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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2020
How have modern cultures of dissent learnt to narrate the experience of political imprisonment? From 1851 to 1853, M. A. Bakunin was incarcerated in St Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress. Here, the “father of Russian anarchism” wrote what has become known as his Confession: an account of his personal and political development, penned in the most notorious prison of the Russian autocracy at the behest of the tsar. Previous scholarship has focused entirely on the content of this peculiar text. The present article is the first to mobilize extensive archival research—on its carceral conditions of production and intellectual conditions of possibility—in order to understand the form of Bakunin's Confession. Doing so reveals the text as one of the first Russian Bildungsromane: the birth of a genre whereby the imprisoned self became legible through a new epistemology of self and history between Goethe and Hegel. Excavating the nature and afterlives of this novel political aesthetics provides original insights into the “politicization” of state incarceration in European history, the origins of modern Russian autobiographics, and the construction of the radical self.
1 GARF f. 109, op. 3a, d. 3209 (“‘Zapiska dlia svedeniia’ o privoze Bakunina iz-za granitsy i zakliuchenii ego v Alekseevskom raveline …”), ll. 2–2ob. The mentioned letter to Nabokov, commanding him to take “all necessary precautions” with this dangerous prisoner, can be found at RGIA f. 1280, op. 5, d. 326 (“Delo kantseliarii komendanta po Alekseevskomu Ravelinu. Po Vysochaishemu poveleniiu o zakliuchenii prestupnika Bakunina v Alekseevskii Ravelin”), l. 2. Note that this I. A. Nabokov—Commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress from 1849 to 1852, during the imprisonment of F. M. Dostoevsky, M. A. Bakunin, and others—was the great-uncle of writer Vladimir Nabokov.
2 Pivotal works here include Zinoman, Peter, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (Berkeley, 2001)Google Scholar; and—in the field of Eastern and Central European history—Müller, Anna, If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women's Prison in Communist Poland (New York, 2018)Google Scholar; Kenney, Padraic, Dance in Chains: Political Imprisonment in the Modern World (New York, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pallot, Judith and Piacentini, Laura, Gender, Geography, and Punishment: The Experience of Women in Carceral Russia (Oxford, 2012)Google Scholar.
3 That is, the optics classically pioneered in Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.
4 Kenney, Dance in Chains, 3, 11, original emphasis.
5 Neier, Aryeh, “Confining Dissent: The Political Prison,” in Morris, Norval and Rothman, David J., eds., The Oxford History of the Prison (Oxford, 1995), 390–425, at 394–6Google Scholar.
6 Lotman, Ju. M., “The Decembrist in Everyday Life,” trans. Pike, C. R., in Shukman, Ann, ed., The Semiotics of Russian Culture (Ann Arbor, 1984), 71–123, at 96Google Scholar.
7 Gor′kii, Maksim, “V. I. Lenin,” in Gor′kii, Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow, 1952), 17: 5–46, at 24Google Scholar.
8 For all the global significance of his words and deeds, the figure of Bakunin has been strangely peripheralized by the historical discipline. In the Soviet Union, Bakunin studies became ideologically impossible from the 1930s onward—the most exhaustive historical work on Bakunin remains his Collected Works and Letters, edited by old Bolshevik Iu. M. Steklov and published by the All-Union Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles from 1934 to 1935. Indicatively, only four of the thirty planned volumes were released before the project was halted and the society purged in 1935. See Bakunin, M. A., Sobranie sochinenii i pisem, ed. Steklov, Iu. M., 4 vols. (Moscow, 1934–5)Google Scholar. The majority of Anglo-American scholarship tends towards political biography. One exception is the work of John Randolph, whose groundbreaking study of Bakunin's early years is also a highly original spatio-intellectual history of Russian Idealism. See Randolph, John, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 See Randolph, The House in the Garden; Kelly, Aileen, Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism (New York, 1982), 1–75Google Scholar; and Carr, E. H., Michael Bakunin (New York, 1937), 3–93Google Scholar.
