Why was the writer exiled to the Ilim prison? Where did the writer serve before and after the exile? What was his intransigence in the Legislative Commission.

Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev was born in 1749 in the family of a wealthy landowner, he spent his childhood in the Nemtsov estate near Kaluga.
In St. Petersburg there was a privileged institution for the children of wealthy nobles - the Corps of Pages. There they prepared young men for court service. In the page corps, the young man learned court life, met Catherine, whose whims (to give a fan, bring a book) were the duties of a page.
In 1766 six best students The Corps of Pages were sent by the government to the University of Leipzig to continue their education. Radishchev was among the best. He saw a Europe whose life was so different from Russian life, got acquainted with the ideas of European philosophers of the Enlightenment. At this time, Goethe studied in Leipzig - in the future - the great German poet. Radishchev began writing poetry and translating. He called autocracy "the state most contrary to human nature."
Returning to Russia, Radishchev entered the service. He tried everywhere and in everything to act according to his conscience and became the head of the
Petersburg customs, received the Order of St. Vladimir from the hands of the Empress and earned respect the best people of his era. At every step, Radishchev met with manifestations of autocracy, arbitrariness, despotism, with which his heart did not want to put up.
So, Radishchev is forty-one years old. He is no longer a page boy, but a mature husband. He saw life, took responsibility for other lives. He sees life without embellishment. To my true friend To Alexei Mikhailovich Kutuzov, he turns the words: “I looked around me - my soul became wounded by human suffering. He turned my eyes to my insides - and saw that the disasters of a person come from a person, and often only because he looks indirectly at the objects around him.
Radishchev makes a bold attempt to look directly at the objects and phenomena of Catherine's reality. In his home printing house (!), Having lulled the vigilance of the censor with an innocent title, he publishes the book Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.
English writer Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) creates the book Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. main idea this book - the intrinsic value of the human personality, its uniqueness and freedom. Radishchev takes the form of travel as the basis of his work and develops Stern's idea: what hinders the freedom of the individual in Russia?
Radishchev describes his journey from the new capital of Russia to the old one. Naming the chapters by the names of the stations, he tells various incidents and cases that he observed in life or himself was a participant in them. He meets and talks with different people: peasants, nobles, stationmasters, merchants, recruits, writers, solicitors, seminarians.
Catherine was outraged. "Radischev is a rebel worse than Pugachev!" - she said with fervor, Radishchev fell into the hands of her house executioner (!) Sheshkovsky, and then was sentenced to death penalty. Catherine replaced the execution with a ten-year exile to Siberia, to the Ilim prison - then this punishment was considered almost worse than the execution.
Five years later, Catherine died, her son, Pavel I, allowed Radishchev to settle near Moscow under the supervision of local authorities.
Having ascended the throne, Alexander I called Radishchev to the commission for drafting laws. Radishchev proposed to destroy the table of ranks, introduce a jury trial, abolish torture during interrogations, introduce freedom of printing, establish freedom of trade, free serfs, and abolish corporal punishment.
What happened next, no one knows for sure. What event prompted Radishchev to take the last step? Not wanting to serve the state contrary to his principles, he drinks poison.
September 2, 1802 Radishchev passed away, but his main book- "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow" - "was an expression of such truthfulness" that "represents one of the most notable phenomena in the history of Russian literature XVIII century” (G.V. Plekhanov).

Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev was born in 1749 in the family of a wealthy landowner, he spent his childhood in the Nemtsov estate near Kaluga.

In St. Petersburg there was a privileged institution for the children of wealthy nobles - the Corps of Pages. There they prepared young men for court service. In the page corps, the young man learned court life, met Catherine, whose whims (to give a fan, bring a book) were the duties of a page.

In 1766, six of the best students of the Corps of Pages were sent by the government to the University of Leipzig to continue their education. Radishchev was among the best. He saw Europe, whose life was so different from Russian life, got acquainted with the ideas of European philosophers of the Enlightenment. At this time, Goethe studied in Leipzig - in the future - the great German poet. Radishchev began writing poetry and translating. He called autocracy "the state most contrary to human nature."

