A. N

...Yes, a young man hungry for glory,
Came to my dilapidated tomb,
So that he can speak with feeling:
"Under the yoke of power, this one is born.
Wearing gold-plated shackles,
He was the first to prophesy freedom for us."

A. Radishchev, ode "Liberty".

I. CITIZEN OF FUTURE TIMES

"Man, man is needed to bear the name of the son of the Fatherland..."

A. Radishchev

Do you want to know: who am I?.. - Radishchev asked in one of his poems.

I am the same as I was and will be all my life:
Not a cattle, not a tree, not a slave, but a man!

He wrote this poem when he arrived in a road wagon, accompanied by two non-commissioned officers, in the winter of 1790, to snow-covered Tobolsk.

He had just escaped from the hands of the Tsar’s executioner, from the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, where, sentenced to “beheading,” he waited a long time for his hour of death, which was later replaced by exile. He was exhausted from the long and difficult journey.

The future worried him. It seemed to him that the vast snowy desert, stronger than a stone prison wall, stronger than a cast-iron grate, would stand between him and his former life. Exile seemed to him like a grave, ready to swallow everything that he especially treasured: an active life full of work and struggle, love for family and children, cherished dreams, favorite books.

Will you have enough mental strength, courage and faith in your cause to endure hardships, melancholy and bitterness of exile, a lonely, barren life?

Yes, he will endure everything, endure everything! He remained the same as he was, and will remain so throughout his entire life. Nothing could break, nothing will break him: he is a human!

He could have been thrown into prison, deprived of his rights, shackled in chains, doomed to a slow death in Siberia. But no one could ever make him a slave, take away his pride in the high title of a person.

This consciousness was the source of his unshakable courage.

Like all great Russian revolutionaries, fighters for the freedom and happiness of the people, Radishchev sacredly believed in man.

“It is known that man is a free being, since he is endowed with intelligence, reason and free will,” he wrote, “that his freedom consists in choosing the best, that he knows and chooses this best through reason... and always strives for the beautiful, majestic, high.” .

These words clearly and strongly express Radishchev’s faith in the good will of man, the noble dream of human happiness.

And this was not only the conviction of the thinker. This was the thrill, joy, pain and suffering of a living, warm heart; it was the main work of the brave and selfless life of a revolutionary fighter.

Unlike many progressive thinkers and writers of Western Europe of that time, Radishchev did not generalize the concept of “man”. And this alone not only distinguishes him from them, but his vitality and truth, the clear and precise purposefulness of his activities puts Radishchev above the most daring Western European thinkers and writers XVIII century, reveals the depth and originality of his philosophical thought.

That person, for whose freedom and happiness he fought all his life, was not an abstract idea of ​​​​man in general, but a living historical reality: a Russian man, a Russian serf. Radishchev was alien to cosmopolitan tendencies; first of all, he loved his native Russian people and believed in them. He believed in powerful forces, believed in the majestic and wonderful future of the Russian people. He lived for this future and fought for it.

“Firmness in enterprises, tirelessness in execution are the essence of the qualities that distinguish the Russian people... Oh, people, born to greatness and glory!..” wrote Radishchev.

And before his spiritual gaze the coming times were revealed, when the slaves, “burdened down by heavy bonds, furious in their despair, will break the heads of the inhuman masters with the iron that prevents them from liberties and will stain their fields with their blood...”

“What would the state lose?” - Radishchev asked a question. And his answer sounded like a wonderful prophecy:

“Soon great men would be plucked from among them (the slaves - B.E.) to stand up for the beaten tribe... “This is not a dream, but the gaze penetrates the thick veil of time, hiding the future from our eyes; I see through a whole century..."

He belonged to the number of people whose meaning of life was to fight for a better future for his people, so that this future would soon become today.

Contemporaries said about Radishchev: “he saw ahead.”

Later Herzen wrote about him:

“Alexander Radishchev looks forward... His ideals are our dreams, the dreams of the Decembrists. Whatever he writes, you hear the familiar string that we are used to hearing in the first poems of Pushkin, and in the Dumas of Ryleev, and in our own hearts...”

In his famous book “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow,” Radishchev recounts such an incident. Coming out of the road cart at the Khotilov station, he picked up a bundle of papers from the ground, dropped by an unknown traveler. He unfolded it and began to read the papers. They contained “an outline of legal provisions” on the abolition of slavery in Russia. Reading these papers, Radishchev found in them a manifestation of a humane heart, “everywhere I saw a citizen of future times...”

Probably won't find better definition and for Radishchev himself. Truly he was a "citizen of the future." He reveals a glorious galaxy of fighters for the happy future of the Russian people, for the happy future of humanity.

It was not for nothing that he so often addressed us, his descendants, the continuers of his life’s work. Not for nothing, shortly before his death, he said:

Posterity will avenge me...

But striving for a better future, carried away by the dream of it, Radishchev did not stand aside from the pressing issues of our time, and did not neglect the present. The strength and truth of truly great “citizens of future times,” that is, figures fighting for a happy future for mankind, lies in the fact that, seeing far ahead, they grow strong and strong shoots of the future on the soil of modernity through work and struggle.

The greatest examples of this type of figure are Lenin and Stalin.

Radishchev was a practitioner of struggle - this is another remarkable difference between him and Western European thinkers and writers - his most advanced contemporaries - and until the end of his days he honestly fulfilled the duty of a citizen, a faithful son of his homeland, of his time, as he understood this duty.

However, what is new in Radishchev’s views is not the theory of progress, but the theory of revolution; what is new is that history for him is no longer just a collection of illustrations and examples, as it was for the enlighteners. He is trying to establish a connection between historical events, find the reasons for their occurrence in the conditions of people’s material life.

Radishchev's interest in history and attempts to comprehend the laws of historical development were determined by the desire to prove the inevitability of revolutionary upheavals, which alone bring humanity the triumph of freedom and justice. Hence the desire to abandon general, abstract reasoning and get closer to real facts historical reality. “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” first of all set the task of clarifying the political, economic and legal situation of the Russian state and people in order to prove, using concrete material of modern Russian life, the crime of autocracy and serfdom, the inevitable onset of a revolutionary coup. It was this concreteness of thinking that made it possible to raise the question of scientific foresight. Based on the study of Russian life, Radishchev concluded that it was the “severity of enslavement” that would push the peasantry to revolt, that this revolution would bring freedom to the people, establish a republic of workers, and sweep away autocracy and oppression from the face of the earth.

In “Journey” and the ode “Liberty,” Radishchev outlined a heartfelt and dear dream about the future of the Russian people, borne in his heart over many years of struggle. He inspiredly painted a picture for the reader future life free people.

The years of revolution will pass, and the people will create their government from among the free. “Soon great men would be torn from their midst to defend the beaten tribe.” The interests of the people, concern for their welfare - this is what will be the subject of their attention in their daily work. In this state the population will be free. All citizens will be required to work. The land will be distributed to the people for their possession. New laws adopted by the people's government will operate in society, which are designed to regulate not only the economic relations of workers, but also to educate them, pursuing the benefit and interest of millions.

The great spirit of freedom, “creative like God,” which has triumphed in the society of workers, will transform all aspects of the lives of workers. Labor, which was a curse under corvée, becomes joyful and creative. In the state of workers, says Radishchev, “work-fun, sweat-dew, which produces meadows, fields, forests with its vitality.” The final liberation from poverty and misery - free labor, the basis of growing economic wealth - will become a real possibility. If under serfdom “the land is like a stepmother”, “it gives meager bribes to slaves”, then in the state of free workers

The spirit of freedom warms the field,

Tearslessly the field instantly becomes fat,

Everyone sows to himself and reaps to himself.

