On Thursday, March 14th, Science Center 469 from 6 pm, Rachel Koroloff (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), will give a talk titled “Corresponding Gardens: The Botanical Collections of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and the Aptekarskii Prikaz in the first half of the eighteenth century".
As usual, there will be food and drinks, and the talk will start at about 6,15/6,20 – please RSVP to savoia@fas.harvard.edu
The end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries saw in Russia the development of a well-connected, geographically expansive botanical network that linked the Aptekarskii prikaz (the Apothecary’s Chancellery) in Moscow, and the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences with botanical gardens, universities and Academies throughout western Europe and Asia. This paper will examine the relationship between the botanical gardens of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and their respective collections, in order to suggest that the description, cultivation and dissemination of Russia’s flora within botanical circles comprised a powerful intellectual resource for the early Russian Empire. As a resource it not only helped to place the Russian Empire squarely within the international scientific community, but also worked to connect the growing academic communities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, helping each to define its own independent yet complementary botanical agenda. In studying how these gardens came to be, where they chose to focus their collections, and how they built up broader networks, this paper brings into discussion the variety of the Russian Empire’s intellectually and politically savvy approaches to its own botanical diversity.