Women’s Travel and Travel Writing in Russia, 1700-1825

This article represents a first attempt in scholarly literature to describe Russian women’s travel writing as such and to isolate its specific characteristics. It begins with a discussion of the types of travel relevant to women in eighteenth-century Russia: although individual experiences varied greatly with social position, women normally traveled in connection with familial obligations; even the few very elite women who left records of extended trips describe their trips as motivated by personal duty. The article analyzes in detail the accounts of two female grand tourists (Daškova, Stroganova) and one domestic traveler (Gladkova). While the doubly audacious act of both traveling and also writing about it required various types of justification, elements of pointedly feminized stylization were also hallmarks of men’s writing in this period and thus, somewhat paradoxically, are particularly apparent in those texts that women aspired to publish. When writing for a more private circle, women’s travel accounts testify instead to a rich layer of female spaces and experiences that is entirely absent in the more public texts written by either men or women.