4. SHOOTING BLANKS

Whatever misgivings about his career and his life Bakunin had were temporarily put aside, for he was finally entitled to go on leave and return to Priamukhino. In August 1833, the dashing young officer strode into his family’s dining room unexpectedly, and everyone jumped up to greet him. There were tears of joy all around and much news to exchange; even seeing “little Michel” as an adult for the first time was something to marvel at.

But if Michael had changed dramatically since he left for school five years earlier, so too had his family. The happy reunion could not paper over the cracks in the Priamukhino idyll. If the restraints of the regime put Michael on the horns of a dilemma between duty and freedom, they affected his sisters Liubov, Varvara, Tatiana, and Alexandra even more profoundly. Their father had educated all the children well; they had bright, inquisitive minds and enjoyed reading literature and philosophy. Nonetheless, Michael’s options were few, and only one existed for his sisters: the social whirl of society with the object of finding suitable spouses. Suitable did not mean spouses who evoked romantic love; it meant arrangements that would be useful maintaining and improving the family’s position in the complicated ranking system of status and wealth. When the Bakunin women bumped into the limits of their world, it was a shock no less rude than the one Michael experienced at military school. Just as Michael was torn between being the dutiful son and becoming his own man, the sisters were torn between wishing to obey their parents and social norms and their own fulfillment.

The sisters had little patience for duller suitors, no matter how “suitable,” and were quickly bored with the rounds of dances and balls and the stylized rituals of flirtation and courtship. They, like Michael, thought court and salon life was filled with hypocrisy and they resented having to play their shallow roles. Worse, “society” took time away from their studies, music, and art. Even earlier than Michael, they had determined that the life they were expected to live offered them nothing. The structured roles that had been so important for the nobility in the past were now empty forms, especially for smart women who wanted to put their education and talent to use. And if Priamukhino appeared to Michael as a sanctuary, to his sisters it loomed as a prison. Life on the country estate offered them no challenges or inspiration. Women were assumed to be the repositories of virtue and purity, but as Liubov noted, at Priamukhino, “we are deprived of the means to do wrong” and thus were never put to the test, never able to exert any real virtue or demonstrate real purity. Because there was nothing to resist, the sisters never experienced the “delicious sentiment one feels when one comes to surmount some bad instinct when one does one’s duties despite all the temptations.” Their untested virtue was as formulaic and empty as their social life.[83]

It was increasingly clear to them that fulfillment was unlikely to be found in society, in marriage, or on the estate. With much of the external world denied the sisters and that which was open boring and oppressive, they increasingly turned to Christianity for solace, meaning, and intellectual challenge. While religion provided an outlet for powerful feelings, it also offered a creative and compelling way for the sisters to grow intellectually. Together with their friends Alexandra and Natalie Beyer, they debated philosophical and religious doctrine, read deeply, and sought philosophical and religious truths in their lives.[84]

It was a serious, scholastic undertaking and the Bakunin and Beyer sisters came to be crucial to the development of philosophy in Russia in this period. The universities had been greatly expanded as successive tsars sought to attain the technological benefits of the West without adopting its values or its economic and social changes. However, students like Michael Bakunin in the military and his sisters at Priamukhino were not merely interested in the official curriculum and in learning what the authorities deemed appropriate for them to learn. Physics might be important to the military; philosophy held the key to life and liberty.

But philosophy was forbidden in Russian universities, precisely because it insisted that no received wisdom should go unchallenged. Implicitly and explicitly, it challenged the myths of the regime and called into question its corrupt, exploitative, and crumbling pillars. For that reason, students interested in thinking outside the boundaries of state-sponsored orthodoxy formed their own study groups, or circles, that met outside of class to read and discuss the ideas and issues that mattered to them. The two most important circles were one headed by and named after Nicholas Stankevich and another jointly by Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Ogarev. Almost exclusively male, the Stankevich circle and the Herzen-Ogarev circle became centers for avant-garde thought in literature, philosophy, and politics.

According to Herzen and the many historians who have accepted his memoirs uncritically, the circles sprang up spontaneously. More careful historians, however, have noted that they owed much to the sophisticated discussion groups of the Bakunin and Beyer sisters. One reason Bakunin loved his sisters was the intellectual equality they shared, and they proved able sparring partners as he thought and rethought his own philosophy. The sisters did not restrict their philosophical inquiries to letters. They transformed their social life into something between the society salon and the philosophical circle, creating the first spaces for provocative discussion. Here Stankevich would first explore the metaphysics that defined his worldview; through debate with the Bakunins and Beyers on the nature of religion and art, he would be challenged to rethink his own ideas; here he would meet still others, including Michael Bakunin, who shared his quest for knowledge.[85]

By the time Michael returned to Priamukhino, his older sisters were more conscious rebels than he. He was sick of army life, but they had been aware of their own dilemmas much longer and had less to look forward to. He quickly discovered how deeply frustrated they were with Priamukhino. Women were expected to know of the new worlds of knowledge but to refrain from participating; they were expected to defer to and marry men who had none of their education or abilities. The Bakunin and Beyer sisters created new opportunities for themselves, but these were deeply divided by gendered realities. Young men were not expected to embody virtue and purity. That meant they could stay out unescorted; they could meet in pubs. They could seek employment or start irregularly published journals that paid them a pittance; they could, in a word, act. Women had no such choices, and they used philosophy and religion to try to convince themselves that if there was happiness to be found on earth, it was not an external happiness dependent on circumstance, but an internal happiness.

