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Keywords

Jodocus Crull, Daniel Defoe, Idolatry, Prose Style, Robinson Crusoe, Russia, Satire, Savagery, Tartars

Document Type

Features

Abstract

This article considers the significance of Jodocus Crull, a writer, compiler, and translator whose reputation as a hack has distracted attention from his two prominent compilations of Russian history. Crull’s first compilation, The Antient and Present State of Muscovy (1698), published at the time of Peter the Great’s diplomatic visit to England, appears to have influenced the prose style of Daniel Defoe and his uncommonly negative portrayals of Sino-Russian relations. Defoe’s writings on travel and trade have been widely discussed. But scholars are less certain about Defoe’s hostility towards the East, which emerges most prominently in his fiction. On his caravan voyage through Siberia in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Crusoe encounters hordes of “Tartars,” a catch-all term for the Indigenous peoples living between the Chinese and Russian borders. He describes these Tartars as “savages,” echoing the ambiguous terminology he uses to objectify the trespassing cannibals in The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). However, in a fit of rage inconsistent with his previous moral qualms, Crusoe destroys a Tartarian idol, the Great Cham-Chi-Thaungu, to make a mockery of their idol worship, confessing “I was more mov’d at their Stupidity and brutish Worship of a Hobgoblin, than ever I was at any Thing in my Life” (192). Crusoe’s grotesque description of Cham-Chi-Thaungu is taken directly from a similar description of “savage” idolatry in Crull’s Antient and Present State of Muscovy. I contend that in Crusoe’s revenge and elsewhere throughout the sequels, Defoe draws on and adapts Crull’s violent imagery to support his own satirical attack on Chinese culture, downplaying the threat of Eastern imperialism. Crull has been dismissed not only as a hack, but also as a purveyor of salacious, unnecessary violence. Yet Crull’s sadistic and sardonic prose has much in common with Crusoe’s abrupt change in Farther Adventures. Thus, the article first identifies Jodocus Crull as a new source for Defoe’s fiction worth examining; second, it makes the interpretive claim that Crull’s Antient and Present State of Muscovy helps to explain Crusoe’s inconsistent and at times paradoxical thoughts on violence and “savagery” in parts two and three.

DOI

10.70213/1948-1802.1110

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Language

English

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application/pdf

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Text

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