{"id":702,"date":"2020-02-18T01:15:14","date_gmt":"2020-02-18T01:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/?p=702"},"modified":"2020-02-18T01:15:14","modified_gmt":"2020-02-18T01:15:14","slug":"serfdom-exposed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/lmcnett\/serfdom-exposed\/","title":{"rendered":"Serfdom Exposed"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow <\/span><\/i>is a scathing critique of the institution of serfdom as well as the social hierarchy and oppression present throughout Russia.\u00a0 Alexander Radishchev\u2019s compelling narrative and focus on the serfs\u2019 humanity results in a text that pushes Russia to address the injustice of serfdom head on–which why Catherine the Great had such a strong, negative reaction to the book and banned it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While reading this, I was first struck by the fact that this is the first critique\/account of an historical event that was written <\/span>during <\/span><\/i>the time it took place.\u00a0 Unlike watching Soviet-era depictions of Ivan or reading literature written centuries after the period in which they cover, <\/span>A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow<\/span><\/i> is a real-time account of Russian culture–but perhaps more importantly, it is a real-time reckoning about the injustices present throughout Russia.\u00a0 In particular, when Radishchev describes his first interaction with the peasant, he remarks, \u201cThe words of this peasant awakened in me a multitude of thoughts.\u00a0 I thought especially of the inequality of treatment within the peasant class…This thought made my blood boil\u201d (267). In this instant, the author has been \u201cawakened\u201d to the cruelty of serfdom–and this awakening is mirrored in the way the the text is written.\u00a0 Radishchev intimately describes a series of encounters with peasants and serfs in an attempt to reveal their stories–to demonstrates that blanket terms such as \u201cpeasants\u201d and \u201cserfs\u201d are dehumanizing. And although the work was banned, it is evident that Radishchev is attempting to provoke the same type of awakening he had in his readers.\u00a0 The text takes the reader on a \u201cjourney\u201d (as the title suggests), a journey that exposes the shortcomings and injustices of Russian society. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition, I found the following remark by Catherine interesting: \u201c[Radishchev] is trying in every possible way to break down respect for authority\u2026 to stir up the people…against their superiors and against the government\u201d (278).\u00a0 To me, this shows how serfdom as an institution was so intertwined with the aristocracy of Russia, and that an attack on serfdom was an attack on the government itself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow is a scathing critique of the institution of serfdom as well as the social hierarchy and oppression present throughout Russia.\u00a0 Alexander Radishchev\u2019s compelling narrative and focus on the serfs\u2019 humanity results in a text that pushes Russia to address the injustice of serfdom head on–which why Catherine the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1024,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-6-the-enlightenment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1024"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}