There have been three previous Russian editions of Bellingshausen's Two seasons, in 1831, 1949 and 1961. The potential significance of this new edition is that it follows its predecessor after a long interval, during which the all-pervasive Soviet system collapsed. It is one of a series of more than thirty exploration narratives, to date, which was launched in 2006 by a leading publisher in the genre and which includes works by foreign as well as Russian authors, several of which describe polar or partly polar expeditions, Amundsen, Kruzenshtern, Litke, Nansen etc. This volume received a second impression at the end of 2009.
Also included are five other texts by members of the Imperial Russian Navy's 1819–1821 expedition which were previously published or republished in separate collections (Andreyev Reference Andreyev1949; Sementovskii Reference Sementovskii1951). The editors have provided bibliographic information about all six titles, explanatory notes, and a glossary of nautical terms. There is an introduction by the former glaciologist Vladislav Koryakin who has directed the Department of the History of Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences in recent years. The book is sturdily produced and all parties are to be congratulated for getting it back into print and for including the supplementary texts.
There are extensive illustrations including drawings by the expedition's artist Pavel Mikhailov, at least two of which were not included in the Soviet editions, plus a few images taken from Dumont d'Urville's Atlas pittoresque, other unattributed sketches, and some modern or not so modern photographs, all in black and white. Russian publishers are just as good at printing pictures nowadays as anyone else. So it is a pity that Mikhailov's drawings, which were full page and on larger pages in the Soviet editions, only receive half or a third of a page here. Other illustrations are squeezed into even smaller spaces. Given those restrictions the quality is generally quite good, but there are some lapses. The photograph of Bellingshausen's statue (page 37), for example, recalls the dreariest Soviet smudges.
The text of Two seasons appears generally sound. But like their predecessors the editors have failed to notice some of the errors in the first edition. The most striking is the discrepancy between Bellingshausen's two sets of latitudes for Kirribilli Point in Sydney Harbour, the second of which is wrong by two degrees or about 220 km to the north (page 432). That long-standing dereliction of scholarship has in the past deceived others into hailing the second figure as ‘highly accurate’ and ‘close to modern values’ (Govor Reference Govor1995).
The first edition entered its (Julian) dates in the margin, with the year and month at the head of every page and each new number aligned with the first paragraph for that day. This one follows the Soviet editions by replacing that lucid marginal system with added italic text, such as ‘21 January’ etc., inside each first paragraph but no page by page reminders, so useful for longer entries. (There are no running headers.)
Koryakin rightly surveys the whole voyage, not just its Antarctic phases, but inevitably emphasises the claim to first discovery of Antarctica on 16 January 1820 (O.S.) and to confirmatory evidence on 5 February 1820 (O.S.) (pages 16–18). The question of whether Bellingshausen ever put forward such a claim himself remains controversial. Koryakin goes some way to meet the opinion expressed by more cautious commentators, that Bellingshausen was frustrated and misled not only by poor visibility but also by his entirely understandable perplexity at the extremes of glaciation that he encountered. Koryakin underlines the point by contrasting Bellingshausen's dissatisfaction with the probes made in 1820 with his satisfaction over the more solid discoveries of Peter I Island and the Alexander I Coast in 1821 (pages 17–21). To expect a Russian scholar to admit to any connection between Cook's earlier and similar misunderstanding of glaciation and that experienced by his admirer Bellingshausen would be asking too much this side of Utopia. But the present reviewer must deplore the veil that Koryakin draws over most Soviet Antarctic historiography before 1949, including Shokalskii, Vvedenskii and the first edition of the Soviet Encyclopaedia (Bulkeley Reference Bulkeley2010).
There is one inexcusable blunder. Not having the present edition yet before him, Koryakin paginated about fifteen of his references to the second (1949) edition. But apparently neither the editors nor the publishers could be bothered, during production, to re-paginate them to the edition that now contains them. The print run for the second edition was about eight times more than the first and third put together, so it is not particularly rare even now. But it still costs four or five times the price of this one. So much for respecting Drofa's middle-income readership. (Besides being uncommercial, giving people the URLs to on line copies of the second edition would not have helped, because they do not show the pagination.)
The book has neither index, nor bibliography of works cited, for example something by Petermann in 1867 (page 22), nor historical bibliography, nor list of illustrations, nor biographies of Bellingshausen and Lazarev. That makes it a useful stop gap rather than the sort of scholarly edition that might take us forward from the Soviet editions of half a century ago. In particular, although it mentions Mikhail Belov it pays little attention to various studies published by Belov and others in the 1960s, after the previous edition. Take the question of whether Two seasons uses Julian or naval (noon to noon) dates. Having recently downloaded the on line copy of the 1831 edition now generously provided by the Russian State Library, the present reviewer is less convinced than he was, alas, a few months ago by Belov's argument on this (Belov Reference Belov1963; Bulkeley Reference Bulkeley2010). But that is one of several matters that any comprehensive new edition would need to address. Another is the original chart of the expedition's itinerary, discovered too late to be discussed in the 1961 edition.
Bellingshausen and his companions deserve a painstaking reexamination of the nineteenth century originals of the texts included here and of other sources, a reevaluation of all previous Russian and non-Russian Bellingshausen scholarship, and a subsequent edition of Two seasons which draws that work together and presents all materials to an impeccable standard. There is no knowing how much of this they will ever receive. Or when.
