I know Astolphe de Custine mostly as an esthete, failed novelist and minor figure (and pretty much a social outcast, being an old homosexual and sugar daddy with the wrong political opinions for the more important Salons) gravitating around Frédéric Chopin (and also Balzac, Hugo, Lamartine, Delacroix, etc.) in the 1830s (George Sand and most of the Romantics like the Liszt-d'Agoult couple hated or loathed him, so Chopin and him grew distant for a while). I've mostly read (and help a friend translate) part of his correspondence, some reviews etc. though I have read many excerpts from his travel diaries along the way. Don't buy it expecting a work of the importance or quality of Tocqueville's, though the themes/topics forcibly brings comparisons. There are good reasons why his works have been totally forgotten for over a 100 years, before La Russie en 1839 attracted interest again. Historians got interested again mostly because his commentaries on Nicolas II's Russia often still applied to post-war Soviet Russia.
As I may have noted, that was the context in which I was made aware of it. Now I'm wondering if there is even an English translation, since the writers I've seen cite him were both Francophone historians. I might still check it out if I can without too much trouble, but if he's as insignificant as you say, it probably won't be.
I think he's been translated in English during his lifetime as was common for that sort of books. I don't know if he's been re translated since (translations in the 1830s are often quite bad/rushed).
There seems to be an English edition in print, but the title is quite different (it should be "Russia in 1839"
: The Empire of the Czar: Or Observations on the Social, Political, and Religious State and Prospects of Russia, Made During a Journey Through That. There's another edition under the title "The Journals of the Marquis de Custine Russia 1839", it seems.
I don't know how "insignificant" he should be considered. I didn't seen him quoted much in French scholarship on Russia.
He wasn't highly considered in political/intellectual circles in his lifetime (which considering the cliques may not say that much... but the nickname "half a man of letters" isn't reassuring, though it's half about him being homosexual), though with his book on Russia he did have a success, especially in Russia itself. Then he got completely forgotten in the West except as a very minor figure on the fringes of the Romantics (though never accepted among them), the kind who's a footnote in biographies of his much more famous kin or friends.
But more recently there's some new interest in his work. I saw that in English there's even an essay about his Russia in 1839, and there's also biographies now.
I wasn't very impressed with what I read from him, but he could be one of those who published one single good work and much dross.
One Amazon review said this: "Custine's writing is swarming with stereotypes, unverified reports, and exclamations stemming from ignorance. But, the virtue of this book is not in the quality of its writing or the accuracy of its portrayal of Russia under Nicolaus I. Together with all of its faults, this book is a historical artifact, a part of history and not the retelling of it. When it is read with this in mind, Custine's account is compelling, funny, surprising to anyone who is at least roughly familiar with 19th century Russia."
