travel accounts of Russia

[Jules Levin]

On 3/29/2011 9:27 AM, William Ryan wrote:
> A colleague of mine in the Hakluyt Society, Ray Howgego (author of the 
> mighty /Encyclopedia of Exploration/), who shares my interest in 
> western travel accounts of Russia, has sent me the following list of 
> books which he suspects are all confected by writers who probably 
> never went to Russia:

Let me take advantage of this topic to mention the most important 
Hakluyt publication re Russia, Giles Fletcher's Of the Rus Commonwealth, 
1591.   The large number of Russian words cited and defined are rendered 
useless in subsequent editions.   The Russian translation (1905) merely 
translated Fletcher's definitions into contemporary Russian.   A later 
English edition used the Russian translation as a pony to "correct" 
Fletcher's often interesting and significant renderings.  Thus 
Fletcher's Riba bela shows up as 'belarybitsa' in the "Correct Russian" 
column.  If you are researching 16th Century Russian, first occurrence 
of Russian words in English, or how Elizabethan spellers would render 
Russian pronunciation, you must go to the original truly beautiful 
Hakluyt publication of 1591.
Jules Levin

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