July/August 2019: What We'll Be Reading Next

Quick, illogical assumptions motivate me to state that I have not been terribly keen on any books that were published in July or are to be published in August.

Instead I have finished older books. Die Russland-Expedition: Von der Newa bis zum Altai, Humboldt's travels in Russia, winding up in a border station to China, then returning past German settlements founded by Catherine the Great, past Astrakhan, and through the Caspian Sea, braving an outbreak of anthrax and innumerable mosquitoes, were picturesquely set forth in later travelogues by Gustav Rose (a science professor who was a fellow traveller) and in Humboldt's letters.

The letters are not saintly, in my view. Humboldt writes to Count von Cancrin, the Russian government minister who granted his journey, in tones at times confident and friendly, at other times servile and toadying. His views in these letters are much more blissful than his views in letters to his brother and friends. His euphoria about Russian military victories against the Ottoman Empire also seems a little bloodthirsty now. I did roll my eyes a little at Humboldt's worries that he might be nominated for a prestigious position back in Berlin, which two hundred years later I'd characterize as a 'First World Problem.' Also, it's easier to sympathize with the mosquito problem, than with his boredom at being greeted by lengthy dinners and eager delegations wherever he goes.

Астрахань Городская клиническая больница №2 имени братьев Губиных (1838)
via Wikimedia Commons

AT ANY RATE, journeying and surveying the natural world through Siberia and back, experiencing a lifelong dream, Alexander von Humboldt was an emissary of the Russian government. Not only was it paying him a fabulous sum and gratifying a wish; it was also organizing transport with a lavish hand — teams of horses that were frequently changed out, etc., and military escorts, transported him over thousands of miles with an ease uncharacteristic of the times — and shelter.


Whether fear or gratitude was the greater inhibitor, at any rate, the Prussian traveller was not there to be anything but complimentary of tsarist governance, and he was not free to write in a political vein no matter how many versts away from St. Petersburg he sped or how well-entrenched in the elite of the Prussian state (he knew Frederick William III well) he stood. His silence about Russian politics would last, apparently, to the end of his life; he never 'dished the dirt.' The commentators in C.H. Beck's edition of Die Russland-Expedition champion Humboldt, however, and dig forth hints that the Prussian felt pangs of unhappiness under the Tsar's censorship. At least there is a brief scene of harmless-seeming Russians being sent into harsh exile in Siberia.

Another depressing facet to the book, unlike the utopian tones of the South American scenes from Humboldt's Ansichten der Natur, is the situation in Prussia. Humboldt had fallen out of favour with his king (which apparently was the least of his worries), his brother's wife Caroline had died, and he is aware that he himself is ill and elderly.

Humboldt was in his 60s. He was not tottering on the brink, at least by our standards. But I suppose that this age was a risk if he wanted to travel huge distances in his time. Either way, Alexander and his brother Wilhelm were both frightened that one of them would pass the threshold of the tomb and leave the remaining brother alone. That said, Alexander lived into the 1850s — the travels to Russia were in the 1820s — although Wilhelm, the elder brother, did die in 1835. The Russian journey does seem to have been his last great hurrah.

Additional information: "Alexander von Humboldt" [Wikipedia]