The old humiliation will end. The worker will be able to live freely and in contentment. No one will dare to encroach on his work, his family, his independence; his people’s government will be his faithful defense. Living in contentment, the people will pay much attention to education and the arts, and then the sciences, arts and “handicrafts raised to the highest degree of perfection” will flourish. The basis of public education will be the principle of comprehensive education of the mind, feelings and body, but the main attention will be paid to instilling in every free worker a sense of love for the fatherland and civic virtue, love of work and freedom.

Devotion to the people's interests, expression of the will and spirit of the people, Radishchev's genius allowed him to dream so boldly and confidently under the conditions of the serfdom regime about the advent of this happy future. Radishchev at the same time, based on a study of real conditions modern Russia knew something else too. “It is not this dream, not the gaze that pierces the thick veil of time, hiding the future from our eyes; I see through a whole century.” The possibility of this kind of guesswork can only be possible for a person trying to think historically and explain the phenomena of reality.

According to Belinsky, it was in the 18th century, in the very its beginning, in the era of Peter the Great, Russia became one of the those states, together with which she began to “hold the fate of the world on the scales of her power.”

The following decades further strengthened this place and position of Russia in the system of states of the world; not a single major event of the century, no matter how far from Russia the geographical location of its occurrence, took place outside the direct or indirect participation of Russia, outside the influence of Russian politics. This, in turn, could not help but determine the peculiarity of the development of Russian culture.

Leading Russian figures who took upon themselves the function of leading the cause of education treated the culture of the world in a businesslike manner. Getting acquainted with the ideological wealth of the past and present of the advanced countries of Europe, they knew how to pay tribute to the results achieved and reject, condemn sharply and categorically what could harm the Russian liberation movement, the cause of the struggle against the feudal-autocratic state.

The time when the historical experience of other peoples and, above all, the experience of socio-political and liberation struggles, came to Russia in an indirect form, that is, in the form of ready-made political, sociological and philosophical teachings, has ended irrevocably. A new era was dawning—the Russian people put forward a thinker of such caliber as Radishchev, who independently studied, comprehended, and theoretically formulated this experience. At the same time, the revolutionary struggle of the peoples of the world was always and invariably formulated and generalized from the standpoint of the practical needs of the Russian liberation movement, from the heights of the achievements and experience of the Russian historical process. So Russian democratic culture, Russian revolutionary thought acquired a world-historical character.

Radishchev, an encyclopedically educated, independent and inquisitive thinker who showed extraordinary political sensitivity to the greatest events of the century, was closely connected with the intellectual and social life of the world, which was certainly facilitated by Russia’s position in international affairs, turned out to be exactly the person who made a new contribution, wrote new page in the history of advanced philosophical and political thought of the era of enlightenment of the 18th century, laying the foundation for the Russian revolutionary movement, he became the first Russian revolutionary.

Facts indicate that Radishchev worked in Russia in an environment of exceptional political activity of society, that the flow of events put him forward with his “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” as an ideological leader and leader, as an exponent of the revolutionary aspirations of the people. His rebellious book is therefore not only a wonderful monument to personal courage and heroism. This is a document that testifies to the formation of an independent, advanced philosophical and political worldview in Russian society.

IN literary activity Radishchev’s attention is drawn to one extraordinary circumstance. Working long and hard for nine years, creating one work after another, he does not publish them. He began publishing long-completed works only in 1789. Consecutively, one after another, “Conversation about what is the son of the fatherland?”, “Life of F.V. Ushakov”, “Letter to a friend living in Tobolsk”, “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” are published. At first glance, this seems incomprehensible: the person sought

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

FEDERAL EDUCATION AGENCY

SAKHALIN STATE UNIVERSITY

LAW INSTITUTE

Department of Theory and Law and State Legal

disciplines

Socio-political thought and literature: A.N. Radishchev

Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk

Introduction

1. Biography of Radishchev and the main directions of his activities

3. A.N. Radishchev about the revolution as the only way to achieve freedom for the people

Conclusion

List of used literature

Introduction

The topic of the abstract is defined as “Socio-political thought and literature: A.N. Radishchev."

Personality A.N. Radishcheva has always been assessed ambiguously in Russia. However, even without accepting him, society still recognizes his right to serve as a certain high moral standard. This duality of relationships is deeply symbolic. It is known that Russian society is imbued with the ideas of statehood and strong power to a much greater extent than Western society, in which the ideals of freedom and democracy have prevailed for a very long time. Western world In general, we tend to have a wary and wary attitude towards the state. Hence the long-standing desire of society to bring the work of the state machine under its control, hence the ardent struggle for freedom of speech and the jealous defense of the rights and freedoms of the individual. Not so in Russia, where from time immemorial protection from the strong was sought not in public opinion, but in the power of the strongest. That is why it was so difficult in the Russian state for all preachers of the ideas of democracy and freedom, because they were opposed not only by the omnipotence of the state, but also by the wary and hostile reaction of society. Radishchev's voice was the voice of one crying in the desert, and the seed of labor sown by him fell on hard soil and gave stunted shoots. But still, the appearance of such a person was an event of enormous importance and had a strong and lasting influence on Russian life, for it gave rise to a feeling of some vague concern in the minds of all honest people; bringing discord into the existing worldview. Largely not accepting those thoughts and ideas that figures like Radishchev tried to instill on Russian soil, our society still could not help but appreciate the sacrifice and personal courage of the preachers themselves. Observing their, at first glance, absurd and obviously futile struggle against the omnipotence of the state machine, handing them over to its power without the slightest hesitation, Russian society simultaneously and involuntarily began to think about the meaning of their ideals and thereby opened up to them. Historical role Radishcheva was difficult and ungrateful - he preached among cold hearts and indifferent glances - it was not he who was destined to inspire Russian society with the desire for freedom; His bitter fate was that without expecting either support or mutual understanding, receiving only reproaches for slander, to show society the extent of his lack of rights. He went for it without hesitation and paid a lot for his firmness. Was his sacrifice justified? At first glance, it seems not. The fight ended without him - others appropriated the fruits of victory and won the trophy they had won. But we must not forget that public consciousness very often does not follow a straight path, but moves along dark and winding paths. And if we follow this path, we will see that their significance is enormous. Love of freedom cannot be instilled through abstract reasoning; it is cultivated only by selfless example. After all, the feeling of freedom is initially unusual for everyone. How many people live and die without noticing that it is not there. And they will never know that they are not free until they are shown it. But even then they will never take their word for it - in order to ignite the hearts of fellow citizens with a passionate desire for freedom, someone must openly sacrifice everything for it.

The purpose of the essay is to conduct a study of the socio-political thought and literary activity of A.N. Radishcheva.

To achieve the goal, the following tasks are set:

1) Research the biography of A.N. Radishchev and the main directions of his activities, including his views on autocracy.

2) Reveal the features of A.N.’s literary activity. Radishcheva.

Theoretical basis The research included the works of the following scientists: M.N. Zueva, K. Ryzhova, Pavlenko N.I., Klyuchevsky V.O.

Abstract structure. The abstract consists of an introduction, independently posed questions, a conclusion and a list of references.

1. Biography of A.N. Radishchev and the main directions of his activities

Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev was born in August 1749 in the family of a landowner mediocre. Alexander's first years were spent in the village of Verkhniy Ablyazov, Saratov province. A combination of favorable circumstances meant that he received a good education. Alexander learned the Russian language in the usual way of that time, that is, through the book of hours in the psalter. However, this home teaching did not last long, since in 1757 Radishchev was sent to the house of a Moscow relative of his mother, Argamakov, an intelligent, rich and enlightened man, who was the curator of Moscow University. Here, together with the children of his relative and other young people, he was brought up under the supervision of a French tutor, and also took advantage of lessons from university professors and teachers. During the coronation of Empress Catherine II, Argamakov enrolled Radishchev as a page; after the court returned to St. Petersburg, he sent him to the capital to continue his studies in the Corps of Pages. As a page, Radishchev had the opportunity to observe the life of Catherine’s court, where he often visited as part of his position. (Then pages served the empress at the table).

