The Public Self and the Intimate Body in Radishchev’s Letters from Exile

Scholarship on Radishchev has so far neglected his fascinating letters from exile (1791–1801), using it primarily as source material on the writer's biography or ideas, instead of analyzing it as a part of Radishchev's text. The present paper examines how the writer uses his letters to build his new public image, after it has been destroyed by his arrest and trial. But Radishchev also uses them to stage his intimate body, in order to arouse his addressees' interest and pity. Finally, he at times turns this real body into a rhetorical one, which fulfills different functions, from staging a fictitious intimacy in place of Radishchev's real one when it is not satisfactory, to serving as a symbolic gift for his protector Count Alexander Vorontsov. The study of this specific issue sheds a new light on the writer

Aesthetics · Art · Biography · Literature · Order (exchange · Pity · Psychoanalysis · Rhetorical question · Sociology · The Symbolic · Central European and Russian historical studies · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Historical Studies of British Isles · Philosophy · Psychology