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

Russian literary language, Radishchev’s reputation as a bad writer originates with Karamzin and his supporters, who used his archaized style as an example of incorrect linguistic choices in a quarrel that took place in the early nineteenth century with the cultural conservative Alexander Shishkov (1754–1841) and his followers.

Radishchev thus wrote in a Russian that was deliberately awkward. He is not, whatever anyone says about the literariness of the final product, a writer without a style or a theory of style. To be sure, norms of prose idiom in the period remained in flux, with translators and original writers still experimenting with German and Latin syntactic forms as well as other prosodic features. Yet Radishchev’s purpose was not to experiment with style for its own sake. He wished to create a distinctive medium to convey his ideas and to manipulate the reader. One of the most curious and innovative chapters in the work is “Tver.” It brings together, for a rare change, both prose and poetry and represents an extended critique of poetic forms in Russia, as illustrated by the many stanzas excerpted from Radishchev’s much longer poem Liberty. It is almost needless to say that a poem with that title, while presented under the guise of a lesson in style, also has a political message, and stanzas cited for their rhetorical verve vividly denounce tyranny. Much of what has been said about Radishchev’s prose holds true of his poetry. In the hope of preserving that sense of a form overloaded with drama and abstraction, we have translated the excerpts in verse, approximating the ten-line stanza and rhyme scheme. And while Radishchev’s narrative mode can be fleet, the sometimes turgid style and strained idiom function as a tool for focusing the reader’s mind on his sometimes abstract philosophical vocabulary and on the highly visual element of his prose, which relies on anecdote, episode, and verbal painting as a way of aligning emotional and intellectual content. Radishchev took his epigraph for the Journey from Trediakovsky’s Tilemakhida. That work was a poetic resetting of an important didactic prose work by the French archbishop Fénelon, used as a textbook in the education of princes. In his foreword to Tilemakhida, Trediakovsky stressed the idea that poetic language not only has to differ from colloquial language but also has to correspond to the content of the work and, furthermore, to impart wisdom to the reader. By the late eighteenth century, the work’s neoclassical style and Trediakovsky’s highly artificial idiom struck readers as passé. The epigraph signaled that the Journey would combine narrative and didacticism in the manner of Fénelon’s original educational treatise-cum-novel and that Radishchev, in spite of popular opinion, intended to emulate Trediakovsky in devising a work of linguistic and stylistic idiosyncrasy.12

Certain aspects of Radishchev’s style cannot be reproduced in a translation. But can a translator completely disregard the stylistic complexion of the Journey and not try at least to indicate the strangeness of Radishchev’s word choice, grammar, and syntax? A smooth Radishchev would be a contradiction in terms. But once syntactic effects specific to Radishchev are acknowledged as daringly disjointed in the original, and once it is accepted that only some of these are eligible to be transferred formally intact into English, stretching translation to be the faithful re-creation of all aspects would be self-defeating (the most notorious example of such translation perhaps being Vladimir Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin). We recognize that the Journey’s stylistic opacity is part of its meaning and have aimed to retain it where that can be done without undue stretching of the norms of English. At the same time, we have also aimed to use a more straightforward English syntax where understanding is little changed by ironing out syntactic knots in isolated phrases. The question is about the overall reading experience, and we trust that the effects of Radishchev’s idiosyncratic style and voice, where they have been captured, will give a sufficient cumulative sense of what kind of writer he is.

The reader may find it helpful, then, to have an outline here of the problems posed and solutions offered. These can be discussed in terms of layout, syntax, and lexicon. Radishchev’s paragraphing has been retained in this translation. The original printed punctuation of the Journey is very much that of an eighteenth-century work, sometimes with very long sentences broken up by commas alone or cast in a succession of verbal phrases choppily strung together. Following the example of Laurence Sterne, an important model in the writing of sensibility across Europe including Russia, Radishchev makes expressive use of the dash. He also uses the dash inconsistently to indicate dialogue and direct speech, and our practice has been to modernize and substitute quotation marks and also delineate voices where long dashes are originally missing.

Syntax is the most challenging feature for the reader and the translator. The complexities relate to the length and structure of subordinate clauses; the framing of scenes with near formulaic expressions to indicate arrivals and departures; and nonstandard word order. There are certainly meaningful instances in which chapters adopt a more formal tone and periodic syntax commensurate with serious topics. It is to be expected that Radishchev would formulate complex observations about the law, social justice, institutions, and other matters in complex ways, just as many of the writers of the period he read on these topics did. Some of the challenges posed by Radishchev’s syntax are not unique to him and are familiar from much prose of the period. The page-long sentences to be found sometimes in the Journey are no more archaic than the majestic sentences typical of eighteenth-century English prose masters such as Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, or David Hume. In English translation, preserving all of the far-ranging sentences that spool into the nesting of clauses would prove counterproductive. There are times when little of the sense has been lost, in our view, by dividing a page into a succession of shorter sentences or by shaping clauses made up of a string of phrases joined by