Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

The line is adapted by Radishchev from the narrative poem Tilemakhida by V. K. Trediakovsky (1703–1769), a poetic version of the French writer and educationalist Cardinal Fénelon’s didactic novel Télémaque (1699), widely read as a conduct book and used as a manual for teaching virtue to princes and kings. The line comes from a part of the poem in which evil rulers in hell see themselves in the mirror of Truth. Trediakovsky rendered Fénelon’s Télémaque in the equivalent he devised to the classical hexameter: a line that combined trochees and spondees and had six stresses. It can be interpreted as a dolnik. Trediakovsky’s hexameter was later adopted by Nikolai Gnedich (1784–1833) in his seminal translation of the Iliad (1829) and by Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852) in his translation of the Odyssey (1842–46).

3. The stationmaster, fourteenth class in the Table of Ranks, organized the provision of postal coaches and horse relays. This provincial petty clerk stuck in a backwater was made famous in Pushkin’s story “The Stationmaster” (1831). For more on the Table of Ranks, see endnote 9.

4. Folk songs became prized in the eighteenth century as genuine expressions of popular culture. A number of important collections of ethnographic materials, folklore, and popular songs were published in Russia.

6. The Service Archive (razriadnyi arkhiv), established in 1711, contained the service records of all service people (sluzhilye liudi) for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Service records of eighteenth-century servitors were kept in the Heraldry Office.

7. Rurik was the legendary founder of the Rurikid dynasty, who, according to Russian chronicles, ruled in Novgorod beginning in 862. His descendants ruled in Kiev beginning in the early tenth century. Vladimir Monomakh reigned in the twelfth century and was famed for his wisdom and advice to princes.

8. Mestnichestvo was the Muscovite system of precedence governing ritual occasions and reflecting individual and family status among the nobility from the fifteenth to the late seventeenth century. A reform introduced in 1682 by Tsar Fyodor Alexeyevich, the older brother of Peter the Great, abolished mestnichestvo, shifting power to military interests away from the landed nobility. The law eliminated the superiority of Moscow nobility over that of the provinces.

9. The Table of Ranks was a list of positions in the military, civil, and court services introduced by a 1722 law to govern state servitors’ promotion through the ranks. It played a critical role in overhauling the service class and allowed Peter to replace the Muscovite service elite with a new class of servitors. It forcefully reconfirmed every nobleman’s obligation to serve the Crown and the state. Divided into fourteen grades or classes, from the first (highest) to the fourteenth (lowest), the Table defined the status of every servitor and his position vis-à-vis his peers. It also made it possible for commoners to be ennobled through ascending the hierarchy of ranks, making the hereditary nobles resentful.

10. According to Catherine the Great’s legislation of 1785, which instituted fundamental reforms in the nature of service to the Crown and the treatment of nobles, a register was to be kept in every province of the genealogy of the local nobility, with the ancient aristocracy (as distinct from the newer service nobles) listed in the final part.

14. Schismatic or Old Believer (raskol’nik or starover): a member of a movement of religious purists that arose in Russia in the middle of the seventeenth century. Schismatics rejected the reforms of Patriarch Nikon, which aimed to bring Russian religious practices closer to Greek. Radishchev refers here to the Schismatics’ refusal to keep religious holidays, including Sunday.

15. One point of contention between the Schismatics and the Orthodox believers was how to make the sign of the cross, with two fingers or three. Here the peasant indicates that he is an Orthodox believer by claiming that he uses three fingers to cross himself.

18. State peasants worked on lands owned by the state. Although they, too, had to pay various taxes, they enjoyed many freedoms (most importantly, personal) denied to peasants belonging to an individual landowner.

21. Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–1789): a painter celebrated in the second half of the eighteenth century for his maritime paintings and large canvases depicting shipwrecks as sublime events in which the terrible drama of the disaster contrasts with the still beauty of the moonlit sea; a number of his paintings were in the Hermitage.

