Kyiv Academy in Travelogues of the Second Half of the 18th through Mid-19th Centuries

During the second half of the 18th century, Kyiv gradually started attracting an increasingly bigger number of travellers, both from the Russian imperial centre and Western countries. In some cases, Kyiv could be the final destination of travel, but in most cases, it was only one of the stops on a journey toward the South, in particular to Crimea. Given the widespread interest of learned travellers in issues of the Enlightenment and education, Kyiv Academy could stir curiosity and arouse a desire to visit this institution. That said, motives of interest among Russian and Western travellers could vary; the former were attracted by Kyiv Academy because of its input into the development of education and sciences in Russia itself. Some travellers expressed admiration toward the educational institution and emphasised its role in the education of learned members of the high clergy and bureaucracy. They also stressed the fact of a relatively long history of the Academy that had to prove the long tradition of education and science in the Russian Empire. However, Western travellers visited the Academy because of their general interest in the state of education in the Russian Empire. With time these tendencies changed. In this paper, we study mentions of the Kyiv Academy in travelogues; in particular, we are interested in the issue of the changing character of these mentions during a long period from the 1760s to the mid-19th century, both in the framework of the history of travel literature and from the point of view of imperial control of knowledge.