10 This turn of phrase comes from Victor Serge, “La confession de Bakounine,” quoted in Bakunin, Sobraniie sochinenii, 4: 420–21.
11 For the arrangement of this transfer, see GARF f. 109, op. 18 (1843)(1st Expedition), d. 116, ch. 2 (“Ob otstavnom Praporshchik Mikhaile Bakunine. Chast′ 2-ia. O peredache ego Avstriiskim Pravitel′stvom v nashi predely i o zakliuchenii v krepost′”), ll. 3, 3ob, 4.
12 On shackling Bakunin see ibid., ll. 3, 3ob, 4. His military escort would be decorated for their service; see ibid., ll. 27, 28, 29, 29ob, 30, 31, 31ob, etc.
13 Ibid., l. 22.
14 RGIA f. 1280, op. 5, d. 326, ll. 3, 4, 4ob; GARF f. 109, op. 18 (1843)(1st Expedition), d. 116, ch. 2, ll. 21, 22.
15 RGIA f. 1280, op. 5, d. 327 (“O zakliuchenii v onyi: Bakunina, Sinitsina, i Grebnishchogo i o zakliuchennom Leonov”), ll. 3, 3ob, 4a.
16 Ibid., ll. 4b, 4b ob, 4v, 4v ob.
17 Record as: “German-language books—4 … Unbound French-language books—3; Unbound English-language books—2; French-language books in their binding—3; English-language books in their binding—2; German-language books in their binding—2; A French-language Bible—1.” See Ibid., ll. 4a.
18 M. A. Bakunin to Aleksandr Herzen, 8 Dec. 1860, in Bakunin, Sobranie sochinenii, 4: 359–69. Orlov's request is confirmed in an internal report from 1856, held in the archives of the Third Section. See GARF f. 109, op. 18 (1843)(1st Expedition), d. 116, ch. 2, ll. 282–286ob.
19 While Bakunin's letter to the tsar is not itself titled a “confession,” this is the term with which both autocratic officials and Bakunin himself would later refer to it.
20 Both the original text and the scribal copy are preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation: the former at GARF f. 825, op. 1, d. 297 (“‘Ispoved′’ Bakunina M.A. Nikolaiu I. Podlinnik, kopiia s pometkami Nikolaia I, mashinopisnye kopi, granki”), ll. 2–49ob, the latter at ibid., ll. 51–207ob.
21 GARF f. 825, op. 1, d. 297, l. 50. A copy was also given to the chairman of the State Council and the viceroy of Poland; see Bakunin, Sobranie sochinenii, 4: 418; and GARF f. 109, op. 18 (1843)(1st Expedition), d. 116, ch. 2, ll. 75–75ob.
22 Bakunin, M. A., The Confession of Mikhail Bakunin, trans. Howes, Robert C. (Ithaca, 1977), 31–2Google Scholar. All citations from this translation have been checked and altered when necessary with the original text and the authoritative Russian edition: M.A. Bakunin, “Ispoved′ ot iiulia-avgusta 1851,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 4: 99–207.
23 For discussions of the textual life of the pre-reform tsarist legal system see Kollman, Nancy, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wortman, Richard S., The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the late eighteenth-century carceral autobiography of Nikolai Smirnov recently translated in Mackay, John, ed., Four Russian Serf Narratives (Madison, 2009)Google Scholar.
24 Bakunin, The Confession, 149–50; Bakunin, “Ispoved′,” 4: 206.
25 Bakunin, The Confession, 33; Bakunin, “Ispoved′,” 4: 101, original emphasis.
26 See RGIA f. 1280, op. 5, d. 326, ll. 35, 35ob, 36, 37, 38, 40; GARF f. 109, op. 18 (1843)(1st Expedition), d. 116, ch. 2, ll. 168, 169, 171–172ob, 173–4.
