ABSTRACT
Gogol’s Nose was one of many witnesses to the fashion of the day in the imper ial capital of Russia and its inspiration, the 16-year-old Khosrow Mirza (1813-75), the seventh son of Crown Prince ‘Abbas Mirza (Figure 3.1), who travelled from Tehran to St Petersburg on the “Redemption” mission after the Tehran massacre of the Russian embassy, including its head, Russian minister plenipotentiary A. S. Griboedov (1790-1829) on 30 January/11 February 1829.3 To avoid yet another military conflict with Russia, seemingly inevitable in this situation, Fath ‘Ali Shah sent his grandson with apologies to St Petersburg. His trip lasted ten months (May 1829-February 1830),4 of which he spent almost three in St Petersburg, fully enjoying the life of a celebrity among the highest Russian nobility. Khosrow Mirza’s “Redemption” mission was of extreme importance, not only for both countries but for all participants in the Great Game,5 determining its future direction. As such, it generated several contemporary records from both the Russian and the Persian sides, which scrupulously collected various details about each other, including news from the Ottoman front, or the illness of the shah and the crown prince. There have been attempts to introduce the primary sources regarding the mission. However, until now there has been no comparative study of the complex surviving Persian and Russian materials related to this event and the people involved. This large task remains outstanding, and the purpose of this chapter is to produce a survey of the materials that will be the basis of a forthcoming reconstruction and analysis of the influence of the mission on the future direction of the Great Game, of the perception of the Persians and the Russians of each other, of the ways and methods of identification of the common and alien in each other, or what is known as the “otherness” in the dichotomy of Orientalism-Occidentalism.
