Le Voyage de Petersbourg à Moscou (1790) by Alexandre Radichtchev (review)

Rodolphe Baudin's short book on Alexandre Radichtchev's Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (Le Voyage de Petersbourg à Moscou) is conceived primarily as a pedagogical tool for teachers and students, but it is also aimed at the general public. This book marshals an overview of the state of criticism on Radichtchev's travelogue, giving equal attention to recent and older critical approaches. Baudin writes with clarity on matters both simple and complex, but the specialist will find much here that is trivial or redundant, as the volume is not designed to advance an original approach to the writer. Nevertheless, as a summation of existing knowledge, this volume will be useful even to specialists, not only as a refresher, but also as a convenient encapsulation of successive changes in critical paradigms and an illustration of how much is yet to be properly conceptualized. While not exhaustive, Baudin's grasp of secondary literature is substantial. One could quibble over the weight given to various approaches, of course, but that would quickly boil down to matters of taste.

The book is organized in the following way. Baudin briefly sets up the historical context, surveys Radichtchev's biography, and then offers various considerations about the genre and structure of the Journey, before addressing sources and ideas. He then discusses its poetics, language, and reception, and finishes with a useful bibliography. While heuristically helpful, this organizational principle necessitates multiple cross-references and results in overlapping passages: for example, politics is treated both under structure and ideas, while the theme of sleeping is treated both as a biblical source and under poetics. In contrast, the chapter on poetics amounts to little more than an analysis of a few themes, while missing the opportunity to draw on matters of structure.

Driven by the demands of clarity and succinctness, Baudin seeks to present a systematic exposé of Radichtchev's ideas, glossing over some of the tensions in his thoughts. Radichtchev is presented as a deist (60), but also as someone who thought that the knowledge of good and evil and even of the existence of God is innate (74) and who deploys multiple Biblical references in his text (62-64). Radichtchev believes that men are endowed with the capacity for unlimited self-perfection (75), but is pessimistic about man's ability to avoid succumbing to passions (76). Baudin is, of course, aware of the pitfalls of over-systematization and ends up echoing Allen McConnell in conceding that Radichtchev's thought is nuanced rather than systematic, and moralistic rather than theoretical. In the philosophical chapter of Baudin's book, the heavy reliance on secondary literature, rather than on the Journey, generates some frustration, as one cannot easily reconstruct which of Radichtchev's texts are being drawn upon to prompt various conclusions.

As he discusses the influence of Helvetius upon Radichtchev, Baudin zeroes in on a central contradiction that is woven through the Journey, namely that between asserting the centrality of self-interest and emphasizing compassion. A brief reference to the "inner philosophical dialogue" of the Journey suggests an alternative way of resolving seeming contradictions (61), which deserves to be elaborated on more stringently.

In keeping with recent Russian scholarship, Baudin gives much prominence to approaches that underscore the religious subtexts of the Journey, including some of his own. The Journey is at once assimilated to a Masonic rite of initiation, to the procession of Christ's passion, and, in its final chapter, to a descent to hell. Aside from the evidentiary basis of these inferences, one wonders about the extent to which these various kinds of emplotment are compatible with one another and, more importantly, about how literally such juxtapositions are meant to be understood. If the Journey espouses the Catholic rite of the "Way of the Cross" (despite the differing number of stations), does it imply that the traveller is a Christ-like figure or only a penitent who identifies with the...