Novel: To the Hermitage

Overview
Malcolm Bradbury’s To the Hermitage is a double-voiced novel that braids an 18th-century journey with a late-20th-century excursion, using the figure of Denis Diderot and the magnet of St Petersburg’s Hermitage to explore how ideas travel, mutate, and collide with power. One strand follows Diderot’s trek north to meet Catherine the Great; the other strands together a present-day academic junket heading to a Diderot conference in the reborn, precariously capitalist city once called Leningrad. The result is a witty, erudite travel tale about the Enlightenment’s hopes and the postmodern world’s ironies.

The 18th-Century Voyage
In the historical thread, told in a supple pastiche of Enlightenment prose, Diderot leaves France after Catherine the Great buys his library and appoints him its paid custodian. Accompanied by a fictional English amanuensis who doubles as witness and commentator, he moves through the Low Countries and the Baltic toward Petersburg, meditating on art, science, liberty, and the possibilities of reason-made-real. The episodes culminate in audiences with Catherine, whose curiosity and appetite for modern learning are genuine yet bounded by autocratic realities. Diderot talks, argues, and advises on reforms, education, and the arts; he tours collections that will grow into the Hermitage; he sees up close the distance between enlightened theory and imperial governance. The northern journey becomes both a physical ascent into colder latitudes and an intellectual test of whether philosophy can find a home inside power’s glittering chambers.

The Contemporary Journey
The modern strand, narrated by a dryly self-aware British academic-writer, retraces the route by ship and rail as a mixed party of scholars, curators, media people, and cultural fixers head for a conference titled, with hopeful grandness, “To the Hermitage.” They stop in Nordic capitals and proceed to St Petersburg, threading through visas, sponsorships, and institutional rivalries. Amid flirtations, panel papers, and a hovering TV crew anxious for a story, rumors surface of a lost Diderot text and a trove of documents that might recast his Russian sojourn. The city itself, imperial facades, Soviet husks, new-money neon, stages the comedy and unease: a place where culture is treasure, commodity, and backdrop. By the time the party reaches the Hermitage’s endless galleries, the conference has begun to look like both homage and farce, caught between lofty invocations of the Encyclopédie and the contemporary scramble for funding, prestige, and a good angle.

Structure, Voice, and Play
Bradbury counterpoints voices and epochs, alternating chapters so that episodes echo across centuries. The 18th-century sections shimmer with period cadence and philosophical sparkle; the present-day ones tilt toward campus-novel satire, full of academic jargon, media opportunism, and tender self-mockery. Faux-archival fragments, letters, and journal entries fold into the narrative, letting the reader feel the seduction and slipperiness of “found” history. As the two journeys converge on the Hermitage, museum and metaphor fuse: a repository that promises order, memory, and continuity while exposing the curatorial choices and political compromises that make such order possible.

Scope and Resonance
To the Hermitage surveys the Enlightenment’s dream, knowledge collected, reason enthroned, art made public, against late-20th-century uncertainties about truth, authority, and value. Diderot’s hopes for rational reform meet Catherine’s magnificence and caution; the modern delegates’ celebrations of cosmopolitan exchange meet the realities of sponsorship, spectacle, and post-Soviet flux. Yet the novel keeps faith with conversation itself: the talk in salons and conference rooms, on quays and corridors, that sustains inquiry across time. The journeys end not in triumph or despair but in a layered recognition that museums, cities, and books are living negotiations, assemblies of meanings others will later rearrange.