Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow
Alexander Radishchev
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow
Alexander Radishchev
Paperback
|
English
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Description
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow is among the most important pieces of writing to come out of Russia in the age of Catherine the Great. Alexander Radishchev’s account of a fictional journey blends literature, philosophy, and political economy to expose social and economic injustices and their causes at all levels of Russian society.
Combining profound linguistic sophistication with enviable literary style, Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman, two of today’s most esteemed scholars of Russian literature, have produced the definitive translation of Radishchev’s classic revolutionary cri de coeur.
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow is an outstanding monument of Enlightenment thought in Russia. Distinguished scholars Irina Reyfman and Andrew Kahn have skillfully translated Radishchev’s archaic, high style to heighten the emotional pathos and to contrast official rhetoric to the reality of human suffering. That this important work is again available in English is cause for celebration.
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow offers a troubling account of Russian civilization at the end of the eighteenth century, a critique both deliberately archaic in its style and eminently resonant with the political and social anxieties of our contemporary moment. Reyfman and Kahn could not have found a better time to revive Radishchev’s classic in their remarkably lucid and readable translation.
This is a much needed and long overdue new translation with a highly informative introduction and helpful annotations of Radishchev’s influential book, masterfully done by two premier specialists in eighteenth-century Russian literature. The translation preserves elements of Radishchev’s idiosyncratic style without sounding overly archaic, a notable achievement.
A valuable glimpse of Russia as seen in the years just before its 19th-century literary renaissance.
[Radishchev] crafts a masterly fictional travelogue, combining philosophy, poetry, and the political ideals of the Enlightenment in an unequivocal condemnation of serfdom, censorship, and corruption . . . Various, engaging, and deeply affecting . . . Kahn and Reyfman’s attentive new translation is a boon for English-language readers.
Journey remains relevant by implicating the author, narrator and reader in its indictment . . . The insight to understand where our daily bread is truly coming from, the creativity to invent an idiom to express it, and the martyrdom of being broken by the state as a result – these are the lasting legacies of Alexander Radishchev’s Journey.
[This book] will be an important addition to courses on Russian literature and history and the European Enlightenment. But Radishchev’s Journey is also worth reading for anyone seeking to square a belief in the goodness of humanity with the reality of structural injustice that is as much the basis of contemporary American society, as it was of Imperial Russian society in 1790. Reyfman and Kahn have preserved the strange, stilted style of Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow while also capturing the searing moral outrage that motivated its writing.
A fascinating and entertaining read.
Alexander Radishchev was born in 1749 to a minor noble family and began writing verse and prose in the 1780s. In 1790, after the publication of Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow caused an uproar, he was arrested and sentenced to death before being exiled to Siberia. Tsar Paul allowed him to return, and Alexander I pardoned him and appointed him to the Commission for Drafting of New Laws. Radishchev committed suicide in 1802.
Andrew Kahn is professor of Russian literature at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
Irina Reyfman is professor of Russian literature in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University.
Combining profound linguistic sophistication with enviable literary style, Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman, two of today’s most esteemed scholars of Russian literature, have produced the definitive translation of Radishchev’s classic revolutionary cri de coeur.
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow is an outstanding monument of Enlightenment thought in Russia. Distinguished scholars Irina Reyfman and Andrew Kahn have skillfully translated Radishchev’s archaic, high style to heighten the emotional pathos and to contrast official rhetoric to the reality of human suffering. That this important work is again available in English is cause for celebration.
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow offers a troubling account of Russian civilization at the end of the eighteenth century, a critique both deliberately archaic in its style and eminently resonant with the political and social anxieties of our contemporary moment. Reyfman and Kahn could not have found a better time to revive Radishchev’s classic in their remarkably lucid and readable translation.
This is a much needed and long overdue new translation with a highly informative introduction and helpful annotations of Radishchev’s influential book, masterfully done by two premier specialists in eighteenth-century Russian literature. The translation preserves elements of Radishchev’s idiosyncratic style without sounding overly archaic, a notable achievement.
A valuable glimpse of Russia as seen in the years just before its 19th-century literary renaissance.
[Radishchev] crafts a masterly fictional travelogue, combining philosophy, poetry, and the political ideals of the Enlightenment in an unequivocal condemnation of serfdom, censorship, and corruption . . . Various, engaging, and deeply affecting . . . Kahn and Reyfman’s attentive new translation is a boon for English-language readers.
Journey remains relevant by implicating the author, narrator and reader in its indictment . . . The insight to understand where our daily bread is truly coming from, the creativity to invent an idiom to express it, and the martyrdom of being broken by the state as a result – these are the lasting legacies of Alexander Radishchev’s Journey.
[This book] will be an important addition to courses on Russian literature and history and the European Enlightenment. But Radishchev’s Journey is also worth reading for anyone seeking to square a belief in the goodness of humanity with the reality of structural injustice that is as much the basis of contemporary American society, as it was of Imperial Russian society in 1790. Reyfman and Kahn have preserved the strange, stilted style of Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow while also capturing the searing moral outrage that motivated its writing.
A fascinating and entertaining read.
Alexander Radishchev was born in 1749 to a minor noble family and began writing verse and prose in the 1780s. In 1790, after the publication of Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow caused an uproar, he was arrested and sentenced to death before being exiled to Siberia. Tsar Paul allowed him to return, and Alexander I pardoned him and appointed him to the Commission for Drafting of New Laws. Radishchev committed suicide in 1802.
Andrew Kahn is professor of Russian literature at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
Irina Reyfman is professor of Russian literature in the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University.