Returning to Russia, Radishchev entered the service. He tried everywhere and in everything to act according to his conscience and became the head of the

Petersburg customs, received the Order of St. Vladimir from the hands of the Empress and earned the respect of the best people of his era. At every step, Radishchev met with manifestations of autocracy, arbitrariness, despotism, with which his heart did not want to put up.

So, Radishchev is forty-one years old. He is no longer a page boy, but a mature husband. He saw life, took responsibility for other lives. He sees life without embellishment. To his faithful friend Alexei Mikhailovich Kutuzov, he turns the words: “I looked around me - my soul became wounded by human suffering. He turned my eyes to my insides - and saw that the disasters of a person come from a person, and often only because he looks indirectly at the objects around him.

Radishchev makes a bold attempt to look directly at the objects and phenomena of Catherine's reality. In his home printing house (!), Having lulled the vigilance of the censor with an innocent title, he publishes the book Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

English writer Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768) creates the book "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy". The main idea of this book is the inherent value of the human personality, its originality and freedom. Radishchev takes the form of travel as the basis of his work and develops Stern's idea: what hinders the freedom of the individual in Russia?

Radishchev describes his journey from the new capital of Russia to the old one. Naming the chapters by the names of the stations, he tells various incidents and cases that he observed in life or himself was a participant in them. He meets, talks with different people: peasants, nobles, stationmasters, merchants, recruits, writers, solicitors, seminarians.

Catherine was outraged. "Radischev is a rebel worse than Pugachev!" - she said with warmth, Radishchev fell into the hands of her house executioner (!) Sheshkovsky, and then was sentenced to death. Catherine replaced the execution with a ten-year exile to Siberia, to the Ilim prison - then this punishment was considered almost worse than the execution.

Five years later, Catherine died, her son, Pavel I, allowed Radishchev to settle near Moscow under the supervision of local authorities.

Having ascended the throne, Alexander I called Radishchev to the commission for drafting laws. Radishchev proposed to destroy the table of ranks, introduce a jury trial, abolish torture during interrogations, introduce freedom of printing, establish freedom of trade, free serfs, and abolish corporal punishment.

September 2, 1802 Radishchev passed away, but his main book - "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow" - "was an expression of such love of truth" that "is one of the most notable phenomena in the history of Russian literature XVIII century"(G.V. Plekhanov).

Radishchev, who tested strong influence philosophy of the Enlightenment, drew extreme and uncompromising conclusions from it. In his time, almost all educated people read the works French philosophers. Why exactly Radishchev dared to deny the autocracy and defend the freedom of man?

Obviously, precisely because the writer had a particularly vulnerable, especially excitable conscience. His moral ideals and the culture of feelings was so high that he perceived violence, the violation of freedom as his personal misfortune and experienced it as an undeserved personal insult inflicted on him, experiencing unbearably sharp pain.

In this spirit, he begins his main work - “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” (1790), emphasizing how personally, as a person, he was shocked by what he saw around me: “I looked around me - my soul became wounded by the suffering of mankind. I turned my gaze into my inner being and saw that the misfortunes of a person come from a person, and often only from the fact that he looks indirectly at the objects surrounding him ... I felt enough strength in myself to resist delusion; and unspeakable joy! I felt that it was possible for everyone to be an accomplice in the prosperity of their own kind.

This desire for sympathy, compassion, made Radishchev a philosopher, citizen and writer. It also determined the genre of the composition - "journey", widespread in sentimentalism. The “traveler” can naturally survey all the places that he meets on the way, and in the first person, emotionally uplifted, tell about what he saw and what struck his imagination. However, Radishchev's sensitivity compared to the sentimentalists and their leader Karamzin was sharply radical and socially specific.

All the chapters of the book - from "Sofia" to "Savior Field" - are permeated with one idea: in Russia the law sleeps and lawlessness reigns. This lawlessness is contrary to all "natural laws" given by nature to man. No one observes the law in the country - neither coachmen and petty officials, nor governors and dignitaries. A Russian person does not have “personal safety”, “personal liberty”, “property”. Perhaps things would have been different under an enlightened sovereign? In the chapter "Spasskaya Poles" a picture is drawn (the second part of the "dream") in which lawlessness does not disappear. But perhaps private measures and reforms or spontaneous peasant riots will help? Radishchev answers this question in the negative. He comes to the conclusion that the whole point is in the monarchy, in the very principle of autocracy, and the deliverance from the autocracy belongs to the distant future.

