‘Brief Conversations for Pilgrims’: Rasputin, Russian-speaking travellers and the pilgrim experience in Jerusalem in 1911–1912

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1911, Grigorii Rasputin undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. That same year, the Katanov brothers published a quadrilingual phrasebook in Jerusalem – in Russian, Greek, Turkish and Arabic – designed for Russian pilgrims. The Russian pilgrim market was a very different one to the western tourist and pilgrim market typically catered to by phrasebook and guidebook authors in Palestine. Russian pilgrims tended to be poorer, of lower socio-economic status, to travel in large groups, and to have limited contact with people and places in Palestine outside the churches and religious sites which were their goal – all of which made their linguistic needs very different. Using Rasputin’s own account of his pilgrimage, the Katanov brothers’ phrasebook and another contemporary account by English journalist Stephan Graham, this paper explores the Russian pilgrim experience in Jerusalem and how it contrasted with that of the elite western tourists who are most prominent in our written sources.