ABSTRACT

Carla Serena was a Belgian-born woman of Jewish origin married to a London-based Venetian merchant who took a six-year long solo journey to two peripheral regions of the Russian Empire, namely the Caucasus and the Black Sea-Caspian Steppe, in the 1870s. This chapter analyses five articles she wrote on the Caucasus in Le Tour du Monde (1880–82) and the volume, Seule dans les steppes. Épisodes de mon voyage aux pays del Kalmoucks et des Kirghiz (1883), which deals with the Russian Steppe and its people. In particular, it shows the twofold contribution of Serena’s works to the study of travel writing in the Russian Empire. On the one hand, Serena’s accounts are valuable historical documents that depict the Caucasus and the Russian Steppe in the second half of the nineteenth century, including the Russian–Ottoman War of 1877–78. On the other hand, they reflect the writer’s position as a Western European woman travelling alone, which influenced not only the topics she covers, but also her style, which departed from that of earlier travellers to the same regions.