A Russian Voyage Around the World

IN THE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS section of her monograph, Edyta M. Bojanowska admits that “writing a study of a single book that few people have read seemed a risky move.” The single book in question is Ivan Goncharov's The Frigate Pallada (1858), a 700-page travelogue about the voyage of the titular ship, which sailed between 1852 and 1854 from the Gulf of Finland to England; the Cape of Good Hope; Java, Singapore, and Hong Kong; Japan and, briefly, Shanghai and the islands south of Japan; Manila and Korea; and finally Siberia, where Goncharov parted company with the crew and made an overland journey back to St. Petersburg. Commissioned by the Russian government, the sailing voyage had a “top-secret mission” that the authorities hoped would get Russia out of its mid-19th-century economic slump: “to open up Japan, a country that for two centuries had kept a strict isolation from Europeans, to western trade” before the Americans, led by Commodore Matthew Perry, could do so. In this early version of the Cold War, the Americans got to Japan first, which in the end did not matter, as the Japanese negotiated trade treaties with both. Goncharov, a well-known writer, was offered the job of secretary to the ship's commander because the government wanted “a literary man” to produce a record of the trip for Russian readers (the mission, if successful, would not remain a secret).