In 1765 Catherine, seeing that in Russia in the most important and governmental places there was a shortage of people who knew laws and jurisprudence, ordered the selection of 12 young people, including six pages, to be sent to the University of Leipzig. Radishchev was among these chosen ones. All preparations were made with a generous hand; the young people were provided with more than enough support (800 rubles per person per year). Each student had the opportunity to study, except for law. Radishchev listened to philosophy, studied the Latin classics in detail, and also studied medicine and chemistry. He knew all subjects very thoroughly. His son later wrote that Radishchev was an almost universal person. With a deep knowledge of laws, he also had concepts in literature. All the classical authors - Latin, French, German, English and Italian - were completely familiar to him, just like everything that was then written in Russian. In medicine he could pass the doctor's examination and was in practice a very good physician. Chemistry was at one time his favorite activity. Among the languages, he was fluent in French and German, and later learned English. He knew music, played the violin, was a talented dancer, a skilled fencer, a good rider and a successful hunter.

Upon returning to St. Petersburg in 1771, Radishchev and his friend Alexei Kutuzov entered the Senate as protocol clerks with the rank of titular councilors. However, the service here did not last long. In 1773, Radishchev became a captain on the staff of the commander-in-chief in St. Petersburg, Count Bruce, and served under him as chief auditor (reporter on court cases). It was the most enjoyable time of his life. The boss loved and distinguished him, introduced him into the best St. Petersburg society. During these years, Radishchev became close friends with the famous publisher and educator Novikov and translated several books for him from German and French.

In 1775, Radishchev married the niece of his university friend Anna Vasilievna Rubanovskaya and retired as a second major. He lived for two years on his estate, as well as in Moscow, and did not serve anywhere. At the end of 1777, he again began to look for a place for himself and soon became an assessor at the Commerce Collegium, the president of which was then Count Vorontsov... in order to better understand his new responsibilities, Radishchev, as he himself later recalled, whole year I was engaged in reading magazines and definitions of the Commerce Board, so that I soon acquired decent knowledge on all issues. As always, in his new position he showed unshakable strength of character in defending just causes and extraordinary honesty. (This is at least evidenced by the fact that while in a position where others made millions through bribes, he acquired nothing and lived his whole life on one salary). Count Vorontsov valued Radishchev's opinion very highly and consulted with him on all matters. Soon he obtained for him the rank of court councilor. In 1780, Radishchev was appointed assistant to the manager of the St. Petersburg customs. In 1783, his first wife died during childbirth. This was a great personal grief for him. “The death of my wife plunged me into sadness and despondency,” he later wrote, “and for a while distracted my mind from all exercise.” He was left with four small children. In their upbringing and all household chores, Radishchev received a lot of constant help from the sister of his late wife Anna Vasilievna, Elizaveta Vasilievna Rubanovskaya. Gradually she became the person closest to him.

Radishchev devoted all his free time from service to literary works. Already in his early works one can see the deep influence of the French enlighteners, and the influence is not external, speculative (as was often the case at that time), but deep, assimilated by the heart and all his ardent nature. Radishchev had a sense of innate justice. He was outraged and indignant by any manifestation of despotism and slavery, any abuse of power or infringement of individual rights.

It is easy to understand how strange and unusual this strange admirer of freedom must have seemed in Russia, where autocracy and serfdom were officially recognized state institutions and deeply rooted phenomena. Talk about freedom in Russia before the start French Revolution it was even fashionable, and among high Russian society one could find sincere admirers of Rousseau and Voltaire. Repression and persecution befell Radishchev after, instead of abstract matters, he turned to concrete images of Russian life: he depicted the slavish state of Russian serfs, indignantly attacked the soul-owning landowners and associated the word “despotism” with the Russian monarchy. Then his heated preaching was immediately seen as sedition and a threat to the state. Meanwhile, the views of early and late Radishchev differ only in that they have different areas applications, in essence they have always been the same. In 1773, translating for Novikov the book of the French educator Mabley “Reflections on Greek History”, Radishchev conveys the word despotisme as “autocracy” and immediately in a special note (in full agreement with the theory of “natural law” and “social contract”) explains, that “autocracy is the state most contrary to human nature... If we live under the rule of laws, then this is not because we absolutely must do it: but because we find benefits in it. If we give the law the honor of our rights and our natural power, then so that it is used in our favor: about this we make a silent agreement with society. If it is violated, then we are released from our obligation. The injustice of the sovereign gives the people, their judges, the same and greater rights over them that the law gives over criminals.” We immediately see the idea of ​​​​the dominant power of the people in his treatise “An Experience on Legal Subjection,” which Radishchev worked on in the 1780s. He wrote: “the conciliar power of the people is the original power, and therefore the highest, united power, capable of founding and destroying the composition of society...”. Radishchev unconditionally recognized the people’s right to overthrow the unjust, lawless government. “The bad use of popular power,” he wrote, “is the greatest crime... not the sovereign, but the law can take away property, honor, liberty or life from a citizen. By taking away one of these rights from a citizen, the sovereign violates the original condition and, having the scepter in his hands, loses his rights to the throne.” The ode “Liberty,” completed in 1783, essentially expressed the same views, but expressed with ardent pathos and passionate poetic language, they acquired a completely different sound, and Radishchev did not even try to publish it then.

In 1789, he purchased a printing press, a typeface, and set up a printing house in his house. This is where it was printed general ledger Radishchev - “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow,” on which he worked since 1785.

The journey was completed in December 1788. Radishchev received censorship permission to publish the manuscript in July 1789. At the beginning of the next year, he began printing the book. In May it was published without the author's name and went on sale. Soon the novel began to be in demand - the copies that Radishchev gave to the bookseller Zotov quickly sold out. But then “The Journey...” caught the eye of Catherine II and plunged her into the greatest indignation. She ordered to immediately find the author. The investigation began. Radishchev found out about this and hastened to burn the remaining edition of the book. However, this could no longer ward off inevitable disaster. On June 30 he was arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The matter could not be difficult, since all the seditious thoughts of the author were clearly expressed in his book. Already on July 24, the Criminal Chamber decided to subject Radishchev to death penalty, and the book should be confiscated and destroyed. In September, the Empress replaced this punishment with ten years of exile in the Ilimsk prison. For Radishchev, the time had come for difficult trials.

He spent the first three months on the way to his place of exile shackled. Then a decree came from the empress to unchain him. In Tobolsk, Radishchev was caught up with Elizaveta Vasilievna Rubnovskaya, who decided to follow him to Siberia. Radishchev's two little sons were with her. The arrival of his sister-in-law made him very happy. “I will live, and not vegetate,” he wrote about this. The future no longer seemed hopeless to him. Indeed, in Ilimsk Radishchev was given complete freedom, and he was given the opportunity to arrange his life comfortably. There were eight servants with him. A house with five rooms and many services was prepared for the exile: a kitchen, servants' quarters, sheds, cellars, etc. But having enough money, Radishchev immediately began to build new home into 8 rooms, which was soon completed with the help of carpenters sent by the governor. Here Radishchev had a large office and library. He immediately bought several cows, two horses, a variety of poultry and garden vegetables. In exile, he continued to lead a very active lifestyle - he got up early, read and wrote a lot. During these years, he wrote the treatise “On Man, His Death and Immortality”, the political and economic essay “Letter on Chinese Trade”, as well as “Abridged Narrative of the Acquisition of Siberia”. Radishchev subscribed to several metropolitan and foreign magazines and was aware of all the news. In his free time he studied a lot chemical experiments. He himself taught children history, geography, German and French, hunted a lot in the summer and loved to sail on a boat on Ilim. His personal life also turned out well. In Siberia, Radishchev married Elizaveta Vasilievna, who gave birth to him in next years three children.