23. Subedar: an Indian officer rank in British India. The travails of Clive of India, who established the dominance of the East India Company in Bengal, was discussed in contemporary historical writing by, among others, Abbé Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal, in his Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1777) and Voltaire in his Fragments historique sur l’Inde (1773). The British were attacked in 1756, leading to the fall of Calcutta and the death of more than one hundred British prisoners stifled in cells (giving rise to the name the Black Hole of Calcutta).

24. Oranienbaum: the oldest of the imperial palaces around St. Petersburg. Located to the west of St. Petersburg on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, it features formal gardens and terraces. In 1743, Elizabeth commissioned Giambattista Pittoni to build a palace for her nephew, the future Peter III. In the 1760s, Pittoni built the Chinese Palace for Catherine II as her official country residence.

25. Polkan, Bova: characters in the Russian woodblock print (lubok) The Tale of Bova the King’s Son. Originally, Pulicane (a chimeric character, half-human, half-horse) and Buovo in the Italian version of a fourteenth-century chivalric romance Li Reali di Francia nei quali si contiene la generazione degli imperadori, re, principi, baroni e paladini con la bellissima istoria di Buovo di Antona by Andrea da Barberino. In 1799–1802 (?), Radishchev wrote a long poem, Bova, of which only the introduction and canto 1 survive. Nightingale-Robber: in East Slavic mythology, a monstrous creature that kills with its terrifying whistling.

26. Governor-general (namestnik): according to the 1775 Provincial Reform Law (Uchrezhdenie o guberniiakh), the state’s chief administrator in charge of two or more provinces.

31. A possible reference to Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See (Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient), a discussion of visual perception inspired by success in the surgical removal of cataracts.

32. Captain James Cook (1728–1779): British navigator, cartographer, and explorer in the Pacific, author of an important set of scientific journals. He perished in Hawaii, probably murdered during an uprising, although different accounts circulated.

33. The Goths were East Germanic peoples who toppled the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD; the Vandals sacked and looted Rome in the sixth century and made extensive conquests in Southern Europe and North Africa.

35. Praskovya (Paraskeva): “Friday” in Greek; St. Paraskeva Pyatnitsa (name day November 10) is a mythological figure in East Slavic tradition that combines Christian and pagan features.

36. Radishchev’s interlocutor lists five of eight subjects (classes) taught in seminaries. Kuteikin, a character in The Minor (Nedorosl’, staged in 1782, published in 1783) by Denis Fonvizin (1744/1745–1792), refers to his unfinished seminary education, informing the other characters that he reached the sixth (“rhetoric”) class of the eight classes that comprised seminary education before leaving the school. Radishchev’s seminarian ironically mentions the next class, “philosophy,” after which seminarians ostensibly leave without taking the last class, “theology.”

37. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645): a Dutch philosopher, political theorist, and jurist. Charles de Montesquieu (1689–1755): a French political philosopher. William Blackstone (1723–1780): an English jurist and politician. The works of all three were in Radishchev’s library.

38. Court almanac (pridvornyi kalendar’): a yearly publication (beginning in 1745) that published the names of courtiers promoted in rank as well as lists of recipients of awards.

39. Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803): a French esoteric philosopher and mystic, the founder of Martinism, a form of Christian mysticism focused on the fall of man and the process of his return to grace.

41. Frederick the Great (1712–1786): the king of Prussia from 1740 to his death. A proponent of enlightened absolutism, he modernized the Prussian bureaucracy, reformed the judicial system, and encouraged religious tolerance.

43. Bayle’s Dictionary: Radishchev quotes The Historical and Critical Dictionary (Dictionnaire historique et critique) by Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), one of the most important works of rational skepticism of the European Enlightenment. In editions that contain a chapter on Akibah (and not all do), Bayle gives the dialogue in Latin with an English translation in which parts of the body are omitted and indicated with a long dash. Radishchev is more explicit and ironical.

