Revisiting Linguistic and Topographical Principles of Russia’s Mapping in the XVIIIth Century: Critical Overview of Documents

The article is aimed at presenting a critical overview of the XVIIIth century documents stored in Archives of RAS (ff. 3 and 20 – manuscripts by Lomonosov) and RSAAD (f. 248 – documents of the Senate). This period is rich in the documental base; methodological views by V.N. Tatitschev and M.V. Lomonsov are the core of the article. The analyzed sources are divided into three groups: enactions on the issues relating to mapping, geodesy and frontier surveying; civil letters; authorial instructions. The choice of sources is caused by both their capacity to be unexceptionable material in the course of reconstructing historic and cultural landscapes and by the fact that they concern, firstly, requirements for writing place-names on Russian maps, and secondly, gathering techniques of place-names. It is of vital importance to deduce how the attitude of surveyors, geodesists and scholars in general towards the problem of gathering and processing geographical names changed during fledging years of Russian cartography. The article concludes that the Geographical Department of the Russian Empire (having been responsible for all the geodesic and surveying procedures at that time) didn’t manage to solve the problem of developing commonly used principles of writing place-names on maps, and in fact delegated complete control over it to map-makers. This yielded, as a result, to the “free will” in marking place-names onto maps. The latter in its turn caused the occurrence of multiple linguistic mistakes on Russian maps of the XVIIIth century. It became a reason for reexamination of the whole cartographical perspective later, in the XIXth century. However the problem of place-names standardization has become the real focus of scientific research only since late 1930s