27 GARF f. 109, op. 18 (1843)(1st Expedition), d. 116, ch. 3 (“Ob otstavnom Praporshchik Mikhaile Bakunine. Chast 3-ia. Ob osvobozhdenii ego iz kreposti i ob otpravlenii v Sibir′ na poselenie”), ll. 8, 8ob, 37, 37ob, 45.
28 Il′inskii, A., “Ispoved′ M. A. Bakunina,” Vestnik Literatura 10 (1919)Google Scholar. Note that Il′inskii's initial piece only contained selections from the text. Complete versions were published in 1921 and 1923; see Polonskii, V., ed., Ispoved′ i pis′mo Aleksandru II (Moscow, 1921)Google Scholar; and Polonskii, ed., Materialy dlia biografii M. Bakunina, 3 vols. (Moscow and Petrograd/Leningrad, 1923–33), 1: 100–248. The existence of Bakunin's Confession was first brought to the awareness of non-russophone readers by Victor Serge in 1921; see Serge, Victor, “Bakunins ‘Bekenntnis’,” Das Forum 9 (June 1921), 373–80Google Scholar; and Serge, “La Confession de Bakounine,” Bulletin communiste, 22 December 1921, 941–3.
29 Polonskii, V., “Michael Bakunin und seine ‘Beichte’,” in Kersten, Kurt, ed., Michael Bakunins Beichte aus der Peter-Pauls Festung an Zar Nikolaus I.: Gefunden im Geheimschrank des Chefs der III. Abteilung der Kanzlei der früheren Zaren zu Leningrad (Berlin, 1926), xix–xxviiiGoogle Scholar.
30 See, for example, Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin, 140–46.
31 For summaries of the narrative content and events described in Bakunin's Confession see Polonskii, “Michael Bakunin und seine ‘Beichte’”; Steklov, Iu. M., Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, ego zhizni i deiatel′nost′, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1926–7)Google Scholar; and Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin.
32 Bakunin, The Confession, 35; Bakunin, “Ispoved′,” 4: 103.
33 Bakunin, The Confession, 86; Bakunin, “Ispoved′,” 4: 149. Tsar Nicholas I marked the margins of this section in pencil.
34 M. A. Bakunin to Aleksandr Herzen, 8 Dec. 1860, in Bakunin, Sobranie sochinenii, 4: 366.
35 See Zhirmunskii, V. M., Gete v Russkoi literature (Leningrad, 1982), 30, 23–41, 410–32Google Scholar; and Paperno, Irina, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia (Ithaca, 1997), esp. 1–19Google Scholar.
36 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Sobranie sochinenii Gete v perevode russkikh pisatelei, ed. Gerbert, I. V., 10 vols. (St Petersburg, 1878–80)Google Scholar; as described in Zhirmunskii, Gete, 433.
37 See Zhirmunskii, Gete, 378–9.
38 In a letter to his sister from March 1835, Bakunin first relates that he has moved in with Nikolai Stankevich, and then, “We are reading German writers together: Goethe, Jean Paul Richter, Hoffman, etc.” Quoted in Zhirmunskii, Gete, 181–2.
39 V. G. Belinskii to M. A. Bakunin, 10 Sept. 1838, in Belinskii, V. G., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols. (Moscow, 1956), 11: 291Google Scholar. This circle even discussed producing a complete translation of the novel for the journal Otechestvennie zapiski. See V. G. Belinskii to V. P. Botkin, 16 April 1840, in ibid., 507.
40 See Steiner, Lina, For Humanity's Sake: The Bildungsroman in Russian Culture (Toronto, 2011), 4–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Ibid., 4 n. 7. The concept of Bildung/obrazovanie was held apart from vospitanie (a concept also commonly translated as “development”) in nineteenth-century Russia, with the latter term signifying a more formal terrain of education that lacked the former's sense of organic totality. The classic nineteenth-century essay on this difference is Tolstoi, L. N., “Vospitanie i obrazovanie,” in Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. Chertkov, V. G., 90 vols. (Moscow, 1936), 8: 211–46Google Scholar.
