self-reproach and guilt, inspired by the gaudy and wasteful palace he's built, the narrator is woken from his dream in agitation. Reception Considered by many to be the seminal radical text of the 18th century, Journey continued to influence Russian political thought even after its condemnation. As the progenitor of public liberal discourse in Russia, Radishchev is considered an ancestor of all major subversive literature written in the 19th and 20th centuries. Journey is best known as a critical satire of feudalism. An early, incomplete version was initially approved by imperial censors, and Czar Catherine the Great was expected to tolerate its publication. Instead, she condemned the book. Radishchev represented Russia's educated aristocrats, and Catherine feared that his calls for reform would spread to the rest of his class. Radishchev was arrested a month after Journey's publication, charged with inciting "disobedience and social discord," and sentenced to death. The original copies of Journey were confiscated, and the book was suppressed until 1905. Literary criticism was censored until 1857. Catherine the Great commuted Radishchev's sentence to exile. Alexander I fully pardoned him and appointed him to the Legislative Committee, which codified Russian law. Journey strongly influenced the Decembrist movement. Early socialists Nikolai Ogarev and Alexander Herzen published a version of Journey from exile in 1858, and most Soviet critics claimed Radishchev as a precursor to Bolshevism. Other Cold War-era criticism, from the USSR and the West, identified Radishchev as a liberal intellectual. D. M. Lang interpreted Journey as a tract in support of individual rights, especially freedom of expression, and government by the people. He claimed it an ancestor of anti-Soviet liberalism. Scholar Allen McConnell read it mainly as an attack on Czarist rule and the institution of serfdom. Philosophy Radishchev studied at Leipzig University during Catherine the Great's liberal reforms, which exposed him to the French Enlightenment ideas that he argued for in Journey. Like contemporary French philosophers, Radishchev supported individual rights based on natural law and equality in the state of nature. He shared his belief in women's advancement and human progress with Condorcet. Journey also makes references to Adam Ferguson, Thomas Jefferson, Acts of Parliament, and American state constitutions, as well as the Bible and medieval Christian orthodoxy. A section cut from the published version, "Creation of the World," explicitly invoked the social contract and celebrated Oliver Cromwell and George Washington as anti-monarchists. Journey argues for reform, not