.10


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