When this was originally published in 1959 it was the first full-length biography of Alexander Radishchev published outside Russia and was based on hitherto unpublished material, memoir literature and Radishchevâs own writings. Radishchev occupies a notable position in the history of European social thought, as the first writer to apply the criteria of the Western Age of Reason to conditions in Tsarist Russia. Sentenced to death on the orders of Catherine the Great and subsequently exiled in Siberia, Radishchev stands out as the first great figure of the Russian radical intelligentsia and the first literary victim of Tsarist official intolerance.
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