After the death of Catherine II, Paul I allowed Radishchev to return to Moscow and live on his estates. In February 1797, Radishchev left Ilimsk. On the way, a terrible misfortune awaited him - Elizaveta Vasilievna caught a cold, fell ill and died shortly after arriving in Tobolsk. Having been widowed for the second time, Radishchev arrived alone with his children in the summer of 1979 to his village of Nemtsovo. Here he lived continuously until the death of Paul I. While doing housework, he did not forget his literary works - he wrote the poem “Bova” in 12 songs, taken from old fairy tale, as well as several articles.

Upon the accession of Emperor Alexander I to the throne, Radishchev was returned to his former titles of collegiate adviser and complete freedom. He immediately left for St. Petersburg, where the emperor, who was planning profound reforms of Russian society, appointed him a member of the Commission for drafting laws. Radishchev passionately devoted himself to drafting a new “Civil Code”. The thoughts that he tried to reflect in his project were the following:

1) everyone is equal before the law.

2) the table of ranks is destroyed.

4) religious tolerance

5) freedom of speech

6) abolition of serfdom

7) replacement of the poll tax with a land tax.

8) freedom of trade.

In the future, he talked about introducing a constitution in Russia. However, his views in no way coincided with the views of the Chairman of the Commission, Count Zavadsky. The count once remarked to him that Radishchev’s too enthusiastic way of thinking had already brought misfortune upon him once and that he might be subjected to a similar misfortune another time. These words, according to the testimony of Radishchev’s sons, made an extraordinary impression on their father. He suddenly became thoughtful, began to worry incessantly, and was constantly in a bad mood. Close friends began to notice strange things about him that indicated the onset of mental illness. On September 11, 1802, Radishchev unexpectedly took poison (strong acid). All attempts to save him were unsuccessful, and he died on the same day.

2. “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” as the main work of A.N. Radishcheva

Since 1785, Radishchev began working on his main work - “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.”

The outer outline of this work consists of the notes of a certain traveler who travels by train from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Accordingly, each of the twenty-five chapters bears the name of a station on the road between these cities. But travel notes are only an external reception. The actual genre of the “road novel” gave Radishchev the opportunity to address a wide variety of topics in Russian life during the journey. Moreover, the scenes that the traveler himself sees are interspersed with the stories of the people he meets and with the reading of manuscripts he found on the road, forgotten or lost by passers-by. All this extremely expands the range of phenomena described and generally creates a gloomy image of a deprived and powerless Russia, a country where arbitrariness reigns and the rule of the strong triumphs. Thus, in the chapter “Copper” there is a story filled with indignation about the sale of a family of serfs at auction; in the Torzhok chapter we read a discussion about censorship suppressing free speech; in “Lyuban” and “Pawns” the forced labor and wretched poverty of the serfs are very clearly depicted; in the chapter “Novogrod” there is a portrait of a merchant greedy for profit, ready to resort to deception for the sake of profit, etc. Almost every chapter contains angry and unusually strong attacks on serfdom. The chapter “Zaitsevo” contains a story about the murder by peasants of a small landowner who cruelly oppressed them. The chapter “Gorodnya” depicts abuses during recruitment. In the chapter “Spasskaya Field”, under the guise of a fantastic dream, there is a story about a king from whose eyes the thorn suddenly fell and who saw with horror the arbitrariness and lawlessness reigning around his throne (in fact, this is a very poisonous satire on the entire reign of Catherine II). But the book contained not only criticism - many chapters contained projects and proposals for correcting society. Thus, in the chapter “Vidropusk” Radishchev included a project for the complete destruction of court officials, since the people who serve the tsar cannot even be equated with those who serve the fatherland. “Khotilovo” sets out a project for the gradual abolition of serfdom, etc. However, the author himself, it seems, did not believe in the power of his recipes and pinned his hope only on the cleansing power of a popular uprising. “Oh, if only the slaves, burdened with heavy bonds,” he exclaims, “furious in their despair, would break the iron that hindered their liberties, our heads, the heads of their inhuman masters, and stain their fields with our blood! What would the state lose there? Great men would soon be torn from their midst to stand up for the beaten tribe, but they would be deprived of other thoughts about themselves and the right to oppress.” In general, the book must have left a painful impression on the readers of that time. Never before has Russian reality been shown in such an unsightly form, and no one before Radishchev proposed such radical methods for correcting it.

In Soviet historiography, “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” was often used as a source to characterize the real situation of peasants and the landowners who owned them. The former are awarded with attractive features, the latter - with a complete lack of human virtues. Both are far from reality, or rather, do not belong to typical phenomena - Radishchev acts as a publicist, passing off the exception as the rule: he gave universal significance to vices and virtues.

3. A.N. Radishchev about revolution as the only way to achieve freedom for the people

With his works “Letter to a Friend,” “Conversation about Being a Son of the Fatherland,” “The Life of Fyodor Vasilyevich Ushakov” and “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow,” Radishchev prepared readers to perceive the idea of ​​the need for revolution. In the ode “Liberty,” the most important stanzas of which he included in “Journey,” Radishchev presented a genuine anthem in honor of the future victorious revolution. As the greatest holiday of mankind, he depicts the day when “an army of evil will arise everywhere”, “the riveted nations will rejoice” and will rush “to wash their shame in the blood of the tormentor.” The holiday will be the day when the rebel people win. After the revolution and the execution of the tsar, according to Radishchev, “the people will sit on the throne” and freedom will reign - “freedom is a gift, an invaluable source of all great deeds.” He highly valued Cromwell for teaching “how nations can take revenge on themselves,” and “executed Charles at his trial.” Demanding the complete liberation of the peasants, pointing to the revolutionary path towards it, Radishchev did not exclude the path of reforms from above. This was neither a deviation from his basic views nor a manifestation of liberal illusions and hesitations. He meant reforms that would not strengthen the existing system, but would weaken it and accelerate its death. He developed a plan for the gradual implementation of measures that should culminate in the “complete abolition of slavery.” However, Radishchev had little faith that the landowners, these “greedy animals, insatiable leeches,” would agree to carry out reforms or that the monarch would implement them. He threatened the landowners that “the slaves, burdened with heavy bonds, in their rage of despair will break the heads” of their hated masters with iron. Radishchev believed that revolution was not an empty dream: “The gaze penetrates the thick veil of time, hiding the future from our eyes. “I see through a whole century,” he wrote. Catherine II understood the danger that criticism of serfdom, combined with the proclamation of revolutionary ideas, approval of spontaneous peasant revolts and presentation of a revolutionary program, posed to the autocratic serfdom system. A special stage of revolutionary, republican thought in Russia is associated with the name of Radishchev. Walking “following Radishchev,” persecuted by the autocracy, the Radishchevites - his contemporaries and followers - took the baton from his hand and passed it on to the generation of Pestel and Ryleev, Griboedov and Pushkin. If a galaxy of great French enlighteners ideologically prepared the bourgeois revolution in Western Europe, then Radishchev had the great honor of being the ideologist of the nascent revolutionary movement in Russia.

Conclusion

A.N. Radishchev went down in the history of Russian political thought as the first republican revolutionary. He resolutely rejected ideas about the “unreasonable mob” and fervently believed in the creative potential of the masses. For him, the revolution meant a deep restructuring of society and the state in the interests of the people. His idea about the need to preserve the peasant community was important. He combined everything: a public figure and a Russian patriot, a Christian shepherd and a writer. Radishchev's voice was a voice crying in the wilderness. His views had a great influence on the political views of Pestel, Ryleev, and other Decembrists, who also defended republican ideas.

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I. CITIZEN OF FUTURE TIMES

“Man, man is needed to bear the name of the son of the Fatherland...”

A. Radishchev

Do you want to know: who am I?.. - Radishchev asked in one of his poems.

I am the same as I was and will be all my life:

Not a cattle, not a tree, not a slave, but a man!

He wrote this poem when he arrived in a road wagon, accompanied by two non-commissioned officers, in the winter of 1790, to snow-covered Tobolsk.

