From Other to Brother: Western Travel Writers and the Remaking of Russia

The answer lies less in Russia and more in the socio-cultural climate of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western Europe. By examining not only the accounts of Western travel writers to Europe but the writers themselves I will show how the “discovery” of Russia by Westerners was defined by Early Modern anxieties surrounding religion and society that emerged during the Reformation and Enlightenment. These travel writers especially the Germans Sigismund von Herberstein and Adam Olearius – a Catholic and an Evangelical Lutheran respectively – used Russia as a field on which to argue their own respective views on what an ideal moral society should look like in the process establishing Russia as an antithetical Other. In particular, they criticised Russian men as violent, licentious, and stupid drunks while Russian arranged marriages condemned women to essential slavery locked at home with husbands who expressed love for them only by beating them. In reforming Russian society Peter the Great responded to these exact criticisms, creating a new and outward-looking class of international aristocrats to represent Russia thereby de-othering it in the eyes of their Western European counterparts.