Abstract
Lucy Atkinson, née Finley (1817–1893), was one of Britain's most intrepid female travellers. In 1839 or 1840, midway through the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855), she went to St. Petersburg to take up a post as a governess in an aristocratic family, tutoring the young daughter of General Mikhail Nikolaevich Murav’ev (1796–1866), who from 1850 to 1857 would serve as vice-president of the Russian Geographical Society. (Murav’ev later gained notoriety for his brutal suppression of the Polish revolt of 1863.) There, Lucy met an architect turned water-colour artist, Thomas Witlam Atkinson (1799–1861), whom she married in 1848. The couple promptly set off, with official support, on an epic journey that would enable William to sketch and paint the natural landscape in remote regions at the boundaries of the expanding empire. Travelling via Moscow, Nizhnii Novgorod, Kazan’ and Ekaterinburg, they explored Siberia, Eastern Kazakhstan, the Altai region and the Buriat lands bordering Mongolia. Sheltering during the harsh winter months in towns such as Barnaul and Irkutsk, they travelled for almost six years before returning to St. Petersburg in December 1853.
Some ten years after completing this journey, by which time the Atkinsons had returned to Britain and Thomas had died, Lucy turned her recollections, supplemented by the diaries that her husband had kept during their wanderings, into a lively, varied narrative, full of local colour, rich in anecdotes, and displaying a broad emotional range. This travelogue, offered to the reader as a series of letters to people close to her, was published by John Murray in 1863. Lucy presents herself in it as a curious and resourceful traveller who is undaunted by extremes of temperature, snowstorms, earthquakes, bedbugs, venomous snakes, bands of brigands, drunken coachmen, untrustworthy guides, and nights on end sleeping in yurts. She rides thousands of miles along bumpy roads in an open sleigh or on horseback across waterless terrain and round narrow ledges of rock in vertiginous mountain ranges. She practises shooting with pistols and rifles in case the couple should be attacked. After a particularly arduous crossing of a Kazakh steppe, she gives premature birth to a boy whom the couple eccentrically name Alatau Tamchiboulac. She then spends the winter in the Kazakh outpost of Kopal (now Kapal, south of Lake Balkhash), subsisting on a diet without vegetables, butter, milk, eggs, or edible bread or drinkable tea, but nonetheless has a merry social time in the company of the chief local Russian official, who is a member of the eminent Baltic German Wrangel’ family. As Lucy at one point confesses (or boasts), when some local women try to dissuade her from accompanying her husband and a group of other men on a visit to a remote Kazakh lake, ‘I have a little wilfulness in my disposition’ (109).
On one level, Lucy's book is an important contribution to the genre of women's travel-writing that was then burgeoning. It reflects the sense of self-worth of a Victorian woman of non-noble origin, who repeatedly remarks upon the patriarchal nature of Kazakh society, in which girls are considered to be of little value and a woman ‘is a true slave to a man, contributing to his pleasure in every way, supplying all his wants, attending to his cattle, saddling his horse, fixing the tents’ (187). From the point of view of historians of Russia, this travelogue is an informative primary source on the domestic and social life, marriage customs, and food and drink of Russian colonists and indigenous peoples (especially Kazakhs, but also Bashkirs, Buriats, Kalmyks and Tungus) in outlying regions of the vast empire. It is also of interest for the brief sketches Lucy provides of members of Russia's ruling elite, whom the Atkinsons encounter and whose assistance and hospitality they enjoy. The most important of these, perhaps, is Nikolai Nikolaevich Murav’ev (1809–1881), a cousin of Mikhail Nikolaevich, Lucy's employer in St Petersburg. This member of the Murav’ev family, whom the Atkinsons meet in Krasnoiarsk and Irkutsk and who came to be known as Murav’ev-Amurskii, played a leading role in the extension of Russian power in Eastern Siberia, of which he was the Governor-General from 1847 to 1861.
Lucy's travelogue is also of interest to students of the emergence of opposition to autocracy, since the Atkinsons come across numerous Decembrists, that is to say men (including several members of the Murav’ev clan) who had been sentenced by Nicholas I to exile in Siberia because they had participated in the failed military revolt of December 1825. In Ialutorovsk, for instance, Lucy meets Matvei Murav’ev-Apostol, brother of one of the five Decembrists who were hanged in 1826 and another cousin of Mikhail Nikolaevich. In Irkutsk, she is charmed by Prince Sergei Volkonsky and Prince Sergei Trubetskoi and their wives, Mariia Volkonskaia and Ekaterina Trubetskaia, who were admired by many of their peers for following their husbands into exile. South of Lake Baikal, she finds Nikolai and Mikhail Bestuzhev and in Ialutorovsk, on her return journey, Ivan Iakushkin and Vasilii Tiesenhausen. She is sympathetic to the Decembrists, to some of whom she bore messages from family members in European Russia.
