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Tracking the Travels of Adam Olearius

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Tracking the Travels of Adam Olearius Tracking the Travels of Adam Olearius Nancy S. Kollmann (Stanford University) am a big fan of Gary Marker’s first book—a study of printing and I publishing in Russia’s eighteenth century. There he showed how Russia’s reading public took shape and how its interests changed, moving steadily towards belles-lettres and secular philosophy with a good dose of lowbrow adventure tales and garishly illustrated romances. So Gary understands the early modern publishing world, with its penchant for illustration and its dynamism, which is what this paper is about. It stems from an encounter I had in Houghton Library with a curious version of Adam Olearius’ Travels to Russia and Persia. Students of early modern Russian history are unavoidably fast friends with Adam Olearius (1599-1671). His account is fascinating and is one of the few to provide contemporary illustrations, problematic as they may be. Olearius served Duke Frederick III of Schleswig-Holstein, who was endeavoring to win a monopoly for Holstein on trade to Persia, for which he needed Russian permission for transit travel. Frederick sent two embassies—to Moscow in 1633-35 and through Russia to Persia in 1635-39—and Olearius served on both. He returned briefly to Russia in 1643. In 1647 Olearius published an account of his voyages, as he 134 Tracking the Travels of Adam Olearius said, upon the urging of friends (a common trope in introducing such books). The 1647 edition appeared at the Schleswig press—a handsome volume in 536 folio pages with about 70 copper engravings approxi- mately evenly divided between the Russian and Persian parts of the account (plus nine dedicatory portrait engravings). Olearius’ images were primarily ethnographic scenes of daily life and panoramic city- scapes, with three large maps (the cities of Moscow and Ardabil, and a map of Persia celebrated as including the first accurate depiction of the Caspian Sea).1 In 1656, noting that the 1647 edition was sold out and that he had had time to prepare material and images that had not made it into the first edition, Olearius published an even more lavish volume, a folio edition of 766 pages with about 120 illustrations, including around 70 in the Russian portion; in addition to more ethnographic scenes and cityscapes, it added a large map of the course of the Volga River.2 Olearius’ intent in both these editions was to illustrate daily life and mores, as well as to share his scientific and geographic expertise. Olearius was a distinguished scholar in the late Renaissance tradition of the humanist scientist. A linguist, theologian, and geog- rapher, after his Russian and Persian travels Olearius served Duke Frederick as counselor, court mathematician, and antiquarian, as well as curator of the duke’s library and Kunstkammer. Fascinated with Persia, Olearius translated a classic Persian collection of verse and stories (Sa’di’s Gulistan or Rose Garden), prepared Persian- Latin and Latin-Persian-Turkish-Arabic-Hebrew dictionaries, expanded the duke’s cabinet of curiosities (including flora and fauna he collected in Russia and Persia), corresponded with scholars throughout Europe, and amassed a library of over twenty-four hundred volumes, including rare Persian manuscripts. He also built scientific instruments, including an astrolabe, a microscope, a tele- scope, and the Great Celestial Globe that the duke of Gottorp gave to Peter I in 1713.3 Olearius was an inveterate promoter of information about Persia, India, and points east, areas on which Duke Frederick had set his sights for trade. Olearius managed the publication of several works related to these areas at the Schleswig press. He personally oversaw reprinting or Nancy S. Kollmann 135 revisions of his 1656 edition (in 1661, 1663, and 1671) and included in all his editions an account of travel to Madagascar and India by his friend John Mandelsloh that Olearius himself had edited.4 In 1654 he published his translation of the Gulistan and in 1666 Heinrich von Uchteritz’s account of Barbados; in 1669 Olearius edited a Schleswig publication of Jürgen Andersen and Volquard Iversen’s travels to India and the Spice Islands. Trade was not his only motivation; this was a time when Europeans were fascinated by foreign travel, presaging Enlightenment universalism. One contemporary French writer asserted that travel accounts were “more popular than the novel,” and Olearius strikes notes of edification and entertainment in introducing his 1663 edition, justifying travel accounts as a way for those at home to learn lessons from other societies and to virtually enjoy a society through the eyes of a faithful observer like himself.5 Olearius’ account is one of the more valuable foreigners’ accounts of Russia, despite his evident prejudices. He perpetuated the trope of Russia as a despotism