Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

Journey represented a challenge to Catherine in Russia, despite the fact that Radishchev was no revolutionary: merely an observer of the ills he saw within Russian society and government at the time.

Written during the period of the French Revolution, the book borrows ideas and principles from the great philosophers of the day relating to an enlightened outlook and the in particular contemporary understandings of Natural Law.

In the book, Radishchev takes an imaginary journey between Russia's two principal cities; each stop along the way reveals particular problems for the traveller through the medium of story telling.

Eventually getting on the road, he encounters a man trying to sell genealogical papers to nobles seeking to increase their rank, and a poor peasant laboring on a Sunday.

[1] Likely the most famous scene is the narrator's dream of being a "tsar, shah, khan, king, bey, nabob, sultan, or holder of some such dignity, sitting in regal power on a throne".

[5] Early socialists Nikolai Ogarev and Alexander Herzen published a version of Journey from exile in 1858, and most Soviet critics claimed Radishchev as a precursor to Bolshevism.

[6] Radishchev studied at Leipzig University during Catherine the Great's liberal reforms, which exposed him to the French Enlightenment ideas that he argued for in Journey.

[4] Journey also makes references to Adam Ferguson, Thomas Jefferson, Acts of Parliament, and American state constitutions, as well as the Bible and medieval Christian orthodoxy.

[6] A section cut from the published version, "Creation of the World," explicitly invoked the social contract and celebrated Oliver Cromwell and George Washington as anti-monarchists.

The narrator professes an individual faith in a single deity revered by every religion, and a quote from Joseph Addison in the same chapter may refer to Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's heretical multiple-worlds theory.

Point of view shifts between the central narrator and secondary characters, unconventional verb forms emphasize process over single actions, and run-on sentences simulate stream of consciousness.

Tilemakhida was a mixture of narrative and instruction in a neoclassical poetic style, originally intended to mirror the treatise's content and educate the reader, but outmoded by 1790.