As a companion to the Frondeuse series, I’ve assembled a collection featuring Stepniak’s “A Female Nihilist,” an account of the life of Olga Liubatovitch, together with a selection of poems and popular journalism relating to other women involved in the struggles against the Czars and their government. The popular accounts naturally made the most of the apparent contrasts between the beauty and education of those women, and the violence of their acts.
poetry
Sir Henry Parkes, “The Beauteous Terrorist” (Sophie Perovskaya, 1885)
“She was beautiful. It was not the beauty which dazzles at first sight, but that which fascinates the more, the more it is regarded. “A blonde, with a pair of blue eyes, serious and penetrating, […]
The Sex Question
Stories by Voltairine de Cleyre and Lizzie Holmes
The anarchist tradition has always had a literary side. Even Proudhon was fond of inserting the occasional illustrative tale in his works. And the French tales of proletarian life which have been featured here had […]
Saint Ravachol
Stepniak, “A Female Nihilist” (1886)
A FEMALE NIHILIST I. On the 27th of July, in the year 1878, the little town of Talutorovsk, in Western Siberia, was profoundly excited by a painful event. A political prisoner, named Olga Liubatovitch, miserably […]