and brought a Reform Protestant moralizing to his commentary. Condemning Russians’ crudeness and barbarity, he scathingly described drunkenness and sexual debauchery, uncleanli- ness, foul language, and street fighting. At the same time, nothing human was foreign to him, and his book is a wide-ranging ethnography of Russian society, politics, and religion. He declared that he would only present information that he personally saw or could verify: “I present here a true and exact description of that state and also of other countries, regions, and peoples, which we visited, in the very view and condition in which we found them in the present time.”6 So, modern-day readers, reading critically, can learn a lot about Muscovy from Olearius’ encyclopedic account.7 A fascinating aspect of his account is the illustrations, whose veracity Olearius personally vouched for. In the 1647 edition he wrote, As for the copper engraved pictures of this edition, one should not think that they are, as is sometimes done, taken from other books or other engravings. Rather, I myself drew the majority of them from life (some of them—by our former doctor G. German, my close friend). Then they were turned into a final form with the help of the 136 Tracking the Travels of Adam Olearius excellent artist Avgust Ion, who many years ago taught me drawing in Leipzig. For that they used models, dressed in national costumes that I brought here. So that, however, during the work of engraving no degree of accuracy would be lost, for a long time I kept three engravers, not without great expense, at my house. They were to work under my direction.8 Nevertheless, Olearius’ engravers took what he told them and interpreted it using the conventions of early modern European engraving; these pictures are a few problematic steps removed from direct eyewitness.9 What concerns us here is the fate of Olearius’ Travels in transla- tion. Marshall Poe has detailed the many languages and editions the most popular European travel accounts to Russia appeared in early modern Europe.10 I had blithely assumed that such translations repre- sented the same texts (and illustrations) as the originals. An afternoon in the Houghton Library at Harvard disabused me of this idea and piqued my curiosity about the uses to which travel accounts were put in early modern Europe. Houghton Library possesses a Dutch translation of Olearius’ 1647 edition by Dirck von Wageninge, published in Utrecht in 1651. Looking at it de visu when researching Olearius’ images of punishment was eye-opening. This is a tiny book (about five and a half inches tall) that would fit into a pocket or satchel; produced in duodecimo in 925 pages of thickly packed text and scant margins, it is small and fat. It seems to contain the full text of Olearius’ 1647 edition, including the Russian and Persian parts and John Mandelsloh’s letters. But the illustrations are greatly pared down—only four of the nine dedicatory portraits are included, and of the travel illustrations, only six of the 1647’s seventy illustrations appear. Distributed through the text, they form three matched pairs: the Russian and Persian alphabets and numerals, portraits of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich and the Safavid Shah Safi, and images of diplomatic receptions by these two rulers. Out of Olearius’ compendious folio volume, this editor has crafted a handy travel guide for a diplomat or merchant; recall the Dutch Republic’s aggressive trade across the Middle East and Asia at the time.11 Nancy S. Kollmann 137 Translations of Olearius had a life of their own, apparently, and I became curious to see what others were like. Surveying the major early modern translations, Olearius’ Travels emerges as a malleable object, the text being excerpted or edited, the illustrations and maps omitted, pared down, or redone, all to suit the perceived readership in a given place and later time. Let’s start with the 1647 edition. Interest was fierce in Olearius’ book as soon as it appeared in the Dutch republic; in 1651 three different versions came out. In addition to the diminutive Utrecht one, in Amsterdam, two publishers put out rival versions, one in quarto and a smaller one in octavo. I have been able to look at the quarto, published by Hartgers.12 This is an entirely different presentation than the Utrecht translation. It appears to include the Russian and Persian travels, but has little interest in imagery. Its title page dedicates the top half to a banner, held by stereotypic Russian and Persian figures, on which the title appears; the bottom half is a truncated version of Olearius’ image of the Moscow diplomatic audience. Otherwise, the book seems to select a random group of only five images—a storm at sea in Livonia, Russian burials, Cheremis pagan rites, a market in Persia, and men shooting a cannon and crossbow in a Persian square. These are scat- tered through the 134-page book.
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