Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow Read online

  JOURNEY FROM ST. PETERSBURG TO MOSCOW

  RUSSIAN LIBRARY

  The Russian Library at Columbia University Press publishes an expansive selection of Russian literature in English translation, concentrating on works previously unavailable in English and those ripe for new translations. Works of premodern, modern, and contemporary literature are featured, including recent writing. The series seeks to demonstrate the breadth, surprising variety, and global importance of the Russian literary tradition and includes not only novels but also short stories, plays, poetry, memoirs, creative nonfiction, and works of mixed or fluid genre.

  Editorial Board:

  Vsevolod Bagno

  Dmitry Bak

  Rosamund Bartlett

  Caryl Emerson

  Peter B. Kaufman

  Mark Lipovetsky

  Oliver Ready

  Stephanie Sandler

  ■□■

  For a list of books in the series, see Series List

  Columbia University Press / New York

  Published with the support of Read Russia, Inc., and the Institute of Literary Translation, Russia

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Translation copyright © 2020 Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54639-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Radishchev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, 1749–1802 author. | Kahn, Andrew, translator. | Reyfman, Irina, translator.

  Title: Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow / Alexander Radishchev; translated by Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman.

  Other titles: Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu. English

  Description: New York: Columbia University Press, [2020] | Series: Russian library | Translated from the Russian.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020002496 (print) | LCCN 2020002497 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231185905 (cloth; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231185912 (paperback; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231546393 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Serfdom—Russia. | Russia—Social conditions—To 1801.

  Classification: LCC HN525 .R313 2020 (print) | LCC HN525 (ebook) | DDC 306.0947—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002496

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002497

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

  Book design: Lisa Hamm

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction by Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman

  Note on the Text

  JOURNEY FROM ST. PETERSBURG TO MOSCOW

  1. Departure

  2. Sofia

  3. Tosna

  4. Lyubani

  5. Chudovo

  6. Spasskaya Polest

  7. Podberezye

  8. Novgorod

  9. Bronnitsy

  10. Zaitsovo

  11. Kresttsy

  12. Yazhelbitsy

  13. Valdai

  14. Edrovo

  15. Khotilov: Project for the Future

  16. Vyshny Volochok

  17. Vydropusk

  18. Torzhok

  19. Mednoe

  20. Tver

  21. Gorodnya

  22. Zavidovo

  23. Klin

  24. Peshki

  25. Chornaya Gryaz

  Notes

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  While translating Alexander Radishchev’s travelogue, we benefited from the generous help of many individuals. First of all, we would like to express our gratitude to Christine Dunbar, the editor of the Russian Library series at Columbia University Press. She was the person with whom we first discussed this project, and has remained enthusiastic and supportive from beginning to end, answering our questions and helping to solve problems, small and large. We particularly appreciate her reading the entire manuscript, both the introduction and the translation, and coming up with many helpful suggestions at the revision stage. We also thank friends and colleagues who read either the entire manuscript or parts of it at different stages and helped us to revise and improve our translation. Our deepest gratitude goes to Kelsey Rubin-Detlev and Nicholas Cronk for reading the entire manuscript. Their meticulous and learned help was inestimable. Avi Lifschitz and Thomas Wynn generously read selections and offered valuable feedback on aspects of Radishchev’s sources and his style. We would also like to acknowledge the generosity of colleagues who responded to our queries about sometimes very complex aspects of the Russian eighteenth-century economy, legal system, and social system. We could not have managed without their expertise. Robert H. Davis, librarian for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies at Columbia University, helped to search for hard-to-find books and articles. Robert H. Scott, head of the Electronic Text Service, Columbia University Libraries (retired), has our gratitude for making it possible to copy the microforms of rare eighteenth-century publications. We also owe profound gratitude to the anonymous reader of our manuscript for the Columbia University Press. We found her or his careful reading and thoughtful and wise suggestions tremendously useful while giving our manuscript one last round of revisions. Ben Kolstad and Leslie Kriesel provided valuable help with production, and Peggy Tropp with copyediting, for which we are extremely grateful. The opportunity to present our work at the X International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia (Strasbourg) in July 2018 afforded feedback from our fellow participants that proved invaluable to the development of our translating strategy. We are grateful to them.

  INTRODUCTION

  ANDREW KAHN AND IRINA REYFMAN

  The Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow is the work that made Alexander Radishchev an underground celebrity. Confiscated when Radishchev published it in late May 1790, this work of travel literature and political critique is one of the most notorious books of the eighteenth century. Banned until nearly the end of the Imperial period, it was read in manuscript copies that circulated clandestinely (there are about seventy extant copies dating from 1790, many with readers’ comments), in the few rare copies of the first edition that survived (Alexander Pushkin acquired such a copy), or finally, in copies published by the émigré press outside Russia starting in 1856. Radishchev’s arrest, on June 30, 1790, came at the start of the third decade of a reign that began in 1762, when Catherine II took the throne. Because her clash with this dedicated civil servant and gifted freethinker came toward the end of the epoch, it overshadowed her long record of accomplishment. Radishchev’s sentence of exile looked like an act of despotic intolerance, casting doubt on Catherine’s commitment to the improvement of social welfare and other progressive tenets of the Enlightenment. Russian historians have continued to debate whether the principles of toleration, reform, and rational government that Catherine had made cornerstones of her reputation were real or mere virtue signaling. The historical irony is that Radishchev’s intellectual qualities and philosophical views were very much the product of the values of toleration, Westernization, and reform that Catherine had championed for much of her reign.

