ABSTRACT
A leksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev was a Russian prose writer and poet. His best known work A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow [Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu], published anonymously in 1790 and officially suppressed in Russia until 1905, is a radical criticism of all aspects of contemporary Russian life. Influenced by Richardson, Sterne, Marivaux and early Goethe, Radishchev’s Journey is an extreme example of sentimental prose which dwells upon all aspects of Russian autocracy, bureaucratic power, religion, education, culture, and aesthetics. In his discussion of translation techniques, Radishchev often concentrated not only on politics, but even more so on the analysis of formal aspects, specifically on versification, an important theme of debate at the time when syllabic poetry was gradually developing into syllabotonic. Radishchev’s preference for hexameter, as expressed in the Journey, was later reiterated in The Monument [Pamiatnik, 1801], in which he praised Trediakovskii for adopting hexameter in his prose translation of Fénelon’s Télémaque. Radishchev’s cult of expressiveness was often developed at the expense of clarity, as in his ‘The Angel of Darkness’ [‘Angel T’my’], an imitation of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Several of his other works can be regarded as free translations or imitations. ‘The Prayer’ [‘Molitva’], for example, is a translation of a passage from Voltaire’s ‘Poem on Natural Law’ [‘Poème sur la loi naturelle’].
