Grinevskaia, I.A.: A Journey to the Lands of the Sun

Title

Puteshestvie v kraia solntsa, Sankt-Peterburg 1914 (2016-)

A Journey to the Lands of the Sun

Keywords

Summary

Grinevskaia’s travel notes, recounting her journey through Egypt and the Middle East in 1910-1911, are part of an ongoing publication in “Ezhegodnik rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo Doma” (2016, 2019, 2020, 2021). Of the 33 chapters comprising the travel notes, only chapters 1-13 have already been published. The travel notes provide details of Grinevskaia’s journey from Warsaw to Odessa, Constantinople, Athens, Alexandria, Cairo, Ramla, Port Said, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Beirut, Izmir, again Constantinople, Varna, Odessa. A valuable example of Silver Age travelogue, this work is a combination of travel anecdotes, historical digressions, spiritual reflections (especially on Bábism), ponderings upon the author’s own writings, careful tackling of topical questions (for instance, the position of women in “Oriental” countries and in Russia).

Bio

Izabella Grinevskaia, née Beyle Friedberg, was a Russian writer and translator. Born in Hrodna in the family of a Jewish writer, she later moved to Saint Petersburg, where she began to attend literary circles. She married the journalist Aleksandr Grinevskii, with whom she contributed to the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedia. Following their separation, she remarried to fellow writer Mordecai Spector and moved to Warsaw. The two eventually divorced. She later lived in Odessa, Constantinople, Saint Petersburg. Her first publication, a novella, dates back to 1888; from then on, she would write short stories, poems, dramas, both in Yiddish and Russian. She was also active as a translator from many languages, including Polish, Italian, French, German. A follower of the Bábi Faith, she is most known for her historical drama Bab (1903), a partially fictionalised rendering of the life of the Báb (the founder of Bábism). The play was a critical success, and it was performed five times in Saint Petersburg before it was banned by the censors. It also appeared in translation in German, English, French. In 1910-1911 Grinevskaia travelled to Egypt and the Middle East, spending two weeks as a guest of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the head of the Bábi Faith. She consequently wrote an account of this experience under the title A Journey to the Lands of the Sun (1914), which was not published due to the outbreak of WW1 and the Revolution. After 1917 she continued to live in Russia, though virtually without publishing. Her diaries of the Leningrad blockade were published only recently.

Sources

A. Grishunin, “Grinevskaia, Izabella Arkad’evna”, in Russkie pisateli. 1800-1917. Biograficheskii ukazatel’, t. 2, Moskva 1992, p. 44-45;

A. Gracheva, “Grinevskaia, Izabella Arkad’evna”, in Dictionary of Russian Women Writers, ed. by M. Ledkovsky et al., Westport-London 1994, p. 232-234;

E. Mitnik, Neizvestnye materialy Izabelly Grinevskoi: “Puteshestvie v kraia solntsa”, “Ezhegodnik rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo Doma na 2005-2006”, 2009, p. 246-267.

A.F.