Freygang, Frederika und Wilhelm von (nee Kudriavskaia).

[EARLY WOMEN'S TRAVEL NARRATIVE] Lettres sur le Caucase et la Géorgie suivies d’une relation d’un Voyage en Perse en 1812. Relation d’un Voyage a Tauris en 1812.

Hamburg: Chez Perthes & Besser ("Se vend à St. Petersbourg chez Pluchart, à Londres chez T. Boosey, à Paris chez Treuttel & Wurtz."), 1816. Octavo (20.5 x 13 cm). Later quarter imitation leather binding; [3], 4-230, [3], 234-353, [2] pp. [1] map and 4 engraved vignettes in the text (signed S. D. Bendixen and F. A. de la Belle); errata page. Inventory stamp of the Gatchina Palace Library (Gatchinskii dvorets); half title signed "Casimir" in ink. Edges of boards lightly rubbed, light stains to front endpapers, p. 163 with neat tape repair, a few light stains/foxing throughout, two pages with tiny hole, one marginal annotation in pencil. This copy lacks the folding map of the Caucasus region. Item #P002764

This account of Frederika Afanas'eva von Freygang’s (nee Kudriavskaia) journey to the Caucasus in the years 1811–1812 is one of the earliest such accounts by a Russian woman writer. The correspondence sent by Frederika to her husband (then head of a military command to the Transcaucasus region during the latter stages of the Russo-Persian War of 1804–1813) chronicles her arduous journey through the Russian steppe and the main range of the Caucasus Mountains with her three children. The descriptive passages of the people, customs, and geography encountered along the way are rendered in the flowing French idiom of the Russian aristocracy and represent a valuable record of the early era of Russian colonial expansion in the region. Freygang’s impressions and descriptions were of undoubted importance to the military administration of the time and to the aristocratic readership, as the provenance of this copy illustrates (it stems from the Imperial collection of the Gatchina Palace Library). An important work from an early nineteenth-century female author. The second part of the book, by Frederika Freygang’s husband Wilhelm, is a historico-political account of the Transcaucasus region compiled from notes taken in the field. Freygang’s military sorties took him to the territories of the present day nations of Georgia, Armenia, Iran, and Azerbaijan, and his account of these lands, then mostly under the administration of the Persian Empire, is an early exemplar of the colonial and orientalist works that would come into vogue with the reading public in the following decades. Together an early and important work with broad anthropological and historical interest.

Price: €600.00

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