A. Radishchev - the first Russian revolutionary thinker

Radishchev A.N.

Radishchev Alexander Nikolaevich (1749 - 1802), writer.

Born into a landowner family. His childhood years were spent in the village of Verkhnee Ablyazovo (now Penza region). The boy’s first educators were serfs: nanny Praskovya Klementyevna and uncle Pyotr Mamontov, who taught him to read and write. They brought him into the world folk art, an interest and love for which the writer retained throughout his life. In 1762, Radishchev was assigned to a privileged educational institution- St. Petersburg Page Corps. All sciences were taught to the students of the corps by one French teacher, but the young pages were on duty in the palace, serving the empress herself. Here Radishchev observed the palace atmosphere and court morals.

Upon completion of the corps, Radishchev, among the best students, was sent abroad, to Leipzig, to receive a special legal education.

After graduating from university, Radishchev returned to his homeland, ready, in his own words, to “sacrifice his life for the benefit of the Fatherland.” He expected to take part in great job to draw up new legislation promised by Catherine. However, Radishchev was forced to take a very modest position as a protocol clerk in the Senate. Here, a whole string of cases about serfs passed before him: torture of peasants by landowners, peasant riots and unrest, pacified by “small guns and cannon.” After some time he retired.

During these years, Radishchev made acquaintances in literary circles and became close to N.I. Novikov. In the notes to the translation of the book by the French enlightenment philosopher Mably, he writes: “Autocracy is the state most contrary to human nature...” Following this, he emphasizes that the “unjustice of the sovereign” gives the people the right to judge and punish him as the worst criminal. Here the idea is concisely expressed, which the writer would later develop in the famous ode “Liberty” (1783).

Glorifying in it the tyrant fighters - Brutus, William Tell, he glorifies and calls on the “thunderstorm of kings” - a revolution, the “voice” of which should turn the darkness of slavery into light. At the same time, Radishchev’s “Liberty” is a hymn to the people and their work.

In 1789-1790 four works of Radishchev, written in different topics. This is “The Life of Fyodor Vasilyevich Ushakov,” which tells about the life of Russian students in Leipzig; “Letter to a Friend...”, giving a historically correct assessment of the activities of Peter I; “A conversation about being a son of the Fatherland,” where the right to be called a patriot is denied to the majority of representatives of noble society, and, finally, the main work and feat of Radishchev’s entire life is “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.”

In “The Journey...” Radishchev set out to show the Russian reality of his time. After the publication of “Travel-,” by order of Catherine II, Radishchev was imprisoned in a casemate in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The court sentenced him to death penalty, replaced by a ten-year exile in Siberia. Driving into exile through Tobolsk, he wrote:

You want to know: who am I? what am I? where am I going?

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!..

After the death of Catherine II, Radishchev was allowed to return to Central Russia. Until the end of his days, the writer lived under police supervision in the small Kaluga estate Nemtsov. Here he continued to engage in literary work. In the unfinished poem “Songs Sung at Competitions in Honor of the Ancient Slavic Deities,” the author of “Journeys...” speaks about the future awaiting his native people:

O people, glorious people!

Your later descendants

They will surpass you in glory...

All barriers, all strongholds

They will crush with a strong hand,

They will defeat... even nature,

- And before their mighty gaze,

In front of their illuminated faces

The glory of huge victories,

Kings and kingdoms will fall on their faces...

On March 11, 1801, another palace coup took place: Paul I was killed and his son, Alexander I, ascended the throne. Radishchev was invited to take part in the work of the commission for drafting laws, and he set to work. But none of his projects got off the ground. Radishchev committed suicide by taking a lethal dose of poison.

...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 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 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 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 (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 in 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 they, seeing far ahead, 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.

Revolution is the highest expression of the creative potential of the people. That is why in Gorodnya the traveler makes a direct appeal to the serfs to revolt. This call to rebellion is full of great joyful faith in the victory of the people, in the creation by their own efforts of a new statehood, a new culture, “decent people’s rule.” These are the inspired words of the traveler: “Oh! If only the slaves, burdened with heavy bonds, furious in their despair, would break our heads, the heads of their inhuman masters, and stain their fields with our blood! What would the state lose? Soon great men would be torn from their midst to defend the beaten tribe; but they would have other thoughts about themselves and would be deprived of the right of oppression.” In “Journey” and the ode “Liberty,” Radishchev soulfully revealed his dream about the future of the fatherland. He inspiredly painted a picture for the reader future life free people.

