Custine, Marquis de. Journey for our time; the journals of the Marquis de Custine, 1839,     edited and translated by Phyllis Penn Kohler. Chicago: H. Regnery, 1951.  
Alternate annotation, SL 2005
 

    Marquis de Cuistine was a French writer, intellect, and anti-revolutionist who ventured on a journey to find an alternative form of government to that of his own representative monarchy. He was not in favor of this compromising form of government and was hoping that Russia had something more to offer that he could write about. What he found was not a message of hope but of reality. The main body of work contains descriptions of the social conditions of a society living under a tyrant leader.  The author also mentions the government and its position in society as being all encompassing.  In doing so he adds interviews of diplomats. His intended audience is the people of France, more specifically the people of influence in his country.

    Cuistine was born into an anti-revolution aristocrat family in which his father and grandfather were killed for trying to protect the monarchy. Being of the upper class, many of the people he met and described are of a similar stature with a similar purpose: politics.  At one point the author describes his meeting with the Czar and their discussion of leadership.  Poland is referred to briefly when describing the need to dismiss its former constitution for the ideals of the Russian Emperor. Also described is a despotic regime under Czar Nicholas. Under his rule the people are seen as ignorant and obedient to their ruler. Such similarities are seen in the medieval feudal system when Cuistine describes Petersburg's peasants as owned by the land and in doing so reminds the reader of his biases toward French supremacy by accounting for these people as barbarian.

    He composed his accounts in 1839, after the French Revolution, while the book was not translated into English until 1951 by an American Ambassador to present day Russia. The value of Marquis de Cuistine’s accounts for the study of the Baltic Region is not apparent through his travels in Russia- often he describes the territory of specific cities and does not insinuate a presence of Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia in any of his descriptions.  However, what is of value is the descriptions of the state that imposed its ruling on the region between the two time periods.  The similarities of the social happenings in Cuistine’s accounts of 1839  to that of the translator’s preface in 1951 were tremendous.  This illustrates to the Baltic enthusiast, that the region was in standstill for over one hundred years.

(JD 2006)