Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism

Начало книги

In May, 1790, when Catherine II had been on the throne twenty-eight years, copies of a new book, entitled A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, found their way into one or two bookstores in the Russian capital. The few people who bought it must have gaped as they turned the pages of the bulky volume duly provided with the censor's imprimatur. Indebted to the technique of Sterne's Sentimental Journey, this medley of narrative, argument, invective, and homily, enlivened by thumbnail character sketches sharply drawn and an occasional digression into surprisingly frank autobiography, was least of all a rambling travelogue. It was a political tract of unprecedented boldness. Here spoke, in the rhetorical and tearful accents of the period, not only a sensitive heart that bled at the sight of suffering and swelled with indignation -- an indignation not free from self-righteousness -- at the spectacle of injustice, but also a mind committed to the ideas of a revolutionary age.

Читать дальше →