42 This new Herderian vision of history gained widespread purchase in Russia in the 1830s, filtering into official culture through Nicholas I's nationalities policy and the concept of narodnost′. See Knight, Nathaniel, “Ethnicity, Nationality, and the Masses: Narodnost′ and Modernity in Pre-Emancipation Russia,” in Hoffman, David and Kotsonis, Yanni, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (London, 2000), 41–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., “‘Nationality’ in the State Ideology during the Reign of Nicholas I,” Russian Review 19/1 (1960), 38–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
43 Gutman, Huck, “Rousseau's Confessions: A Technology of the Self,” in Foucault, Michel, Technologies of the Self (London, 1988), 99–120, at 100Google Scholar. For more on the narrated subject in Rousseau see Ginzburg, Lydia, On Psychological Prose, trans. Rosengrant, Judson (Princeton, 1991), 153–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 Rousseau's novel vision of the human subject as site for continuous, reflective self-cultivation found a steady stream of admirers upon its appearance in Russia. See Steiner, For Humanity's Sake, 10–11; Meyer, Priscilla, How the Russians Read the French: Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy (Madison, 2008)Google Scholar; and Barran, Thomas, Russia Reads Rousseau, 1762–1825 (Evanston, 2002)Google Scholar.
45 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, trans. Heitner, Robert R. (Princeton, 1987), 17Google Scholar.
46 In a lecture at the University of Dorpat in 1819, Karl Morgenstern coined the term Bildungsroman precisely in order to understand this new vision of the self in Goethe's literary works: “The task of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship,” he remarked, “appears to be nothing else than to depict a human being who develops toward his true nature by means of a collaboration of his inner dispositions with outer circumstances.” See Morgenstern, Karl and Boes, Tobias, “On the Nature of the ‘Bildungsroman’,” PMLA 124/2 (2009), 656–7Google Scholar.
47 Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Trask, William (Garden City, 1953), 388Google Scholar.
48 Bakhtin, M. M., “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” in Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. McGee, Vern W. (Austin, 1986), 10–59, at 45Google Scholar.
49 We have clear evidence that the pivotal works discussed here were familiar to Bakunin from his early Lehrjahre in Moscow. However: were any of these texts available to Bakunin during his imprisonment? The correspondence between the Third Section and the Peter and Paul Fortress administration reveals that Bakunin was permitted to read “French and German novels; mathematical, physics, [and] geographical [works]; and the newspaper ‘Russian Invalid’.” RGIA f. 1280, op. 5, d. 326, ll. 38, 40. To which “French and German novels” might Bakunin have had access during his time in the Peter and Paul Fortress? The earliest surviving catalogue of the Alekseevskii Ravelin library dates from 1864. It lists 455 volumes, divided into three categories—those of “Spiritual Content” (189), “Secular Content” (128), and “Various Content” (138). It is the third category that is the most tantalizing for the historian—under this final category is listed simply “[Works] in the German Language—28/In French—105/In English—4/in Hebrew—1.” RGIA f. 1280, op. 8, d. 752 (“Delo o sostoiashchikh veshchak i knigakh pri dome Alekseevskogo ravelina”), ll. 6ob–8ob. Unfortunately, we are thwarted again by the monolinguism of the prison warden. However, we can make some educated guesses regarding these volumes based upon later archival evidence. We know that radical author N. G. Chernyshevsky read many non-Russian texts during his Ravelin imprisonment at the start of the 1860s, including The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. RGIA f. 1280, op. 5, d. 108 (“O zakliuchenii v Alekseevskii raveline raznykh lits”), ll. 300, 300ob. By the early 1880s—just before its closure—the Alekseevskii Ravelin carried a host of foreign belletristic works in Russian translation. This included large collections of Byron, Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, Schiller, and Goethe—the last of these being the recently published ten-volume Collected Works, carrying the first complete Russian translation of Dichtung und Wahrheit. RGIA f. 1280, op. 5, d. 213 (“O vysylke iz Departamentu Gosudarstvennoi Politsii knig dlia chteniia izvestnomu prestupniku”), ll. 6–9, 24, 30. Thus, during his time in the Alekseevskii Ravelin from 1851 to 1854, it is quite likely that Bakunin had access to some early European tales of development—most likely Rousseau's Confessions, and perhaps copies of Goethe in the original as well.
