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

life in the capitals—at that time. Episodes provide an opportunity to perform, in virtuous and sympathetic acts, the principles that the narrator holds to be universal. The Journey contains many stories intended to arouse emotional responses from readers, mainly indignation at injustice. Displays of philanthropy, fellow feeling, and sympathy provide essential narrative moments for demonstrating how sensibility is meant to work. But Radishchev’s manner is not to let readers, or participants, indulge their feelings simply as an emotional reflex without considering the cause of their indignation. Sentimental fiction of the period encouraged readers to weep openly, because the shedding of tears was a display of feeling and affirmation of sensibility that required cultivation. For the historian Lynn Hunt, the seeds of revolution in France lay in the gradual development of sensibility brought on by literary movements.11 For Radishchev, the facile demonstration of virtue was insufficient, and the difficult manner he devised for the Journey may strive to promote reading of a particularly thoughtful kind. One role of Radishchev’s narrator is to bring home the social component in roused feeling by framing it in the conceptual vocabulary of sensibility, social contract, and the law. Does this reflect a mistrust of the efficacy of fiction? Radishchev most likely did not share the view, widespread in the eighteenth century (and enshrined in Russia by the neoclassical theorist Alexander Sumarokov in his “Epistle on Poetry,” 1748), that fiction corrupted. His Sternean moments of digression and plotting are not a facile imitation of the sentimental style. They show a commitment to the underlying belief that narration can re-create empirical reality and affect sensibility especially strongly when written in a style that is antisentimentalist or at the very least not Karamzinian or Sternean.

Journey narratives require some form of itinerary and movement in time and space as an axis of development. The form is highly flexible, permitting embedded stories, anecdotes related second- or even thirdhand, and multiple forms of place description, such as historical excursus or a highly aesthetic type of picturesque. Stories in Radishchev’s Journey do not extend beyond the book’s basic unit of the chapter. Yet over the course of the book, a set of case studies develops in the demonstration of moral principles advocated by the narrator and other storytellers. Like the picaresque, the travel narrative depends on the staging of random encounters and stories told or overheard before the voyager can continue. For instance, in the chapter “Spasskaya Polest,” when the narrator parts with the victim of a shipwreck whose extended tale has been reproduced in the previous chapter, “Chudovo,” he overhears the conversation of an official and his wife concerning a corrupt boss and his taste for oysters. Listening is just as important as observing; the narrator must remain attuned to the stories he hears from others, anecdotes that expand the range of topics treated. In the same chapter, after the narrator meets an unfortunate passenger who is being ruined in the law courts, he responds to his interlocutor’s distress physiologically, which results in an allegorical dream that affords an interior vision. Sometimes, as it happens, the narrator need not go anywhere to become a witness to tales about miscarriages of justice.

For Radishchev, forms of discourse and forms of discovery go together. In travel literature, we frequently see that tenets held to be universal face challenges in local practices and customs, forcing the narrator to raise questions about beliefs, their origins, and their validity. Performativity is one important technique in the way the work lays bare the epistemological foundations of certain ideas. In the chapter “Bronnitsy,” the narrator has a religious experience we could call a revelation. One effect of the scientific revolution that preceded the Enlightenment—in which no discoveries were more important than Newton’s theories of light—was to generate religious controversy, questioning whether revelation afforded a privileged verification of the divine in the workings of man or whether the only basis for explanation of natural effects was empirical and scientific. Reconciling science or natural philosophy and Christian dogma occupied much of the intellectual energy of the period, and Radishchev was well informed on the range of heterodox views, from deism to materialist atheism, that faced Christian theology (topics he treated later in his treatise On Man, His Mortality, and Immortality). In “Bronnitsy,” the traveler arrives at a place that had once been the location of a pagan cult in the pre-Slavic period and where now a small church stands. His travel in this instance becomes imaginary as he envisions himself “transported to antiquity.” The purpose of his time travel and indulgence in an imagined act of divination is to learn the future. In his emotional stupor, the traveler enters a state similar to that of the initiate into Masonic mysteries. He hears a divine voice reproaching him for trying to pierce the “impenetrable shield of unknowability” and explaining that limits in human knowledge are a form of self-protection designed by a divinity to preserve man in a state of blissful ignorance. Thunder, the sign of the pagan god Perun, peals and seemingly confirms the truth of this conclusion. However, it impels the traveler to meditate further on the nature of names for the divine, from the Eastern and classical gods to the Christian God, and to end with an evocation of “O my God!” The traveler’s declaration of his monotheistic faith is nondenominational and based on an inner belief that spells the difference, he states, between the believer and the atheist. The institutions of religions, their practices and their buildings, are transient and therefore an insufficient basis for belief in the divine. Ultimately, the traveler concludes, as did Plato and Rousseau, that religion is a personal matter based on an individual aptitude to hear “a secret voice.” That affirmation, however, is not the last word. The chapter ends with a quotation adapted from Joseph Addison’s Cato that presents a vision of cosmic destruction in which “something” will persist even beyond the extinction of the stars and the cooling of the sun.