La temporalité de l'âme sensible dans le Voyage de Saint-Pétersbourg à Moscou

摘要

The Time as a Creation of the Sensibility in A. N. Radiščev’s Journey This paper tries to show that Radiščev in his Journey does not organize the time of his narration in an objective and rational manner. In this highly sentimental book the time appears to be a creation of the traveller's feeling. The author has an obvious predilection for the temporal categories which lie outside the present, so that his hero can escape to the hard reality he watches. In spite of an apparent similarity, Radiščev's look at the future differs from an utopian vision. For him the future is mainly a shelter from surrounding world ills, which offers the hero an opportunity to lyrical effusions. So is the poetic function of the past, used by the traveller as a theme of elegiac meditation. The cyclic conception of the universe, evocated in several chapters of the Journey, unifies both of the forms of the unreal time (past and future) in an endless oscillation of the cosmic pendulum.