As long as autocracy exists, there is always the danger that it will certainly become despotism or tyranny. Catherine II thought of herself as an enlightened empress, but what is it like for the serfs and other common people (Lyubani) to live under her? Under the "suffering of mankind" Radishchev understood the fate of the serfs. He was a staunch opponent of "slavery in Russia". Many chapters of Journey ... (Khotilov, Zaitsevo, Edrovo, Lyubani) are imbued, on the one hand, with sympathy for the peasants, on the other hand, with merciless criticism of Catherine's reign, in which "two-thirds of the citizens are deprived civil rank and partly dead in the law”, one third are “greedy animals, insatiable leeches”. The horrifying and blatant pictures of arbitrariness and lawlessness painted by Radishchev were supposed to influence the "natural" feelings of the nobles and awaken in them compassion for the destitute. Radishchev hoped that the social instinct would inspire the nobles with the idea of inevitable retribution from the people. Therefore, the writer urged the nobles to give up class privileges, to use all their influence to restore the "natural equality of all." It is precisely these qualities - increased emotionality in the depiction of Russian life and an ardent desire to change it - that explain the high didactic and pathetic style characteristic of "Journey ...".

Announcement of the sale of serfs in the newspaper Moskovskie Vedomosti. 1797

The nobles ignored the "lessons" of Pugachev and Radishchev. They did not understand the thoughts of the writer-philosopher, which prompted intellectual tension. Radishchev did not change his convictions, and his writer's pen became stronger and stronger. One of his lyrical masterpieces “Do you want to know: who am I? what am I? where am I going?..” (1791), warmed by a deep personal feeling, is devoid of teaching intonation, preaching tone, and archaic vocabulary.

No less profound was the elegy "Eighteenth century"(1801-1802), in which Radishchev summed up the tragic end of the past brilliant age of the Enlightenment, of which he was the son. Pushkin called this elegy the best poetic work Radishchev and admired "poems, so wonderful under his pen." "Following Radishchev" he praised freedom in the ode "Liberty", argued with him in "Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg." Radishchev's thoughts worried Pushkin throughout his life, and this is the best proof that the critical literary pathos of the sentimentalist writer 1 has not faded over time. Radishchev's word about freedom and "natural rights" of a person, about sympathy for neighbors and complicity with people will never die, because it is part of the enduring moral values of all mankind.

Questions and tasks

Where did A. N. Radishchev study? What sciences and whose writings was he fond of in Leipzig?
Why was the writer exiled to the Ilim prison? Where did the writer serve before and after the exile? What was his intransigence in the Lawmaking Commission?
In what ode did Radishchev sound the idea of retribution against tyrants?
With what words did the writer express the surprise and shock of a person and citizen at what he saw during the trip (“Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow”)?
What works of Radishchev did Pushkin admire and what did he appreciate in them?
Read the text “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow”, analyze one of the chapters (optional) or prepare one of the dialogues for staged reading.
What in the dialogue with the peasant (“Lyubani”) struck the author of “Journey ...” and what thoughts did it provoke later? What do the words of the peasant say: “You see, one horse is resting, but when this one gets tired, I will take on another ...”?
Literary critic V. A. Zapadov writes: “All the chapters from Sophia to Spasskaya Poles’ are united by the cross-cutting theme of the law and general lawlessness. Lawlessness reigns at all levels of society; everyone acts contrary to the laws - from the coachman and the petty official to the governor and the closest assistants to the sovereign. Find examples of this in "Journey...".
Which works of XVIII centuries would you call great and the talent of which writer of this century can be “amazed”?

1 Sentimentalist writer main feature « human nature announces the feeling. See the definition of sentimentalism in the second part of the textbook in " Concise Dictionary literary terms.

Russian thinker, writer. Ode "Liberty" (1783), story "The Life of F. V. Ushakov" (1789), philosophical writings. In the main work of Radishchev "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow" (1790) wide circle ideas of the Russian Enlightenment, a truthful, sympathetic image of the life of the people, a sharp denunciation of autocracy and serfdom. The book was confiscated and distributed in lists until 1905. In 1790 Radishchev was exiled to Siberia. Upon his return (1797), in his draft legal reforms (1801 02), he again advocated the abolition of serfdom; the threat of new reprisals led him to commit suicide.