...The years of revolution will die down, and the people will create their own government. “Soon great men would be torn from their midst to defend the beaten tribe.” The interests of the people, concern for their welfare - that is what will be the subject of their attention. In this state the entire population will be free and everyone will work. The land will belong to those who work. The triumphant great spirit of freedom, “creative like God,” transforms all aspects of life. Labor, a curse under corvée, will become joyful and creative. In the state of workers, says Radishchev, “labor is joy, sweat is sweat, which with its vitality produces meadows, fields, forests.” Poverty and misery will become an irrevocable past: free labor is the basis of economic wealth.

Believing in the revolution, Radishchev, based on studying the real conditions of contemporary Russia, firmly knew that the necessary circumstances did not yet exist, that the time had not yet come for a glorious victory. That is why, truly prophetically, he wrote in “Journey”: “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.” Pushkin, who knew “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” well, rightly called it “a satirical appeal to indignation.” In his rebellious book, Radishchev ideologically comprehended the colossal experience of the people in their tireless centuries-old struggle for their freedom, and expressed faith in the inevitable victory of the Russian revolution. The writer's revolutionary beliefs determined his artistic innovation in depicting Russian life and the Russian people. That's why this book was needed by Russian people and freedom fighters and writers. By transforming the “travel” genre into a kind of educational novel, Radishchev accomplished artistic discovery. That is why many writers, and above all Pushkin and Gogol, appreciated and perceived Radishchev’s experience in their own way. In the novel “Eugene Onegin” a chapter “Onegin’s Travels” appeared, which was supposed to play an important role in the ideological revival of the main character of the novel. Plot " Dead souls"develops taking into account the experience of the "travel" genre.

Exiling Radishchev to the distant Siberian prison of Ilimsk, Catherine II was sure that he, unable to withstand the difficult journey, would die along the way. This would have happened if not for the intervention of Radishchev’s friend Count A.R. Vorontsov. He got the empress to order that the shackles be removed from the condemned man, and then sent his messenger along the route with letters to the governors asking them to create tolerable conditions for Radishchev’s movement and life at the place of exile, promising them their protection in return. In November 1796, Catherine II died, and her son Paul began to reign. He changed Radishchev's place of exile - from Ilimsk he was transferred near Moscow, to his father's village of Nemtsovo, where he lived until 1801. New Emperor, Alexander I, having ascended the throne, promised society the creation of new laws. He declared a political amnesty, released Radishchev, summoned him to St. Petersburg and appointed him, on the recommendation of A.R. Vorontsov, who came into force, to the Commission for drawing up new laws. Returning to the capital, Radishchev set to work with renewed energy. But he soon saw that Alexander's promises were lies. For trying to defend his opinion in the commission, he was threatened with a new exile. But neither threats nor persecution broke the sick Radishchev. Not wanting to come to terms, he decided to commit suicide. At 9 o'clock in the morning on September 11, 1802, he drank a glass of strong poison - nitric acid. On the night of September 13, Radishchev died in severe agony.

The autocracy imposed a ban on the name of Radishchev and on his revolutionary works - the ode “Liberty” and “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.” But despite this, they were widely published in lists and were known to many readers. Already in the 1790s, handwritten copies of the Travels began to appear. New lists were created and distributed especially intensively in the first half of the 19th century. Apparently there were several hundred such lists in circulation. More than 60 “Travel” lists have reached us.

Advanced public figures and writers have repeatedly tried to republish the Journey or reprint some chapters. In 1805, the chapter “Wedge” was reprinted in the journal Severny Vestnik. In 1806-1811, Radishchev’s sons published the Collected Works of their father in six volumes, but without “Liberty” and “Travel,” which were banned by censorship. Pushkin knew Radishchev’s works very well and had his own copy of “Travel.” In 1817, following Radishchev’s ode “Liberty,” he wrote his ode “Liberty.” In 1833-35 he wrote “A Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg,” including large excerpts from Radishchev’s “Journey” in his book. In 1836, in the poem “Monument,” he included a stanza that openly stated that he was following the path paved by Radishchev:

* And for a long time I will be so kind to the people,
* That I have found new sounds for songs,
* That, following Radishchev, I glorified freedom
* And he sang mercy.