In the meantime, however, reality was intruding on them all. The problem was a social as well as personal one. Russia was a state in transition. The old ways, rituals, and arrangements were backward and ineffective compared to the new freedoms offered, at least in theory, in the rest of Europe. The French Revolution and the war with Napoleon had shown that the nobility was effete and irrelevant; at best, it could exert its power only to delay the inevitable. What was the percentage in sticking with that? Yet while Western ideas had made it across the borders of the empire, the economic and political and social changes that gave them a basis in the real world traveled much more slowly. Put more concretely, it made little sense for a military officer to study the most modern strategy and tactics knowing full well he would never have the trained men or equipment to implement them. Russian universities offered an excellent curriculum in the sciences. But when eager students turned their inquisitive, trained, skeptical minds on Russian history, literature, economics, or politics, they found the doors to those subjects welded shut. To open them was to risk expulsion, exile, even execution. This generation was caught between the promise of the sweeping changes they observed just over the border and the reality of Russia’s creaking stasis.

The first response of these young men and women was rarely rebellion. More often it was an evolving desire to live lives that made sense and that were fulfilling and interesting. That this simple desire threw them into opposition with the tsar says more about the repressive regime than about the young, inadvertent rebels themselves. Simply trying to live the lives they had been educated to live put them in immediate moral dilemmas with family, friends, and authorities. What did one owe one’s family? Where did true duty lie? Was duty even a virtue? When it clashed with freedom how was one to decide? Since these were bright, highly literate young men and women, they turned to books for help. These themes were not unique to the Bakunins or Russia. They were tossed up in every nation that was exposed to the political and economic upheavals of the age.

For the Bakunins, philosophy and reality collided when Liubov, the oldest of the children, agreed to marry Konstantin Renne, a cavalry officer and noble with an estate near Priamukhino. Michael had learned of the engagement in a letter some months before he returned home and applauded his sister’s choice.[86] Now that he was home, however, his sisters could tell him what they feared to put in their letters. Liubov did not love Renne and had agreed to marry him only because it was what their parents wished. The choice between duty and freedom, to marry or not, was still hers, but it was an agonizing one. She loved her parents and did not want to hurt them or dismay them by open revolt. Yet to marry Renne would be an act of sacrifice, not love, and even the dubious promises of unearthly salvation could not make that choice more palatable. In the real world of nineteenth-century Russia, she had no other meaningful choices. She could not go to university, could not work, could not run away to Haight-Ashbury or the circus. Liubov herself put the dilemma plainly in a letter to the Beyer sisters, long before Michael learned of her crisis: “I know that I am completely free in my choice, but this thought never leaves my head: I must entrust myself blindly to my parents and believe that they desire only my happiness.”[87] [88] Undoubtedly they did desire her happiness, but it was impossible for them to conceive of her being happy outside of the social norms of their generation and experience.

When his sisters told him of Liubov’s plight, Michael sided with them and together with them pleaded her case to their parents. While several historians playing on the rebel without a cause theme have cast Michael as the “outside agitator” who led his unwitting sisters to rebel, more recent work by John Wyatt Randolph and Marshall Shatz has shown he was far from being the instigator. Instead, his sisters appointed Michael champion of the oppressed in the hope that his status as eldest male child would be an important strategic asset. After the initial arguments, however, his first reaction was to try to restore peace to the family. When his leave ended and he had to return to St. Petersburg, he sent a quick letter to his sisters, asking them to listen to their parents, to stop causing them pain, and to put aside their “small actions, small words, and very small thoughts” in the interest of the family. He reminded them of the sacrifices their parents had made, that their parents were essentially good, that this conflict could be healed if the children took the lead in seeking peace and resolution, and that no irreparable rift existed.