44. In the 1780s, Radishchev read various historical sources and made numerous notes. The nature of government in Kiev and, especially, Novgorod was one of his particular interests because he believed that both were republics governed by princes invited and dismissed by the veche, a popular assembly of all residents, proving for Radishchev that medieval Russia practiced direct democracy. For a full publication of Radishchev’s notes, see Irina Reyfman, “Istoricheskie zametki A. N. Radishcheva,” in Filosofskii vek. Al’manakh, vol. 25, Istoriia filosofii kak filosofiia, part 2, ed. T. V. Artem’eva and M. I. Mikeshin (St. Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii Tsentr Istorii Idei, 2003), 235–50.

45. Mayor (posadnik): the head of the civilian government in Novgorod. The military commander (tysiatskii) oversaw the militia troops and the police. Both were elected officials.

47. Ivan Vasilyevich: a composite image of two Ivans, Ivan III (reigned 1462–1505) and Ivan IV the Terrible (reigned 1547–84), both of whom were instrumental in subjugating Novgorod to Moscow. Ivan the Terrible is believed to have personally participated in the so-called massacre of Novgorod in 1570; hence the later mention of the cudgel.

48. What follows comes from the notes Radishchev made while reading various historical sources, including V. N. Tatishchev’s Russian History (Istoriia Rossiiskaia), G. F. Miller’s “Brief Report on the Origins of Novgorod” (“Kratkoe izvestie o nachale Novagoroda”), and Nestor’s Chronicle with His Successors … (Letopis’ Nesterova s prodolzhateliami …). For a description of Radishchev’s sources, see Reyfman, “Zametki A. N. Radishcheva po russkoi istorii,” 227–34.

49. The merchant class was not hereditary but was defined by voluntary membership of one of the three guilds. Beginning in 1785, a qualification for joining the third was declaring a capital sum of one thousand to five thousand rubles; the second, five thousand to ten thousand rubles; and the first, ten thousand to fifty thousand rubles. Those who declared capital of more than fifty thousand rubles received the status of eminent citizens (imenitye grazhdane). There were other ways to achieve this status.

50. Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801): a Swiss writer, philosopher, physiognomist, and theologian best known for his Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (4 vols., 1775–78), in which he propagated the theory that human character was expressed in the structure of skull and face. His work was very popular in the late eighteenth century and was translated into English by Thomas Holcroft as Essays on Physiognomy for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind (London: G. G. J. & J. Robinson, 1789).

54. The future assessor’s service record is questioned by Krestyankin. According to the Table of Ranks regulations, the military service accorded hereditary nobility to commoners beginning with the lowest fourteenth class (this changed under Nicholas I, in 1846). In contrast, in civil and court service a commoner had to achieve the rank of the eighth class to receive hereditary nobility. Radishchev’s Krestyankin excludes court service from this rule, given that the lower ranks in the court service, in his exaggerated presentation, were occupied by stokers, lackeys, and butlers. Cf. “Vydropusk,” where Radishchev includes the argument against treating the court service as equal to civil service.

56. The Zaporozhian Host (Zaporozhskaia Sech’): a military commune founded by the Cossacks in the late sixteenth century to the south of the rapids on the Dnieper. The Cossack society consisted of groups of several hundred men each, who lived and ate together. Corporal punishment was widely used—hence Radishchev’s comparison.

57. Peasants with land (odnodvortsy): in Muscovite Russia, the servitors of the lowest rank who were rewarded for their service by a small parcel of land. In the eighteenth century, their status was ambiguous: like state peasants, they paid taxes and had to serve the military (fifteen years instead of twenty-five); like noblemen, they had the right to own land and serfs and were free from corporal punishment.

58. The Summer Garden (Letnii sad), the Baba: parks in St. Petersburg. The first was imperial; the other belonged to the courtier A. A. Naryshkin. Both parks were open to the public.

59. Officials in the ranks of first to fourth class as were there wives and widows, were to be addressed “Your Excellency”; fifth to eighth, “Your High Ancestry”; ninth to fourteenth, “Your Honor.”

62. Lada: Slavic goddess of love, most likely invented in the late eighteenth century; see Mikhail Chulkov, Dictionary of Russian Superstitions (Slovar’ russkikh sueverii) (St. Petersburg: 1782), 189.

