Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow by Irina Reyfman (top 10 novels of all time .txt) 📕

estates, by the new ruler, Paul. After Paul was assassinated in March 1801, Alexander I fully pardoned the writer and offered him a position on the Legislative Commission to work on the codification of Russian law. Steeped in Western legal theory and knowledgeable about Russian legal practice, Radishchev joined the commission’s work with enthusiasm. Several of his pieces on jurisprudence date from his year and a half with the commission. In September 1802, however, he committed suicide by drinking nitrohydrochloric acid. His motivation remains a mystery. It has been conjectured that he may have taken his life either because he feared another period of Siberian exile, as his son Pavel suggests in his biography of his father, or out of his general disillusionment with the constitutional project in which he was involved at the time. It is significant, however, that he had been thinking and writing about suicide ever since Fyodor Ushakov voiced his desire to kill himself instead of dying a slow and painful death during his illness in Leipzig.

From early on, Radishchev found in writing a medium to explore his thoughts about personal and public matters of concern. During his time in Leipzig and for several years after his return to Russia, he was chiefly engaged in translations from French and German; most important among these was Abbé de Mably’s Observations sur les Grecs, which was published anonymously in 1773. Around the same time, Radishchev turned to literature. In 1779–82 he worked on the metrically innovative “oratory” “Creation of the World”; he included it in the early version of the Journey, where it followed the excerpts from the iambic ode “Liberty,” written around 1783. In its full form, the ode discusses the social contract and the right it gives the sovereign people to protest against a corrupt monarch. Radishchev’s examples of champions of liberty include Cromwell against the Crown and, for the American colonies, Washington’s revolt against the British Empire.

While in the Peter and Paul Fortress, Radishchev began writing a work that perhaps provides some insights into his authorial motives for the Journey. It is based on the Life of St. Philaret the Merciful, who lived in the first century AD in Asia Minor. A prosperous and charitable man, Philaret lost his estate to robbers and became a pauper. Nonetheless, he continued his charitable work, and God eventually rewarded him. Radishchev uses this Life as a canvas for his own biography, to communicate with his family and to explain his actions. It is significant that he chose the Life of the saint who, like the author of the Journey, was sensitive to the sufferings of humanity.

Most of Radishchev’s works of literature (excluding the Journey) were made available to the reading public when his sons Nikolai and Pavel published an edition in six volumes (1806–11). Literary activities were clearly just as important to him as his political interests. His diverse writings included a work of natural philosophy on the nature of the soul and the body, A Historical Song about the idea of historical change, a long poem, Bova, based on folk traditions (inspired as well by Voltaire’s burlesque epic The Maid of Orleans), and another long poem, Songs Sung at the Competition in Honor of the Ancient Slavic Divinities, written in tribute to the Russian medieval epic the Lay of Igor’s Campaign. Yet Radishchev was not much appreciated as a writer by the generation that followed. His openness to experimentation and the use of highly idiosyncratic forms stymied most readers. There were some exceptions. Pushkin, for instance, admired both Radishchev’s experiments with meters and his poetry. His 1836 essay “Alexander Radishchev” is often cited for its criticism of Radishchev’s “barbaric” style, but Pushkin also paid tribute to Radishchev’s “honesty of intention” in the Journey and this work’s comprehensive summation of “all French philosophy of the period.” Radishchev’s persecution and the initial hostility to his ideas were instrumental in shaping how readers interpreted the work’s political goals in the last century of Imperial Russia, as well as in Soviet Russia, where virtually from the 1917 revolution Radishchev was lionized as a proto-Bolshevik.

THE JOURNEY: ITS PUBLICATION AND RECEPTION

Textual studies of the composition of Radishchev’s Journey—his second longest work after the complex quasi-materialist treatise he wrote in exile on the body-soul duality—suggest that he began writing when Catherine’s policies were more permissive and she still had a reputation as a reformer. The first part of the Journey written was “An Oration About Lomonosov.” The other chapters followed, and by the end of 1788 the version that Radishchev submitted to the censor was complete. The censor approved this short version for publication. Censorship, both state and church, in the Catherine period was unsystematic and sporadically applied; in general, the 1780s were a period of flourishing for small presses and of growth for university presses.

V. A. Zapadov calculated that Radishchev added about 40 percent more material after the book was approved by the censor.4 Many of the added passages were the ones that particularly enraged Catherine. Had Radishchev deliberately sought early permission in order to evade censorship? That seems unlikely for at least two reasons: first, because it assumes that the censor would have been vigilant, whereas the evidence suggests that he may not have read the shorter version with any attention; second, and more important, there is no basis on which to claim that Radishchev expected his work would be received as an outrage or as a “personal attack” on the monarch. His superior and old friend Vorontsov regarded the book as no more than an “incautious blunder,” while Catherine saw it as an attempt to foment, as stated in the official charge of July 1790, “disobedience and social discord.”5 Everything suggests, in fact, that the Empress’s fury and her personal involvement in Radishchev’s arrest took him and others by surprise.

Radishchev published the Journey anonymously and at his own expense in May 1790, using his own hand press, obtained the previous year. At 650 copies, the number he confessed