The Russian revolutionary public did not achieve the right to publish Oadishchev’s work in Russia. Then Herzen published “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” in London (1858). During the second half of the 19th century centuries in Russia, attempts were made again and again to publish the forbidden book. Finally, in 1868, the ban on its publication was formally lifted. But practically the situation has not changed. In the same 1868, the merchant Shigin published “Journey,” but it was allowed to be released only because it was hideously distorted - the weight of the page was removed from the book, where autocratic power and serfdom were denounced, all the revolutionary judgments of the author. In 1888, Suvorin published “Travel” in 100 copies. Permission was given only due to the insignificant circulation. A year later, also in a small print run, “The Journey” was published as part of Volume V of A. E. Burtsev’s publication “Additional Description of Bibliographically Rare, Artistically Remarkable Books and Precious Manuscripts.”

Only the revolution of 1905 finally lifted the ban on the rebellious book. In the same year, the complete edition of Radishchev’s “Travel” was published. Since then, it has been published many times - both separately and as part of the Collected Works of Radishchev.

...The time when Radishchev lived became distant history. But the memory of him is alive - a courageous man and thinker, a prophet and martyr of the revolution. The memory of the heart of a free and grateful people is alive and immortal.

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A new stage in the development of liberation ideas in Russia is associated with the name of Radishchev - the first Russian revolutionary thinker, the direct predecessor of the noble revolutionaries - the Decembrists. Radishchev was one of the first educators to connect the protest against serfdom with the struggle against autocracy. He brought the ideas of the 18th century Enlightenment. to their logical conclusion, proclaiming the right of the oppressed to respond to violence with violence. Radishchev's revolutionary conclusions were in direct connection with the turbulent events of his time: the American and French bourgeois revolutions and the peasant war led by Pugachev.

Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev was born in 1749 into a landowner family. The noble estate in early childhood, noble Moscow, where his initial training took place, and finally, the court environment in which he lived until the age of 17 as a student of the Corps of Pages, did not drown out the impulses for justice and freedom in the soul of the thoughtful young man. Studying at the University of Leipzig, where he was sent to receive a legal education, getting acquainted with educational French literature and reading Russian progressive journalism strengthened his hatred of all types of oppression.

Upon returning to Russia, Radishchev translated for the “Society Trying to Print Books,” organized by Novikov, Mably’s essay “Reflections on Greek History or on the Reasons for the Prosperity and Misfortune of the Greeks.” Already in this early literary speech, Radishchev expressed his views on absolutism, accompanying the translation with his own notes, in one of which he declared that the people are the judge of the sovereign and that the injustice of the monarch gives the people the right to judge him as a criminal. Radishchev developed these thoughts in his subsequent works, written after the Peasant War of 1773-1775. and revolutions in North America.

In his ode “Liberty” (1781-1783), remarkable in its depth of philosophical thought and revolutionary pathos, Radishchev openly proclaimed the idea of ​​a violent revolution. The main content of the ode is to describe the disasters that monarchical power brings to the people, and to proclaim the regularity and justice of the popular uprising. “Liberty” is a hymn to the freedom and revolutionary power of the people. Radishchev calls himself the first prophet of liberty and expresses the hope that posterity will not forget him for this. The final stanzas of the ode are dedicated to Radishchev’s dreams of the future glory of his fatherland, freed from the oppression of autocracy.

The heyday of Radishchev's creativity falls in the 80s. During these years, his wonderful book “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” was completed, in which an angry denunciation of autocratic serfdom Russia is inextricably linked with a revolutionary call for the destruction of the feudal system.

At the beginning of the Journey, the author sets out the reasons that prompted him to write this book and the goal that he pursued. This is, first of all, a desire to contribute to the achievement of happiness of people whose suffering deeply hurt his soul. To reveal to people the cause of their suffering and to find people who sympathize with his ideas - this is the goal that the author set for himself.

