In this lucid monograph, Edyta Bojanowska offers a close reading of the account written by one of Russia's most notable classical prose-writers, Ivan Goncharov, of the epic naval expedition dispatched by the Russian authorities in the 1850s to Japan. The expedition began in St. Petersburg in October 1852 and proceeded via Portsmouth, Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands, Cape Town, Singapore, and Hong Kong to Nagasaki. For Goncharov, who served as secretary to Vice-Admiral Evfimii Putiatin, the commander of the expedition, the voyage ended in August 1854, when he disembarked on Russia's Pacific seaboard to begin his journey back to St. Petersburg through Russia's Siberian possessions. The most visible political outcome of the expedition was a Russian trade agreement with Japan. Its longer-term, undeclared purpose was to strengthen Russia's position as an imperial power in the Far East.

The voyage also bore literary fruit, The Frigate Pallada, the first edition of which appeared in 1858 and would remain its author's favorite creation. This work is of interest on several levels. From the literary point of view, it is an engaging, indeed masterly, example of travel writing. From the point of view of the intellectual or political historian, it made a contribution to the debate, which flourished in this non-fictional or semi-fictional genre, about the relationship of Russia to the wider European world. It reflected Russia's own imperial mentality and aspirations. It demonstrated the tendency of Russian writers both to underline the perceived differences of Russia from her European neighbors and competitors and to emphasize her affinities with them.

Bojanowska's well-researched study of Goncharov's text is informed by engagement with scholarship on imperialism and colonization, as well as literary history. She establishes a rich historical context, in which the empire building and rivalries of other imperial powers are ever-present. Britain's Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60) in China; the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's US squadron in Tokyo shortly before the Pallada reached Nagasaki in 1854; the Crimean War (1853–56), in which hostilities between Britain and Russia broke out while the Pallada was at sea; the Indian Mutiny of 1857: these events in some way color Goncharov's impressions. Goncharov took up the self-justificatory notions shared by imperial powers about their duty to colonize thinly populated spaces and “civilize” their inhabitants. He peddled the stereotypes of the mid-nineteenth-century world about the supposed nature of ethnic groups. His various ideas about empire building and the cultural assumptions or anxieties that nourished them are likened to a kaleidoscope in which humanitarian sentiments mixed freely with brutal realpolitik. The main discovery he made during the voyage, Bojanowska believes, was that an age of globalization, as we would now call it, was beginning. Russia's success and self-respect in this brave new world, Goncharov believed, would depend on whether Russians could achieve the sort of mobility, connectivity, and energy exhibited by the British and exemplified in his own fiction by Stolz, the antithesis of the eponymous central character of his best-known work Oblomov.

The organization of Bojanowska's book is both chronological and thematic. Chapter 1, which traces the Pallada's progress from Portsmouth to Cape Town, reveals Goncharov's admiration of the efficacy of British colonialism and the commercial acumen that accompanies it: Britain furnishes Russians with a model of how to run a successful empire. Chapter 2, in which Goncharov's gaze shifts to Singapore and China, dwells on the international networks established by Europe's colonial powers and the commonality of the interests of those powers once they began to develop global free-trade networks. Chapter 3, on the Russians’ sojourn in Japan, addresses the tension between Goncharov's humane instincts and his endorsement of Russians’ resolve to behave, like other Europeans, as assertive imperialists. In Chapter 4, as he returns home by land, Goncharov presents eastern Siberia as “the Russian piece” in his “mosaic of the global imperial world order” (164), and compares Russia's variety of imperialism favorably with foreign manifestations of the phenomenon. Chapter 5 reviews the hierarchies—of cultures, races, and imperialisms—that Goncharov has established and again probes his travelogue's contradictions and complexities. The final chapter discusses the reception and enduring popularity of The Frigate Pallada, the expurgations that made this text palatable from an official Soviet viewpoint, and the omission of criticism of its dated prejudices from a very recent Russian electronic version of it. In sum, Bojanowska's thorough examination of this important but relatively neglected text is a valuable addition to the corpora of academic literature on the history of Russian thought and literature, broadly understood, and on European imperialism and colonialism.