A Visit to the Exhibition of All Nations: The Chicago World’s Fair and the United States in Vasily Sidorov’s Travel Writing

Abstract

The Chicago World’s Fair represented a continuity of the World’s Fairs as key international events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which were widely covered, including in travelogues for home readership. The Russian Empire showed considerable interest in participating, especially after Americans organized a relief campaign during its famine a year ago. While the Russian government supervised the exhibits and sent specialists to study the American economy and society, many Russians visited the Fair individually, and some published travel accounts. This article explores the account titled America. Travel Notes and Impressions (1895) written by novelist and botanist Vasily Sidorov. Traveling with a group of European tourists, he admires American nature and praises American technological progress, mobility, and freedoms that could be potentially borrowed but shows uncertainty about major cities and excesses of industrialization and technological development, to a degree repeating what was pointed out by earlier Russian visitors. He evaluated the Fair and most of what he saw through the image of Europe which was also employed to emphasize his sense of cultural superiority.