The Quest for Forbidden Lands: Nikolai Przhevalskii and His Followers on Inner Asian Tracks by Alexandre Andreyev, Mikhail Baskhanov, Tatiana Yusupova (review)

Russia’s exploration and mapping of the vast uncharted territories of Inner Asia – the Western periphery of the Qing Empire at the turn of the twentieth century – was an ambitious undertaking sponsored by the military, imperial scholarly institutions, and private donors. Its goals were manifold, contributing both to scholarship and to the geopolitical interests of the empire.

The volume is coauthored by Alexandre Andreyev, Tatiana Yusupova (both of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences), and Mikhail Baskhanov (an independent researcher). It is organized as a series of biographical essays presenting Russian explorers of the region during the last decades of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The introductory chapter by Alexandre Andreyev positions the author vis-à-vis the historiography of the topic and maps out a general historical context of the expeditions, their geography and the institutional and academic interests behind them. In a reader-friendly way, the chapter presents information on involvement in expeditions of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (IRGO), the War Ministry, and the Academy of Sciences, on earlier undertakings by Petr Petrovich Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, the interimperial Great Game, and how imperial ethnography envisioned the diverse peoples of Russia.

Each of the following six chapters is dedicated to a biographical sketch of one of the region’s explorers: Nikolai Przhevalskii, Mikhail Pevtsov, Vsevolod Roborovskii, Petr Kozlov, Bronislav Grombchevskii, and Grigorii Grumm-Grzhimailo. This format may seem a slightly outdated way of presenting the entangled and multifaceted history of the imperial exploration of the “Orient.” The authors justify their choice by arguing that it allows them “not only to present the life stories of the travelers, with all their enlightening details, but also to fit these narratives into the broad context of Russia’s public life and scholarship of the epoch, by focusing on the circumstances which shaped the personalities and scholarly interests of these men” (P. vii).

Chapter 1 is dedicated to the biography of Nikolai Mikhailovich Przhevalskii (1839–1888). Penned by Alexandre Andreyev, it offers a comprehensive approach to Przhevalskii’s biography, from discussing his ancestors and family, childhood and education, and the early stages of his military career to the problem of his ethnic self-identification, intimate life, religious beliefs, and views of Darwinism. Paying due attention to Przhevalskii’s contributions to the fields of geography, zoology, and botany, Andreyev finally describes in great detail expeditions to Ussuri, Mongolia, and the Tibetan Plateau.

Chapter 2, by Mikhail Baskhanov, focuses on a much lesser known figure – the “geographical general” Mikhail Vasil’ievich Pevtsov (1843–1902), an influential military geographer who made a career exploring the vastness of Inner Asia. The chapter covers Pevtsov’s early years, his service in Western Siberia, expeditions to Dzhungaria, Western Mongolia, Northern China, and Tibet, and his collaboration with the West Siberian Branch of the IRGO. Baskhanov argues that this relatively unknown student of geography and ethnography of Inner Asia deserves to be ranked in the same category as the most prominent explorers of this remote region (P. 150).

Chapter 3, also written by Alexandre Andreyev, tells the story of another lesser-known explorer, Vsevolod Ivanovich Roborovskii (1856–1910). His name usually comes up in historiography only in connection with first-rank figures, such as Przhevalskii, Pevtsov, and Kozlov, who relied on Roborovskii as an aid. Yet Roborovskii headed an expedition of his own in 1893–1895, which, along with the story of his life outside of travels form the main focus of the chapter.

Alexandre Andreyev and Tatiana Yusupova coauthored chapter 4 dedicated to Petr Kuzmich Kozlov (1863–1935) – a close assistant and friend of Przhevalskii and, according to the British historian Evart Barger, a person ranking among the most outstanding Western travelers of the “golden age of discovery” (P. 255). Typical of the biographical genre employed in...