Once in St. Petersburg, however, he reread Liubov’s letters and realized the depth of her dilemma and despair. Michael now delivered the help he had been asked to give. He sent Liubov’s letters to their father, in the hope that they would convince him that she loved her parents and was not acting simply to spite them. Making amends for his earlier lack of solidarity, he wrote to Liubov to strengthen her resolve and to forestall her from sacrificing herself on the marriage altar for the presumed good of the family. Any thoughts she had of happiness with Renne, even the dulled happiness of self-sacrifice, were an illusion, he agreed. It meant subjecting her will and her ideas to Renne, and he was clearly her inferior. Her marriage would be a lie to herself and to God, for she would have to swear love and obedience to a man she did not love. Worse, it would be a futile sacrifice that would not accomplish what she hoped it would, that is, to make her parents happy. For her parents desired her happiness, and if she were to marry Renne, they would know she was miserable and would thus be unhappy themselves. There was no way Renne could truly love her, for he knew how little she cared for him. Worse, he was a Courlander, that is, an Estonian, and of course, Bakunin continued, all the Baltic people hated Russia for sucking them into the empire. Renne’s parents would despise Liubov, yet she would have to be pleasant to them and do their bidding. Now on a roll, Michael hearkened back to the Romantic literature they had enjoyed to suggest that her marriage would separate the dear Liubov from her loving family. This separation would so fill them with melancholy, he assured her, that they would pine away even unto death. Is that what she wanted? he asked. Would that make everyone happy?

On the other hand, he pointed out, refusing Renne would not, as Liubov feared, bring dishonor on her family. There was no dishonor in their father letting his daughter out of a marriage she did not want, and not even their mother wanted Liubov to sacrifice herself. His arguments, Michael concluded, were not insubstantial but were the result of much reflection. If she could answer them, then, and only then, would he go along quietly with the marriage plans.[89]

His letter, with all its rhetorical excesses, had its intended effect. As Michael had predicted, once their father understood how strongly Liubov felt, he relented and the marriage was called off. The consequences of the episode were as profound as the event itself. It confirmed to the Bakunin sisters that they could try to seek happiness outside the narrow roles prescribed for them, though it would not be easy. It confirmed their turn to religion and philosophy and encouraged them to continue to seek truth there. It was also a formative experience in Michael’s political development. He had been raised to believe his sisters were his equals. The conflict with their parents reaffirmed this and pushed him to think about women’s emancipation early on. Admittedly this was on a private, not a political, level, but it continued to inform his ideas all his life.[90]

The fight for Liubov encouraged Michael to consider the question of his own emancipation more carefully now that he was back at school. Inspired by his sisters and his earlier dabbling with the works of Venevitinov, he continued to read far outside the military curriculum and to discuss philosophy in his letters to his sisters. He sought out people in St. Petersburg with similar interests, including Nicholas Muraviev, yet another famous cousin of Michael’s mother. Recently retired from state service, his children, especially three of his daughters and his son Sergei, were about Michael’s age. The older man welcomed Michael to his home and encouraged him to read and talk about politics and philosophy with him and his children. The sisters shared the same education with the Bakunin and Beyer sisters and they too “have no patience for society,” Michael wrote. While they played the game well, their real life began when they excused themselves to “discuss literature, history, the sciences, philosophy.”[91] Continuing to extend his reading, Bakunin worked his way through Christophe-Guillaume Koch’s History of the Revolutions in Europe, a classic multivolume work that stressed technology, trade, the role of the church, and political developments and would likely serve well enough in first-year Western Civ courses taught today.[92]

By January of 1834, he was writing to his sisters of his “intellectual revolution.” He had examined his life carefully and reiterated that, like his sisters, he was bored with high society and the “pleasures of the ball and the dance.” While he felt awkward and out of place there, the real problem was he found it deadly dull. To be fully human, one had to use one’s mind on ideas and issues that mattered. Where he had previously lived an “external” life, aimed at maintaining appearances and pleasing others, now he proposed to throw himself into his studies. These would decidedly not be military studies. He was finished with studying just to master the material and please others, he noted. Now he set out to study for himself, to seek happiness in intellectual work. Unlike his sisters, his understanding could not come through religion but through knowledge of the real world. “Knock and it shall be opened, the Gospel says,” he wrote his sisters, but he added that religion too often meant knocking one’s head on the floor. Those who sought happiness through prayer and acts of grace were misled. After all, even a hungry dog could beg, he went on, and if that were all humans were meant to do, why then were they given consciousness? No, if they had brains, they were meant to use them, and that meant trying to understand the mysteries of the world.

Naturally that left little time to attend to the routine of the classroom. Now completely uninterested in the military or in military school, Michael wore his duties lightly. He apparently wore his uniform lightly as well. When the commander of the school caught him inappropriately attired—a venial or even possibly a mortal sin in this tsar’s army—and gave him a dressing-down, Michael’s response was not to the general’s liking. Unlike his earlier incidents of dumb insolence and sullen rebellion, this one was met with severe consequences. The commander expelled Michael from school, officially charging him with poor grades and “lack of attention through the entire course of studies,” and transferred him to active duty on the Polish border.[93]

