MLN

Francesco Algarotti's Viaggi di Russia is a work dealing primarily with Russian Realpolitik and war. And yet it includes a great number of "délices" and "agréments." This can be explained in part by the demands of the eighteenth-century travel genre, but also by the combination of "stoicism" and "epicureanism" that existed in the circles that Algarotti frequented, and especially in that of Friedrich II of Prussia. Algarotti has been criticized for adorning the account of his journey through the northern seas to Russia with Latin quotations referring to the classical Mediterranean world. But allusions to ancient Rome, playful and serious at the same time, are essential to his analysis of Russian military power and to his criticism of the Russian campaign of 1736-39 in the Crimea.