His famous Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, which he printed at his own expense in 1790, was the first in a long series of literary bombshells which the privileged aristocracy was to set off against the established order. Yet it was in many ways a typical product of Catherine's time: moralistic in tone and pretentious in style. Imitating Sterne and Volney, Radishchev couches his social criticism in the philosophic language of the European Enlightenment. Evil comes "from man himself, and often only from the fact that he has not yet seen surrounding places in the right light." Artificial divisions and restrictions rather than inherent limitations keep man from realizing his "inviolable worth."72
Even his criticism of serfdom, which was the most novel and daring feature of the book, was in some ways only a kind of delayed response to the demand for social and economic criticism which Catherine herself had made to the Free Economic Society a few years before. The basis for Radishchev's objections to serfdom were, moreover, in conformity with those of Catherine's Enlightenment. His protest was based not on practical or even compassionate grounds but rather on the high philosophic plane that the system prevented serfs from using their own rational faculties to conceive of any alternative to their degrading lot.
Appearing as it did without official approval in the first year of the French Revolution, Radishchev's book alarmed Catherine. She arrested him for treason and sentenced him to decapitation, which was commuted to exile in Siberia. In distant Tobol'sk he reaffirmed his faith in human dignity with verse written in the inelegant singsong style that was to become fashionable among the radical "civic" poets of the nineteenth century:
I am what I have always been, and shall be evermore Neither cow, nor tree, nor slave, but a man.73
When he returned from Siberia after Catherine's death, his last years were spent in drafting a republican constitution for Russia which he hoped young Alexander I would put into effect. Radishchev committed suicide in 1802, leaving behind unfulfilled hopes for social and political reform which continued to agitate the aristocracy throughout Alexander's reign. Interest in his ideas was revived again only during the reform period of Alexander II's reign, when Herzen brought out a new edition of his Journey in 1858, on the eve of peasant emancipation.
Skovoroda and Radishchev stand at the headwaters of two mighty streams of thought that swept through modern Russian thought. Skovoroda was the precursor of Russia's alienated metaphysical poets, from Tiutchev to Pasternak, and of a host of brooding literary figures from Lermontov's Hero of our Time to Dostoevsky's Idiot. Skovoroda is the untitled outsider in aristocratic Russia, the homeless romantic, the passionate believer unable to live within the confines of any established system of belief. He stands suspended somewhere between sainthood and total egoism, relatively indifferent to the social and political evils of this world, thirsting rather for the hidden wellsprings and forbidden fruits of the richer world beyond.
Radishchev was the privileged nobleman with a European education, conscious of the artificiality of his position; he was conscience-stricken by the suffering of others and anxious to create a better social order. His preoccupation with social problems foreshadows the civic poetry of the Decembrists and Nekrasov, the literary heroes of Turgenev, and even the
search for family happiness and social adjustment from Eugene Onegin to Anna Karenina. At the same time, there is in Radishchev a heroic Pro-metheanism that anticipates the ecstatic, secular belief in the future of Lunacharsky and Trotsky. In his last book, On Man, His Mortality and Immortality, Radishchev rejects the prosaic materialism of the French Encyclopedists and sees man attaining perfection-even immortality- through heroic effort and a creative evolution that includes a regeneration (palingenesis) of the dead. His conviction was that "if people feared death less they would never become slaves of superstition. Truth would find for itself more zealous defenders."74
Radishchev and Skovoroda were precursors rather than decisive influences in their own right; and it is dangerous to lift their ideas out of the complex context of their own life and times. Nevertheless, they stand as pioneers if not prophets: they were the first to set out on the argosy of alienation that would lead to revolution. Almost all Russian revolutionaries have seen in Radishchev the founding father of their tradition; and it has now been revealed that Skovoroda was one of the very few religious thinkers who was read and admired by Lenin himself. There are many memorials to Radishchev in the USSR, and Lenin planned also to erect a monument to Skovoroda.75
Novikov and Masonry
Far more influential than either Radishchev or Skovoroda in Catherine's time was Nicholas Novikov, who shared both the philanthropic reformism of the former and the religious anguish of the latter. Novikov was a serious thinker and, at the same time, a prodigious organizer who opened up new paths of practical activity for the aristocracy. A member of the exclusive Izmailovsky regiment and of Catherine's legislative commission, Novikov imitated Catherine in the sixties by founding his own weekly satirical journal, The Drone, named after the dull pedant in a play then popular at court. In this journal-and even more in its successors of the early seventies, The Painter and The Purse-Novikov voiced the increasing dissatisfaction of the native Russian nobility with Catherine's imitation of French ways and toleration of social injustice. Novikov's journals became the first organs of independent social criticism in Russian history. Like later "thick journals," each of these was shut down by imperial authority. Novikov then linked his publishing energies to two other institutions which
were to play a key role in the cultural development of the alienated intellectuals: the university and the small discussion group, or "circle."
The university was, of course, Moscow University, which, prior to the arrival of Novikov and his circle in the late seventies, had been a moribund institution with a total enrollment of some one hundred students listening to uninspired lectures in Latin and German. When, however, the poet Kher-askov became curator of the university in 1778, it was rapidly transformed into a center of intellectual ferment. Novikov took over the Moscow University Press in 1779 and organized a public library connected with the university. From 1781 to 1784 he printed more books at the university press than had appeared in the entire previous twenty-four years of its existence, and within a decade the number of readers of the official University Gazette increased from six hundred to four thousand.76
In 1783 he set up Russia's first two private printing presses, capitalizing one of them the following year as Russia's first joint-stock printing company. He also took the lead in organizing Russia's first private insurance company and, in 1787, a remarkable nationwide system for famine relief. His Morning Light, begun in the late seventies, was the first journal in Russian history to seek to impart a systematic knowledge of the great philosophers of classical antiquity, beginning with translations of Plato and Seneca. He edited a series of journals and collections in the eighties, ranging from children's books to voluminous documents on early Russian history. His "Library of Russian Antiquity" underwent two large editions during the eighties. Together with the History of Russia and Decline of Ancient Morals by his friend, Prince Shcherbatov, Novikov's works tended to glorify the moral fiber of old Muscovy, and implicitly challenged Catherine's cavalier dismissal of traditional elements in Russian life. The publication in the seventies and eighties of Chulkov's encyclopedic collections of Russian folk tales, songs, and popular legends pointed to a wealth of neglected native material for literary development: sources of popular wisdom neglected by the Voltairians of St. Petersburg. Even Ivan Boltin, an admirer of Voltaire and translator of Diderot, rose up to extol Russian tradition in his Notes on the History of Ancient and Modern Russia by Le Clerc in 1789: a vigorous refutation of the unflattering six-volume history of Russia published in 1782 by a Russophobic French surgeon.77