66. Pretender: Emelyan Pugachev (1742–1775), leader of the 1773–75 peasant rebellion executed in 1775, styled himself as the Emperor Peter III and was therefore a Pretender to the throne.

67. “You already know how to love”: cf. Nikolai Karamzin, “Poor Liza” (“Bednaia Liza,” 1792): “Peasant women too know how to love” (“I krest’ianki liubit’ umeiut”), a line that became proverbial. While it is likely that Karamzin had read the Journey when he wrote his famous story, there is no proof he had.

70. “And we, the sons of glory, we, glorious by name and deeds among the peoples of the Earth”: the original plays on the similarity of the words slava (glory) and slovuty (known, glorious) and slaviane (Slavs). This false etymology was popular in the eighteenth century. See, for example, the beginning of Vasily Trediakovsky’s “Discourse on the Primacy of the Slavic Language Over Teutonic” (“Rassuzhdenie o pervenstve slavenskogo iazyka pred tevtonicheskim,” published in 1773).

71. “Change your name and the story talks about you”: a quotation from Horace, Satires, I.1. 69–70: “Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur” (“With the name changed, the same tale / Is told of you”).

76. In Christian traditions, including Eastern Orthodox tradition, Easter week (Svyataya nedelya) is the period of seven days from Easter Sunday through to the following Saturday. Lent ends on Easter Sunday, and the following week is the time when food containing meat or milk is allowed. One can detect irony in the traveler’s tone.

77. The nymph Egeria: in Roman legend, a divine consort of Numa Pompilius, Rome’s second king (reigned 715–673 bc) and a figure much written about in the eighteenth century as a legislator; Egeria was said to have counseled Numa on laws and religious rituals.

80. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803): a German philosopher, poet, and literary critic. Radishchev here translates, with some omissions and additions, a fragment of his 1780 “Vom Einfluss der Regierung auf die Wissenschaften und der Wissenschaften auf die Regierung” (“On the Influence of the Government on the Sciences and the Sciences on the Government”).

82. Paragraph 480 of Catherine II’s Instruction to the Legislative Commission contains, among other things, this principle: “Words are never to be considered a crime, unless they lead to or are linked to or follow a lawless act.”

86. Titus Labienus: an historian in the time of Augustus, an opponent of monarchy. He committed suicide after his writings were burned on the order of the Senate. His works were later restored on the order of Caligula.

87. Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598): a Spanish orientalist and theologian. He was accused of heresy but eventually acquitted in 1580. Radishchev’s motivation in citing him in the context of Roman censorship is unclear.

93. Radishchev refers to the Council of Nicaea (325) called by Constantine the Great (reigned 306–337), the first Roman emperor converted to Christianity. Arius (256–336), a Libyan presbyter and ascetic, was relegated to anathema by the council as a heretic for his arguing for the supremacy of God the Father.

94. Theodosius II (401–450): Eastern Roman emperor. In 431 he called the Council of Ephesus that condemned as a heretic Nestorius (386–450), the Archbishop of Constantinople (428–431).

97. Abelard (Pierre Abélard, 1079–1141 or 1142): a French scholastic philosopher, theologian, and logician. In 1141, Pope Innocent II (1130–1143) excommunicated Abelard, confined him in a monastery, and ordered his books to be burned.

99. Codex diplomaticus, published by Gudenus, volume IV: Codex diplomaticus anecdotorum, res Moguntinas, Francicas, Trevirenses, Hassiacas, finitimarumque regionum nec non ius Germanicum et S. R. I. historiamvel maxime illustrantium, ed. Valentin Ferdinand, Freiherr von Gudenus, et al., 5 vols. (Göttingen, Frankfurt, and Leipzig, 1743–68).

100. The words in brackets are restored based on the Latin original from which Radishchev was translating: “tenore presentium districte precipiendo mandamus …”

101. Pope Alexander VI (Borgia/Borjia, 1431–1503): elected Pope in 1492. Radishchev compares him to Tiberius (see note 89).

