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

and educationalist Cardinal Fénelon’s didactic novel Télémaque (1699), widely read as a conduct book and used as a manual for teaching virtue to princes and kings. The line comes from a part of the poem in which evil rulers in hell see themselves in the mirror of Truth. Trediakovsky rendered Fénelon’s Télémaque in the equivalent he devised to the classical hexameter: a line that combined trochees and spondees and had six stresses. It can be interpreted as a dolnik. Trediakovsky’s hexameter was later adopted by Nikolai Gnedich (1784–1833) in his seminal translation of the Iliad (1829) and by Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852) in his translation of the Odyssey (1842–46).

A.M.K.

Aleksei Mikhailovich Kutuzov (1749–1797), a friend from youth and Leipzig, known for his philosophical character and involvement in Freemasonry.

1. DEPARTURE

1. Cf. Matthew 5:4: “Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted.”

2. SOFIA

2. Radishchev refers here to the decrees of 1782 that regulated the order of dispensing horses at the post stations.

3. The stationmaster, fourteenth class in the Table of Ranks, organized the provision of postal coaches and horse relays. This provincial petty clerk stuck in a backwater was made famous in Pushkin’s story “The Stationmaster” (1831). For more on the Table of Ranks, see endnote 9.

4. Folk songs became prized in the eighteenth century as genuine expressions of popular culture. A number of important collections of ethnographic materials, folklore, and popular songs were published in Russia.

3. TOSNA

5. Radishchev is referring to Catherine’s 1787 journey to Crimea and Ukraine.

6. The Service Archive (razriadnyi arkhiv), established in 1711, contained the service records of all service people (sluzhilye liudi) for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Service records of eighteenth-century servitors were kept in the Heraldry Office.

7. Rurik was the legendary founder of the Rurikid dynasty, who, according to Russian chronicles, ruled in Novgorod beginning in 862. His descendants ruled in Kiev beginning in the early tenth century. Vladimir Monomakh reigned in the twelfth century and was famed for his wisdom and advice to princes.

8. Mestnichestvo was the Muscovite system of precedence governing ritual occasions and reflecting individual and family status among the nobility from the fifteenth to the late seventeenth century. A reform introduced in 1682 by Tsar Fyodor Alexeyevich, the older brother of Peter the Great, abolished mestnichestvo, shifting power to military interests away from the landed nobility. The law eliminated the superiority of Moscow nobility over that of the provinces.

9. The Table of Ranks was a list of positions in the military, civil, and court services introduced by a 1722 law to govern state servitors’ promotion through the ranks. It played a critical role in overhauling the service class and allowed Peter to replace the Muscovite service elite with a new class of servitors. It forcefully reconfirmed every nobleman’s obligation to serve the Crown and the state. Divided into fourteen grades or classes, from the first (highest) to the fourteenth (lowest), the Table defined the status of every servitor and his position vis-à-vis his peers. It also made it possible for commoners to be ennobled through ascending the hierarchy of ranks, making the hereditary nobles resentful.

10. According to Catherine the Great’s legislation of 1785, which instituted fundamental reforms in the nature of service to the Crown and the treatment of nobles, a register was to be kept in every province of the genealogy of the local nobility, with the ancient aristocracy (as distinct from the newer service nobles) listed in the final part.

11. Piter remains a familiar name for St. Petersburg; the usage first emerged in the late eighteenth century.

12. Prostrations or small bows from the waist were part of the etiquette of respect and deference as well as shows of piety in church.

4. LYUBANI

13. Quitrent (obrok): a tax imposed on a serf for using the land allocated to him by the landowner. It was considered a lighter obligation than the corvée.

14. Schismatic or Old Believer (raskol’nik or starover): a member of a movement of religious purists that arose in Russia in the middle of the seventeenth century. Schismatics rejected the reforms of Patriarch Nikon, which aimed to bring Russian religious practices closer to Greek. Radishchev refers here to the Schismatics’ refusal to keep religious holidays, including Sunday.

15. One point of contention between the Schismatics and the Orthodox believers was how to make the sign of the cross, with two fingers or three. Here the peasant indicates that he is an Orthodox believer by claiming that he uses three fingers to cross himself.

16. The peasant is referring here to corvée (barshchina), unpaid work on the landowner’s land. It was considered to be the more onerous obligation.

17. Poll tax (podushnye): a tax that peasants had to pay to the state; it was calculated according the number of male members (souls or dushi) in the household.

18. State peasants worked on lands owned by the state. Although they, too, had to pay various taxes, they enjoyed many freedoms (most importantly, personal) denied to peasants belonging to an individual landowner.

5. CHUDOVO

19. Sisterbek: presently Sestroretsk, a town to the north of St. Petersburg on the northern shore of the Gulf of Finland.

20. Paphos and Amathus: ancient cult sanctuaries of Aphrodite on Cyprus.

21. Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–1789): a painter celebrated in the second half of the eighteenth century for his maritime paintings and large canvases depicting shipwrecks as sublime events in which the terrible drama of the disaster contrasts with the still beauty of the moonlit sea; a number of his paintings were in the Hermitage.

22. The last Turkish War in the Archipelago: Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, in particular the victory of the Russian fleet in Chesme Bay in July of 1770.

23. Subedar: an Indian officer rank in British India. The travails of Clive of India, who established the dominance of the East India Company in Bengal, was discussed in contemporary historical writing by, among others, Abbé Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal, in his Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes