Between East and West: Polish and Russian nineteenth-century travel to the Orient.

摘要

In the nineteenth century, foreign travel became much easier than it had ever been before. Improvements in the means of transportation enabled travelers to cover greater distances. The changing economics of travel made traveling accessible to a greater number of people. At the same time, intellectual pursuits led Europeans to the peripheries of the world which had been previously known to them. In the first part of the nineteenth century, the broadly defined Orient---stretching from the Middle to the Far East---became both a dynamically developing scholarly field, as well as a favored destination of European travelers.; This study investigates the accounts of Polish and Russian writers who traveled to the Orient. Influenced by the Western European orientalist discourse, the accounts of Slavic travelers, whatever the author's motives for venturing into the East, display original features. This specificity is grounded in the two societies own long-standing traditions of direct contacts with the Muslim world, as well as in the particularities of their socio-cultural development. In the eighteenth century, with the expansion of the ideology of the Enlightenment in Poland and Peter the Great's reforms in Russia, both countries began to look at the Orient through Western eyes. In the nineteenth century, the age of nationalism, Polish and Russian travelers continued to apply intellectual categories borrowed from the West, but they were also searching for values dictated to them by their own cultures.; The two Slavic cultures define themselves through the records of individual oriental voyages provided in some works of literary Orientalism, such as Mickiewiczs "Crimean Sonnets" and Pushkin's Caucasian poetry, as well as through other accounts from the period that were subsequently marginalized. Accounts of pilgrimages to the Holy Land represent an especially interesting case. Even though the pilgrimage involves crossing many national and cultural borders, it is often a journey to an area with which the traveler deems to posses intimate spiritual familiarity by virtue of his identification with the Christian tradition. These accounts provide valuable clues as to the writers' understanding of themselves and their cultures. They are documents not only of individual quests and discoveries, but also of the cultural history of an epoch.