Download Free The Philosophical Ideas Of Alexander Radishchev Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Philosophical Ideas Of Alexander Radishchev and write the review.

Alexander Radishchev's major work, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, first published in 1790, was the most scathing denunciation of serfdom and autocracy that had ever appeared in Russia. Its author was immediately arrested, tried for treason, and condemned to death, the sentence being later commuted to exile in Siberia. Catherine the Great, who had provided Radishchev with a schooling in despotism in the Corps des Pages and with an introduction to the Enlightenment at the University of Leipzig, saw in his book a gratuitous insult to herself as well as an attempt to incite a revolt that would bring him to power. Forgetting that many of its ideas were the same as those she had herself expressed earlier, she denounced it as the fruit of foreign abstract theories acting on an excitable, ambitious and resentful man. The Journey was effectively suppressed for more than a century. Any mention of Radishchev was discouraged by the censor for seventy years. A generation after Radishchev's death in 1802, Pushkin's biography of him was refused publication permission on the ground that the subject of it was forgotten and deserved to remain so.
When this was originally published in 1959 it was the first full-length biography of Alexander Radishchev published outside Russia and was based on hitherto unpublished material, memoir literature and Radishchev’s own writings. Radishchev occupies a notable position in the history of European social thought, as the first writer to apply the criteria of the Western Age of Reason to conditions in Tsarist Russia. Sentenced to death on the orders of Catherine the Great and subsequently exiled in Siberia, Radishchev stands out as the first great figure of the Russian radical intelligentsia and the first literary victim of Tsarist official intolerance.
Alexander Radishchev’s 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. An account of a fictional journey along a postal route, it blends literature, philosophy, and political economy to expose social and economic injustices and their causes at all levels of Russian society. Not long after the book’s publication in 1790, Radishchev was condemned to death for its radicalism and ultimately exiled to Siberia instead. Radishchev’s literary journey is guided by intense moral conviction. He sought to confront the reader with urgent ethical questions, laying bare the cruelty of serfdom and other institutionalized forms of exploitation. The Journey’s multiple strands include sentimental fictions, allegorical discourses, poetry, theatrical plots, historical essays, a treatise on raising children, and comments on corruption and political economy, all informed by Enlightenment arguments and an interest in placing Russia in its European context. Radishchev is perhaps the first in a long line of Russian writer-dissenters such as Herzen and Solzhenitsyn who created a singular literary idiom to express a subversive message. In Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman’s idiomatic and stylistically sensitive translation, one of imperial Russia’s most notorious clandestine books is now accessible to English-speaking readers.
This book traces the history of revolutionary movements in nineteenth- century Russia, ending with the great famine of 1891-92, by which time Marxism was already in the ascendant. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.