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Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (World Classics Literature, Russian Language Edition)

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The book was written in 1789-1790 and is the most popular ofRadishchev's works. The cause is not only it's content but as wellthat for writing it Radishchev was sent to Siberia. In this book in a form of a journey, rather popular in XVIII century (for example - Stern's "Sentimental Journey"), which lets one include in a description any narrative fragments, is widely described the situation in Russia in the end of the XVIII century (political, economical, moral). The book starts with epigraph "A fat huge beast, barking with its 100 maws", which is a contamination of 2 lines from Trediakovsky's "Tilemachida", concerning the description of the place in Hell where suffer the bad monarchs. They see two mirrors, in one of which they see them as they were told they looked like when they were alive, and in the other one - their real views, among which there are Cerber and Hydra. Radichev tries to make a similar mirror of his book - he tries to show both the imaginative and the real condition of the russian reality, parts of which he tries to describe. As I said, a journey con include easily any narrative fragment, so in Radishchev's text one can see anything - bright stories, philosophy, economical projects etc. Certainly, it would be difficult to read this book, but not only cause of the difficulty of the language, which is much easier in the translation, but because of a difficulty with which one can get familiar with the realities of other culture of a difficult epoch. But the one who would read it would get a good idea of what is russian prose of the 2nd part of the XVIII century and what was Russia at that time.