[Text in Russian] Atlas Trinadtsati Chastei S. Peterburga s podrobnym izobrazheniem naberezhnykh, ulits, pereulkov, kazennykh i obyvatel'nykh domov [WITH] Alfabitnyi ukazatel' k Atlasu 13-ti chastei S. Peterburga [An Atlas of the Thirteen Parts of St. Petersburg with a detailed image of its embankments, streets, alleyways, and town houses [WITH] An Alphabetical Index] [Inscribed and Signed to Dmitry Yegorovich Benardaki] by TSYLOV, Nikolai Ivanovich - 1849

St. Petersburg: s.i., 1849. First Edition. Two volumes; small quarto (26.5cm.); uniformly bound in publisher's blind-ruled purple cloth, gilt-lettered spines; atlas volume includes 392 numbered street plans as well as one hand-colored map of the city and 13 hand-colored district maps (collated and complete); index volume: [6],279,[1],39pp. Cloth extremities rather faded, spines uniformly sunned to tan, a few plates trimmed a bit close touching numbers, else a Very Good, internally fine set of the first atlas of St. Petersburg, albeit lacking errata leaf. Front free endpaper of the atlas inscribed and signed by Tsylov "To Dmitry Yegorovich Benardaki / With the sincerest devotion / From the author / Nikolai Tsylov"). The seed of St. Petersburg was first planted in 1610 as a small but powerful fortress built where the Neva meets the Okhta River. The Swedish, having recently annexed a large swathe of land from the Russians during the "Smuta" (a.k.a. the Time of Troubles, 1598-1613), were in need of a stronghold to preserve their rule over the newly-acquired region of Ingria and thus Nyenschantz was built. For almost a hundred years the fortress remained under threat of invasion, rebuffing at least one major attack, in 1656. By the mid-1670s the fortress had been modernized and expanded to house as many as six hundred. But while the Swedish saw the location as a protective measure, Peter the Great saw something much more powerful: a gate to the Western world. By 1700 the Great Northern War had broken out and by 1703 the fortress had fallen and Ingria was once again Russian soil. With deliberation Peter the Great made plans to establish a city on the estuary of the Neva River, and that city would be the new capital of Russia, St. Petersburg.

Situated as a port town and a link between Russia and the West, St. Petersburg was for the next two hundred years a cosmopolitan and Western-looking capital city, while Moscow came to represent Russia's medieval and Orthodox origins. Fittingly, the first topographical description of the city, which appeared in 1713, was published not in Russia, but in Leipzig, anonymously, and in German. Speculation has been made that the work was commissioned by Peter himself, who saw the need to paint a positive portrait of the city amongst his Western peers. Apparently he saw no need to win over his own subjects, and for much of the 18th century there remained a dearth of secular Russian literature, printed in Russia, about Russia. The first full-length book about St. Petersburg in Russian arrived on the scene in 1749 by the hand of a zealous librarian named Andrei Bogdanov, but his oversized folio was never published. The most popular description of the city published in the 18th century was by a German, Johann Gottlieb Georgi. The title translates as "Description of the Russian Imperial Capital City St. Petersburg and the Memorable Sites in Its Suburbs, with a Map" (1794), and included detailed descriptions of the school, churches, hospitals, charitable institutions, and government agencies throughout the city. The work was hugely influential, saw several editions in its original German, as well as a French translation, but most importantly, it was translated into Russian. Its thumbprint can be seen on Tsylov's atlas.

Between the publication of Georgi's "Description" and Tsylov's "Atlas," however, another sixty years and the Napoleonic Wars intervened. St. Petersburg had now been scrutinized by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol, among others, yet some still decried the lack of literature devoted exclusively to the city itself. Significantly, in 1845, a leading member of the Westernizing faction of Russia's budding intelligentisia named Vissarion Belinsky, published an anthology titled "A Physiology of Petersburg," in which the author accused Russian society of missing proper "belletristic works in the form of travel narratives, [puteshestriviia], accounts of tours [poezdki], sketches, stories, and geographic descriptions [opisaniia] that would acquaint [the public] with the various parts of boundless and diverse Russia" (cf. Emily D. Johnson, "How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself" (2006), p. 35). In the next five years a flood of travelogues and topographical studies appeared on the market, best among them the first atlas of St. Petersburg, compiled by the high-ranking officer Nikolai Ivanovich Tsylov (1801-1879). Tsylov's atlas was born of a smaller such work he had compiled, of a single district of the city. This had been received with such warmth that he felt compelled to produce the present work, a democratic and nearly microscopic depiction of the city in which the street plans are even demarcated by building materials (stone, wood, or a mix). The atlas is accompanied by a substantial index of the buildings, including a directory of the major townhouses, their inhabitants, and even the number of floors (rarely exceeding four). Of special note are the thirteen maps preceding each section, expertly hand-colored in all extant copies.

Based on auction records and library holdings it can be surmised that very few sets were issued, possibly by subscription or privately: of the three copies located in OCLC (Harvard, NYPL, Wisconsin) at least the Wisconsin copy is also inscribed by Tsylov. NUC adds a copy at the Library of Congress; COPAC adds copies at the British Library and Cambridge.

Provenance: Inscribed and signed by the author to Dmitry Yegorovich Benardaki (sometimes spelled Dmitrii Egorovich) (1799-1870), presumed to be the inspiration for Murazov in Nikolai Gogol's novel "Dead Souls." Already in the 1830s Benardaki had amassed an enormous fortune through speculation on wheat. He was first introduced to Gogol by the Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin, a relationship rather novelistically described by Henri Troyat in his biography of Gogol "Divided Soul" (1973): "From [Benardaki's] conversation...Gogol discovered the ruthless world of competition and profit, and the struggle for market control. The eloquent and astute Benardaki became for him a personification of the practical man. The Russian of the future must be modeled upon this man. What a fine character for a novel this Christian millionaire would make!" (p. 200). A rather more grounded description of the relationship can be found in David Christian's article "The Neglected Great Reform," published in "Russia's Great Reform, 1855-1881") (1994). According to Christian, Benardaki loaned Gogol some money in 1839 "and it may be that a grateful Gogol took him as his model for the virtuous tax farmer Muzarov" (p. 113). In any case, Benardaki's 1863 patent of nobility went up at Sotheby's in 2007 for an eye-watering sum.