  THE MAN AND HIS WORK

  Born in Moscow in 1749, Radishchev was the scion of a wealthy and well-educated provincial nobleman, a descendant of a Tatar prince who entered Russian service under Ivan the Terrible. The future writer spent the first years of his life on one of his father’s numerous estates and was taught at home; beginning in 1756 or 1757, he lodged in the Moscow house of a relativ
e on his mother’s side, Mikhail Argamakov, the director of Moscow University, to be taught together with his children.1 Their education was first-rate: Moscow University professors gave them private lessons, they had access to the university library, and they were able to attend public lectures at the university. In 1762, the young Radishchev entered state service as a page to the newly enthroned Empress. He spent the first year in Moscow, where the court had relocated for Catherine’s coronation, and then moved with the court to St. Petersburg. His education continued at the Corps of Pages, where he studied physics, mathematics, geography, and languages. He also learned music, dance, and fencing. The duties of a page required Radishchev to appear at court, and his first attempt at creative composition, the synopsis of a one-act comedy in French cowritten with his classmate P. I. Chelishchev (the Ch. of the chapter “Chudovo”), was staged at the court theater.2

  In 1766, Radishchev was one of a select group of twelve young noblemen sent to Leipzig University to further their education. Each of them was given room and board and a bursary of eight hundred rubles, a substantial sum. The young people studied natural philosophy, law, logic, geography, physics, and mathematics; they also learned languages—German, French, and Latin. Among their instructors were first-rate European scholars and scientists, including the philosopher Ernst Platner and poet Christian Gellert. Radishchev also studied medicine. The connections he makes in his major writings between forms of sensibility and sensation may have been rooted in his education at Leipzig University. The Age of Reason was also an Age of Sensibility, and the human propensity for sympathy and empathy was seen as a matter of hardwiring in the body as much as a product of a refined education (discussions of pedagogy in this period in Russia, as well as in Western Europe, considered these parallel influences). The foundation for Radishchev’s knowledge of a wide range of Enlightenment ideas about the body and soul, as well as about political economy and the law, was laid during his Leipzig years.

  The period of study at Leipzig was formative not only educationally but also politically and emotionally. Radishchev developed firm friendships with some of his fellow students, most especially Fyodor Ushakov (1748/49–1770), whom he would later commemorate in an important biography, The Life of Fyodor Ushakov (1789). The biography recounts how Russian students, with Ushakov as their ringleader, rebelled against their corrupt supervisor to protest poor living conditions. This experience was seminal for Radishchev, who later traced his mature thinking about political action and legitimate forms of protest back to this event. The Life of Fyodor Ushakov also describes the titular character’s death from venereal disease, stressing his courage in the face of death and connecting his firm behavior with his leadership qualities. Radishchev is unusually frank about Ushakov’s libido and the sexually transmitted disease that prematurely killed him. The topic of prostitution and syphilis recurs in episodes of the Journey that consider passions, including sexual passions, as an important factor in human behavior.3 The friendship with Ushakov was thus a turning point for Radishchev, providing both a political and an emotional education.

  On his return to Russia, Radishchev and two others of his cohort, including his friend Alexei Kutuzov, the future Freemason and eventual dedicatee of the Journey, served briefly in the Senate before entering military service. Radishchev served as a military lawyer until his retirement in 1775. Soon after retirement, Radishchev married Anna Vasilyevna Rubanovskaya (who died prematurely in 1783). He resumed his service career in January 1778 as a civil servant in the Commerce College, with the rank of collegiate assessor. He held this post under Alexander Vorontsov, the well-educated, progressive nobleman, diplomat, and brother of Catherine’s confidante Ekaterina Dashkova. At the time, Vorontsov was president of the Commercial College and had recruited Radishchev to work for the Commission on Commerce. He remained a loyal patron to Radishchev during his career and, especially, after his arrest and exile in 1790.

  A civil servant of distinction and ability who had a practical grasp of policy implementation (he visited the port cities on the Baltic to see things with his own eyes), Radishchev seems never to have put a foot wrong. When the government passed gubernatorial reforms in 1780, Radishchev was seconded to State Councillor Dal, the director of St. Petersburg Customs, and assumed oversight for trade entering the port at St. Petersburg. In this capacity he was said to have commanded the respect of his colleagues for his incorruptibility, a conspicuous virtue when contrasted with the venality of officialdom much illustrated in the Journey. He made steady progress up the ranks, achieving several promotions in the early 1780s. In 1789 he was designated director of St. Petersburg Customs.

