XI International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia
10th-14th July 2023
Valeria Kolosova, Kira Kovalenko, and Olga Belichenko (European University at St. Petersburg, Russia), "Documenting the Plant Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Russia: between East and West"
The eighteenth century in Russia was the time of numerous dramatic cultural changes. Among other, they influenced also availability and use of natural resources, including plants.
The newly commercialized plants made available through the New World colonization as well as East India Company, became known in Russia thanks to the translations from French, German and English, including compilations of texts from various sources. The plant landscape changing via international trade can be traced in works of renowned agriculturist A.T. Bolotov.
The Russian Academy of Sciences, in its turn, launched a number of large-scale expeditions exploring the Eastern / Asian part of Russia. The expeditions of Krasheninnikov, Gmelin, Pallas and Lepyokhin demonstrated the optics of the young natural science in relation to the botanical discoveries.
Finally, the existing tradition of Russian literacy kept track of the already known plants, with the genres of church literature, business documents, and herbals. The first records of proverbs, sayings, as well as the dialect words from the 18th century help us to trace the existing practice in contrast to innovations brought by the colonial explorations.
PhytoLex, an online database aiming to match Russian scientific and colloquial plant names of the 11th-18th cc. with the Latin nomenclature, unites the three mentioned groups of texts. The three small study cases of database use will provide insights on the evolution and synonymy of plant names; their links to the social groups; as well as the paralinguistic information.