“Active duty” was perhaps an exaggeration: Michael’s letters from the field complain that he was bored and alone. The only amusements were the officers’ balls that he had never much enjoyed, while his intellectual work was more difficult and less satisfying for there was no one to talk to.[94] He told the Beyer sisters that his posting was a “hole” in which he was interred, surrounded by fellow officers most of whom walked on four paws, and that he was entirely isolated and alone. Even nature seemed to turn against him: as he approached his new station, he noted, literally in flowery language, that the luxurious birch trees were giving way to thick stands of somber pine and the scented orchids were disappearing, their place taken by dried out, boring daisies that could survive anywhere. In French, the word for “daisy” is immortelle, and he punned off that to call them “dried out and inanimate immortals.” But surely the charming orchid was a thousand times more dear than drab, prosaic, and insensible life eternal?[95] Driven to ennui by the activities of his comrades—”cards and vodka,” he complained to his parents—he discovered that Rousseau was wrong to preach about the charms of solitude. Instead, Michael wrote, “Man is made for society,” and this observation would continue to mark his politics. Never an individualist anarchist in his later political career, he understood early on that humans needed family and friends to share the joys and pains of life. “Voluntary solitude,” he continued, was virtually the same as egoism; could, he asked, the egoist be happy? For him, the answer was a resounding no, and he looked forward to rejoining his family, for only among others could he pursue all his “hopes, desires, projects, and dreams.” In keeping with his view that intellectual needs were founded upon physical ones, he also asked his parents for money, since he was essentially penniless. As a serving officer, he had to pay for his own uniforms and food, and Michael was, he claimed, subsisting on black bread and water, without money even for tobacco and tea.

Yet he was still unable to break with the military. He wrote to his parents about the dilemma of wishing to fulfill his duty even as he threw himself into studying philosophy, history, mathematics, languages, and grammar, anything but the official curriculum. He transcribed and notated his readings, hoping that in this work he might find himself, or at least stave off the “sad state of insensibility and disillusionment.” Later he found a few people to talk with, in particular a doctor who was in touch with one of Russia’s foremost Romantic and idealist thinkers, Danylo Vellansky, who in turn had studied with Schelling in Germany. But Michael’s future was still unclear; he was unable to properly devote himself to studying philosophy and increasingly worried that his father would not be able to arrange a longed-for transfer to Tver. Worse, his expulsion from military school curtailed any chance for promotion or early release.[96]

Finally he decided to take matters into his own hands. He had written to Sergei Muraviev in late January 1835 that he was trying to “free myself from the military yoke.” The answer lay, as it so often does, in the proper application of history. Bakunin had been studying Russian history, and of course, he was a military officer who studied strategy and tactics. His plan was conceived in the finest tradition of the Russian general staff: when faced with an untenable situation, run.[97]

Priamukhino was eight hundred miles away but the opportunity to adopt his strategy was given to him when he was ordered to Tver to secure horses for his unit. He simply spontaneously demobilized himself and went home, applying for the first time the anarchist tactic of direct action, that is, resolving the issue through his own actions, not those of politicians or others acting on his behalf.

His parents, of course, were appalled. Their son was absent without leave, possibly even a deserter depending on the whim of the military courts, and Alexander Bakunin scrambled to secure a relatively honorable discharge for his son on the grounds of illness.[98] While few officers took the drastic action Michael did, it was common for young noblemen to leave the service as soon as practicably possible, for it offered them nothing. Unfortunately, Russia offered little else for them, either. At Priamukhino, Michael hoped, well fed, surrounded by bright, literate people who shared his concerns, with nothing particularly pressing to do, he could devote himself to philosophy.

But family responsibilities and battles made it impossible for him to study. His father kept going on about getting a job, and had secured a civil service post in Tver for his wayward son. Michael rejected this out of hand, writing a friend that it was impossible to take up his studies while holding down a job as a functionary. Nor could he give up his studies, for they were “the essential foundation, the religion, of my life.” To abandon them would violate his “human dignity.”[99] The solution came to him when Michael Bakunin met Nicholas Stankevich at the Beyers’s Moscow home in March 1835. Their similar backgrounds and interests practically guaranteed the two young men would hit it off. “Meeting Stankevich saved me,” Michael wrote his sister Varvara. “It marks an epoch, a turning point in my life. I was influenced not just by his profound intelligence and noble goals, but also by the beautiful spontaneity and total clarity of all his being.” In January 1836, he headed for Moscow to join Stankevich and the other members of his circle.[100]

Stankevich was one of the most influential young Russian intellectuals of the day, and the two quickly became close friends, though they made an unlikely pair at first glance. Bakunin was physically imposing, boisterous in company, and assertive, even aggressive in his debating style. Quick-witted, he synthesized vast amounts of material and was drawn to the bold insight and the dramatic overstatement. He borrowed and spent money freely and was often incautious in his philosophy and his friendships. Stankevich was, at least outwardly, the sober yin to Bakunin’s raging yang. Quiet, pale, physically frail, he too was the son of a landowning noble, but his family was wealthier than Bakunin’s and so Stankevich had not been pressed into the military. Born in 1813, he was educated in a school attended largely by children outside the nobility, and this democratic upbringing influenced him greatly. He later attended the University of Moscow, where he formally studied literature and history and was introduced to German idealist philosophy through one of his teachers, a Professor Pavlov. Living at the professor’s home, Stankevich took part in discussions with academics who were determined to study philosophy informally despite the official ban. While Pavlov taught natural sciences, not philosophy, the moment one stops to ask, “What is science?” or “What is nature?” philosophy becomes part of the subject matter. Even in physics and agronomy, idealist philosophers found their way into the Russian academy.

