Yury Golovkin - Ramifications

Ramifications

There is nothing like failure to ensure obscurity and oblivion, and nothing significant has been written on the Golovkin expedition, even in Russian, since 1875. For the post-war period that may largely be due to the enforced sensitivities of Soviet scholars to the delicacy of Sino-Soviet relations, for, as one of them put it in 1959, it was all a question of the penetration and exploitation of the Chinese market, and that was hardly a friendly act.

The Golovkin embassy was a political failure, but it provided a unique intellectual opportunity which was not missed by contemporaries in St Petersburg. Filipp Vigel’, whose reminiscences are a valuable source for the workings of Russian upper-class society in the nineteenth-century, recorded that the prospect of travelling to China excited much interest; his own motives for participating were, however, somewhat mercenary, for he was short of money and it was only through his influential connections that he was able to land himself with a well-paid position on the embassy in a clerical capacity. More significantly, the embassy included a party of scientists and other ‘savants’ under the direction of the Academy of Sciences and under the leadership of Count Jan Potocki (1761–1815). Potocki’s leadership of the scientific team was not simply a matter of his personal connections with the fellow Pole, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, for his intellectual and political credentials for fulfilling that role were impeccable, and without him it is unlikely that the brilliant German orientalist, Julius Klaproth, would have had any part to play in the mission. Others in the party of scientists carried out a detailed exploration of Siberia, studies of the flora and fauna, and so on.