Voyage de Benjamin Bergmann chez les Kalmuks, traduit de l'allemand par M. Moris, membre de la Société asiatique

First French edition, illustrated with a lithographed frontispiece and 11 lithographed plates (bound between pp. 360–361), cf. Brunet, I, 787; Chadenat, 5323.

Full calf binding, smooth spine with gilt decorative motifs, gilt roll on the headbands, red morocco title label, gilt roll borders on the boards, handmade paper endpapers and pastedowns, gilt edges on the board edges, red page edges, contemporary binding.

Restorations to the spine, one restoration at the foot of the title page.

An epistolary account of a journey undertaken in 1802 among the Kalmyks, a nomadic people of the Astrakhan province (North Caucasus).

The original German edition, in four volumes, was published in Riga in 1804.

This edition is an extract: "[The author] wishes to introduce us to the people he visited, as they are; he seeks to forget himself and to put himself in the place of a Kalmyk, to see, act, and feel as they do, in order to better convey what he experienced..." (Translator’s Preface).

It provides extensive information on the customs, religion, and language of this Central Asian people.

Included are eleven lithographed plates depicting the Kalmyk alphabet, as well as a text in the Kalmyk language accompanied by its transcription in Latin characters. The final quarter of the translation recounts one of the major episodes in the history of this people: Essay on the Flight of the Kalmyks from the Banks of the Volga, which describes the migration, in 1771, of 300,000 people who fled the region to settle in the north of the Caucasus, then under Chinese rule. Both ethnographic and linguistic, the work was the subject of a lengthy analysis by Abel-Rémusat in the Journal des savants of June 1825 (pp. 363–370).