The Travelogue and the Ode—Aleksandr Radishchev's Polemic with the Court Ode in Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu

Abstract

In the oft‐quoted dedication of his Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu, Aleksandr Radishchev's narrator highlights the need to “look straight” and attributes mankind's misery to obscured vision. He sets on his journey in an effort restore proper visual perception to his people. Yet the manner in which the journey can enable this restoration is less than clear. In fact, this issue has prompted several recent reevaluations of vision in the travelogue. In this essay I return to the problem of vision and reconsider Radishchev's visual challenge in the Puteshestvie. I suggest that restoration of vision is deeply tied to artistic genre and its means of representing reality. As Mikhail Bakhtin and P. N. Medvedev have argued in the Formal Method in Literary Scholarship that every genre has its unique “means of seeing and conceptualizing reality.” As they suggest, the artist “must learn to see reality through the eyes of the genre.” These remarks are especially relevant to the neoclassical ode, a genre with a peculiar perspective defined by aesthetic distance. Due to its status as foundational genre of Russian literature, the ode and its peculiar “eye” are given substantial attention in Radishchev's thoughts about artistic vision. Radishchev spends considerable time addressing and polemicizing against the ode on both political and aesthetic grounds. As I show, Radishchev's narrator is drawn to the ode's dominant visual perspective, but employs his experience as traveler to move away from that aesthetic. This endeavor does not result in a comprehensive new visual perspective; instead, Radishchev's polemic is aimed at reorienting the Russian literary gaze and locating it closer to the phenomenology of being. It is this relocation, rather than a proper emendation of the gaze, that is at the heart of Radishchev's project.