He had just escaped from the hands of the Tsar’s executioner, from the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress, where, sentenced to “cut off his head,” he waited a long time for his death hour, which was later replaced by exile. He was exhausted from the long and difficult journey.

The future worried him. It seemed to him that the vast snowy desert, stronger than a stone prison wall, stronger than a cast-iron grate, would stand between him and his former life. Exile seemed to him like a grave, ready to swallow everything that he especially treasured: an active life full of work and struggle, love for family and children, cherished dreams, favorite books.

Will you have enough mental strength, courage and faith in your cause to endure hardships, melancholy and bitterness of exile, a lonely, barren life?

Yes, he will endure everything, endure everything! He remained the same as he was, and will remain so throughout his entire life. Nothing could break, nothing will break him: he is a human!

He could have been thrown into prison, deprived of his rights, shackled in chains, doomed to a slow death in Siberia. But no one could ever make him a slave, take away his pride in the high title of a person.

This consciousness was the source of his unshakable courage.

Like all great Russian revolutionaries, fighters for the freedom and happiness of the people, Radishchev sacredly believed in man.

“It is known that man is a free being, since he is gifted with mind, reason and free will,” he wrote, “that his freedom consists in choosing the best, that he knows and chooses this best through reason... and always strives for the beautiful, majestic, high.” .

These words clearly and strongly express Radishchev’s faith in the good will of man, the noble dream of human happiness.

And this was not only the conviction of the thinker. This was the thrill, joy, pain and suffering of a living, warm heart; it was the main work of the brave and selfless life of a revolutionary fighter.

Unlike many progressive thinkers and writers of Western Europe of that time, Radishchev did not generalize the concept of “man”. And this alone not only distinguishes him from them, but the vitality and truth, the clear and precise purposefulness of his activity puts Radishchev above the most daring Western European thinkers and writers of the 18th century, and reveals the depth and originality of his philosophical thought.

That person, for whose freedom and happiness he fought all his life, was not an abstract idea of ​​​​man in general, but a living historical reality: a Russian man, a Russian serf. Radishchev was alien to cosmopolitan tendencies; first of all, he loved his native Russian people and believed in them. He believed in powerful forces, believed in the majestic and wonderful future of the Russian people. He lived for this future and fought for it.

“Firmness in enterprises, tirelessness in execution are the essence of the qualities that distinguish the Russian people... Oh, people, born to greatness and glory!..” wrote Radishchev.

And before his spiritual gaze the coming times were revealed, when the slaves, “burdened down by heavy bonds, furious in their despair, will break the heads of the inhuman masters with the iron that prevents them from liberties and will stain their fields with their blood...”

“What would the state lose?” - Radishchev asked a question. And his answer sounded like a wonderful prophecy:

“Soon great men would be plucked from among them (the slaves - B.E.) to stand up for the beaten tribe... “This is not a dream, but the gaze penetrates the thick veil of time, hiding the future from our eyes; I see through a whole century...”

He belonged to the number of people whose meaning of life was to fight for a better future for his people, so that this future would soon become today.

Contemporaries said about Radishchev: “he saw ahead.”

Later Herzen wrote about him:

“Alexander Radishchev looks forward... His ideals are our dreams, the dreams of the Decembrists. No matter what he writes, you hear the familiar string that we are accustomed to hearing in Pushkin’s first poems, and in Ryleev’s Duma, and in our own hearts...”

In his famous book “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow,” Radishchev recounts such an incident. Coming out of the road cart at the Khotilov station, he picked up a bundle of papers from the ground, dropped by an unknown traveler. He unfolded it and began to read the papers. They contained “an outline of legal provisions” on the abolition of slavery in Russia. Reading these papers, Radishchev found in them a manifestation of a humane heart, “everywhere I saw a citizen of future times...”

There is, perhaps, no better definition for Radishchev himself. Truly he was a “citizen of the future.” He reveals a glorious galaxy of fighters for the happy future of the Russian people, for the happy future of humanity.

It was not for nothing that he so often addressed us, his descendants, the continuers of his life’s work. Not for nothing, shortly before his death, he said:

Posterity will avenge me...

But striving for a better future, carried away by the dream of it, Radishchev did not stand aside from the pressing issues of our time, and did not neglect the present. The strength and truth of truly great “citizens of the future,” that is, figures fighting for a happy future for mankind, lies in the fact that, seeing far ahead, they grow strong and strong shoots of the future on the soil of modernity in work and struggle.

The greatest examples of this type of figure are Lenin and Stalin.

Radishchev was a practitioner of struggle - this is another remarkable difference between him and Western European thinkers and writers - his most advanced contemporaries - and until the end of his days he honestly fulfilled the duty of a citizen, a faithful son of his homeland, of his time, as he understood this duty.

He called the time in which Radishchev lived, the 18th century, “crazy and wise,” worthy of curses and surprise. A century of creation and destruction, the triumph of the free human mind and the revelry of the dark forces of the hated “autocracy” - this is how Radishchev saw the 18th century.

In honor of him, he composed poems, solemn and passionate, like a hymn. In these verses, written at the dawn of the new, XIX century, Radishchev tried to comprehend those phenomena of life of which he was a contemporary.

He wrote that the 18th century was born in blood and, watered with blood, goes to the grave. It raised and toppled kingdoms. It broke the bonds that fettered the human spirit and gave freedom of thought. In this century, new lands and peoples were discovered, and the heavenly bodies were numbered. Science has achieved marvelous successes by putting volatile vapors to work, luring heavenly lightning to earth.

But the main thing that Radishchev saw and appreciated in the 18th century is that, in his opinion, it opened the way for people to freedom, to the fight for freedom.

“O unforgettable century, you grant truth, freedom and light to joyful mortals...”

This is how it seemed to Radishchev, and this is how he portrayed his time - the 18th century - in poems written in his twilight years.

He was born during the reign of “Peter’s daughter”, Empress Elizabeth, he lived in the “Catherine’s century”, glorified by court writers, he survived the short reign of the “madman on the throne” - Paul - and died in those days when Alexander I, “the weak and crafty ruler “2, stepping to the throne over the corpse of his father, he promised to rule Russia “according to the behests” of his grandmother.

Radishchev was a contemporary of the events that dealt crushing blows to the old, feudal way of life: the revolutionary war of the American people for their independence, bourgeois revolution in France, which heralded the death of feudalism in Western Europe, and the formidable peasant war in Russia under the leadership of Emelyan Pugachev.

Russia second half of the XVIII centuries was a noble, military-bureaucratic empire. Its power and wealth rested on the old basis of feudal serfdom, on the predatory robbery of the people by kings, noble landowners, merchants, and officials. The state of landowners-serfs, insatiable in their greed, merciless in their cruelty, squeezed the last vital juices out of the serf peasants who made up the overwhelming majority of the population of then Russia.

The export of grain abroad increased from year to year. Serf manufactories arose. This gave big profits to the serf owners, fueled their passion for money-grubbing, and led to their even greater enslavement of the people. The people groaned in the shackles of slavery, under the burden of poverty and backbreaking forced labor.

"From the time of Peter began foreign trade Russia, which could only export agricultural products. This caused the oppression of the peasants, which increased with the growth of exports, for the sake of which it occurred, until Catherine II made this oppression complete and completed legislation. But this legislation allowed the landowners to increasingly oppress the peasants, so that the oppression intensified more and more ... "

This was a period of strengthening of serfdom in Russia and intensification of the class struggle between serfs and serf-owning landowners.

“The main feature of serfdom,” wrote Lenin, “is that the peasantry (and then the peasants represented the majority, the urban population was extremely underdeveloped) was considered attached to the land - this is where the very concept of serfdom came from. A peasant could work for a certain number of days for himself on the plot that the landowner gave him; the other part of the day the serf worked for the master. The essence of class society remained: society was based on class exploitation. Only landowners could have full rights; peasants were considered without rights. Their position in practice differed very little from the position of slaves in a slave state... Serfs were absolutely excluded from all political rights.

