Text addressed to Aleksandra, Liubov, Tatiana and Varvara Aleksandrovna Bakunina (November, 1835)

THE BEARS OF BERNE AND THE BEAR OF SAINT-PETERSBURG ___________ Patriotic lament for a humiliated and hopeless Switzerland March, 1870 The Russian government has judged our Federal Council well, when it dared to demand the extradition of the Russian patriot Nechayev. Everyone knows that the order has been given to all the cantonal police to seek and arrest that revolutionary, as intrepid as tireless, who, after having escaped twice from the claws of the czar, that is from death preceded by the most dreadful tortures, would probably have believed, that once having taken refuge in the Swiss republic, he would […]

[There are two manuscripts by Bakunin with titles very close to “Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis,” written one after the other and overlapping in some places, but substantially different. The 12,000-word “Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis” in the Dolgoff anthology is drawn from one of the later parts of a 54,000-word manuscript identified in the Collected Works collection with the title “Lettre à un Français.” A second manuscript, 10,000 words long, broken into separate letters, and identified as “Lettres à un Français sur la crise actuelle,” followed. Here is the first letter from the […]

There are some interesting items tucked away in the works of Bakunin, but I’m not sure I have come across one as peculiar as this “Ebauche d’un conte érotique” (fragment of an erotic tale), from a work apparently written in October and November, 1848. Further commentary would probably add nothing at this stage… Chapter III We soon made ourselves acquainted. A charming intimacy was established between us…. They spoke to me of their pastimes, of their pleasures, of their love for their father… of his goodness, of the tender solicitude that he had for them. I admired the guilelessness, the […]