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6 - Russian or French? Bilingualism in Aleksandr Radishchev's Letters from Exile (1790–1800)
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- By Rodolphe Baudin, Associate Professor of Russian and Head of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Strasbourg
- Edited by Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav Rjeoutski, Gesine Argent
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- Book:
- French and Russian in Imperial Russia
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 25 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 29 June 2015, pp 120-131
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
The publication of the Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow (Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu) in May 1790 infuriated Catherine II and prompted Radishchev's immediate arrest and detention. Behind an apparently benign travelogue after the manner of Sterne's Sentimental Journey, the aging empress had seen a pamphlet against her politics. Bad timing was the main cause of her anger, as the political evolution of contemporary France had made her intolerant of the expression of social and political criticism she had once admired in the works of her friends the French philosophes.
Radishchev was first sentenced to death, then the verdict was commuted to ten years of detention in the fort of Ilimsk, in Eastern Siberia. The writer left the Russian capital in chains on 8 September 1790, and after a sixteen-month journey to the point of his detention, spent five years in Ilimsk, before Catherine's death and the accession of Paul I, who set him free from his Siberian exile in 1797. Radishchev survived the harsh material and climatic conditions of his detention largely thanks to the support of his former superior and patron, Aleksandr Romanovich Vorontsov (1741–1805), who had served as president of the College of Commerce from 1773 to 1792. Vorontsov not only provided Radishchev with books and money, but also offered him the chance to stay in touch with the outside world, through the correspondence which he exchanged with him during his detention.
The fate of Vorontsov's letters to Radishchev is unknown. However, we do know Radishchev's letters to his patron. They form the larger part of the writer's surviving correspondence, published in the third volume of the Soviet Academy edition of Radishchev's works. Both French and Russian were used in these letters. The aim of the present chapter is therefore to examine the factors determining the choice of language in the letters. Before examining Radishchev's letters, though, I shall briefly consider when and how each language was used in Russian aristocratic correspondence more generally in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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