Both under slavery and serfdom, the dominance of a small minority of people over the vast majority of them cannot be done without coercion...

To maintain his dominance, to maintain his power, the landowner had to have an apparatus that would unite a huge number of people under his subordination, subject them to known laws and rules - and all these laws boiled down mainly to one thing - to maintain the landowner’s power over the serfs. This was a serf state..."

Catherine II, “Mother of the Fatherland,” as the grateful nobles called her, distributed hundreds of thousands of acres of land with the peasants living on it to her entourage. The Orlov brothers, who took part in the palace coup of 1762, which elevated Catherine to the royal throne, received over 50 thousand peasants as a gift; Field Marshal Potemkin, the most powerful of her favorites, over 40 thousand peasants. Catherine gave away up to 800 thousand people to the nobles. During her reign, the number of serfs belonging to the landowners amounted to more than half of the peasant population.

Of the remaining peasants, the largest number belonged to the state - “state” peasants. Then came the “palace” peasants, whose taxes were spent on maintaining the royal court; “economic” peasants - selected by Catherine along with the lands from the monasteries and transferred to the jurisdiction of a special institution - the College of Economy; and “appanage” peasants, as the peasants who constituted the personal property of the royal family began to be called under Paul I.

The peasants were slaves.

Their personality, their life, their work, property - everything was subject to the arbitrariness of the landowner. To force slaves to obey, landowners needed not only brute force, but also “legal” unlimited power over them. In 1765, by decree of Catherine, landowners received the right to exile rebellious peasants “for insolence” to hard labor. And two years later, slave peasants were prohibited from filing any complaints against the landowners. For violating this prohibition, the perpetrators were subject to severe punishment: “for the first daring, send them to hard labor for a month,” said Catherine’s decree, “for the second, with punishment in public, they will be sent there for a year... and for the third crime, with punishment publicly flogged, exiled forever to Nerchinsk..."

Serf peasants had no rights; they were, according to Radishchev’s precise and terrible definition, “dead in law.”

In the second half of the 18th century, the trade in serf slaves became widespread. The landowners sold their peasants “for export”, separately from the land, they sold entire villages, families, individual peasants, tearing them away from their families - wives from husbands, children from parents - “in pieces with their offspring,” as they said then.

Abuse and torment of serf-owners was a common occurrence, reaching the point of sophisticated torture, even murder, like that of the landowner Saltychikha, who tortured more than 100 people to death.

The wealthy Penza landowner N. E. Struisky, who was fond of poetry and imitated Voltaire in his awkward verses, himself judged the peasants according to all the rules of European legal science. He himself read the indictments, he himself made defensive speeches. In the basements of his house he had a whole arsenal of necessary instruments for torture, which he widely used during his trials of unresponsive defendants.

Struisky, according to the historian V.O. Klyuchevsky, was completely a child of Catherine’s age, to such an extent that he could not survive it: when he learned about Catherine’s death, he suffered a stroke, he lost his tongue and soon died.

Not every landowner “tormented” his peasants as much as the Saltychikhas, Struiskys and many others like them. But each was a ruthless exploiter of peasant labor and each looked at the peasant slave as a kind of powerless and dumb creature that completely belonged to him, the landowner. And when Radishchev, in his “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow,” angrily exclaimed: “Be afraid, cruel landowner, I see your condemnation on the forehead of each of your peasants,” he meant precisely all landowners, all serf-owners.

From year to year the situation of the serfs worsened, and the oppression of the landowners' tyranny intensified. “Liberty is born from torment,” Radishchev later wrote. The position of the serf slaves could not but cause attempts on their part to resist. The peasants ran away from the landowners and formed armed groups. In the 40s and 50s, they were hunted by tsarist troops sent to “search for thieves and robbers.”

Later, in the 70s, peasants, “working people” of serf factories, and oppressed nationalities rebelled against their oppressors. Their brave leader Emelyan Pugachev led the freedom-loving army across the Orenburg steppes to the Volga, marking his path with the smoky glow of the peasant war. It was, in the words of A. Pushkin, “a rebellion... that shook the state from Siberia to Moscow and from the Kuban to the Murom forests...” The Pugachev uprising ended, like all previous peasant uprisings, in suppression.

“Individual peasant uprisings,” says Comrade Stalin, “even if they are not as banditry and unorganized as Stenka Razin’s, cannot lead to anything serious. Peasant uprisings can only lead to success if they are combined with workers' uprisings. Only a combined uprising with the working class can achieve the goal.”

The power of the serf owners, their class interests, was headed by Empress Catherine II, who ruled Russia despotically for 34 years.

Even at the very beginning of her reign, Catherine gave the following, for example, orders to military teams sent to suppress peasant uprisings:

“To frighten them (the peasants - B.E.) not only with imperial wrath, but also with cruel execution, and finally with fire, sword and everything that can only happen from an armed hand... We intend to inviolably preserve the landowners with their estates and possessions, and keep the peasants in proper obedience..."

At the same time, in the first stages of his reign, realizing the fragility of the crown Russian Empire on her German head, Catherine put on the mask of a free-thinking “philosopher on the throne.” This cunning buffoonery was necessary for her, a cynical politician, in order to throw dust in the eyes of the progressive people of Russia and Western Europe, in order to deceive public opinion.

But then unrest began at home - peasant uprisings, riots; later, there, abroad, the storm clouds of the revolution began to gather. And nothing remained of Catherine’s “free-thinking.” “Autocracy” began - frank, undisguised, rude. “...Over time, history will evaluate the influence of her reign on morals,” wrote A. Pushkin in “Notes on Russian History of the 18th Century,” “will reveal the cruel activities of her despotism under the guise of meekness and tolerance, a people oppressed by governors, a treasury plundered by lovers, will show her important mistakes in political economy, insignificance in legislation, disgusting buffoonery in relations with the philosophers of her century - and then the voice of the seduced Voltaire will not save her glorious memory from the curses of Russia... Catherine destroyed the title (more fairly, the name) of slavery, and gave away about a million state peasants (i.e., free cultivators) and enslaved free Little Russia and the Polish provinces. Catherine abolished torture, and the secret office flourished under her patriarchal rule; Catherine loved enlightenment, and Novikov, who spread its first rays, passed from the hands of Sheshkovsky (in a footnote in Pushkin - “the household executioner of meek Catherine”) to prison, where he remained until her death. Radishchev was exiled to Siberia; The prince died under the rods, and Fonvizin, whom she feared, would not have escaped the same fate if not for his extreme fame...”

Herzen wrote with bitterness and anger in the preface to the London edition of Radishchev’s “Travels from St. Petersburg to Moscow” about the notorious times of Catherine, that every day “Powder and glitter, blush and tinsel, Voltaire, Nakaz and other draperies that covered mother- empress,” fall more and more and she appears in her true form.

“The courtyard - Russia lived then as a courtyard - was constantly divided into parties, without thought, without statesmen at the head, without a plan, writes Herzen, each party has, instead of a banner, a guards gladiator, whom gray-haired ministers, senators and generals push into a disgraced bed, covered with the purple of Monomakh. Potemkin, Orlov, Panin - each has a reserve of candidates, if necessary, couriers are sent for them to the active army... The honored one is installed in the palace (in the rooms of his predecessor, who is given compensation - 5 thousand peasants in the fortress), covered with diamonds (Lansky's buttons cost 80 000 rubles in silver), stars, ribbons, and the Empress herself is taking him to the opera; the public, warned, rushes into the theater and pays exorbitant prices to see the new concubine...”

