In September 1863 a Russian naval squadron made a long stay in New York harbor, hoping to escape capture by the British Navy in the event of a war between Britain and Russia over the Polish Uprising of 1863. Schuyler met some of the officers of the Russian flagship, the "Alexander Nevsky", which inspired him to study Russian. He learned Russian well enough to translate the novel of Ivan Turgenev, "Fathers and Sons", which was published in 1867, the first translation of Turgenev to appear in the United States. The same year Schuyler studied Finnish, and edited the first American translation of the Finnish national epic, "Kalevala".