Discovering ‘Little Russia ’: Victor Tissot and Ukraine’s Image in the West in the 1880s

The Swiss Victor Tissot (1844-1917) was a very popular writer of Belle Epoque France. His popularity began in 1876 thanks to a polemical book Voyage aux pays des Milliards, which encountered an unprecedented success in France, because of his critical assessment of the results of the Prussian-French war on the destiny of Europe. He was recognised at once by the public as an excellent "écrivain voyageur" and he started to write a series of travel books, pretending to offer an accurate picture of the countries he visited. He gave, in a brilliant journalistic style, a lot of geographical, political and cultural elements in order to allow his public to understand their reality prima manu. Since his books became a sort of best sellers it is interesting to analyse what kind of information he offered to his readers, which image of those countries he propagated among them. This article presents the case-study of Little Russia, as he called Ukraine: in 1882 Tissot published in Paris La Russie et les Russes, whose first part, entitled La Petite-Russie, is devoted to his journey from Lviv to Kyiv. He describes the landscape, the towns, the villages, the personages he met, the stories he listened, the conversations he had, illustrating the way of life of various ethnic groups of different social level: Jews, Poles, Ruthenians, Russians where appears evident his personal point of view, modelled on a Swiss French "European" and bourgeois way of life. Among prejudices, stereotypes inherited by a sum of previous literary readings, curiosities and anecdotes, historical excursus, errors and misunderstandings he depicted an image of Little Russia very interesting if we think to the literary audience he had in the last quarter of the 19th century, thanks to the translations and the reprints of various parts of this book in successive and separated editions.