The high-ranking court mob stupidly and arrogantly despised everything Russian and folk and, slavishly borrowing a foreign external gloss, remained an inert and greedy, ignorant mass of serf-owners-slave owners, far from their native reality and, despite their gold-woven camisoles, powdered wigs, French speech, from the genuine culture. Count A. R. Vorontsov, Radishchev’s friend and patron, perfectly expressed in his “Autobiographical Note” the alienation of the nobility from Russian life and Russian culture:

“We can say that Russia is the only country where they neglect the study of their native language, and everything that relates to home country, alien to the present generation. A person with a claim to education in St. Petersburg and Moscow takes care to teach his children French, surrounds them with foreigners, hires dance and music teachers for them at an expensive price and does not teach them the native language, so that this excellent and very expensive education leads to perfect ignorance regarding one’s country, indifference, perhaps even contempt for the country with which one’s own existence is connected...”

It was a time of cruel contradictions, crude, hypocritical and hypocritical lies - lies and deception on a state scale, - a time of unheard-of destinies - “fortunes” - of random people, fabulous palace celebrations and popular poverty, peasant uprisings. Along with the talk about freedom, tens and hundreds of thousands of free Cossacks and peasants became enslaved. Disputes about human rights did not prevent the sale of serf families. From reading the “Spirit of Laws” and the “Encyclopedia”, the noble landowners moved on to personally punishing the courtyard peasants...

No wonder Griboyedov was surprised at the duality of the moral character of the nobles of the 18th century.

He was indignant at the combination of opposites: “from the outside, chivalry in morals, in the hearts the absence of any feeling,” “a mixture of vices and courtesy.” He was indignant at how a man could bravely fight the Turks under the banner of Suvorov, and then “caress” “random” people in St. Petersburg in the hallway.

This duality, the painful contradiction of life, sometimes painfully stung thinking people XVIII century. Some were imbued with contempt for Russian reality, others sought oblivion in the wilds of metaphysics, in the fog of mysticism, in Freemasonry. There were also those who passed away.

In 1793, the Yaroslavl landowner Opochinin, one of the Russian “freethinkers,” committed suicide. In his dying will he wrote:

“Disgust for our Russian life is the very impulse that forced me to arbitrarily decide my fate.” He bequeathed the release of two families of servants and the distribution of the master's bread to the peasants.

“Books, my dear books! - he wrote in his will about his library. “I don’t know who to bequeath them to: I’m sure no one needs them in this country; I humbly ask my heirs to burn them; they were my first treasure; they only fed me in my life; if it weren’t for them, then my life would have gone on in constant grief, and I would have left this world long ago with contempt...”

People like Opochinin, due to their class limitations, could not or did not want to see and understand that no oppression, no violence can humiliate the great Russian people, stifle their growth, stop their movement forward, understand that they are alive, strong and wise - “a people born to greatness and glory.”

Without ceasing, Russian thunders throughout the world military glory. Russian soldiers walk the road of victory - from the Poltava battle to Gangut, from Kunersdorfa to Larga and Cahul, from the assault on Izmail to the ice and snow of the defeated Panix.

The son of a Pomeranian peasant, the great Russian scientist Mikhailo Lomonosov, creates his theory of the structure of matter, which was then recognized by the whole world, develops the concept of a chemical element, makes many other scientific discoveries, and clears the Russian language of distortions.

Brave sailors control the flight of Russian ships to the deserted shores of snowy Alaska.

Russian scientists, architects, artists, poets and writers work and create, creating works of art that will forever be included in the treasury of human culture.

And the one who knew how to properly understand and appreciate the manifestations of the mighty forces of his native people knew that there was also another life path for Russian people with a sensitivity to untruth and a strong soul: the way to fight autocratic, serfdom oppression and violence.

WITH mid-18th century. centuries in Russia, scientists and writers appeared from among commoners and progressive nobles who began to condemn the main evil of their time - serfdom, as well as social conditions, which gave rise to and strengthened it, is an autocratic system. These scientists and publicists include, first of all, A. Ya. Polenov, S. E. Desnitsky, Ya. P. Kozelsky, N. I. Novikov. (More details about their activities will be discussed below.)

D. I. Fonvizin, M. M. Kheraskov, G. R. Derzhavin, Ya. B. Knyazhnin, V. V. Kapnist, I. A. Krylov, N. M. Karamzin, I. work fruitfully in the field of Russian literature. I. Dmitriev and many others. During these years, such works appeared as “The Brigadier” and “The Minor” by Fonvizin, the tragedy “Vadim Novgorodsky” by Knyazhnin, “The Yabeda” and “Ode to Slavery” by Kapnist, “Letters of a Russian Traveler” and “ Poor Lisa" Karamzin, Derzhavin's odes, Dmitriev's poems, the first works of the young Krylov.

Russian advanced culture is increasingly moving away from the royal court, becoming more and more hostile to it, acquiring more and more independence and becoming truly popular.

It was this cultural, this political environment that brought forward Radishchev and had a direct impact on the formation of his worldview.

Radishchev’s worldview was formed in a complex era, rich in internal contradictions, of the emergence of new productive forces, the subsequent development and maturation of which, as Comrade Stalin teaches in his work “On Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” inevitably leads to the revolutionary overthrow of old production relations and the establishment of new ones.

“After the new productive forces have matured, the existing relations of production and their bearers, the ruling classes, turn into that “insurmountable” obstacle that can be removed from the road only through the conscious activity of the new classes, through the violent actions of these classes, through revolution. Here the enormous role of new social ideas, new political institutions, new political power, designed to abolish by force the old relations of production. Based on the conflict between new productive forces and old production relations, based on the new economic needs of society, new social ideas arise, new ideas organize and mobilize the masses, the masses rally into a new political army, create a new revolutionary power and use it to abolish force the old order in the field of industrial relations and establish new orders.”

Radishchev was one of the first heralds of those new social ideas, which in their further development and formation formed the basis of the long, heroic revolutionary struggle of the new with the old, began to organize the masses, unite them, led and led, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, to victory in his native country .

He was the first among Russian democrat educators - the first not so much in time, but in the revolutionary strength and clarity of his convictions, in the courage and consistency of his actions.

For him, for a Russian nobleman who managed to overcome the class noble-landowner worldview and took the path of revolutionary thinking, there was only one path left - the path of struggle. And Radishchev chose this path. His weapon was the writer's pen.

He loudly and boldly declared about the criminal and evil that he saw around him, and about his desire to fight for a free life, for the happiness of his native people.

He was extremely sincere and selfless. Having embarked on the path of a just struggle, he hoped that in the distant happy future the feat of his life would not be forgotten. He hoped that the young men, getting ready to fight for the freedom, honor and glory of their homeland, would come to his “dilapidated tomb” and remember with gratitude the one who

The first to prophesy freedom for us...

In order to correctly assess Radishchev’s activities, it is necessary to take into account the historical features of the era in which he lived and fought.

“We must not forget that at the time when the enlighteners of the 18th century wrote (whom generally accepted opinion refers to the leaders of the bourgeoisie), when our enlighteners wrote from the 40s to the 60s, all social issues came down to the fight against serfdom and its remnants ".

Radishchev fought against serfdom. With this struggle of his, the history of Russian liberation thought begins. A great Russian patriot, he was the first Russian revolutionary thinker, revolutionary activist, the direct predecessor of the Russian revolutionaries of the 19th century.

A. V. Lunacharsky with with good reason pointed out that Radishchev was not only a humanist, shocked by the atrocities of serfdom, the predecessor of a repentant nobleman like the liberal Turgenev, but that he was “a revolutionary from head to toe.” Radishchev expected deliverance from slavery not by the grace of the kings, but due to the excess of oppression, that is, through rebellion.

He was an active participant in the fierce class struggle that shook the foundations of the feudal state of Catherine II.

“What is class struggle? This is the struggle of one part of the people against another, the struggle of the masses of the disenfranchised, the oppressed and the working people against... the owners or the bourgeoisie. And in the Russian village this great struggle has always taken place and is now taking place, although not everyone sees it, not everyone understands its significance. When there was serfdom, the entire mass of peasants fought against their oppressors, against the class of landowners, who were protected, defended and supported by the tsarist government. The peasants could not unite, the peasants were then completely crushed by darkness, the peasants had no helpers and brothers among the city workers, but the peasants still fought as best they could and as best they could. The peasants were not afraid of the brutal persecution of the government, they were not afraid of executions and bullets, the peasants did not believe the priests who went out of their way to prove that serfdom was approved by the Holy Scriptures and legitimized by God (that’s exactly what Metropolitan Philaret said then!), the peasants rose up here, then there, and the government finally gave in, fearing a general uprising of all the peasants."