Biography

Born on August 20 (31 n.s.) in Moscow in a rich noble family. Childhood years were spent in the father's estate near Moscow, the village of Nemtsovo, and then in Upper Ablyazov.

From the age of seven, the boy lived in Moscow, in the family of a relative Argamakov, with whose children he studied at home with professors of the newly opened university.

In 1762 1766 he studied at the St. Petersburg Corps of Pages, then for five years he continued his education at the Faculty of Law of the University of Leipzig, and also studied literature, natural Sciences, medicine, mastered several foreign languages. Big role Radishchev's worldview was shaped by his acquaintance with the works of the French Enlighteners Voltaire, D. Diderot, J. J. Rousseau, by reading which he "learned to think."

Upon his return to Russia in 1771 he was appointed recorder to the Senate, then in 1773 1775 (the years of the peasant uprising of E. Pugachev) he served as chief auditor (divisional prosecutor) at the headquarters of the Finnish division. Military service made it possible to get acquainted with the cases of fugitive recruits, the abuses of landowners, Pugachev's manifestos, read the orders of the military collegium all this became decisive in ideological development Radishchev. In the year of the reprisal against Pugachev, he resigned, married A. Rubanovskaya.

In 1777, Radishchev joined the College of Commerce, headed by the liberal nobleman A. Vorontsov, who was in opposition to Catherine II, who brought Radishchev closer to him and in 1780 recommended him for work in the capital's customs (since 1790 he was director).

In the 1780s, Radishchev supported the rapidly developing activities of Russian enlighteners: Novikov, Fonvizin, Krechetov. Followed with interest the events of the War of Independence in North America(1775 83), during which a new republic was formed United States of America.

During these years, Radishchev was actively engaged in literary work. Wrote "The Word about Lomonosov", "Letter to a friend...", finished the ode "Liberty".

In 1784, the "Society of Friends of the Literary Sciences" was created in St. Petersburg from former students of the university, into which Radishchev also joined, dreaming of subordinating his journal "Conversing Citizen" to the goals of revolutionary propaganda. Radishchev's article "A Conversation about the Son of the Fatherland" (17897.

From the mid-1780s, he began work on "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow", which in 1790 was printed in the amount of 650 copies. After famous words Catherine II (“he is a rebel, worse than Pugachev”), the book was confiscated, Radishchev was arrested and imprisoned Peter and Paul Fortress. Catherine II replaced the death penalty with 10 years of exile in the Siberian prison Ilimsk.

While in exile, Radishchev, on behalf of Count A. Vorontsov, studied Siberian crafts, the economy of the region, and the life of peasants. In letters to him, he shared his thoughts on organizing an expedition along the Northern Sea Route. In Ilimsk he wrote "Letter on Chinese bargaining" (1792), philosophical work"About a Man, About His Mortality and Immortality" (1792㭜), "Abridged Narrative of the Acquisition of Siberia" (1791 96), "Description of the Tobolsk governorship" and others.

In 1796, Paul I allowed Radishchev to settle in his homeland in Nemtsovo under the strictest police supervision. He received complete freedom in March 1801 under Alexander I.

Attracted to the Commission for the Compilation of the Code of Laws, he worked on drafting legislative reforms. Radishchev's legislative writings included the demand for the abolition of serfdom and class privileges, and the arbitrariness of the authorities. The chairman of the Commission, Count P. Zavadovsky, threatened Radishchev with a new exile to Siberia. Driven to despair, Radishchev committed suicide on September 12 (24 n.s.), 1802, by taking poison.

Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev was born in 1749 in the family of a wealthy landowner, he spent his childhood in the Nemtsov estate near Kaluga.

Returning to Russia, Radishchev entered the service. He tried everywhere and in everything to act according to his conscience and became the head of the

Five years later, Catherine died, her son, Pavel I, allowed Radishchev to settle near Moscow under the supervision of local authorities.

On September 2, 1802, Radishchev passed away, but his main book - "Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow" - "was an expression of such love of truth" that "is one of the most notable phenomena in the history of Russian literature of the 18th century" (G.V. Plekhanov).