Enjoying Europe, yearning for Russia? Russian travel writing on the Baltic provinces during the 19th century

Abstract

ABSTRACT After the end of the Napoleonic Wars it became popular in the Russian Empire to investigate one’s own country. Inspired by Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinskii’s bestseller A Journey to Reval (1821), the Russian elite also travelled through the Baltic provinces with their romantic medieval ruins and Hanseatic cities. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Baltic German culture was usually understood as enhancing Russia’s imperial diversity and ‘Europeanising’ the state. From the 1830s onwards, travel accounts concentrated on traces of the empire in the region and imagined the city of Reval/Tallinn as a site of memory for Russia’s first emperor, Peter I. This article argues that Russian travel writing on the Baltic provinces used tourism imaginaries that mirrored a growing imperial consciousness in which the Baltic provinces became more ‘Russian’ in the perceptions of the Russian public. This process has to be seen in the context of the nationalisation of Russian elite perceptions that also affected the general idea of this region as culturally ‘German’. In the end, the better accessibility of the region due to infrastructural modernisation paradoxically contributed to a growing sense of alienation, the romantic attraction of ‘Europeanness’ turned into a source of threat for the empire.