Five journeys to tsarist Russia

The travel notes of five writers – Astolphe de Custine, Theophile Gautier, Alexandre Dumas, Jeremiah Curtin and Mark Twain – who visited Russian Empire almost at one and the same time – are compared in this article. Special attention is paid to the figure of Jeremy Curtin, an american ethnographer, linguist and folklorist, almost unknown to Russian literary criticism.