It is useful to have this fresh edition of Lucy Atkinson's travelogue, which had previously been reprinted only once. In a 66-page introduction, Nick Fielding and Marianne Simpson, who is a direct descendant of Lucy's brother Matthew, outline the background to the couple's travels and chronicle Lucy's life in the light of newly-discovered information. The edition might have benefitted, though, from a map enabling readers to follow the Atkinsons’ extraordinary itinerary and also from the inclusion of standard modern equivalents of Lucy's quirkily transliterated forms in the glossary of Russian and Tatar terms at the end of the book.
The travels of Lucy and Thomas Atkinson in Central Asia and the journey that Thomas made there in 1847, before he married Lucy, take up almost a quarter of Fielding's monograph Travellers in the Great Steppe, which was published the year before the new edition of Lucy's travelogue. This ambitious and lavishly illustrated book recounts the exploits of dozens of western travellers, besides the Atkinsons. These included thirteenth-century papal emissaries to the Mongol court and, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, English merchants. In the nineteenth century, the number of travellers increased. In 1819, Nikolai Nikolaevich Murav’ev, an elder brother of the above-mentioned Mikhail Nikolaevich, was sent to reconnoitre the Khanate of Khiva. In 1873, Eugene Schuyler, an American diplomat, made an extensive journey to Russia's newly-conquered Central Asian territories. In the 1880s, the Victorian missionary Henry Lansdell travelled twice in the region. There was a dare-devil who, in 1899, reached Khiva on a bicycle. In the early twentieth century, there followed several businessmen who realized what opportunities the region afforded to exploit mineral resources, grow crops, and yield milk for butter, if only transport networks could be developed to bring these goods to European markets.
Of all the matters on which Travellers in the Great Steppe touches, the most important, from the point of view of historians of imperial Russia, is the extension of the empire into Central Asia, to which Chapter 6 in particular is devoted. This expansion involved the establishment of military outposts across the northern edge of the Siberian steppe, on the eastern seaboard of the Caspian Sea, in Eastern Kazakhstan, and along the north-western rim of the Chinese Empire. It entailed Russian attempts to break the power of the khans of Khiva, who profited from the trade in Russian (and Persian) slaves. (Khiva was taken by General Konstantin Kaufmann in 1873.) As colonization proceeded, soldiers were followed by civilian administrators, geographers such as Petr Semenov, explorers such as Nikolai Przheval'skii, cartographers, ethnographers, botanists and biologists. At the geopolitical level, this imperial expansion would intensify diplomatic confrontation with Britain over control of Afghanistan and India. To modern readers in an age critical of imperialisms, Fielding may seem to underplay the sheer brutality of the Russian conquest and the racist attitudes that supported it, attitudes shared by the Hungarian-born anthropologist Charles-Eugène de Ujfalvy and his Parisian wife, Marie de Ujfalvy-Bourdon, who are among the travellers he examines. At the same time, he is alive to the lasting implications of Russia's imperial interest in Central Asia for defining the nation's own identity.
That said, Travellers in the Great Steppe should be read not so much as a work of scholarship but rather as a description of the accounts left by bold spirits who explored a region with which the author has fallen in love. It is for the most part a compendium of factual information interspersed with extended quotation from the travelogues used and it lacks close analysis or sustained defence of particular theses. Fielding himself defines his intention as to ‘entertain and inspire’ (xi) and hopes that the ‘book and the stories it contains will stimulate further exploration of this beautiful and exciting region’ (312).
Irrespective of the book's overriding thrust and purpose, it would have benefitted from closer editorial scrutiny. It contains numerous inconsistencies in spelling and presentation of proper nouns. We find, for example, both Bokhara and Bukhara, the Muscovy Company and the Moscovy Company, and Turcomans and Turkomans. The Aral Sea is referred to as both ‘Lake Aral’ and ‘the Aral Lake’ as well as by its established modern name. Errors of transliteration of Russian words are legion, e.g., ‘Asov’ for Azov, ‘Grosni’ for groznyi (‘terrible’, as a descriptor of Ivan IV), ‘Tatischev’ for Tatishchev. Material is repeated (e.g., a quotation from a source on pages 47 and 52–3 and details of a Russian defeat on pages 130 and 133). Small factual inaccuracies include the date of the capture of Astrakhan’ by Ivan IV and, at one point, the location of Lake Zaisan in north-east Kazakhstan. All the same, Travellers in the Great Steppe succeeds as a tour d’horizon, reminding twenty-first-century readers of the fortitude of the pioneering explorers of earlier times and helping to rescue from oblivion some important contributors to the collection of human knowledge of various kinds.