“Another beautiful nihilist…” (1887)

There are four instruments which, wielded by dominant minds, bend and mold the sentiments of the masses to meet the form and spirit of the times: The force of early influence, the school, the platform, and the press. These are the four grand educators, and education is the strong right arm of progress, that arm which bares its mighty muscles and strikes upon the hewn rock of time the chisel-blows which carve the tablets of an advancing era, there to remain until the surges of the incoming ages shall hav swept them away, leaving a smooth face whereon shall be […]

[Vera Figner, Russian Revolutionary; a woman of great charm and radiant beauty. She was condemned to imprisonment for life, and for twenty years was immured in the living rave of the Schlusselburg Fortress. When these lines were composed the writer thought that Vera Figner was still in prison. By a strange chance, on three days after the lines were written, he read that Vera Figner had been released.] I. Vera Figner, when the breezes blow, Do you awaken to the hostile morn? Or do you live so numbed you do not know, Like a toad in a granite tempest-worn? Vera […]

THE BEAUTIFUL NIHILIST “She was beautiful.” Those are the three words with which a Russian writer, who was intimately acquainted with her, commences his personal description of Sophie Perovsky. “Hers was not,” he continues, “the beauty which dazzles at first sight, but that which fascinates the more it is regarded. A blonde, with a pair of blue eyes, serious and penetrating, under a broad and spacious forehead. A delicate little nose, a charming mouth,. which showed, when she smiled, two rows of very fine white teeth. It was, however, her countenance as a whole which was the attraction. There was […]