Nicholas Bujalski: The Historical Construction of Radical Agency in the Political Prisons of Tsarist Russia

Nicholas I’d love to connect you with a friend of mine, Elena Vasiliou, who is working on historical prisoner subjectivities in Cyprus. Her work is more concentrated on notions of desire, rather than politics/activism, but there’s a definite resonance!

Thank you, Amanda Gavin, for these really fundamental questions!

Alongside research in tsarist state archives (especially the vast materials of the Peter and Paul Fortress prison fund held at RGIA in St. Petersburg), in my work I’ve attempted to compile and analyze every single published memoir of Fortress political imprisonment.

In total, this catalogue amounts to just over one hundred volumes, each possessing distinct conditions of production and distribution (from fragments smuggled out of cells and circulated clandestinely, to the widely publicized radical autobiographies of V.F. Figner and P. Kropotkin published abroad).

The timeline here runs from the mid-nineteenth century to the fall of the Romanov regime. For if Iu.M. Lotman could argue that the greatest tragedy of the imprisoned Decembrist revolutionaries of 1825 was that they possessed “no literary models” – that they were unable to narrativize the experience of political incarceration – then over the course of the next hundred years something radically changed. By 1924 M. Gorkii would sardonically remark: “every Russian who has spent a month in a political prison… considers it their sacred duty to gift Russia with a book of memoirs.”

And it’s this chronology/genealogy (from lack of narrative coordinates to grand autobiographical tradition) that I try to understand in my work, and which I believe is key to the question of transmission/dissemination.

For I have discovered plenty of instances where these memoirs directly influenced later experiences of political incarceration – from revolutionaries explicitly addressing their stories to future comrades (G.A. Gershuni: “A tale of how one felt and lived through ‘the other side of life’ might be useful for young workers”); to incarcerated radicals using knowledge of their forebears to help them endure the Fortress (Kropotkin: “My thoughts fixed especially on Bakunin… ‘He has lived it through,’ I said to myself, ‘and I must, too; I will not succumb here!’”); to ego documents surreptitiously finding their way into the prison libraries themselves.

However, I’ve found myself most interested not in the transmission of particular examples of carceral memoirs, but rather in the appearance, development, and circulation of the larger genre to which each belongs (Cf. the fascinating discussion of ‘structures of narration’ conducted during the HEX “Personal Nationalism” panel on Monday.)

My comment has already gone on for far too long : ) But briefly: I believe that the revolutionary Russian prison memoir genre must be understood through its roots in the Goethean Bildung tradition and Left Hegelian thought. These were new intellectual coordinates – first formulated together in Russia in the 1850s – supporting a new, writable version of the agency-laden subject navigating towards social liberation at the dialectical entwinement of self and world, the personal and the world-historical. I venture that it is this novel political-aesthetic terrain that allowed, and structured, the entire catalogue of revolutionary Russian memoir writing. And it was this form of self-narration, I argue, that proved itself particularly amenable to claiming the experience of incarceration as politically legible (transforming it from a site of mute discipline into a ‘stage’ in a larger life path of radical struggle).

So – beyond the dissemination of any one ego document, I think that it is this historical development and transmission of a larger genre structure (this ‘technology of the self’) that proved so crucial in binding together the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia into a particular community of self-narration – a community for whom the experience of political imprisonment was not only made especially legible, but which also essentially turned the Peter and Paul Fortress into a powerful stage for the performance and reproduction of its own understanding of radical agency.

(And in all of this, I’m sure you can see why I’m really interested in how questions of intellectual history/the discursive construction of ‘childhood’ feature in your own – absolutely fascinating – work!)

Thank you again for your excellent questions, and please don’t hesitate to let me know if I can speak more on any of these topics.

Take care,

Nick