Defenseless weakness
Defenseless weakness

Video: Defenseless weakness

Video: Defenseless weakness
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Anonim

“How can you in an article on Russian literature

forget Radishchev? Whom will we remember”?

(Pushkin "Letter to Bestuzhev". 1823)

On August 31, a man was born who for the first time in Russia admitted that serfdom is slavery. In his book Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, he tries to influence the “heart of a nobleman,” and writes:

He calls the "brutal" custom of enslaving one's own kind, says that this custom was born in the sultry countries of Asia and is not worthy of us, the Slavs, the sons of glory; it was perceived by us when we were struck by the "darkness of ignorance", but to the shame of the past centuries, to the shame of the present reasonable time, it has resisted to this day.

Serfdom is harmful not only for the peasant, but also for the landlords:

In "Journey" Radishchev boldly and truthfully reveals all the horrors of serfdom, the inhumanity and autocracy of the landowners, the humiliation, poverty and ignorance of the peasants, deprived of any prospects for development.

Radishchev points out that the peasants, as he puts it, are "dead in the law," they are forbidden to complain about the landlords. Radishchev's contemporaries were amazed:

Ecumenical councils "robbed the truth of a strong support-difference of opinion, debate and unselected utterance of their thoughts."

Both clergymen and ancient kings and tribal leaders appear to Radishchev as deliberate deceivers of people (sometimes deceiving with a good purpose, sometimes with a bad one). In antiquity, in the times of the coarseness of peoples, the most important, almost exclusive value was (he says) external brilliance.

Radishchev achieves the highest civic pathos and revolutionary free-thinking in the ode "Liberty", which is included in "Journey".

… The sensitivity of the nature of children, Dragged into the yoke of enslavement, Clothed them in the armor of delusion, He ordered to be afraid of the truth.

“The law of God,” - the king is broadcasting;

“Holy deception, - the wise man calls out, To crush the people that you have found …

It was not for nothing that Catherine II appreciated the ode as a revolutionary alarm, as “quite clearly rebellious, where the tsars are threatened with a chopping block. Cromwell's example is commended."

In the ode, Radishchev sings freedom, stigmatizes tyranny, proving that the tsar should be only the first citizen in the state, and the laws are above the tsar.

Catherine found in the book "pages of criminal intent, completely rebellious" and ordered to expel the writer. The case was entrusted to the formidable Sheshkovsky, who was in charge of the Secret Chancellery, the chief investigator of Pugachev's "case".

In addition to Sheshkovsky, the investigation was carried out by the St. Petersburg Criminal Chamber. As a result, the chamber condemned Radishchev to death, the Senate recognized the verdict as correct and presented the verdict to Catherine II. 4 Sep In 1790, a decree appeared, by which Radishchev referred to a ten-year hopeless stay in Iimen.

In 1796 he was returned to European Russia, in 1801 he was appointed to the commission for drafting laws. Firmly professing humane ideas, he proposed the abolition of serfdom, freedom of trade, equalization of all estates before the law, and other reforms.

Such is Radishchev - a gifted and sincere man, he was one of the mournful victims of the great transitional era, the era of the beginning of the fusion of our old folk foundations of life with new ideas that came to us from the West. He was not even aware of their struggle in himself, and lived in their, not reconciled contradiction, as in a fog, getting confused and interfering at every step. This is the characteristic of his contemporaries, rooted in history.

But Radishchev is a Russian man, with the people's feelings and views instinctively living in him, the Epochs of the Novgorod and Pskov Republics, with their veche, communal order. This is characterized by criticism of Western influence, in the following quotations from The Journey, which is currently manifesting itself in our modern life. This is the arbitrariness and bribery of the bureaucracy, new orders borrowed from the West.

*****

“Society is oppressed as a unit.

One strives to hold down the mind, Other will strives to erase;

"For the benefit of the common" - rekut ".

“But you, forgetting to me the vow given, Forgetting that I chose you

I will marry myself in joy, I thought that you were the Lord, not me;

With my sword he broke the statutes, I cast down all the right voiceless, I told you to be ashamed of the truth, Cleared the way for abominations, He began to cry not to me, but to God, And he wanted to disdain me”.

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