Travels in Russia

Gautier, Théophile (1811–1872), translated by Kline, A. S. (contact-email)

Théophile Gautier's travels in Russia, in 1858-59, including visits to Saint Petersburg and Moscow, reveal the wide influence achieved by French culture evidenced in all Gautier’s travel writing, and confirm his passionate interest in all things artistic.

He left for Russia in September 1858, and was there until March 1859, the aim being to publish a work on the Art Treasures of Ancient and Modern Russia, illustrated with two hundred heliogravure plates taken from photographs; his companion, the photographer Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg, was to be responsible for these, as instructed by Gautier, who would write the accompanying text. Tsar Alexander II was the patron, and the trip was fully funded by a businessman, Carolus van Raay. Gautier was in St, Petersburg by mid-October 1858, and visited Moscow briefly in early February 1859 before returning to St, Petersburg, and then Paris in late March. Gautier had also agreed, in exchange for six months’ leave, to provide the Moniteur Universel with a series of articles giving his travel impressions, which provided the basis for Voyage en Russie.

He was in Russia again in August and September 1861, with his eldest son Charles-Marie Théophile, known as Toto, and a family friend Olivier Gourjault, a trip which included further visits to St. Petersburg and Moscow, and his visit to Nizhny Novgorod via Tver and the River Volga.

This enhanced translation has been designed to offer maximum compatibility with current search engines. Among other modifications, the proper names of people and places, and the titles given to works of art, have been fully researched, modernised, and expanded; comments in parentheses have been added here and there to provide a reference, or clarify meaning; and minor typographic or factual errors, for example incorrect attributions and dates, in the original text, have been eliminated from this new translation.

Author Details

Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) was born in Tarbes, in the Hautes-Pyrénées region of south-west France, his family moving to Paris in 1814. He was a friend, at school, of the poet Gérard de Nerval, who introduced him to Victor Hugo. Gautier contributed to various journals, including La Presse, throughout his life, which offered opportunities for travel in Spain (1840), Algeria (1845, 1862), Italy (1850), Russia (1858-59, 1861), and Egypt (1869). He was a devotee of the ballet, writing a number of scenarios including that of Giselle. At the time of the 1848 Revolution, he expressed strong support for the ideals of the second Republic, a support which he maintained for the rest of his life.

A successor to the first wave of Romantic writers, including Chateaubriand and Lamartine, he directed the Revue de Paris from 1851 to 1856, worked as a journalist for La Presse and Le Moniteur universel, and in 1856 became editor of L’Artiste, in which he published numerous editorials asserting his doctrine of ‘Art for art’s sake’. Saint-Beuve secured him critical acclaim, he became chairman of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1862, and in 1868 was granted the sinecure of librarian to Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, a cousin of Napoleon III, having been introduced to her salon.

Gautier remained in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, and the aftermath of the Commune of 1871, dying of heart disease at the age of sixty-one in 1872.

Though ostensibly a Romantic poet, Gautier may be seen as a forerunner to, or point of reference for, a number of divergent poetic movements including symbolism and modernism.

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Kline, A. S.

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