Summary
Aleksandar Radišchev: Journey from Petersburg to Moscow
Imitating the popular genre of European pre-romanticists at the time, Radiščev successfully bypassed censorship with his travelogue and in 1790 managed to publish in samizdat, in fact, an enlightening text in which he exposes the then Russian government, the state system and points to the humiliations and injustices suffered by disenfranchised peasants. In his travelogue, he topographically repeated the journey of the then Empress Katarina II. which she undertook in order not to admire the economic and social "prosperity" of Russia. The work was soon debunked by state censors, and Radischev was sentenced to exile in Siberia. A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow appeared in Russian bookstores only in 1970.
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