Voyage en Sibérie (review)

In 1761, l'Abbé Jean Chappe d'Auteroche set off for Siberia, assigned by the Académie royale des sciences de Paris with the task of observing the transit of Venus across the sun. The eleven chapters comprising this edition are taken from the monumental Voyage en Sibérie, which he published in 1768, and relate the vast journey from Paris to Tobolsk, through Warsaw, Saint Petersburg and Moscow, with much of the latter stages undertaken by sled. Throughout, the Abbé measures and compares latitudes, heights and temperatures, describes feast days, habitations, costumes and mœurs in even the smallest of villages he passes through. However, the Russia which he depicts emerges unfavourably — the prey of a despotism which enslaves all strata of society, from the nobility, in constant fear of exile or the confiscation of their property and so unwilling to invest in the future, down to the serfs, separated from their families and reduced to a status below that of 'les animaux les plus vils'. This society, so anathemic to intellectual life, is a far cry from a 'mirage russe' — witness the lengthy and emotive descriptions, as well as engravings, of tortures and punishments. Nevertheless, while Chappe places drunkeness, sloth, jealousy, dishonesty, cowardice and debauchery among the vices he attributes to the Russian character, he also attempts to reconcile these with Montesquieu's quite different expectations for the character of the 'peuples du Nord'. According to the Abbé, the government of Russia has deformed the character of its people (although he adds that Montesquieu has perhaps overestimated the effects of climate, which should in any case take account of 'la hauteur du sol sur lequel vivent les hommes'). So vehement was Chappe's critique considered that it counted L'Antidote (1770) amongst the refutations it inspired, in which Catherine II herself was rumoured to have a hand.

Chappe's curiosity permeates this volume and we see him constantly verifying existing theories and knowledge by experiment (running, for example, montre à secondes in hand, alongside a vast swarm of insects so as to calculate the quantity it contains). Seeking to confirm that the earth thaws during summer, he procures a dozen convicts to dig the ground to a depth of ten feet so that he may check if it is still frozen (the convicts escape before they have the chance to dig further). If the fur of Russian mammals turns white because of the cold, then surely keeping one in a poêle over winter should not entail a change in its colour. The observation of a squirrel kept indoors, already grey at the end of October, 'doit jeter de grands doutes'. The original text is accompanied by Michel Mervaud's invaluable footnotes, which place Chappe's comments alongside those of the few voyagers who preceded him to Russia, the philosophes and the numerous objections of the Antidote, while Madeleine Pinault Sorensen furnishes comprehensive biographies of the illustrators, and an informative study of each of the twenty-eight depictions of scenes of Russian life reproduced in the second volume.