V. A. Zapadov calculated that Radishchev added about 40 percent more material after the book was approved by the censor.4 Many of the added passages were the ones that particularly enraged Catherine. Had Radishchev deliberately sought early permission in order to evade censorship? That seems unlikely for at least two reasons: first, because it assumes that the censor would have been vigilant, whereas the evidence suggests that he may not have read the shorter version with any attention; second, and more important, there is no basis on which to claim that Radishchev expected his work would be received as an outrage or as a “personal attack” on the monarch. His superior and old friend Vorontsov regarded the book as no more than an “incautious blunder,” while Catherine saw it as an attempt to foment, as stated in the official charge of July 1790, “disobedience and social discord.”5 Everything suggests, in fact, that the Empress’s fury and her personal involvement in Radishchev’s arrest took him and others by surprise.
Radishchev published the Journey anonymously and at his own expense in May 1790, using his own hand press, obtained the previous year. At 650 copies, the number he confessed in the transcript of his interrogation, the print run was large, especially as Radishchev undoubtedly knew that, at the time, few books sold more than 300 copies. He must have hoped his work would attract wide interest among the educated elite. He clearly expected to recover some of the costs via sales through the bookshop of G. K. Zotov. Some copies were sold, and Radishchev sent several to his friends and acquaintances, including Vorontsov’s sister, Catherine’s longtime friend and ally, Princess Dashkova; and the great poet and senator G. R. Derzhavin, who also fell under suspicion and distanced himself from Radishchev by writing a poem in which he condemned him as “a Russian Mirabeau.”6 The rest Radishchev destroyed when he learned that the authorities were looking for the book’s author. Catherine acquired her own copy—which survived with her marginal notes harshly condemning many of the book’s ideas and denouncing the author as a dangerous rebel.
By June 1790, Catherine had determined to her own satisfaction Radishchev’s authorship (her initial suspicions that he had an accomplice coauthor were rejected) and that he was, in her words, “a rebel even worse than Pugachev.”7 His arrest followed an investigation directed by Count Alexander Bezborodko, one of Catherine’s most valued statesmen and a man of cultivated sensibility, who argued for leniency. On the one hand, he believed that Radishchev had not violated the letter of the law, since free presses were permitted by a decree of 1783; on the other hand, the immediate context of the French Revolution was impossible to ignore, as were passages in Radishchev’s book urging the establishment of equality and praising the regicide Cromwell. It was no help to Radishchev that the rumor mill about French spies in St. Petersburg had gone into overdrive, including allegations about a suspected plot to assassinate the Empress attributed to the Masonic Martinists, with whom the work’s dedicatee Andrei Kutuzov had links.8 Evidence that the book was a succès de scandale in demand by readers (the documented investigation speaks of “the great curiosity of the public for the book”); that perhaps as many as fifty copies had gone unaccounted for; and that a translation into German was already in preparation (untrue, as it happened) exacerbated tensions. Radishchev was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, his interrogation conducted by S. I. Sheshkovsky, who, as the dreaded head of the Secret Chancery, was nicknamed “knout-flogger.” In mid-July Radishchev addressed to Sheshkovsky a letter of extenuation and apology intended for the ruler. The questions put to Radishchev were in effect scripted by Catherine; they asked Radishchev to explain whether he felt “the significance of his crime” and to gloss the meaning of passages regarded as explicitly of criminal intentionality.9 The official charge spoke of a “personal affront” to the Empress and a “determination to stir up the people against their masters.” The death sentence decreed on July 24th was confirmed by the Senate in early September, after Radishchev had been stripped of his rank (legislation forbade the execution of nobles). Catherine commuted the sentence to ten years of Siberian exile. This second decree noted the exceptional gesture of “clemency” (miloserdie), one of the Enlightenment values that differentiated the Enlightened autocrat from the tyrant, in sparing Radishchev, who was then sent east under armed convoy.