Upon graduating in 1834, Stankevich was made a school inspector, a job that gave him some official status and an income but did not divert much time from his vocation of philosophy and literary criticism. While he wrote little during his short life—he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven—Stankevich insisted upon clear, critical thought and inspired a generation of thinkers. One of his admirers, Konstantin Aksakov, recalled him as “an absolutely simple man, devoid of any pretensions; a man of unusual and deep intelligence ... [who] argued so coherently, logically, and clearly in debates that the most refined dialecticians ... had to capitulate.” Another contemporary, Paul Annenkov, noted that those who worked with Stankevich “were morally elevated by him and were—if only for a moment—superior beings.” Another central member of the Stankevich circle, Vissarion Belinsky, wrote of his “divine personality” and described him as “holy, lofty ... harmonious, sweet, blessed.”[101]

Moscow and the Stankevich circle provided Bakunin with the time and comrades to take up serious study in exciting surroundings, combining scholarship with friendship in ways familiar to contemporary university students and their professors. In an oft-quoted passage from his novel Rudin, the novelist Ivan Turgenev has one character describe the life:

I was completely reborn. I curbed my conceit, began asking questions, learned, rejoiced, worshipped—in short, it was like entering some kind of church.... Imagine a gathering of half a dozen boys, our only light one tallow candle, tea like slops and dry biscuits as old as Adam—but if only you’d heard our speeches and looked at our faces! Excitement in everyone’s eyes, cheeks on fire, our hearts beating fast, and we’d talk about God, about truth, about the future of humanity, about poetry, sometimes talking nonsense, carried away by empty words, but what did that matter! ... Oh, it was a marvelous time then![102]

Priamukhino continued to figure heavily in their intellectual development. As the historian Marshall Shatz has pointed out, it would be reasonable to speak of the “Priamukhino circle” as well as the Stankevich and Herzen-Ogarev circles, for over the next few years, members of the Stankevich circle would often visit Priamukhino while the Bakunin and Beyer sisters would continue to be important intellectual figures.[103]

The pleasant bohemian existence was not without tensions and problems. The members of the circle were young, passionate, strong-willed, and fierce in their polemics. Bakunin’s dynamism sometimes angered others who surrendered to his arguments not because of the strength of his logic but because of the force of his personality. Belinsky, who would become Russia’s most important literary critic of this era, was nicknamed “Furious Vissarion” by his comrades, and it was a descriptive, not an ironic, nickname. In such an atmosphere, jealousy was not uncommon as each member of the circle vied for the respect of others and for primacy. The old class distinctions of the regime made life complicated, no matter how much the circle may have deplored them. Belinsky was the son of a doctor and thus not of the nobility. If that didn’t matter to Bakunin, it mattered a great deal to Belinsky, who was quick to take offense at actions and comments he perceived as insults. Belinsky had been snubbed by Pushkin, who regarded him as an oddball, and the young critic often felt psychologically and physically overshadowed by Bakunin. Even Bakunin’s sisters frustrated him, as their aristocratic education prepared them to read Schelling and Fichte in the original German, which Belinsky could not. As one of his colleagues, Turgenev, put it, “Belinsky knew how to hate—he was a good hater.”[104]

Belinsky did have important street cred, though, and he made the most of it. He had been expelled from university for writing a play that was critical of serfdom and was a strong fan of Fichte. He worked on a literary journal, the Telescope, which was published in Moscow from 1831 to 1836, when it was shut down for publishing the first of Peter Chaadaev’s “Philosophical Letters,” a critical note on Russia’s backwardness. Foreshadowing the use of psychiatric hospitals as prisons by the Soviet Union, the regime declared Chaadaev insane and kept him under house arrest. But Belinsky continued to attack conservative, orthodox Russian literature and his articles won the young critic some acclaim and notoriety. His visits to Priamukhino both elated and angered Belinsky, for the idyllic country estate left him isolated and at odds with the family, which had its own customs and practices. He did not make matters better when he remarked to Alexander Bakunin, now a frail, aged man whose passion for the French Revolution had long since burned out, that the violence of the Terror was completely justified and added meaningfully that there were “heads that still await the guillotine.” Whatever his own views on revolution, Michael regarded this as an unnecessary provocation of an old man and an abuse of his hospitality, especially inopportune as Michael needed his father to fund his travels.[105]

