Writing On Russia
Herberstein's knowledge of Slovene, acquired in his youth, allowed him to communicate freely with Russians, as Slovene and Russian both belong to the Slavic languages. He used this ability to question a variety of people in Russia on a wide range of topics. This gave him an insight into Russia and Russians unavailable to the few previous visitors to Russia.
He probably wrote his first account of life in Russia between 1517 and 1527, but no copy of this survives. In 1526 he was asked to produce a formal report on his experiences in Russia, but this remained relatively unnoticed in the archives until he was able to find time to revise and expand it, which he possibly started in the 1530s.
The evidence suggests that Herberstein was an energetic and capable ethnographer. He investigated in depth both by questioning locals and by critically examining the scarce existing literature on Russia. The result was his major work, a book written in Latin titled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (literally Notes on Muscovite Affairs), published in 1549. This became the main early source of knowledge in Western Europe on Russia.
Although he contributed a great deal to European knowledge of Russia, he also contributed to a spelling confusion which did not emerge until the end of the 19th century and still causes disagreement: he recorded the spelling of tsar as czar. This 'cz' spelling is against the usage of all Slavonic languages; although the spelling varies, Slavonic languages use the 'ts' pronunciation, and usually that spelling in the Romanised form. English and French began to move from the 'cz' spelling to the 'ts' spelling in the 19th century.
Read more about this topic: Sigismund Von Herberstein
Famous quotes containing the words writing on, writing and/or russia:
“The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)
“The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.”
—Eldridge Cleaver (b. 1935)
“In Russia there is an emigration of intelligence: émigrés cross the frontier in order to read and to write good books. But in doing so they contribute to making their fatherland, abandoned by spirit, into the gaping jaws of Asia that would like to swallow our little Europe.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)