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Chapter Eight—The Dialectic of Vision in Radishchev’s Journey
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C H A P T E R E I G H T The Dialectic of Vision in Radishchev’s Journey “But this is the misfortune of mortals on earth: to go astray in the full light of day, to fail to see what stands directly before their eyes.” —Radishchev, Journey from Petersburg to Moscow If the triumphal odes offered a comforting vision of greatness; and Russian historical tragedies validated virtue in extreme circumstances; if memoirs and essays on ethics defended the love of honor and selfaffirmation ; and physicotheological works confirmed the obviousness of virtue; if Catherine’s politics argued for political transparency and merit as the cornerstone of enlightened Russian politics; with Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from Petersburg to Moscow the hidden tensions and anxieties of the optimistic ocularcentric self came dramatically to the fore.1 Like other works that have been examined so far, the Journey is preoccupied with sight and the problem of correct seeing. But here the desperate desire to justify sight came up against a major impediment stubbornly and cruelly embedded in Russian reality: serfdom.2 when Radishchev held his mirror up to the world (a metaphor for truthseeking in the Journey) he glimpsed Russia not as a utopian paradise but as a vale of tears. Serfdom represented the horrible, shameful, unseen, ignoble, and ignored underside of the beautiful utopian imperial façade and threatened to eclipse all of the nation’s great accomplishments. The mirror Radishchev held up to Russia reflected a total inversion, reversal, and negation. Radishchev centers his attention precisely on the problem of vision. He vacillates between the values of the classicist self that claims and demands The Dialectic of Vision in Radishchev’s Journey 223 a perfect balance between inner virtue and external appearance, and a profound anxiety over whether such a balance is possible, both in the world as a whole but also within the self. Lurking alongside or beneath the jubilant image of the noble, magnanimous, virtuous self was the threat of its failure, the possibility that the projected self was just that, a mere projection, contradicted by reality. The enslaved Russian peasant seemed to reveal all those things that the jubilant self was not: miserable, poor, ignoble, ignorant, downtrodden—those aspects of Russian life that were ignored and unseen but that threatened to undermine the entire edifice of the new Russia. This harshly negative perspective, which confirmed the Ecclesiastes paradigm’s dire outlook, was matched by an equally immoderate sentimentalist idealization of the peasant as the embodiment of blissful, un-self-conscious, natural virtue. Radishchev’s Journey is permeated with deep anxiety, as the threat to Russia’s self-image—as well as to Radishchev’s personal safety— was immediate and palpable. Radishchev was arrested for his book and sentenced to death, but subsequently instead exiled to Siberia, and came to be considered an archetypal revolutionary martyr and intelligentsia hero for later generations. The Journey from Petersburg to Moscow was a direct and personal challenge to Catherine, and Radishchev’s declaration that the king was wearing no clothes was an act of unheard-of civic daring, an insistence on the rights of the public sphere. The Radishchev affair marked both the logical fruition and the unhappy demise of Catherine’s enlightened absolutism, insofar as Radishchev had insisted on carrying through the very program of political transparency and human rights that Catherine had promoted at the start of her reign as spelled out in the Nakaz (the Instruction to the Legislative Commission of 1767).3 As in the case of the classicist self, for Radishchev the personal and political dramas were inseparable. Exposing the falsehood of the state façade not only threatened the basic political beliefs of the era, but also put the very possibility of self-knowledge in doubt, threatening the cohesion of the self as a psychic whole. while new sentimentalist trends in the Journey are obvious and have been well studied by scholars, Radishchev’s goal is not knowledge by means of absorption in the self, which could lead to a solipsistic moral and emotional dead end. On the contrary, Radishchev strives to break out of this blind alley and to validate the universal, collective ideal, the selfless self defined in terms of the welfare of others, of the Russian masses, as a reflection of eternal laws of nature. The Journey’s dedicatory piece offers a microcosm of the book’s intensive scrutiny of the process of sight and miscognition. Here is the entire passage...