In 1811, when Radishchev’s sons published their edition of his works, they omitted the Journey because of the ongoing censorship ban. For most of the nineteenth century, the Journey remained a clandestine book, notwithstanding the anonymous publication of a sporadic chapter or two in journals in Russia and Germany and mentions in works of reference such as Bantysh-Kamensky’s Dictionary of Memorable People (1836). After the political turmoil of 1825, Radishchev’s name was taboo for a decade, and precious few readers had access to his writings. Among them was Alexander Pushkin, who may have read Radishchev’s book in manuscript even before purchasing a rare copy in 1835 (only sixty-seven copies of Radishchev’s printing have been accounted for). One indicator of Pushkin’s engagement with Radishchev’s book can be found in the title of his essay “Journey from Moscow to Petersburg” (1833–35, unfinished). The piece examines the chapters of Radishchev’s Journey in reverse order, providing a set of revisionist commentaries for which Radishchev’s text is always the departure point. It was a sign of the times that in 1837 the minister of education, Count S. S. Uvarov, excluded Pushkin’s article “Alexander Radishchev” from the third volume of his literary journal The Contemporary, extending the ban to the posthumous edition of his works. The ban remained in force until Pavel Annenkov’s important edition of Pushkin’s works in 1857, when the novelist Ivan Goncharov, no less, was the censor.
In 1858, Nikolai Ogarev and Alexander Herzen, exiles based in London and often dubbed the fathers of Russian socialism, published in effect the second edition of Radishchev’s Journey in The Bell (Kolokol) of 1858, their famous radical journal. Although full of errors and unauthorized editorial interventions, this notable edition (reprinted with its distortions in Leipzig in 1876) stimulated Pavel Radishchev in 1859 or 1860 to apply to Tsar Alexander II for permission to publish this and other works by his father. He had published in 1858 his own memoir of his father, partly drawing on rare materials, including a manuscript copy of the Journey provided by the historian Mikhail Pogodin. Pavel succeeded against enormous resistance in publishing his memoir (the censor, reputed to be a secret friend to radicals, lost his job over the matter). However, his efforts to publish the Journey met with refusal in 1860 and again in 1865, during which time he sent Herzen a copy of Radishchev’s massive ode “Liberty” for publication. The ban on the Journey was lifted by the Tsar in March 1868. Rumors of new editions proliferated, and a memoir by Radishchev’s other son, Nikolai, was allowed to appear, while some mentions of Radishchev as the author of the Journey in reference works were tolerated (a fuller version of memoirs by both sons would be banned until 1912). An 1872 edition of the Journey was advertised, but it never appeared, and the print run was destroyed in 1873. Radishchev’s most important work remained taboo in nineteenth-century Russia, and signs of a thaw were scarce. The continued suppression of this work only enhanced its reputation among budding radicals in post-Emancipation Russia.
THE JOURNEY AS A NEW FORM OF POLITICAL LITERATURE
In his introduction to the first and only translation of Radishchev’s Journey into English, Roderick Page Thaler articulated a view long held in the West and in Soviet criticism of Radishchev as one of “the earliest of the liberal Russian intelligentsia” whose main purpose in writing the book was to condemn serfdom and convince Russian landowners to abolish it before the serfs revolted.10 Indeed, Radishchev was one of the first—if not the first—proponents of individual rights in Russia, a position based on his extensive reading of natural law theorists who argued for the equality of all in the state of nature (although some also contended that separate national histories proved that the class structures that emerged were natural for those societies). Radishchev opposed serfdom—even
though he never attempted to free his own serfs. He advocated greater humanity in the management of estates, but his stance also looks defensive of an autocracy that put itself at risk by failing to undertake some reform. Recruiting Radishchev to the ranks of the “liberal intelligentsia” speaks very much of a Cold War outlook. Radishchev wrote toward the end of a reign that had in many respects been progressive in legislating reforms of Russia’s political economy and, in certain peripheral areas, experimenting with the emancipation of state serfs. Catherine the Great was one of the intellectual stars of the European Enlightenment, a celebrity correspondent of many great thinkers such as Voltaire and D’Alembert, as well as host to Diderot in 1774 in St. Petersburg. Given the fear caused by the French Revolution, 1790 was a bad time to agitate for further reforms to Russia’s highly top-down power structure, in which the monarch ruled almost at the grace of the wealthiest nobles, whose fortunes in turn were vested in the land. The Journey contains two “projects for the future,” and while they have a utopian quality, they are also rooted in present circumstance and hint at the possibility that Catherine might reform the Table of Ranks, the hierarchical system Peter had created for staffing the imperial bureaucracy, and create financial incentives for the better treatment of serfs by the landed gentry.