Either citing the stories of those he met, or with the help of his own reasoning about what he saw and heard, or in the form of borrowings from other people’s manuscripts that supposedly fell into the hands of the traveler, the author reveals the depth of the decay of autocratic-landlord Russia, contrasting his revolutionary ideals of social order with the repulsive reality.

Everything that the traveler encounters is a blatant contradiction of the external, ceremonial side of Catherine’s regime, which was presented by the defenders of autocracy as the kingdom of “universal happiness.” Radishchev exposes this ostentatious, deceitful prosperity. Radishchev contrasts the corrupted nobles, slavishly servile to the authorities and tyrannically cruel to their serfs, with the peasants, whose hands create the country’s wealth, as truly noble people. From the first steps the traveler is confronted with these polar opposite forces.

Radishchev portrays a whole gallery of stupid, self-righteous representatives of bureaucratic power, for whom there is only one interest - their own profit. With the same accusatory force, Radishchev denounces the feudal landowners. The chapter “Lyuban” talks about a landowner for whom the peasants work six days a week, the chapter “Vyshny Volochok” talks about a “zealous” owner who robbed his peasants and transferred them to “monthly wages.”

Drawing these landowners, Radishchev views their actions not as the result of personal cruelty or self-interest. He reveals the ulcers of the entire system, which gave rise to base traits in the character of the landowners - the owners of serf souls. The legalized right to own people is, in Radishchev’s fair opinion, the source of peasant enslavement and the vices with which landowners are endowed.

In “The Journey” there are also courageous, noble people who, together with the author, suffer from the violence and meanness that surrounds them: the landowner from the chapter “The Sacred People”, who raised in his sons a sense of duty, honor, truthfulness and courage; the chairman of the criminal chamber, Krestyankin, who tried to be a fair judge; fictional author of the ode "Liberty". These are the same “sympathizers” that Radishchev speaks of in his dedication-preface.

Radishchev characterizes the peasants with attractive features. The moral purity of the peasant girl Anyuta is contrasted with the corruption of official daughters. A blind beggar singer who rejected the traveler's ruble alms; peasants who stood up for the honor of the peasant girl-bride, whom the sons of the landowner were trying to dishonor - all these images are sharply contrasted with the parasite nobles mired in vices. With anger and indignation, Radishchev describes the plight of half-starved peasants who cannot find justice and are sold at auction like cattle.

Based on the idealistic, but for its time, progressive theory of the social contract, Radishchev views enslavement as a crime. He speaks threateningly to the nobles. “Be afraid, hard-hearted landowner, I see your condemnation on the forehead of each of your peasants.” He was deeply convinced of the inevitability of the overthrow by the enslaved themselves of a system based on crime, since “the stream, blocked in its desire, the stronger it becomes, the more firmly it finds opposition.”

But Radishchev looks into the future without fear, when the bursting stream begins to crush everything in its path. “Oh, if only the slaves, burdened with heavy bonds, furious in their despair, would break our heads, the heads of their inhuman masters, with iron, the heads of their inhuman masters, and stain their fields with our blood! What would the state lose? “Nothing at all,” says Radishchev. Great men would emerge from among the people themselves, and in the new society there would be no place for the oppression of man by man.

Radishchev's idea of ​​the possibility of a victorious peasant revolution was utopian; he could not avoid contradictions in his views. He believed that the new society would be based on universal labor, but he saw the source of general well-being in free private ownership of tools and means of production.

Objectively, his theory consisted in demanding the most complete and decisive destruction of feudal-serf relations and the feudal form of property. True, he did not exclude the possibility of social reconstruction through reform. This was reflected in the project for the liberation of the peasants, set out in “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow,” and in some of his individual statements. But Radishchev’s hopes for reform and an “enlightened” monarch were much weaker than the conviction of the necessity and inevitability of the violent destruction of serfdom, and with it the autocracy.

Radishchev could not help but know what consequences the publication of the book “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” would lead to, but he courageously took this heroic step. The blow that Radishchev’s speech dealt to the autocracy was so strong that Catherine personally took up his cause. “He is a rebel worse than Pugachev,” was her conclusion. The Senate obsequiously approved the decision of the St. Petersburg Criminal Court, which sentenced Radishchev to death, leaving the empress the opportunity to demonstrate her ostentatious “mercy” and replace the death penalty with exile. Radishchev was exiled for 10 years to one of the most remote areas of Siberia, to the Ilimsky prison.