102. William Caxton (c. 1422–1491): an English merchant and writer, who pioneered printing in England. The book cited by Radishchev is A Book of the Chesse Moralysed (Le jeu d’échecs moralisés), attributed by Caxton to Jean de Vignay, who in fact had translated it from the Latin original by Jacopo da Cessole.

103. Secret Chancery (Tainaia kantseliariia): body of political investigation established by Peter the Great in 1718.

104. Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (1593–1641): English statesman, supporter of Charles I. The Long Parliament abolished the Star Chamber.

105. As there is no firm evidence that Radishchev quotes from American revolutionary documents, the translation is from Radishchev’s wording

106. Wilhelm Ludwig Wekhrlin (1739–1792): a German writer and journalist. The magazine Gray Monstrosity (Das graue Ungeheuer) was published from 1784 to 1787.

107. Joseph II (1741–1790): Holy Roman Emperor from 1765 and sole ruler of the Habsburg lands from 1780 until his death. He reformed the legal system, abolishing brutal punishments and the death penalty in most instances, and also experimented with the reform of serfdom in his lands (claiming to see in Catherine the Great a model). He also ended censorship of the press and theater.

108. Burkhard Christoph von Münnich (1683–1767): a German general who in 1721 was invited to Russia to work on engineering projects in the newly acquired northern territories. Eventually, he became a field marshal and a prominent political figure during the reign of the Empress Anna Ioanovna (r. 1730–1740), niece of Peter the Great.

109. The traveler’s interlocutor refers to the adoption by Russians of the syllabo-tonic versification system, usually called “the reform of versification,” which replaced the syllabic versification (“the Polish cladding”) practiced from the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the earlier system, the poetic line was determined by the number of syllables in the line, usually at least twelve, with no fixed pattern of stressed syllables. In the new syllabo-tonic system, the line of verse was determined by the number of fixed syllables arranged according to a regular pattern of unstressed and stressed vowels (the tonic element). Vasily Trediakovsky (1703–1769), Mikhailo Lomonosov (1711–1765), and Alexander Sumarokov (1717–1777) were instrumental in carrying out this reform. In the following paragraphs, both their positive and negative contributions to this reform are discussed.

110. The traveler’s interlocuter expresses regret over predominance of iambs in eighteenth-century Russian poetry, mentioning Lomonosov’s predominantly iambic transpositions of psalms and chapters 38–41 of Job, Sumarokov’s iambic tragedies Semiramis (Semira, written and staged 1751, published 1768) and Dimitry the Pretender (Dimitry Samozvanets, staged and published 1771), and Mikhail Kheraskov’s iambic epic poem Rossiada (1770–78).

111. Vasily Petrov’s translation of the Aeneid (1781–86) and Ermil Kostrov’s translation of cantos 1–6 of the Iliad (1787) are also written in iambs.

112. On Trediakovsky and his Tilemakhida, see the note to the dedication at the beginning of this book.

113. The first translation of Voltaire’s Henriade into Russian was done in unrhymed iambics by Yakov Knyazhnin (1740 or 1742–1791), published in 1777.

114. Radishchev wrote “Liberty” (“Vol’nost’”) in the early 1780s and first published it, with significant cuts, in his Journey. Despite the criticism of iambic meter in “Tver,” it follows the tradition originated with Lomonosov’s “Ode on the Capture of Chocim” (written in 1739, significantly revised for its first full publication in 1751) in using both iambic tetrameter and a ten-line stanza. In early manuscript versions of the Journey, after “Liberty” was included a metrically innovative “Creation of the World” oratory (pesnopenie).

115. Veche: see note 44.

116. Radishchev took an interest in the constitutional arrangements of the new American republic, curious about the relationship between states and a federal government. He also disagreed with Montesquieu and Rousseau that only small states can enjoy good government. See A. N. Radishchev, “Razroznennye zametki,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3 (Moscow, Leningrad: Izd. AN SSSR, 1952), 47, item no. 7. This was in a way his response to their argument.

