Три загадки «Записок Великой особы»

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The Notebook of a Great Person is one of the conventional names of a well-known Russian travelogue from the time of the Great Embassy. The author of this essay is unknown, and it is unclear why he chose to focus on trivial matters instead of on European culture. Scholars have recently raised yet another question: Is the essay authentic, or is it a clever forgery? These are the three main riddles of the text that this article investigates. According to Irina Voznesenskaya and Aleksei Alekseev, the countless number of manuscripts and the unexplored manuscript tradition of this text suggest that we are dealing with a fictional story about a fictional journey that was compiled based on real travelogues. Since researchers have only taken the initial steps in studying the manuscripts, this view remains a bold hypothesis. The similarities between several locations in the Notebook of a Great Person and some places mentioned in Petr Tolstoy’s travel diary, which were noted by Irina Voznesenskaya, are intriguing and suggest that the two authors may have had some contact with each other in Venice. Currently (no comma) there are two opinions regarding the authorship of the Notebook of a Great Person. Fred Otten attributes the Notebook to Andrei M. Apraksin, while Dmitriy Yu. Guzevich ascribes it to Andrei P. Izmailov. Otten’s argumentation, however, is subjective and is not based on a faithful reading of the material. Guzevich’s idea about the authorship of Andrei Izmailov is merely a conjecture although recent archival findings in Italy do not contradict this attribution. If Petr A. Tolstoy demonstrates an inexplicably deep understanding of the refined aspects of Western European culture in his travel notes, the author of the Notebook of a Great Person displays the completely opposite tendency in this regard. One should, however, not assume that different cultural norms circulated at the top of Russian society. Even Tsar Peter I himself was occasionally among those who disregarded cultural norms. It is possible that educational levels and cultural expectations did not have a direct impact on Russians in the age of Peter the Great, but rather certain forms of social behavior triggered either the promotion or the rejection of certain aspects of Western culture.