Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

by Irina Reyfman

  Traditional readings of Radishchev’s book have seen it largely as a damning satire, a critique of serfdom and the serf economy, and there is no denying the force with which it exposes all sorts of social ills and evils that arise from abuses of power. These range from corporal punishment and the corruption of the judicial system to sexual exploitation and bribe taking. Far from blaming Catherine for all these ills, Radishchev focuses attention on the newly ennobled—small landowners who advanced up the social ladder through service to the state in the reigns of monarchs from Peter to Catherine II. But Radishchev’s fall from grace was arguably more a story of aspirations disappointed than tyranny opposed: he was not an advocate of revolution and preferred reform, even hoping that Catherine would take to heart his advice on renovating Russian laws to address human exploitation, economic and often sexual. For all his use of sad stories to illustrate the types of exploitation brought about by fundamental inequalities of class, economic situation, and gender, Radishchev keeps alive a more positive undercurrent. In two chapters bearing the subtitle “Project for the Future,” he imagines the promise of a virtuous monarch and state. Radishchev employs here one of his favorite words, a term that is hard to translate: blazhenstvo. Meaning “bliss,” “prosperity,” “the common good,” and “felicity,” and distinct from “good fortune” (schastie), it comes up time and again as a reminder that the human condition has the potential for much happiness when social conditions are reasonable. Late in life, Radishchev became a reader of Condorcet, a great advocate of the rationalist reform of society, whose belief in gender equality and the progress of the human spirit he seems to have shared. The optimism of his century may have been one reason for a critique of Russia born of aspirations for improvement. In 1790, after serving under a monarch who had enshrined social reforms in several important legislative packages, Radishchev hoped for more, and the Journey can be read as his attempt to synthesize in one complex literary work a lifetime spent in various forms of study—of natural and comparative law, the laws of the Russian Empire, and systems of taxation, as well as natural philosophy, as science was called in the eighteenth century.

  TRANSLATING THE JOURNEY

  Until the eighteenth century, the written form of the Russian language derived strongly from the ecclesiastical Church Slavonic. The rise of a secular literature accompanied the development of a new vernacular idiom marked by a more modern vocabulary, conversational tone, and varied patterns of syntax. While Radishchev can be an effective storyteller, he did not adopt for the Journey the newer style that had become the norm in Russia in the 1790s, famously crafted by the other great prose writer of the age, Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826). On the contrary, for his Journey, Radishchev developed an artificially archaic and difficult style, not only using and overusing existing Church Slavonic forms but also creating his own “Slavonicized” expressions. This linguistic oddity has occasioned much comment and criticism, and even native Russians find the laborious syntax, neologisms, and pseudo-Slavonic register a challenge.

  The only English translation of Radishchev’s 1790 travelogue was published by Harvard University Press in 1958. Two translators worked on it: first Leo Wiener (1862–1939), who died before publishing his translation; and then Roderick Page Thaler, who edited Wiener’s translation and supplied it with an introduction, notes, and index. As Thaler informs the reader in his preface, the Harvard historian Michael Karpovich served as his chief consultant during this work. Thaler labeled Radishchev a poor prose writer, seeing the style of his Journey as monotonous, repetitive, uneven, awkward, and often old-fashioned against Karamzin as a benchmark. Such a characterization indicates that Thaler (and, most probably, the original translator Leo Wiener as well) never suspected that Radishchev’s idiosyncratic writing was a consciously created stylistic device, part of his design to make his travelogue effective as a literary work.

  All readers of the Journey know that it is a difficult read. Anyone who has looked at other writings by Radishchev will have seen ample counterevidence that he was also entirely able to write clear prose. The question is why Radishchev devised a style designed to make the reader work hard at the meaning. Many passages in the Journey are not simply outdated (as Thaler believed) but artificially archaic, as has been demonstrated by a number of scholars who have examined Radishchev’s linguistic choices. The fact that some chapters of Radishchev’s book are written in a language that does not present any difficulties to the reader, while others are almost beyond comprehension—so difficult are their word choice, grammar, and syntax—indicates that Radishchev intentionally changed the degree of difficulty to influence his readers in a certain way. It is significant, for example, that the most linguistically obscure chapters and passages usually present the most provocative ideas. Finally, as has been pointed out by historians of the 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-defea
ting (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 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.