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

commas with the more explicit divisions of semicolons, colons, and dashes to stave off syntactical implosion. We have generally preferred to normalize the Russian syntax to produce a readable English version. In some instances, the result is an English text that is actually more accessible than a knotty piece of Russian.

Length is not the only syntactic feature that is difficult to preserve. Radishchev’s use of gerunds and participles in setting up narrative sequences looks overcomplicated by the standard of Karamzin and Pushkin. Typically, “having arrived,” “having approached,” “having driven up,” characters then speak or act. This is a point of grammar that, arguably, conveys how consistently Radishchev emphasizes process—action and reaction—and his technique in setting up encounters and moving characters on and off is to underscore the beginnings and endings of speech acts. Similarly, Radishchev piles up clauses when creating coordinated actions, as in the following sentence, given here literally: “The having arrived detachment rescued this barbarian from the hands of peasants raging against him.” Our translation turns gerundive and participial clauses into the more modern prepositional clauses that suit contemporary English, as seen in this example: “When it arrived, a detachment of soldiers rescued this barbarian from the hands of his angry peasants.” Radishchev can also string together a series of separate subject-predicate combinations, punctuated only with commas. He condenses into a short space entire chain reactions of perception, feeling, and response. These are the moments that are meant to lead to moral realizations, in the reader if not always in the fictional characters. Our translation imitates his pattern, separating successive verbs only with commas.

The rules of word order in Russian, while not absolutely fixed, had acquired a more regular shape by the late eighteenth century. The freedom Radishchev exercises creates an unsettling impression and is undoubtedly one of his most effective devices for slowing down the reader. In these instances, the translator can decide on a case-by-case basis how much of the original wording can be conveyed—or, essentially, how much strain can be tolerated. In general, it is our assumption that when readers open a translation, they accept that there is a barrier of a kind between them and the original and wish for accuracy of meaning without constant stylistic reminders of how remote the original stands from the present idiom. This may be all the more so with a text removed in time by a couple of centuries. The matter is not simple, however, given our firm belief that form and content are inextricably linked in Radishchev’s travelogue. For that reason, we have also sought, at least in some places, to retain an element of syntactic irregularity when the formal complication of the original underpins the message. The bookish language Radishchev uses, especially his insistence on nouns emphasizing process, focuses attention on the internal physical, moral, and psychological processes that define human action, reaction, and interaction in the Journey. The translator into English has some flexibility in choosing between noun forms based on a single root to express action—e.g., “attaining the shore” versus “the attainment of the shore.” We have followed the English preference for nouns based on participles such as “attaining” but have tried to retain denominative nouns where the effect isn’t grossly stilted, because Radishchev’s point is to turn the mundane into some larger category (and vocabulary is a tool of defamiliarization). The clumsiness typical of this text should, however, feel like bumps in the road and not like obstacles, as Radishchev’s narrative often hits its stride to achieve momentum and focus.

Ultimately, a modern translation cannot imitate closely Radishchev’s style and remain readable; at the same time, the translator cannot disregard entirely the artificial idiom Radishchev created for the Journey. We have aimed to provide the readability of an accurate but accessible modern version while also making reasonable efforts to convey an impression of the stylistic dimension of a work of extraordinary historical importance.

NOTES

1. Biografiia A. N. Radishcheva, napisannaia ego synov’iami, ed. D. S. Babkin (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1959), 37.

2. Biografiia A. N. Radishcheva, 54.

3. M. I. Sukhomlinov, A. N. Radishchev, avtor “Puteshestviia iz Peterburga v Moskvu” (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Imp. Akademii nauk, 1883), 6.

4. See V. A. Zapadov, “Istoriia sozdaniia ‘Puteshestviia iz Peterburga v Moskvu’ i ‘Vol’nosti,” in A. N Radishchev, Puteshestvie is Peterburga v Moskvu. Vol’nost’ (St. Petersburg: “Nauka,” 1992), p. 518. Radishchev expanded “Spasskaya Polest,” “Podberezye,” “Novgorod,” “Zaitsovo,” “Edrovo,” “Torzhok,” and “Chornaya Gryaz.”; see Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg: “Nauka,” 2010), p. 21.

5. Cited in Sukhomlinov, A. N. Radishchev, avtor, 54, and Biografiia A. N. Radishcheva, 65.

6. Sukhomlinov, A. N. Radishchev, avtor, 31, 43. Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, was a French nobleman who supported the revolution but was later disgraced when he was found to be in the pay of France’s enemies.

7. Biografiia A. N. Radishcheva, 64. Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev had led a peasant uprising earlier in Catherine’s reign.

8. Sukhomlinov, A. N. Radishchev, avtor, 36.

9. The life written by Pavel Radishchev, as published in the Biografiia A. N. Radishcheva, amply draws on the documentary sources concerning Radishchev’s case (“delo o Radishcheve”).

10. In Aleksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, trans. Leo Wiener, edited with an introduction and notes by Roderick Page Thaler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), vii. Leo Wiener (1862–1939) began teaching at Harvard in 1896 and eventually became the first American professor of Slavic literature. He was a prolific translator (including of the works of Tolstoy). As Thaler reports in the preface to the book, this “translation was first prepared by Professor Leo Wiener of Harvard University, who unhappily did not live to see it published” (vii). Thaler then reports that he “thoroughly revised” Wiener’s translation and supplied the introduction and notes (viii). The Cold War position on Radishchev as a radical and early advocate of “liberal” values, meaning broadly republican or specifically democratic, was a view that took hold in scholarship of which David Marshall Lang, The First Russian Radical. Alexander Radishchev, 1749–1802 (London: