Galina Corman: Das Bessarabien-Bild in der zeitgenössischen russischen Reiseliteratur 1812–1918. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2015. 373 S., 3 Ktn., 1 Abb., 1 Tab. = Veröffentlichungen des Moldova-Instituts Leipzig, 6. ISBN: 978-3-86583-987-9

Galina Corman: Das Bessarabien-Bild in der zeitgenössischen russischen Reiseliteratur 1812–1918. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2015. 373 S., 3 Ktn., 1 Abb., 1 Tab. = Veröffentlichungen des Moldova-Instituts Leipzig, 6. ISBN: 978-3-86583-987-9.

The study of travel literature in an east European historical context has focused predominantly on the East-West axis, addressing questions both of political ideas and cultural transfer, and “mental mappings” of cultural and civilizational categories. This applies both to readings of Western travel texts on Eastern Europe, and to the study of Russian travel literature. But travellers also moved in other directions, and Galina Corman’s study of Russian travel writing on Bessarabia in the nineteenth century brings a welcome change of focus. After its incorporation into the Russian Empire from 1812 onwards, Bessarabia was an important site not only for Russian geopolitics, as armies massed on the Ottoman border in the context of the Greek Revolt and the ongoing Russian-Ottoman wars; but also for travellers involved to a greater or lesser extent in the administration of this province. It was also, in the famous but not unique case of Pushkin, a place of exile.

Corman assembles a corpus of 132 sources, produced by 41 authors, who are usefully tabulated at the end of the work. Not all the works are travel reports in the strict sense, and the corpus includes verse works (notably by Pushkin), and also fiction (the works of A. F. Vel’tman), both of which nevertheless draw to some extent on the templates of travel literature (the problem is discussed briefly on pp. 14–15). Corman divides the “Russian” travellers into four main groups: soldiers, administrators, scholars and men of letters. French-language works, either by ethnic Russians such as Admiral Pavel Chichagov, or by Frenchmen more or less assimilated into the Russian elite, such as Count Alexandre Langeron or Count Alexandre de Ribeaupierre, are included: this is only reasonable given the role of this language and culture in nineteenth-century Russian society, although their works might have been consulted in the original. One travel text used, that of the Montenegrin theology student (later monk and bishop in the Serbian church) Mardarije Uskoković, is explicitly entitled Greeting of a Foreigner to Russia from Bessarabia (Privet inostrantsa Rossii iz Bessarabii, 1912), which suggests a different direction of travel and cultural attitude.

The work opens with a general historical background of approximately fifty pages, which is the least original part of it, although it is competently executed and may prove useful orientation for some readers. Corman then proceeds via a thematic analysis, looking successively at general geographical perceptions of Bessarabia “between Europe and Asia”; at a discourse which sees Bessarabia as “ours” from a Russian point of view, partly national and partly colonial in inspiration. Viewed synoptically, Russian attitudes were caught between the traditional “othering” associated with colonial travel writing by analysts of better-known cases, and a strategy of ‘appropriating’ Bessarabian culture, or at least finding familiar heritage within its confines, such as ancient traces of Slavic or Orthodox culture. This ambiguity extended even to depictions of the province’s non-Russian inhabitants, Moldavians/Romanians, Germans, Jews, Turks and Roma.

Towards the end of the period studied, i. e. in the late nineteenth century, the ambivalence between “national” and “imperial” attitudes merged into a more aggressive “imperial nationalism”. Corman argues that at the end of the century, Russian travellers depicted Bessarabia especially through the prism of its Jewish population, who were viewed negatively but also as a metonym for the multi-ethnic and underdeveloped character of the province, and as a way of drawing a contrast with the allegedly ‘purer’ values of core Russia. While this may be the case in some texts, Corman’s argument relies on rather few sources (she has only four travellers at her disposal after 1880, those of the writers Vladimir Dedlov and Nikolai Lender (“Putnik”), the theologian Uskoković and the administrator Sergei Urusov). This seems too thin a base on which to argue that “broad sections of dominant Russian opinion on Bessarabia” saw the province as “hostile”, “unfriendly” and “un-Russian” (p. 312). The attitudes of Russian travellers, moreover, may not have been fundamentally different from Romanian ones – from Gheorghe Sion in the mid-nineteenth century to Nicolae Iorga at the beginning of the twentieth – who displayed similar hesitations between appropriation and differentiation when describing Bessarabia and its inhabitants. Comparison with neighbouring cases, such as those of Habsburg writers on Galicia, or Russian writers on other regions such as the Caucasus, could also have been adduced.

These reservations aside, Corman’s work is a valuable and interesting collation of sources, themes and attitudes, and deserves the attention not only of scholars working on Russia’s imperial borderlands, or on the particularities of Moldova’s past and present, but also of those interested in the relations between travel, empire and writing more generally.

Alex Drace-Francis, Amsterdam