  Arrested a month after the publication of the Journey, Radishchev was imprisoned in the notorious Peter and Paul Fortress, investigated, and condemned to death in late July. In early September, Catherine commuted the death sentence, replacing it with exile to Siberia. On September 8, 1790, in chains and under guard, Radishchev began his journey to Ilimsk, a small fortress not far from the Angara River. Thanks to Vorontsov, the chains were soon removed, and on his way to Siberia Radishchev spent significant time in Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Tobolsk, and Irkutsk, which eased his journey. His sister-in-law, Ekaterina Rubanovskaya, and his two younger children joined him in Tobolsk. Rubanovskaya became Radishchev’s common-law wife (marriages between in-laws were prohibited), with whom he had three children. She died on the family’s way back to European Russia in 1797.

  Radishchev arrived in Ilimsk in January 1792 and left in February 1797, having been granted permission to live in Nemtsovo, one of his estates, by the new ruler, Paul. After Paul was assassinated in March 1801, Alexander I fully pardoned the writer and offered him a position on the Legislative Commission to work on the codification of Russian law. Steeped in Western legal theory and knowledgeable about Russian legal practice, Radishchev joined the commission’s work with enthusiasm. Several of his pieces on jurisprudence date from his year and a half with the commission. In September 1802, however, he committed suicide by drinking nitrohydrochloric acid. His motivation remains a mystery. It has been conjectured that he may have taken his life either because he feared another period of Siberian exile, as his son Pavel suggests in his biography of his father, or out of his general disillusionment with the constitutional project in which he was involved at the time. It is significant, however, that he had been thinking and writing about suicide ever since Fyodor Ushakov voiced his desire to kill himself instead of dying a slow and painful death during his illness in Leipzig.

  From early on, Radishchev found in writing a medium to explore his thoughts about personal and public matters of concern. During his time in Leipzig and for several years after his return to Russia, he was chiefly engaged in translations from French and German; most important among these was Abbé de Mably’s Observations sur les Grecs, which was published anonymously in 1773. Around the same time, Radishchev turned to literature. In 1779–82 he worked on the metrically innovative “oratory” “Creation of the World”; he included it in the early version of the Journey, where it followed the excerpts from the iambic ode “Liberty,” written around 1783. In its full form, the ode discusses the social contract and the right it gives the sovereign people to protest against a corrupt monarch. Radishchev’s examples of champions of liberty include Cromwell against the Crown and, for the American colonies, Washington’s revolt against the British Empire.

  While in the Peter and Paul Fortress, Radishchev began writing a work that perhaps provides some insights into his authorial motives for the Journey. It is based on the Life of St. Philaret the Merciful, who lived in the first century AD in Asia Minor. A prosperous and charitable man, Philaret lost his estate to robbers and became a pauper. Nonetheless, he continued his charitable work, and God eventually rewarded him. Radishchev uses this Life as a canvas for his own biography, to communicate with his family and to explain his actions. It is significant that he chose the Life of the saint who, like the author of the Journey, was sensitive to the
sufferings of humanity.

  Most of Radishchev’s works of literature (excluding the Journey) were made available to the reading public when his sons Nikolai and Pavel published an edition in six volumes (1806–11). Literary activities were clearly just as important to him as his political interests. His diverse writings included a work of natural philosophy on the nature of the soul and the body, A Historical Song about the idea of historical change, a long poem, Bova, based on folk traditions (inspired as well by Voltaire’s burlesque epic The Maid of Orleans), and another long poem, Songs Sung at the Competition in Honor of the Ancient Slavic Divinities, written in tribute to the Russian medieval epic the Lay of Igor’s Campaign. Yet Radishchev was not much appreciated as a writer by the generation that followed. His openness to experimentation and the use of highly idiosyncratic forms stymied most readers. There were some exceptions. Pushkin, for instance, admired both Radishchev’s experiments with meters and his poetry. His 1836 essay “Alexander Radishchev” is often cited for its criticism of Radishchev’s “barbaric” style, but Pushkin also paid tribute to Radishchev’s “honesty of intention” in the Journey and this work’s comprehensive summation of “all French philosophy of the period.” Radishchev’s persecution and the initial hostility to his ideas were instrumental in shaping how readers interpreted the work’s political goals in the last century of Imperial Russia, as well as in Soviet Russia, where virtually from the 1917 revolution Radishchev was lionized as a proto-Bolshevik.

  THE JOURNEY: ITS PUBLICATION AND RECEPTION

  Textual studies of the composition of Radishchev’s Journey—his second longest work after the complex quasi-materialist treatise he wrote in exile on the body-soul duality—suggest that he began writing when Catherine’s policies were more permissive and she still had a reputation as a reformer. The first part of the Journey written was “An Oration About Lomonosov.” The other chapters followed, and by the end of 1788 the version that Radishchev submitted to the censor was complete. The censor approved this short version for publication. Censorship, both state and church, in the Catherine period was unsystematic and sporadically applied; in general, the 1780s were a period of flourishing for small presses and of growth for university presses.