Book Review: Censorship of Literature in Austria, 1751–1848 by Norbert Bachleitner

Abstract

soldiers were followed by civilian administrators, geographers such as Petr Semenov, explorers such as Nikolai Przheval’skii, cartographers, ethnographers, botanists and biologists. At the geopolitical level, this imperial expansion would intensify diplomatic confrontation with Britain over control of Afghanistan and India. To modern readers in an age critical of imperialisms, Fielding may seem to underplay the sheer brutality of the Russian conquest and the racist attitudes that supported it, attitudes shared by the Hungarian-born anthropologist Charles-Eugène de Ujfalvy and his Parisian wife, Marie de Ujfalvy-Bourdon, who are among the travellers he examines. At the same time, he is alive to the lasting implications of Russia’s imperial interest in Central Asia for defining the nation’s own identity. That said, Travellers in the Great Steppe should be read not so much as a work of scholarship but rather as a description of the accounts left by bold spirits who explored a region with which the author has fallen in love. It is for the most part a compendium of factual information interspersed with extended quotation from the travelogues used and it lacks close analysis or sustained defence of particular theses. Fielding himself defines his intention as to ‘entertain and inspire’ (xi) and hopes that the ‘book and the stories it contains will stimulate further exploration of this beautiful and exciting region’ (312). Irrespective of the book’s overriding thrust and purpose, it would have benefitted from closer editorial scrutiny. It contains numerous inconsistencies in spelling and presentation of proper nouns. We find, for example, both Bokhara and Bukhara, the Muscovy Company and the Moscovy Company, and Turcomans and Turkomans. The Aral Sea is referred to as both ‘Lake Aral’ and ‘the Aral Lake’ as well as by its established modern name. Errors of transliteration of Russian words are legion, e.g., ‘Asov’ for Azov, ‘Grosni’ for groznyi (‘terrible’, as a descriptor of Ivan IV), ‘Tatischev’ for Tatishchev. Material is repeated (e.g., a quotation from a source on pages 47 and 52–3 and details of a Russian defeat on pages 130 and 133). Small factual inaccuracies include the date of the capture of Astrakhan’ by Ivan IV and, at one point, the location of Lake Zaisan in north-east Kazakhstan. All the same, Travellers in the Great Steppe succeeds as a tour d’horizon, reminding twenty-first-century readers of the fortitude of the pioneering explorers of earlier times and helping to rescue from oblivion some important contributors to the collection of human knowledge of various kinds.