50 See Herzen, Aleksandr, My Past and Thoughts, trans. Garnett, Constance, 4 vols. (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; and Annenkov, P. V., The Extraordinary Decade, trans. Titunik, Irwin R. (Ann Arbor, 1968)Google Scholar. The best scholarly work on Russian Hegelianism continues to be Chizhevskii, D. I., Gegel′ v Rossii (St Petersburg, 2007; first published 1939)Google Scholar. For more recent scholarship see Hegel in Russia, special issue of Studies in East European Thought 65/3–4 (2013)Google Scholar.
51 Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 2: 398.
52 See D. I. Chizhevskii, Gegel′ v Rossii, 115–17.
53 Quoted in Walicki, Andrzej, A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Andrews-Rusiecka, Hilda (Stanford, 1979), 119Google Scholar.
54 The most sophisticated work on the emergence of Russian Hegelianism continues to be that of Lydia Ginzburg, who was the first to recognize the 1830s–1840s as the period when “the question of personality as a historical phenomenon and as an individual psychological unity was first posed in earnest.” However, we should note that it is the latter term that receives more attention than the concept of history in Ginzburg's analysis. Furthermore, this rich study of the shift from “romantic consciousness” to psychological realism does not take into account the Bildungs-labors of the Confession, thus leading Ginzburg to identify Bakunin solely with a pre-Hegelian concept of the subject. See Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, 27–106.
55 Moretti, Franco, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London, 1987), 7Google Scholar.
56 Hegel, G. W. F., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. Knox, T. M., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1975), 1: 593Google Scholar.
57 See Toews, John Edward, Hegelianism: The Path toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841 (Cambridge, 1980), 203–54Google Scholar.
58 Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of Right, trans. White, Alan (Newburyport, 2002), 8Google Scholar. This is especially evidenced in Belinskii's journalistic works from 1839 and 1840, such as V. G. Belinskii, “Borodinskaia godovshchina. V. Zhukovskogo. Pis′mo iz Borodina ot bezrukogo k beznogomu invalid,” in Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3: 240–50.
59 Auerbach, Mimesis, 395.
60 Moretti, The Way of the World, 6–10, 15–17.
61 Herzen, Alexander, “Dilettantism in Science,” in Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works, trans. Navrozov, L. (Moscow, 1956), 15–96Google Scholar. Note that this first appearance of a Russian Left Hegelianism is actually headed by an epigraph from Goethe: “Nichts ist drinnen, nichts ist draußen, den was innen, das ist außen”—a recognition of the dialectical play of subjective interiority and external reality between Goethe and Hegel.
62 Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 2: 403.
63 Trotsky, Leon, My Life (New York, 1970), 273Google Scholar.
64 Bakunin, The Confession, 86; Bakunin, “Ispoved′,” 4: 149.
65 Bakunin, The Confession, 86; Bakunin, “Ispoved′,” 4: 149.
66 Katin-Iartsev, V. N., “V tiur′me i ssylke,” Katorga i ssylka 15/2 (1925), 183–211, at 183Google Scholar.
67 The prison and the novel have always been intertwined—in both the genre's earliest narratives (what is Robinson Crusoe's island if not a prison?) and sites of production (it is no accident that Cervantes claimed Don Quixote to have been conceived in a cell). For further discussions of incarceration and the European novel see Grass, Sean, The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (New York, 2003)Google Scholar; and Brombert, Victor H., The Romantic Prison: The French Tradition (Princeton, 1978)Google Scholar.
68 Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Bostock, Anna (Cambridge, 1971), 58–9Google Scholar.
