'Friends of My Soul': Radishchev on Friendship and Immortality

• In Event: The Power of Memory in Late Eighteenth-Century Russian Literary Culture

Abstract

This paper will examine Radishchev’s concept of friendship by looking at some of the author’s shorter works (such as the “Diary of One Week,” the Life of Ushakov, and the Life of Saint Philaret), finding the friend to play a role in his notions of immortality. How is friendship characterized and why does it function in this philosophical role, instead of other categories of relationship? This paper will finally consider how the treatments of both friendship and immortality, as they are documented in writing, draw on tradition but bend expectations of temporality.

Author

• Myles Garbarini, Columbia U