But neither the arrest nor the difficult journey to Siberia broke the great creator of “Liberty.” In poems written on the way, Radishchev proudly said:

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

Living in distant exile in Ilimsk, Radishchev did not stop his literary activity. The most significant work of this period was the philosophical treatise “On Man, His Mortality and Immortality.” This work reflected the contradictions of his worldview. Recognizing the objective existence of matter and the knowability of the world through sensory experience and reasoning, Radishchev at the same time does not dare to reject the belief in the immortality of the soul.

Radishchev was returned from Ilim exile only after the death of Catherine II. On the part of Emperor Paul, this was not an act of mercy, but a manifestation of hatred towards the memory of his mother. Pavel replaced Radishchev's exile in Ilimsk with exile to his family estate, located in the Kaluga province, under the strict supervision of the authorities. But even here Radishchev continued his literary activity.

In March 1801, Radishchev was released from supervision and after some time was appointed a member of the Commission for Drafting Laws. Deceived by this liberal-demagogic gesture of Alexander I, Radishchev eagerly set to work, hoping to raise the issue of abolishing serfdom through reform. But he soon became convinced that Alexander’s ostentatious liberalism was only a repetition of the hypocritical tactics of his sovereign grandmother. This was said in latest works Radishchev, especially in the poem “Historical Song”.

Believing that he could do nothing more for the good of the people, Radishchev committed suicide on September 11, 1802. Shortly before his death, he said: “Posterity will avenge me.”

Early Russian enlighteners of the 60-80s of the 18th century. put the peasant problem at the center of attention of Russian society. The great Russian revolutionary thinker Radishchev made the first attempt to indicate the path to its revolutionary solution. Thus, anti-feudal ideas, common to the “age of Enlightenment”, acquired in Russia, due to historical conditions, their own specific features: representatives of advanced Russian thought received new public relations were depicted as based primarily on the well-being of the peasants.

The great attention shown by representatives of Russian liberation thought to the peasant question contributed to the further development of the revolutionary democratic traditions of the Russian liberation movement.

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 in 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 wrote, you still 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, 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 odographers, 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, the formidable peasant war in Russia under the leadership of Emelyan Pugachev.

Russia of the second half of the 18th century 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 international 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,” Lenin wrote, “is that the peasantry (and then the peasants represented the majority, urban population was extremely poorly developed) was considered attached to the land - this is where the very concept of serfdom came from. The peasant could work certain number 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 command, subject them to known laws, 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 participated in palace coup 1762, which elevated Catherine to royal throne, received gifts from over 50 thousand peasants; 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 her reign, realizing the fragility of the crown of the 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 XVIII century,” will reveal the cruel activity of her despotism under the guise of meekness and tolerance, the people oppressed by governors, the 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 justly, 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 court - Russia then lived as a court - was constantly divided into parties, without thought, without statesmen at the head, without a plan,” writes Herzen, “each party, instead of a banner, has a guards gladiator, whose gray-haired ministers, senators and generals pushed 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 the native country is 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 of the 18th 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 Kunersdorf 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 own theory of the structure of matter, which was then recognized by the whole world, develops the concept of a chemical element, and makes many others scientific discoveries, clears the Russian language from distortions.

Brave sailors rule the flight of Russian ships to deserted shores 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 those who knew how to properly understand and appreciate the manifestations of the powerful forces of their native people knew that there was also another path in life for Russian people with a sensitivity to untruth and a strong soul: the path of struggle against autocratic, feudal oppression and violence.

From the middle of the 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 the social conditions that gave rise to and strengthened it - the 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 Liza” by Karamzin, odes Derzhavin, poems by Dmitriev, 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

He was the first to prophesy freedom for us...

In order to correctly evaluate Radishchev’s activities, it is necessary to take into account historical features 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, “was to take all the peasants away 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.”

How comprehensive and broad 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 idealistic 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 activities. 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 is 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 the 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.

... From an old portrait, perhaps painted by a serf artist, something intelligent 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 difficult 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