69 This new genre's ability to claim victory in defeat is one of the factors that would allow the Russian revolutionary tradition to develop such a robust discourse of political martyrdom—especially from the 1860s onwards, with A. Herzen's “invention” of the Decembrists and the further elaboration of a radical prison mythos. To assert Goethean–Hegelian roots for this phenomenon is thus also to take a particular stance on the perennial historiographical question of the religious origins of the Russian intelligentsia. While I do believe that theology contributed much to the cultural semiotics of revolutionary struggle in the long nineteenth century, I would argue that trans-European intellectual shifts such as those analyzed here bear far greater responsibility for the birth of the Russian intelligentsia than any Orthodox Sonderweg. This question is treated in more detail in further areas of my work.
70 In this way, one could argue that the relationship between self and history in the Bildungs-memoir was one of the necessary preconditions for European radical political cultures to find political sustenance in suffering and defeat. See Traverso, Enzo, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
71 Schlegel, Friedrich, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Firchow, Peter (Minneapolis, 1991), 10Google Scholar.
72 Such an aim is hinted at in a few crucial sections of the Confession, where Bakunin relates fantasies of a tsar who would throw off the mantle of petty state affairs and lead a war for the emancipation of all Slavic peoples. The idea of the Confession's instructiveness is also present in its author's letter to Herzen from 1860: Bakunin states how he “related to Nicholas all of my life abroad, with all of my plans, impressions, and feelings, and not without many instructive remarks [pouchitel′nykh zamechanii] for him about his interior and foreign politics.” See M. A. Bakunin to Aleksandr Herzen, 8 Dec. 1860, in Bakunin, Sobranie sochinenii, 4: 366.
73 Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, 17.
74 Gershuni, Grigorii, Iz nedavnego proshlogo (Paris, 1908), 6–7Google Scholar.
75 His dates of fortress imprisonment are recorded at RGIA f. 1280, op. 1, d. 1134 (“Alfavit sekretnym arestantam soderzhashchimsia v S. Peterburgskoi kreposti s 1900 g. po 1917”), l. 10ob.
76 Kropotkin, P., Memoirs of a Revolutionist, 2 vols. (London, 1899), 2: 141–2Google Scholar, original emphasis. Internal documents relating to the moment of his imprisonment are held at RGIA f. 1280, op. 1, d. 383 (“O politicheskikh arestantov soderzhashchikhsia v S.P.B. kreposti”), ll. 187, 188, 188ob, 189, 190; d. 399, ll. 136b, 136b ob, 136v.
77 We can remark here that the classic radical Bildungs-memoir as first elaborated by Bakunin persisted even through the Stalinist period. As late as the 1930s, past experiences of political imprisonment in Russia were filtered through this politico-aesthetic lens. At a presentation given at the Leningrad division of the All-Union Society for Former Political Prisoners and Exiles in February 1934 on the topic “How to Write Historico-revolutionary Memoirs,” comments by the elderly audience constantly returned to Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit and Herzen's Past and Thoughts: how to negotiate a position between subjective experience and the world horizons of revolutionary progress. See TsGA SPB f. 506, op. 1, d. 582 (“Stenograficheskii otchet zasedaniia literaturnoi sektsii Leningradskogo otdeleniia obshchestva po dokladu Tynianova Iu. N. na temu: ‘Kak pisat′ istoriko-revoliutsionnye memuary’”), esp. ll. 15, 19, 26, 30, 34.
78 See Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self. I thus believe that new histories of radical subjectivity and political incarceration must strike a particular relationship with Foucault: one that exorcises the Foucault of interpolating disciplinary power with the help of the Foucault of discursive subject construction.
79 For the former see Pipes, Richard, ed., The Russian Intelligentsia (New York, 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Bith of Russian Socialism; McConnell, Allen, “The Origin of the Russian Intelligentsia,” Slavic and East European Journal 8/1 (1964), 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walicki, A History of Russian Thought; Berlin, Isaiah, Russian Thinkers (New York, 1978)Google Scholar. The classic work of the latter tradition is Raeff, Marc, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility (New York, 1966)Google Scholar.
80 It is at this crossroads—between Tartu school cultural semiotics, Foucauldian genealogy, and Frankfurt school political epistemology—where I have searched for the origins of the Russian intelligentsia and their narratives of political imprisonment.
81 The recent historiographical turn to examining regimes of subject formation in the Soviet Union—“Soviet subjectivity” studies—can and should be brought to bear upon the imperial period as well. In my attempt to do so here, I am indebted to works such as Krylova, A., “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1/1 (2000), 119–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Halfin, Igal, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburg, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hellbeck, Jochen, Revolution on My Mind (Cambridge, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
82 For more on the question of the “Russian modern” see Hoffman and Kotsonis, Russian Modernity.
83 My notion of an “intelligentsia-in-becoming” is indebted to philosophical existentialism's language of contingency and self-fashioning—recently brought to bear on Russian history by Slavoj Žižek, who has called us to imagine a Kierkegaardian Lenin, a “Lenin-in-becoming.” See Žižek, Slavoj, “Introduction: Between the Two Revolutions,” in Lenin, V. I., Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917 (London, 2002), 3–12, at 6Google Scholar.
84 The term “collective representation” used here is from Nathaniel Knight's invaluable recent Begriffsgeschichte of the word “intelligentsia.” See Knight, Nathaniel, “Was the Intelligentsia Part of the Nation? Visions of Society in Post-Emancipation Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7/4 (2006), 733–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
85 “Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung] … Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis … There takes place in every original phenomenon a determination of the form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history. Origin is not, therefore, discovered by the examination of actual findings, but it is related to their history and their subsequent development.” Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. Osborne, John (London, 1998), 45–6Google Scholar.
86 See Aust, Martin and Schenk, Frithjof Benjamin, eds., Imperial Subjects: Autobiographische Praxis in den Vielvölkerreichen der Romanovs, Habsburger und Osmanen im 19. und frühen (Cologne, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hellbeck, Jochen and Heller, Klaus, eds., Autobiographical Practices in Russia—Autobiographische Praktiken in Russland (Göttigen, 2004)Google Scholar; and Tartakovskii, A. G., Russkaia memuaristika i istoricheskoe soznanie XIX veka (Moscow, 1997)Google Scholar. This push towards the history of subject formation has also seen a renewed interest in biographical writing: see Kalugin, D. Ia., Proza zhizni: russkie biografii v XVIII–XIX vv. (St Petersburg: Izd. Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2015)Google Scholar; as well as Writing Russian Lives: The Poetics and Politics of Biography in Modern Russian Culture, special issue of Slavonic and East European Review 96/1 (2018)Google Scholar.
87 Paperno, Irina, “Introduction: Intimacy and History. The Gercen Family Drama Reconsidered,” Russian Literature 61/1–2 (2007), 1–65, at 2–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In making this argument, Paperno is expanding on Lydia Ginzburg's earlier analysis of the Hegelian “conscious historicism” in Herzen's text. See Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, 195–217. The present article—in its study of prison narrative, epistemologies of the self, and the politics of aesthetics—is consciously seeking to build upon the insights of these two scholars.
88 It is clear that Herzen's much more famous autobiographical text was shaped by exactly the same intellectual coordinates as Bakunin's Confession. We have seen in this article how a young Herzen passed through the crucible of Hegelian thought, reaching a synthesis of German idealism and radical political praxis. In light of this article's original argument, we should also recognize his debt to the Bildungsroman. Goethe appears in Herzen's published work as early as 1834, where in a discussion of Werther and Wilhelm Meister he crowns the author “the Napoleon of literature” (a World Spirit in Weimar?). Quotations and references to Goethe appear throughout Herzen's oeuvre, including in My Past and Thoughts. Perhaps the most telling line Herzen penned on the tension between Goethe's Right Hegelian metaphysico-aesthetics and his own political commitments is the short musing “Rousseau said that man is born free, and Goethe said that man cannot be free; both are right, both are wrong.” See Zhirmunskii, Gete, 257–76, Herzen's emphasis.