The circle was also riven by romance, for the intense intellectual work was accompanied with strong, complex emotions. It is not uncommon for romance to break out whenever like-minded people of a certain age spend a great deal of time together in intense intellectual discussions. Matches and mismatches continued over three years: Natalie Beyer fell in love with Stankevich, who was not interested; Natalie and her sister Alexandra in turn developed strong feelings for Michael, who observed that while he loved the Bever sisters, he was not in love with them. Stankevich and Liubov Bakunin became secretly engaged, though Stankevich soon discovered that he did not love her and left Russia to avoid further entanglement and to find a healthier climate; he was soon joined by Varvara, who left her husband to be with Stankevich and was at his side when he died in Italy in 1840. Belinsky fell for Tatiana Bakunin, but it was Alexandra Bakunin who fell for Belinsky; later, she became engaged to yet another circle member, Vassily Botkin, to the horror of her parents, who could not conceive of their daughter marrying the son of a merchant, even though his income greatly exceeded theirs. Finally, in 1840, the novelist Ivan Turgenev fell for Tatiana, but ultimately decided that he did not love her romantically. Such entanglements of course were hardly restricted to nineteenth-century students, but they remind us that these Russian intellectuals were living, breathing people with complicated lives that they handled as well, or as poorly, as any of us. They were not rarefied, ethereal beings who dealt only with spirituality or epistemology; they were human, and the interplay between their lives and their ideas was dynamic, complex, and profound.

The complicated relationships also let us dismiss once and for all the notion that Michael Bakunin somehow exerted a Svengalian influence over his sisters. He was not the ringleader who got them all worked up in frenzies of rebellion. They gave as good as they got, and were active participants in their battle for liberation, the study of philosophy, and the relationships that marked the development of the circle. A measure of their influence was the attacks Varvara, Tatiana, and Alexandra suffered from the pen of “Furious Vissarion.” The sisters, two of whom had rejected Belinksy, had been ruined by their brother, he insisted. Women could only fulfill themselves, Belinsky thundered, by becoming wives and mothers. Philosophy was beyond them and would ruin them. Singling out Varvara as an example of his point, he continued, that Bakunin’s “thoughts did not give her strength; she was intimidated by them ... She is a mother, and has contemplated many things, about which our trite philosophy has not even dreamed.” For women, “marriage is the only reasonable way to experience life and the only reality ... Society regards her freedom as willfulness, which, if reprehensible in a man, is even more so in a girl ... Marriage for her is an emancipation, the beginning of her individuality.”[106] In response, Bakunin fired off a twenty-one-page letter to set Belinsky straight on philosophy and sexism; unfortunately, the letter has not survived. The entire episode reinforces the argument of the literary theorist Lydia Ginzburg, who understood that as part of defining himself, Belinsky created a caricature of Bakunin, a straw man to embody the ideas Belinsky himself was working out.[107]

Belinsky’s hostility toward Michael and his sisters matters because generations of historians have relied on Belinsky to support two connected arguments about Bakunin. The first is that Bakunin was caught up in a mystical world of idealism, separated from reality, and unable to connect with the world around him. Belinsky, they insist, moved quickly through idealism to realism, and so was better grounded, more connected with reality, and less alienated. Therefore Bakunin, his critics conclude, was later drawn to anarchism precisely because it was fantastic and Utopian, unreal and irrelevant. But the route to Bakunin’s anarchism was much more complicated and cannot be reduced to a philosophical position and a psychological state. More importantly, such a categorization is simply incorrect. It is largely based on Belinsky’s interpretation of the feud between the two men, and so must be considered carefully. Belinsky accused Bakunin of stifling his feelings and having cut himself off from reality to pursue a fruitless life among books and abstract ideas. Instead, Belinsky insisted, the correct task for their generation was to take up jobs in the civil service to serve society by becoming functioning parts of it. Unlike Bakunin, Belinsky insisted he was a man of feeling, not of intellect, and so was superior. “My strength, my power, is in my direct feeling,” Belinsky insisted, while Bakunin was “a man with a marvelous head but decidedly without heart, and, moreover, with the blood of a rotten salt cod.”[108] This appeal to feeling rather than reason hardly suggests that Belinsky was the rational realist of the two. Bakumin, he continued, knew nothing of the real world, only the dream world of Priamukhino and the abstract world of philosophical thought, while Belinsky, on the other hand, was now dedicated to becoming part of “reality.” His immersion into the real world, signified by his getting a job, gave him, Belinsky maintained, much greater insight and a monopoly on truth. What was important was to become a useful member of society, he reproved. Happy to use any weapon to hand, he even suggested that Bakunin’s father, whom Belinsky had earlier hinted might deserve beheading, was now the best model for Michael himself, for at least his father had buckled down to do what had to be done.[109]

