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, 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 something brisk, vivacious, and at the same time, ingenuous in her rounded face. She was girlhood personified. Notwithstanding her twenty-six years, she seemed scarcely eighteen. A […]
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 put an end to her days. She was universally loved and esteemed, and her violent death therefore produced a most mournful impression throughout the town, and the Ispravnik, or chief of the police, was secretly accused of having driven the poor young girl, by his unjust persecutions, to take away her life. Olga was sent to Talutorovsk some months after the trial known as that […]
Blazing Star Library
The Blazing Star Library (plan)
The project of a Blazing Star Library, reprinting the works of William Batchelder Greene is not a new one, but, like the Blazing Star, the possibility of completing the project has seemed to retreat before my efforts for a couple of decades now. With the archiving of what seem to be the last of the “Omega” articles, however, perhaps I’ve done more than a bit of catching up. An adequate edition of Greene’s works would have to document not only the breadth of his interests, but also the simultaneous development of several lines of thought in his work. And that’s […]