User:Sigridlokensgard/Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

Translations
Journey was translated into German by Alexander Herzen in 1858. Two more German versions were written in 1922 and 1952. It was translated into Danish in 1949, Polish in 1956, and modern Russian in 1921. The first English translation was published in 1958.

Reception
Journey is best known as a critical satire of feudalism. An early, incomplete version was initially approved by imperial censors, and Czar Catherine the Great was expected to tolerate its publication. Instead, she condemned the book. Radishchev represented Russia's educated aristocrats, and Catherine feared that his calls for reform would spread to the rest of his class. Radishchev was arrested a month after Journey's publication, charged with inciting "disobedience and social discord," and sentenced to death. The original copies of Journey were confiscated. Catherine the Great commuted Radishchev's sentence to exile. Alexander I fully pardoned him and appointed him to his legal service. Journey was still suppressed until 1905, and literary criticism about Journey was censored until 1857.

Journey strongly influenced the Decembrist movement. Early socialists Nikolai Ogarev and Alexander Herzen published a version of Journey from exile in 1858, and most Soviet critics claimed Radishchev as a precursor to Bolshevism.

Other Cold War-era criticism, from the USSR and the West, identified Radishchev as a liberal intellectual. D. M. Lang interpreted Journey as a tract in support of individual rights, government by the people, and the abolition of serfdom, and claimed it an ancestor of anti-Soviet liberalism. Scholar Allen McConnell read it as an attack on Czarist rule and the institution of serfdom.

03.28

"The true political power of this work derives from its literary and linguistic structures, which enact the relativism of the French Enlightenment."

Philosophy
Radishchev studied at Leipzig University during Catherine the Great's liberal reforms, which exposed him to French Enlightenment ideas. Like contemporary French philosophers, Radishchev argues for individual rights based on natural law and natural equality in the state of nature. Radishchev shared his belief in women's advancement and human progress with Condorcet. A section cut from the published version, "Creation of the World," invoked the social contract and celebrated Oliver Cromwell and George Washington as anti-monarchists. Journey also makes references to Adam Ferguson, Horace, Thomas Jefferson, Acts of Parliament, and American state constitutions, as well as the Bible and medieval Christian orthodoxy.

Journey argues for reform, not revolution. In two sections titled "Project for the Future," Radishchev imagined a harmonious Russia under a benevolent monarch. His critiques of the Russian aristocracy focused on abuses by new peers.

Journey presents morality as learned, not inherent. The narrator professes an individual faith in a single deity revered by every religion, and a quote from Joseph Addison in the same chapter may refer to to Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's heterodox multiple worlds theory.

03.28

dialectics

Literature
The final chapter of Journey credits Mikhail Lomonosov with the creation of literary Russian. Radishchev's style draws on works by Vasily Trediakovsky, Abbé Raynal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Laurence Sterne. At his trial, Radishchev testified that he wrote Journey to imitate Sterne and Raynal.

Journey mixes anecdotal, epistolary, and narrative styles. Point of view shifts between the central narrator and secondary characters. Unconventional verb forms emphasize process over single actions, and run-on sentences simulate stream of consciousness. Some chapters are written in clear, vernacular Russian, while others are opaque, written in a convoluted blend of real and invented Church Slavonic.

Radishchev's prose was initially unpopular. He was compared unfavorably with his contemporary Nikolay Karamzin, in early nineteenth century debates about modernization between supporters of Karamzin and conservative Alexander Shishkov, and as recently as 1958 by editor Roderick Page Thaler. Alexander Pushkin's 1936 essay "Alexander Radishchev" also criticized Radishchev's prose, but praised his intentions and philosophical ideas. His unpublished essay "Journey from Moscow to Petersburg" was a response to the book.

In 2020, translators Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman wrote that the novel's difficult style was meant to encourage readers to analyze its ideas. Journey 's epigraph quotes Trediakovsky's Tilemakhida, a Russian-language poetic version of an educational prose work by François Fénelon. Tilemakhida was a mixture of narrative and instruction in a neoclassical poetic style, originally intended to mirror the treatise's content and educate the reader, but outmoded by 1790. The epigraph presents Journey as a member of the same genre.

2022.03.29

Sterne's A Sentimental Journey was widely imitated in Russian literature between 1790 and 1825, as the novel form took root. Unlike Journey, A Sentimental Journey is apolitical, but both books are fictionalized travelogues told through vignettes and found fragments of other works. At Radishchev's trial, he testified that "the idea of writing a book in this form first occurred to me while reading Yorick's journey [A Sentimental Journey]; this is how I began it."

The found-writings framing of some sections of Journey both directly express Radishchev's politics and draw the reader's attention to the book's artificiality. Scholar Anastasia Accles cites the novel as an example of self-consciousness and irony arising naturally within sentimentalism, rather than opposing it.

Radishchev was one of many sentimentalists who used the travelogue form to encourage the reader to identify with a wide range of characters.

Like many other sentimentalist novels, Journey appropriates its form from the picaresque.

Lomonosov: "Versification, grammar, poetry, prose, and above all rhetoric as the art of civic discourse"