‘Lord Royston’s Tour’

 I admire Lydia Davis’s short story about Marie Curie. It’s a peculiar blend of biography, essay and historical fiction. But she also did a similar kind of piece that might be even better. “Lord Royston’s Tour” is a short story based on Philip Yorke’s journey through the Russian Empire.

Lord Royston was 21 when he set out in 1806. He endured plague, fevers, famine, heat exhaustion and frostbite, driven ever further by his curiosity. He died in a shipwreck while coming home in 1808.

He was a classics scholar, the kind that left Greek anapests in albums at country inns.

He saw the touristy sights — the skin of the horse that had carried Gustavus Adolphus in the battle of Lutzen, was a draw in his day. But he traveled mainly to answer his own questions.

When the archbishop of Archangel, who was fluent in Latin, didn’t know whether the Samoyeds in his archdiocese were pagan or Christian, Royston acquired three sledges and 12 reindeer and set out to the Arctic Circle to find the answer. Pagan.

It was 70 degrees below freezing. The trip was not easy.

Along the way, he acquired a friend, Mr. Poinsett, a South Carolinian. Royston said Poinsett was one of the few literate men to come out of the woods of the New World.

It’s hard to picture the world at that time. Here’s a snapshot of Royston’s party as it leaves the court of a Tatar prince in the desert near the Caucasus Mountains.

 

He sets out for Derbend with an escort. The caravan is very oddly composed: he and his American companion, a Swiss, a Dutchman, a Mulatto, a Tartar of Rezan, a body of Lesgees for escort, two Jews, an envoy of one of the native princes returning from St. Petersburg, and three Circassian girls one of the guides has bought in the mountains and is taking to sell at Baku.

 

A lot of us would have trouble finding these places on a map. This kind of fiction is a way of finding that world and that time in our imaginations.

• Source: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis; New York: Picador, 2009. “Lord Royston’s Tour” is on pp. 216-40. The quotation is on p. 229.

For notes on her biographed story, see “Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman,” April 1, 2024.