Northern and Eastern Tartary: Russian translation of the travel diary of Nicolaas Witsen

In his time Nicolaas Witsen (1641-1717) was probably the greatest connoisseur of the vast territories of Inner Eurasia. He studied not only the existing literature on the subject, but also collected an enormous amount of contemporary data about these areas, until then hardly known in Western Europe. Witsen’s pivotal role in the political and commercial elites of Holland enabled him to build a huge network of informants in Europe, Russia and Asia who provided him with the knowledge he needed.

In 1691 he stunned the scholars of the English Royal Society with the first large size map (115 by 125 centimeters) of the ‘Northern and Eastern part of Europe and Asia’ which he had more or less completed four years earlier. This map covered almost the whole area of Inner Eurasia which in Witsen’s time was known under the name of Tartaria or Tartary, the lands where the Tartars, the nomadic peoples, lived. Especially remarkable was his detailed rendering of Siberia, only recently conquered by the Russians and still almost completely a terra incognita in the West.

In 1692 he produced 'Noord en Oost Tartarye' (North and East Tartary), a book of 660 pages which served as a companion to the map. A revised edition of this work in two folio volumes and a total of thousand pages was printed in 1705. Despite the book’s title, Witsen had not limited himself to the North and East of Inner Eurasia. In fact, his book embraced an even larger area than his map, because besides Siberia, Mongolia and Central Asia it also described Manchuria, the Islands to the North of Japanese Honshu, Korea, as well as Persia, the Crimea, the Caucasus, the lower and middle Volga region and the Ural mountains.

The uniqueness of Witsen’s pioneering work is beyond dispute. He offered far more than a purely geographical description of these parts of the earth. 'North and East Tartary' also dealt with their fauna and flora, and no author before Witsen had devoted so much attention to the history, customs and languages of the nomadic peoples of Inner Eurasia. Although 'North and East Tartary' remained a bibliographic rarity written in a not easily accessible 17th century Dutch, it has always been praised by scholars who were able to consult it. Especially in Russia Witsen’s reputation continued to be very high. Nowadays he is mentioned on many Russian historical websites as the first who reported in printed form on certain towns, nationalities, languages, excavated antiquities or the discovery of minerals. In the past, a number of very prominent Russian experts have acknowledged that Witsen opened a new era in the study of Siberia and they deplored that no translation of his book was available.

The Russian edition of 'North and East Tartary' has been prepared by a group of Russian and Dutch historians. The Russian translation, made by Wilhelmina Gerardovna Triesman as far back as 1945-1950, had to be edited, and gaps had to be filled in. The text was provided with extensive scholarly annotations, which took up as much as one third of the new edition (volume 3). The work was co-ordinated by Dr. N.P. Kopaneva (St. Petersburg), Prof. Dr. B. Naarden (Amsterdam) and Prof. Dr. N.M. Rogozhin (Moscow).

The book was published in three deluxe volumes by Pegasus Publishers, Amsterdam, in 2010. Official presentations took place in St. Petersburg (National Library of Russia) on October 20, 2010 and in Moscow (Russian State Library) on July 14, 2011. With the help of the Dutch Embassy in Moscow and the Dutch Consulate General in St. Petersburg copies of Witsen’s book have been distributed free of charge to 107 libraries and scholarly institutions in the Russian Federation.

OBJECTIVES
Editing and publishing the Russian translation of the book ‘Noord en Oost Tartarije’ (‘North and East Tartary’) written in 1705 by Nicolaas Witsen.

RESULTS
The first complete Russian edition of the book came out in 2010. Presentations took place in St. Petersburg and Moscow. 107 copies of the book were distributed free of charge to libraries and scholarly institutions in the Russian Federation.