Bakunin himself regarded Belinsky’s “reconciliation with reality” as less of a revelation and more of a sellout. Belinsky, he wrote to Stankevich, “has gone to the extreme of turning any ordinary, commonplace, existing being into his ideal.” Far from anchoring himself in the real world, Belinsky had simply surrendered to it. For himself, Bakunin agreed that one could not escape reality, but he insisted that reality could be changed through action. This idea was soon put to the test as he worked once again to help liberate one of his sisters from an unhappy reality.[110]

Of the Bakunin sisters, Varvara was the most interested in and consumed by religion. As a teenager, she had had an intense religious experience that led her to consider becoming a nun. Her parents were horrified at the prospect, and she quietly dropped the idea for the sake of family harmony. Thus she, no less than Michael, understood well the frustration and depression caused by having ambitions and talents thwarted for the sake of others. In 1835, she had married a noble military officer, Nicholas Diakov. Michael and his sisters, including Varvara, regarded him variously as good but rather dull, an amiable idiot, and a potential tyrant. Varvara agreed to marry him for the good of the family and as part of the religious mission she had assumed. In her mind, the marriage was a sacrifice that gave her life a purpose. Through having a purpose, perhaps happiness could be found. She made it clear to her family that this was a sacrifice: during the marriage ceremony she turned from the altar to face her family and said, “Now sisters, be firm: I have redeemed all of you with myself.” Her sacrifice, however, did not lead to happiness. Whatever Diakov’s good points, Varvara deeply resented his control over her. “He has even now,” she wrote, “every right to kiss me, to caress me—he can enter my room at any time, say to me whatever he pleases—and I must be silent and cannot forbid it.”[111] Diakov had little patience for her philosophical work. He wanted her to be a “good,” traditional wife. But prompted by her religious studies, she came to believe that living with a man she did not love was a sin rather than an empowering sacrifice. This wracked her with guilt and made life with Diakov intolerable.

Michael, unlike many of his peers, such as Belinsky, understood that it was “horrible” for a woman to “marry a man whom you do not love, to marry out of calculation, even if you do not feel revulsion for him, even when he has merited your respect.” Foreshadowing Emma Goldman’s writings on marriage, he insisted that “marriage out of calculation is prostitution.”[112] Nor was it possible to argue that in suffering one might find salvation, he warned. “Humanity’s calling is not to suffer here on earth with folded arms in order to win a mythological paradise. It is instead to move that heaven, that God that is in oneself, to the earth, to raise practical life, to raise the earth to heaven.”[113] Far from retreating to idealistic speculation on the immaterial nature of reality, Bakunin used philosophy to understand and confront practical concerns. In turn, the family disputes and the liberation of Varvara had an impact on his philosophy, for these struggles helped convince him external conditions did indeed matter. He had become keenly aware that happiness was not something that could be found only within oneself or in heaven. Happiness could be found only in the real world; it had to be created by humanity through grappling with and resolving personal and social problems.[114]

Thus it is a little silly for historians to assert, as many have, that Bakunin’s interest in German romanticism and idealism was a retreat from reality. In fact, the issues he took up were immediately bound up with real-life questions. The struggle for Varvara’s liberation would meet with some success. She would soon leave Russia, and her husband, for Europe, and would begin an affair with Stankevich that ended only with his death. The notion that when duty and freedom conflicted, freedom was the higher virtue continued to echo throughout Bakunin’s life.

Historians have also relied on Belinsky to make a second argument about Bakunin: that he was sexually impotent and his quest for sexual wholeness drew him to German idealism and then to anarchism as a form of sexual sublimation. Put this plainly, it sounds ridiculous enough, but speculation about Bakunin’s sexual abilities has long tainted the debates over his ideas.

The high road to debunking this line is to argue that Bakunin’s sexuality is absolutely irrelevant. Whatever thinkers do with their private parts has nothing to do with the content or validity of their ideas. It has no bearing on their ideas if they are promiscuous or celibate, straight or gay or bisexual, indifferent to or obsessed with sex. Ironically, other anarchists, such as Emma Goldman, have been attacked because they had too much sex. If you’re an anarchist, it seems you are damned if you do and damned if you can’t.

For those of us more accustomed to the gutter or the median strip than the high road—and the relative popularity of People magazine to The American Historical Review suggests we make up the vast majority—such a principled argument has the whiff of evasion. “Ah, so he was impotent,” we wink, confident that the refusal to get down and dirty is a tacit admission. The problem is, of course, that no one can plausibly explain how sexual dysfunction leads to anarchism or revolution. If there were anything to this argument, the sales of Viagra would prove that millions of North American men are ready to smash the state any day now. More importantly, Marshall Shatz has laid the impotence argument to rest in an excellent piece of historical detective work. Only two pieces of evidence have ever been put forward to support the claim that Bakunin was impotent. The first is that he did not have an affair with either of the Beyer sisters, both of whom had indicated that an advance made by him would be welcome. Bakunin made it clear that he loved the sisters for their “beautiful souls” but did not feel “fervent, stormy passion” for either.[115] His reaction to the Beyers, who were by all accounts brilliant and lovely, may disappoint present-day matchmakers, but as evidence of sexual dysfunction it is ridiculous.