A purely political reading of Radishchev’s rich, complex, multifaceted, and profoundly innovative book would be reductive, however. For all the evidentiary value Radishchev’s Journey has for historians, it is of course not a straightforward piece of documentation or social analysis. There is much more in his Journey than an exposition of his political beliefs, condemnation of serfdom, and criticism of the contemporary Russian monarchy. Most important, it is not a political treatise but a work of literature whose genre is unique. Despite the heated arguments about Radishchev’s political intentions that have persisted since its first publication, the Journey remains not fully appreciated as a work that uses its multiple types of discourse and polyphonic style of narration to offer perspectives on questions about Russian civilization at the end of Catherine’s reign, when the European Enlightenment had come under assault from the French Revolution. The different perspectives of the literary characters from across the social spectrum, including serf and conscript narrators as well as landowners and high-ranking civil servants, emerge in how they tell their stories. There are also narrators who offer perspectives from outside the system by imagining a better future in the language of the allegorical dream and by offering utopian visions of progress.
Radishchev structured his work in twenty-five chapters, each of which is named for a post station where the traveler stops to rest and change horses. The chapters are preceded by a dedication whose addressee is Radishchev’s boyhood friend Alexei Mikhailovich Kutuzov. The dedication addresses two of the most important human capacities: to engage in close observation of the world around one and to feel compassion by virtue of empathy. The former makes the latter possible. Wherever the traveler goes, he must be ready to keep his eyes open and actually see and not turn away from injustice but feel the pain it inflicts. By averting his gaze, man overlooks suffering and condones its existence. Outward observation is not the only mode of viewing, however, because the book also contains allegorical visions and dreams. They enlighten the traveler and allow him to see the failings, his own and mankind’s, that lead to cruelty toward fellow humans.
While sometimes read as a work of political satire and brutal realism, the Journey’s picture of Russia is anything but straightforwardly realistic (any more than Gogol’s Dead Souls is simply a mirror held up to economic reality). Radishchev’s debt to other writers—whether Vasily Trediakovsky for linguistic experimentation, the French anticolonial writer Abbé Raynal for models of slave rebellion stories, or Rousseau for his focus on one’s own heart as a touchstone of virtue—makes it a highly literary work. Although Radishchev read pioneering writers of the social sciences, such as Condorcet and Adam Smith, and drew lessons on political economy and social justice from them, reading Radishchev is not like reading Adam Smith—certainly not the Adam Smith of The Wealth of Nations. For one thing, while Radishchev was expert at administrative memoranda, here his primary rhetorical mode is the story.
Radishchev understood the human self as an empirical being. While he does not deny that goodness may be an innate propensity, he believes that individual values are conditioned by a range of social, scientific, economic, and intellectual forces, and his use of a literary form aims to see how characters respond to competing interests. Travel literature was among the eighteenth century’s most flexible literary modes, and it proved the optimal form for an inquiry into the state of Russian life—mostly rural life, but also 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 nar
rator 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. What Radishchev means exactly is a matter for speculation, but he does not call this energy “God” and seems to associate it with Nature. In mentioning “the crush of worlds,” Addison’s lines seem to side with an idea fashionable in the eighteenth century, starting with the French philosopher Fontenelle (whose treatise On the Plurality of Worlds was translated into Russian in 1728 by the highly European and pro-Petrine prince Antiokh Kantemir) that there is a multiplicity of worlds. This concept was long seen as a challenge to Christian dogma. How could one reconcile the idea of multiple worlds with the account of Genesis? Did it mean that there were multiple gods? In this chapter, Radishchev acknowledges that historically there have been many names for a supernatural power but finds that since empirical proof for the existence of God cannot be produced definitively, it is one’s own spiritualism that convinces best. This short chapter turns out to be a demonstration of the anthropology of religion and a typical example of Radishchev’s method in making plots out of philosophical inquiry.
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow Page 2