The Living and the Dead: Visionary Political Ideas of Alexander Radishchev

The article is dedicated to the usage of the concept of prisutstvie (presence) in the texts by Alexander Radishchev. As the analysis shows, this concept is the meeting ground of three semantic fields: first of all, it signifies God’s presence in the Holy Gifts, secondly, it means ‘being together at one place’, as well as ‘court hearing’, and, finally, it is associated with the presence of an object in the mind (for example, in the work of Descartes, Hume, Locke). Thanks to Radishchev’s philosophical interests, his dependence on the language of European philosophers, and the circumstances of his biography, Radishchev’s works provide abundant material for analyzing the topoi of presence and absence in their different meanings. In spite of the fact that this concept is not essentially reflected by Radishchev, its usage has a systematic character: ‘presence’ emerges in special contexts. The article discusses three aspects of its usage. The first one is philosophical, linked with the idea of ‘personal identity’. The second aspect is intersubjective, connected with the presence-absence of a friend. The last one is political, where the utopian vision of the future is formulated. The conclusion of the article is that the concept of presence denotes a special regime of relations with another person, which is then correlated with the particular perception of the political society.