ABSTRACT
Seventeenth-century Muscovites did not travel. They might escape, migrate, or peregrinate, but they did not view movement through space as a worthy pursuit in its own right and did not encourage wonder at things profane or blasphemous. As far as the gelehrte and aufgeklArte travelers were concerned, this meant describing and classifying "everything", and as Russia was "a blank slate" in matters of enlightenment, "everything" loomed very large indeed. In seventeenth-century Muscovy "Russian" had been equal to "Orthodox" (although not the other way around), and baptism had dispelled foreignness along with darkness. Universal history as a sequence of technological and behavioral stages was not the only beneficiary of ethnographic research. Russian history as a professional and imperial enterprise also arose from the study of non-Russian peoples. The reason for this was a paradox: the linguistic quest for the national origins had been based on the presumed identity of languages and nations.