In this struggle, Radishchev was in word and deed on the side of the oppressed class, on the side of the serfs. Radishchev’s immortal book “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” is his weapon in this fight.

Throughout his life, he did not want to put up with the slave status of the peasants. He was convinced that only a revolution, and a peasant revolution at that, could free the people from the shackles of slavery. This is understandable: in those days there was no working class in Russia.

Moreover, Radishchev believed that a revolution in Russia was not only necessary, but also inevitable.

In the peasant war under the leadership of Emelyan Pugachev, he saw clear evidence that the enslaved Russian people were ready at any hour to rise up in arms against their enslavers.

This revolutionary orientation is the basis of Radishchev’s effective, militant patriotism, who fought against the “leavened patriotism” of the reactionary nobles, who sought to preserve and consolidate the Russian savagery and backwardness of that time and thereby preserve serfdom.

In the most difficult, most difficult days of his life, in the hands of the executioner, in the face of the death penalty, Radishchev did not deviate from his main aspiration, to which he devoted his whole life and which is most clearly expressed in “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.” “My desire,” he says during the judicial investigation, “sought to take away all the peasants from the landowners and make them free…”

Radishchev was the most educated man of his time.

He was widely knowledgeable in the field of political economy, history, legal sciences, medicine, physics, chemistry, botany, and had deep knowledge of Russian and foreign literature and philosophy. According to my knowledge, according to a wide circle scientific interests he was an outstanding phenomenon not only for his time.

And it was he, the most educated, most enlightened writer, who reached the heights of knowledge and philosophical thought, who raised his voice in defense of his native, suffering people, and spoke on their behalf.

Armed with advanced science and knowledge, Radishchev stands at the origins of Russian materialist philosophy, which developed under the influence primarily of the materialist traditions of the great Lomonosov. It is not without reason that in “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” Radishchev praised Lomonosov for the fact that he, shaking off scholasticism and delusions, opened firm and clear paths “to the temple of wisdom.”

As a comprehensively and widely educated person, Radishchev, of course, was well acquainted with the ideas of French materialist philosophers (in his student years he enthusiastically studied their works) and with German idealist philosophy. Bourgeois researchers of Radishchev, as a rule, portrayed him in the uncharacteristic role of a “student” of French enlightenment philosophers. This was a conscious, reactionary in its essence, desire to belittle the importance of Radishchev, to belittle his role in the history of Russian culture.

One of the first critics of Radishchev in the second half of the 19th century was M. Longinov, a bourgeois historian of Russian literature, who opposed Radishchev’s ideological orientation. E. Bobrov, I. Lapshin, A. Nezelenov, G. Shpet and other bourgeois historians of Russian literature and philosophy spoke about Radishchev, trying to reduce the importance of Radishchev and portray him as a student of Western European philosophers.

Radishchev, like all the great Russian materialist thinkers, always followed independent paths and was original and original in everything. Solving the highest, fundamental question of philosophy, he understood much of what was still unclear to the French materialist philosophers.

“The highest question of all philosophy,” according to Engels, is “the question of the relationship of thinking to being, spirit to nature…. Philosophers were divided into two large camps according to how they answered this question. Those who argued that spirit existed before nature... formed the idealist camp. Those who considered nature to be the main principle joined various schools of materialism.”

“The material, sensually perceived world, to which we ourselves belong, is the only real world... Our consciousness and thinking, no matter how supersensible it may seem, is the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of spirit, and spirit itself is only the highest product of matter.”

Radishchev belonged to the advanced camp of materialist philosophers. He solved the highest, fundamental question of philosophy in his works from a materialistic position.

“The existence of things,” he wrote, “is independent of the power of knowledge about them and exists in itself.”

“Fix your thoughts, soar your imagination; You think with a bodily organ, how can you imagine anything outside of physicality?

This is what Radishchev wrote in his treatise “On Man, His Mortality and Immortality,” thereby affirming the basic materialist thesis about the primacy of matter and the secondary nature of thinking.

However, Radishchev’s materialist worldview is not without internal contradictions and is not always consistent, which is typical of all materialists of his time. It happened that he hesitated between the religious dogma about the immortality of the soul and science, which rejected the mystical doctrine of afterlife, recognized a “higher power” that supposedly gave matter movement: “and behold, an omnipotent hand, pushing materiality into space, gave it movement...”

But, not being a consistent atheist, he boldly and sharply exposed the reactionary essence of religion and the church as means of oppression and enslavement of the people.

One of the significant shortcomings of Radishchev’s worldview is also that he, like all materialists of the pre-Marx period, was unable to approach the phenomena public life from a materialistic point of view.

Despite all this, Radishchev’s philosophical materialism is a militant materialism directed against the dominant religious-scholastic ideology at that time, against mysticism and superstition, serving the interests of the enslaved people. Radishchev's materialism is the theoretical and ideological basis of his revolutionary activity. While many of the contemporary Western European materialist thinkers hoped for the possibility of improving the life of the people at the will of an “enlightened” monarch, Radishchev, as mentioned above, first of all expected deliverance from slavery through a revolutionary uprising of the people.

These are the most general outline foundations of Radishchev's worldview. In the future, it will be said in more detail how it was formed and to what extent it determined the life and work of the great Russian revolutionary writer. Now I would also like to note that the triumph of the ideas of Marxism in Russia is largely due to the “solid materialist tradition” that existed, as V.I. Lenin wrote, “in the main directions of advanced social thought in Russia.”

This materialistic tradition began with the works of Lomonosov and Radishchev and was continued by the great Russian philosophers, scientists and writers who liberated the Russian people from the intoxication of clericalism and idealism.

Lomonosov begins Russian natural-scientific materialism.

All his life he fought against medieval scholasticism in science. All his life he propagated materialism as the only correct scientific worldview.

Radishchev stands at another source of Russian materialist philosophy, which will later merge with the Russian revolutionary movement, deepened and developed by the Decembrists and Herzen, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and other fighters against serfdom and autocracy.

It should also be said that materialist philosophical thought in Russia has never been limited to theoretical issues alone, but has always strived for practical application in life, for the transformation of social life. This characteristic feature of Russian materialist thought - its organic connection with the creative creative activity of the people, with their struggle - is also characteristic of Radishchev. This alone allows us to speak of him as one of greatest thinkers XVIII century.

Finally, Radishchev’s significance lies not only in the fact that he was a great revolutionary figure, but also in the fact that he is one of the remarkable Russian writers.

And here, in the field of literary work, he does not act as a follower of Western European literature XVIII century, but as an original Russian writer, an innovative writer, bound by inextricable ties with his homeland, with his people.

If as a philosopher Radishchev is a materialist, then as a writer he stands at the beginning of the realistic trend in Russian literature.

...So antique portrait, perhaps painted by a serf artist, an intelligent one looks at us, beautiful face, with large lively eyes, framed by a smooth powdered wig. It is very attractive, this face, primarily because it is inspired by deep thought.

One cannot help but accept Radishchev with one’s mind; one cannot help but understand and appreciate his historical service to his homeland. But having gotten to know him better, you can’t help but accept him with your heart, you can’t help but love him as a person.

We can perceive him not only as a remarkable historical figure, but also as our close friend - there are so many of those traits in him that we, his descendants, especially value in people.

VI Defeats - lessons for future victories It was a hard night - from December 7 to 8, 2003. The night of our loss. For the first time since 1991, democrats in Russia suffered a crushing defeat in parliamentary elections. Voters have not been particularly fond of politicians before