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
