The Journey is unquestionably a bold work, and above all it is the political credo of a thoroughly cultured man, of one who in thought and feeling had attained to an exceptional grasp of the significance of the eighteenth century. In a brilliant ode, The Giant, Radiščev apostrophises the eighteenth century, blood-stained, mad, and yet wise. With reasoning based upon natural law he proves the bloody and mad doctrine of wisdom, the right of revolution. To Catherine in her passion it seemed that Radiščev was a more dangerous revolutionary than Pugačev, for the former aimed not merely at the abolition of serfdom (writing "the peasant is, dead in law"), but demanded a representative constitution and far-reaching liberties (freedom of the press, etc).
In Siberia, Radiščev, an enlightened opponent of mysticism, wrote an essay upon immortality, maintaining, in opposition to Helvetius, Holbach, and Lamettrie, the possibility and probability of immortality.
Under Alexander I, Radiščev was again given an appointment; but in 1802, when no more than fifty-three years old, suffering from nervous breakdown, he committed suicide by taking poison.
Next to Radiščev, Pnin, poet and prose writer, was in that day the most zealous and notable opponent of serfdom. While Radiščev, following Rousseau, regards slavery as essentially a form of theft, Pnin, taught by the French constitution, dwells rather upon the favourable aspects of private property, desiring that the Russian peasant shall become a proprietor. Excellent is Pnin's demonstration that the liberation of the peasantry is a logical consequence of the generally acclaimed enlightenment.
The poet Sumarokov was the leader of the social reactionaries. In the year 1766, the empress, anonymously and through the instrumentality of the Free Economic Society, offered a prize for an essay upon the question whether it was more advantageous to society that the peasant should own land or should own nothing but personal property, and how far in either case it was desirable that his rights should extend. Sumarokov responded in a vigorous writing that there could be absolutely no doubt as to the nobleman's exclusive ownership of the soil. "The canary bird would be better pleased to have no cage, and the dog would prefer to be without a chain. But the bird would fly away, and the dog would bite. One is therefore necessary for the peasant, the other for the noble."
