Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

Combining profound linguistic sophistication with enviable literary style, Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman, two of today’s most esteemed scholars of Russian literature, have produced the definitive translation of Radishchev’s classic revolutionary cri de coeur. -- Douglas Smith, author of Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow is an outstanding monument of Enlightenment thought in Russia. Distinguished scholars Irina Reyfman and Andrew Kahn have skillfully translated Radishchev’s archaic, high style to heighten the emotional pathos and to contrast official rhetoric to the reality of human suffering. That this important work is again available in English is cause for celebration. -- Marcus C. Levitt, author of The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow offers a troubling account of Russian civilization at the end of the eighteenth century, a critique both deliberately archaic in its style and eminently resonant with the political and social anxieties of our contemporary moment. Reyfman and Kahn could not have found a better time to revive Radishchev’s classic in their remarkably lucid and readable translation. -- Luba Golburt, author of The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination
This is a much needed and long overdue new translation with a highly informative introduction and helpful annotations of Radishchev’s influential book, masterfully done by two premier specialists in eighteenth-century Russian literature. The translation preserves elements of Radishchev’s idiosyncratic style without sounding overly archaic, a notable achievement. -- Valeria Sobol, author of Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination
A valuable glimpse of Russia as seen in the years just before its 19th-century literary renaissance. * Kirkus Reviews *
[Radishchev] crafts a masterly fictional travelogue, combining philosophy, poetry, and the political ideals of the Enlightenment in an unequivocal condemnation of serfdom, censorship, and corruption . . . Various, engaging, and deeply affecting . . . Kahn and Reyfman’s attentive new translation is a boon for English-language readers. * Publishers Weekly *
Journey remains relevant by implicating the author, narrator and reader in its indictment . . . The insight to understand where our daily bread is truly coming from, the creativity to invent an idiom to express it, and the martyrdom of being broken by the state as a result – these are the lasting legacies of Alexander Radishchev’s Journey. * Times Literary Supplement *
[This book] will be an important addition to courses on Russian literature and history and the European Enlightenment. But Radishchev’s Journey is also worth reading for anyone seeking to square a belief in the goodness of humanity with the reality of structural injustice that is as much the basis of contemporary American society, as it was of Imperial Russian society in 1790. Reyfman and Kahn have preserved the strange, stilted style of Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow while also capturing the searing moral outrage that motivated its writing. * Harvard Review *
A fascinating and entertaining read. * Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings *