Book contents
- Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION
- Contents
- PART ONE
- PART TWO
- PART THREE THREE AND EPILOGUE
- 24 The Tsar Visits London, 1874
- 25 Dostoevsky in Bad Ems
- 26 Sophia Perovskaya, Radicalism and the Russian People
- 27 A Mystic in the Desert
- 28 The Tsar at the Front
- 29 The Death of Nekrasov
- 30 A Visit to a Monastery
- 31 Tolstoy Apologizes
- 32 “Prophet, Prophet”: Dostoevsky's Pushkin Speech
- 33 A Death and a Marriage
- 34 Two Conspirators
- 35 Bombs and Blood
- 36 The Trial
- 37 Two Appeals
- 38 A Spectacle on Semenovsky Square
- Epilogue
- Who's Who?
- Chronology
- Endnotes
- A Note on Principal Sources
- Bibliography of Print Materials
- Index
34 - Two Conspirators
from PART THREE - THREE AND EPILOGUE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION
- Contents
- PART ONE
- PART TWO
- PART THREE THREE AND EPILOGUE
- 24 The Tsar Visits London, 1874
- 25 Dostoevsky in Bad Ems
- 26 Sophia Perovskaya, Radicalism and the Russian People
- 27 A Mystic in the Desert
- 28 The Tsar at the Front
- 29 The Death of Nekrasov
- 30 A Visit to a Monastery
- 31 Tolstoy Apologizes
- 32 “Prophet, Prophet”: Dostoevsky's Pushkin Speech
- 33 A Death and a Marriage
- 34 Two Conspirators
- 35 Bombs and Blood
- 36 The Trial
- 37 Two Appeals
- 38 A Spectacle on Semenovsky Square
- Epilogue
- Who's Who?
- Chronology
- Endnotes
- A Note on Principal Sources
- Bibliography of Print Materials
- Index
Summary
Shortly after the Tsar's return from the Crimea, Sophia Perovskaya was on the streets watching his movement about the capital. She was one of the leaders of the People's Will, and she and her friends were again plotting to kill him. Her job and that of a small group aiding her was to detect any pattern in the Tsar's activities as his carriage sped around the city.
For a long time she had been against assassinations. After being released from prison in 1874 and spending some time with her mother in the Crimea, she had worked as a doctor's apprentice in the Simbirsk Province and then attended a course for doctors' assistants in Simferopol, where her father had once been vice-governor. After graduating, she was put in charge of arranging a couple of barracks for wounded soldiers who would be brought to Simferopol as a result of the hostilities just begun against the Ottoman Empire. But before any arrived, she was ordered to the capital to take part in the Trial of the 193, most of whose defendants had been arrested three years earlier for engaging in revolutionary propaganda. At the time of Zasulich's shooting of General Trepov, which occurred the day after Sophia's own acquittal, she still believed that the weapons of the revolutionaries should be words and not guns. Yet tales which she heard of mistreatment of prisoners angered her, and her opposition to actions such as those of Zasulich began to soften.
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- Information
- Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky , pp. 229 - 234Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2002