117. Radishchev’s mistake: it was Neptune who used this expression addressing the winds in Virgil’s Aeneid (see Book I, 135: “Quos ego—”). Radishchev quotes Virgil’s poem in Vasily Petrov’s translation, where these words are translated as “Ia vas! …”

118. Polkan: see note 25.

119. The address “His Excellency” signals that the passing bureaucrat is of the third or fourth class, which entitles him to six horses per carriage. The requirement of fifty horses satirically implies that he either travels in eight to ten carriages or wants more than six horses per carriage.

120. Radishchev refers to Denis Fonvizin’s satirical General Court Grammar (Vseobshchaia pridvornaia grammatika, 1786). Fonvizin (and Radishchev after him) puns on phonetic terms: glasnye (vowels, but also having a voice, able to speak out) and bezglasnye (voiceless, not able to speak out).

121. The original uses an idiom “golod—ne svoi brat” (“hunger isn’t one’s brother”), which means that hunger is difficult or impossible to ignore.

122. Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy: a religious school on Moscow founded in 1685 (classes began in 1678) and converted by Peter the Great to a state institution of higher education in 1701. Lomonosov was accepted as a student in January 1731 and left in late 1735, after he was selected, along with eleven other students, to be sent to Germany to be trained in mining. In 1734, he spent a year studying at the Kiev Academy.

123. Christian Wolff (1679–1754): German natural philosopher and mathematician. Lomonosov studied mathematics, physics, and mechanics under his supervision until his departure in July 1739 for Freiberg to study chemistry and metallurgy.

124. Before departing for Germany, Lomonosov bought Trediakovsky’s 1735 New and Brief Method for Composing Russian Verse (Novyi i kratkii sposob k slozheniiu rossiiskikh stikhov), in which Trediakovsky proposed first steps in reforming the syllabic versification system dominant in Russia at that time. Lomonosov’s copy of Trediakovsky’s book survived with Lomonosov’s extensive marginalia (the copy is preserved in the Archives of Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, fond. 20, op. 2, no. 3).

125. All the figures listed here were renowned as orators. The Athenian Demosthenes was a statesman and a legendary rhetorician; the Roman Cicero was a senator and an important intellectual; (William) Pitt the Elder, a British prime minister in the mid-eighteenth century, was famed for his organlike voice. The figures from Radishchev’s generation are Edmund Burke, the Irish parliamentarian, philosopher, and enemy of the French Revolution but supporter of the American colonies; Charles James Fox, notorious as an antislavery campaigner and supporter of the French Revolution; and the comte de Mirabeau, a French revolutionary activist. These three figures used their eloquence to whip up political assemblies.

126. A reference to Lomonosov’s transposition of Psalm 103 (Orthodox Psalm 104); written before 1749, first published in 1784.

127. A reference to Lomonosov’s 1748 “Evening Meditation on the Greatness of God on the Occasion of Great Northern Lights” (“Vechernee razmyshlenie o Bozhiem velichestve pri sluchae velikogo severnogo siianiia”). In this deist poem, Lomonosov discusses several hypotheses explaining the aurora borealis.

128. Gudok: a primitive chordophone instrument mostly used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Russian jugglers (skomorokhi).

129. A reference to Lomonosov’s “Ode on the Day of the Ascension to the All-Russian Throne of … the Empress Elisaveta Petrovna, the Year 1747” (“Oda na den’ vosshestviia na vserossiiskii prestol … imperatritsy Elisavety Petrovny 1747 goda”), 1747.

130. Pyotr (Platon after becoming a monk) Levshin (1737–1812), the Metropolitan of Moscow from 1787 to 1812, a theologian and a gifted rhetorician. Radishchev refers to his 1772 oration given on the occasion of the Russian naval victory of Chesme. Radishchev also implies Levshin’s connection to Plato (Platon in Russian tradition) through his adopted name.

131. William Robertson (1721–1793): a Scottish historian; Andreas Sigismund Marggraf (1709–1782): a German chemist; Andreas Rüdiger (1673–1731): a German natural philosopher and physicist.

132. Radishchev is referring here to Georg Wilhelm Richmann (1711–1753), a Baltic German physicist, a member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. He was electrocuted while experimenting with lightning.