Month: June 2016

Saint Ravachol

The Anti-Anarchist Bomb-proof Clockwork Substitute Ruler (1898)

June 30, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
Punch (October 29, 1898): 203. IN the gallery of the Fine-Art Society may be seen a number of drawings made in Spain by Mr. E. George, the able architectural etcher and draughtsman. As might be anticipated, they are almost entirely architectural. They are brilliant and broad, limpid in their tones and pure in their tints, but somewhat hard and over-defined even for sunlit Spain. The most artistic of them seem to be No. 10, ‘The City Gate, Salamanca’; ‘A Convent, Salamanca’ (17); ‘San Pedro, and Old Houses, Vitoria’ (21); and ‘The Golden Tower, Seville ’ (44). In the same place […]
Contr'un

One for the road?

June 29, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’m contemplating a research “tour” in the fall, gathering up some missing pieces for various current projects and surveying the possibilities for some longer-term work. By that time, I will have at least Anarchy and the Sex Question to promote—and my publisher would certainly like me to take the opportunity. But as I have been thinking about what I really have to offer in the way of presentations that might themselves be taken out on tour, it strikes me that telling folks about what Emma Goldman is going to tell them in a book we hope they’ll buy might not […]
Bakunin Library

The Three Lives of “God and the State”

June 29, 2016 Shawn P. Wilbur
I have been thinking about “God and the State” in terms of a choice between two texts: the fragment, “God and the State,” and the incomplete work from which it was drawn, “The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution.” This is the choice proposed by James Guillaume, when he suggested that the publication of the latter should be the occasion for no longer publishing in the former. But, if Guillaume’s suspicions were correct and Reclus and Cafiero knew what they were publishing, and engaged in a bit of “literary artifice” when they presented it as a fragment, what we have […]
fiction

Leon de Tinseau, “A Beautiful Nihilist” (fiction, 1892)

June 27, 2016 A Beautiful Nihilist
A BEAUTIFUL NIHILIST. From the French of Leon de Tinseau; V.E.T., Chateau Bange, Bordeaux. In 187-, somewhat before the tragic death of the least Czar, one of the most notable men of the Russian Empire was Prince Michael ——-, whose family name, an illustrious one, reasons of the highest importance forbid our giving. During a visit to France after the war, while at one of the receptions of the Princesse Lise, he met that superb daughter of General de Contremont, whom the Parisian world, springing to life again from its ashes, knew already as “la belle Madeleine,” a girl as […]
biographies

Gesya Gelfman (1852-1882)

June 27, 2016 A Beautiful Nihilist
[aka Jessy Helfman, Hessy Helfman, Hesse Helfman, Hesia Helfman] Gesya Gelfman at Wikipedia “A Horrible Story” (1881) JESSY HELFMAN, THE HUMBLE MARTYR [From Stepniak’s Underground Russia] There are unknown heroines, obscure toilers, who offer up everything upon the altar of their cause, without asking anything for themselves. They assume the most ungrateful parts; sacrifice themselves for the merest trifles; for lending their names to the correspondence of others; for sheltering a man, often unknown to them; for delivering a parcel without knowing what it contains. Poets do not dedicate verses to them; history will not inscribe their names upon its […]
Saint Ravachol

Cruel Punishments (Goukoffski, 1979)

June 26, 2016 A Beautiful Nihilist
The St. Petersburg correspondent of the Daily Telegraph says that official details now published confirm the astonishment which has been felt at the terrible severity of the sentences on the Odessa political convicts. The official publication states that all the 28 prisoners were found guilty of having belonged to an illegal society, which called itself the Social Revolutionary party. No further accusation was brought against Lissogoub, a gentleman aged 29, who had already been hanged; against Bolomeze, aged l8, condemned to 20 years’ hard labour; against the lady Levandovski, aged 25, and condemned to 15 years hard labour; or against […]
Saint Ravachol

Russian Revolutionary Heroines (Sophia Bardina, 1881)

June 26, 2016 A Beautiful Nihilist
RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY HEROINES THE weight of a woman’s brain in Slavonic races is greater than that of a man’s. Among the Germanic peoples the brain weight of the sexes is equal, and in the Latin nations the brain of the man is heavier than that of the woman. Quantity does not necessarily imply quality, but in this case worth follows weight. “For intelligence and resolution,” says M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, the most recent and; the most fascinating of writers on Russia and the Russians, “as well as for education, and the rank she holds in the family, the Russian woman is […]
Saint Ravachol

Mentioned in passing

June 26, 2016 A Beautiful Nihilist
“Achristoff, the 17-year-old priest’s daughter, who made love to the detective Lavroffski, in order to betray him into the hands of the nihilists…” “Victoria Goukoffski, daughter of a medical dispenser of Odessa, who, on hearing that the Nihilist Kovalsky had been sentenced to death, created a riot…” “the daughter of Major General Herzfeld, who was arrested at Kief…” “Jude Krakoffski, the daughter of a university official at Kieff, whose banishment to Siberia for having destroyed certain compromising papers in 1877, was confirmed only the other day…” (1881) “the lady Levandovski, aged 25, and condemned to 15 years hard labour…” “Anna […]
Saint Ravachol

May Beals-Hoffpauir, “Sketches of Russian Heroines. I. Vera Figner”

June 26, 2016 A Beautiful Nihilist
Sketches of Russian Heroines. I. Vera Figner BY May Beals-Hoffpauir Twenty-two years, nearly one-third of the expected three score and ten, spent in a black prison cell with no glimpse of passing cloud or starry skies; no message for thirteen of these years from friend or relative; no hope, in all that dreary time, of any change but death—such is the record of nearly one-half of Vera Figner’s life. It is not strange that her recent appearance in London aroused the wild enthusiasm to which she was already accustomed on the continent. Few can survive twenty years in a Russian […]
poetry

Joaquin Miller, “Sophia Perovskaya” (1881)

June 26, 2016 A Beautiful Nihilist
Sophie Perovskaya, LIBERTY’S MARTYRED HEROINE. Hanged April 15, 1881, For Helping to Rid the World of a Tyrant. Down from her high estate she stept,             A maiden, gently born And by the icy Volga kept             Sad watch, and waited morn; And peasants say that where she slept             The new moon dipped her horn.                         Yet on and on, through shoreless snows                                     Stretched tow’rd the great north pole,                         The foulest wrong the good God known                                     Rolls as dark rivers roll.                         While never once for all these woes                                     Upspeaks one human soul. She toiled, […]