Reysen’s Muscovy and Struys’s Muscovy

Abstract

Beginning with Struys’s departure from Amsterdam in 1668, with which its third act opens, Reysen’s protagonist’s adventures acquire a greater verisimilitude (and are often borne out by other sources) than its previous parts. Struys’s oral recollections of recent events were obviously shaped through the editing process that human memory exerts, suppressing moral ambiguities and ordering them into a pattern.¹ Walter Benjamin has argued that traditionally in Europe ‘seamen were… masters of storytelling’, with a knack for ‘practical interests’.² This predilection surfaces in Reysen on occasion indeed, betraying in such moments the presence in the text of the historical Jan Struys (the accurate listing of his or his fellows’ wages are instances of this). Many of the anecdotes rendered in Reysen, such as the skating forays or the tobacco quarrel on the way from Riga to Moscow, seem infused by Jan Struys’s vivid personal recollections. But the book is not a diary and Struys’s narrative leaves yawning gaps. His group’s pause at Moscow during the winter of 1668–69 gave Reysen’s ghostwriter an interlude to present a chorography of Muscovy. It was patterned after the standard view of the tsar’s empire rendered in various previous texts published in Western and Central Europe, especially in the work by Adam Olearius.³