Sergey Turgenev’s Student Travels: The European Experience and Its Reflection in His Diaries for 1811

Abstract

The article is written on the material of the unpublished diaries of Sergei Ivanovich Turgenev (1792–1827) and focuses on two journeys he made in 1811 while studying at the University of Göttingen: to the Harz and to Holland. The former is a special type of student travel that developed in the German “Bursch” environment and had its own stable routes and behavioral “rituals”. The curriculum of the University of Göttingen had a special course on travel; therefore, for university students, hiking in the Harz was part of the unwritten compulsory “program”. The relative proximity of the Harz to Göttingen, its connection with German history, and the beauty of its nature made it an attractive destination for an educational trip that allowed combining the useful with the pleasant. However, the concept “useful”, when applied to the Harz, changed at the turn of the 19th century. The amateur interest in natural history and mineralogy led to a shift in focus from the description of historical monuments to the natural sciences. The Harz began to be considered primarily as a geological phenomenon and a place of mining, which also determined the plans for its exploration. This focus on natural science is evident in the recordings of Sergei Turgenev’s elder brothers, Alexander and Nikolai, who also studied in Göttingen and visited the Harz several years earlier. The described context allows seeing the peculiarities of Sergei Turgenev’s perception of the Harz. He went there solely for pleasure, did not prepare for the journey in any way, and wrote down his impressions only to satisfy Alexander Turgenev’s request of a report on the trip from his younger brother. For this purpose, Sergei “literated” some of his notes based on his travel diary. Lacking pragmatic information, he tried to compensate for it with “sensitive” reasoning and poetic quotations. The somewhat artificial literary character of the text is balanced by the vivid details and sketches of momentary everyday situations. Sergei Turgenev did not post-process his travel notes on the trip to Holland. The notes show that, within just a few months, Sergei Turgenev’s perception of the European space changed. The entertaining “Bursch” transformed, according to his own words, into an “inquisitive” traveler from Stern’s “classification”. He looks at the Dutch, who then recently became new subjects of the French Empire; watches their preparations for Napoleon’s arrival; is surprised at the degree of their loyalty to the foreign ruler; and ponders the question of how much this loyalty depends on citizens’ well-being. The trip to Holland leads Sergei Turgenev, upon his return to Göttingen, to reading Adam Smith, on the one hand; on the other hand, it gives a start to the reasoning, which goes through all his later diaries and letters, on constitutionalism, on the nature of revolutions, and on the need for modernization reforms in Russia.