The second piece of evidence also falls short of the standard of evidence usually acceptable for medical diagnosis, even by the standards of the nineteenth century. In 1840, Bakunin walked in on Michael Katkov and Maria Ogarev, the wife of Nicholas Ogarev, and found them in what is usually described as “a compromising position.” Katkov apologized to Maria’s husband, and the three remained friends. Some months later, however, Katkov cornered Bakunin and accused him of maliciously spreading the story among their friends and colleagues. Bakunin, nonplussed by the sudden attack, demanded to know what Katkov was talking about. The enraged Katkov called Bakunin a scoundrel and Bakunin responded in kind. Katkov then called Bakunin a eunuch and pushed him. Bakunin grabbed his cane and whacked Katkov with it; according to different accounts, Katkov either slapped Bakunin or spat in his face. Either way, this could only be resolved by a duel, and the appropriate challenge and acceptance were made. Cooler heads, however, eventually prevailed, and both parties retreated.[116]

That is the second piece of evidence: the name-calling in the middle of a quarrel between two young men. From this insult has issued an entire school of explanation of Bakunin’s personality, family relations, and political thought. For readers of the “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” school, there is even less to the Bakunin story than first appears, for the only account of this incident comes to us from Belinsky, who, as we have seen, had his own reasons for implying that Bakunin was bloodless and ineffectual.

The myth of Bakunin’s impotence has lasted in large part because it fits in nicely with the psychological theories advanced by liberals to explain the radicalism of his generation. Thus Isaiah Berlin devoted his scholastic life to defending liberalism, that is, capitalism and the limited democratic rights established by the parliaments of Western Europe and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Paramount for him is the notion that there should be a rigid division between the political and economic spheres. Democracy is something that happens in the voting booth, and it ends at the door of the workplace, where the economic right of the employer to control property and labor—that is, human beings—trumps any notions of democracy. Bakunin and others of his generation went far beyond that cramped view of democracy to insist that liberty had to extend equally to every facet of life. That meant destroying serfdom and capitalism as well as repressive states, for these economic systems restricted human liberty as effectively as any political regime. To denounce this radical critique of capitalism, Berlin argues that Bakunin, Herzen, and others were wracked with guilt over Russia’s terrible poverty, backwardness, and drabness. Under the repressive reign of the tsar, these nobles could do nothing. They were isolated and unable to influence their world; they were, in a word, impotent. Frustrated politically, and, allegedly in Bakunin’s case, sexually, they retreated into a neurotic fantasy world of impossible ideals, Utopian programs, and mystical philosophy. For Berlin, their radical vision demonstrated the failure of Bakunin’s generation to understand the real world, by which Berlin means the world of pragmatic politics, of deals, compromise, and surrender. In short, Berlin’s project was to defend the status quo and to denounce other philosophies by any means that came to hand. That the psychological interpretations were based on no evidence made them better, for as untestable hypotheses, they could not be proved false.

Martin Malia brought Berlin’s seminal arguments to term. What attracted Bakunin and others to German idealism, Malia argued, was the promise thinkers such as Schiller, Schelling, and Fichte held out: that freedom was essentially a mental state that could be achieved regardless of social and political reality. When this illusion became impossible to sustain, Malia continues, the frustrated Russians turned to politics. But they were unable to transcend their early idealism, unable to take up the pragmatic, practical politics of accommodation that Malia deems appropriate. They remained committed to the ideal and the Utopian, precisely because these were unrealizable. For them, politics was the art of the impossible; their vision was religious in its blind faith, intensity, and the quest for perfection. Unable and unwilling to act effectively, Herzen, Turgenev, Bakunin, and the others became, in their own phrase, “superfluous men.” Malia expands on this to insist that the generation was “alienated” from the regime and everyday life. Used loosely, alienation, in the sense of standing apart from or turning away from the Russian regime, is an accurate enough description. But Malia goes further to imply that Bakunin’s generation was also “alienated” in the psychological sense, that is, powerless to make sense of their lives, unable to make meaningful connections with other people, completely separated from their culture, their fellow humans, and themselves. Following both Berlin and Malia, Aileen Kelly applies the concept of alienated social psychology specifically to Bakunin. In the same way that the meaning of “alienation” was subtly twisted to cast aspersions on political theory, so too did “impotence” morph from a metaphor of the nobility to political description to psychological explanation too salacious and easy for biographers to resist.

Yet as we have seen earlier, there is no evidence that Bakunin was impotent or that his colleagues were alienated in the psychological sense. The classical, contemporary alienated being ends up in a high school or a bell tower with a rifle; the closest these young Russians came to that was to found a journal titled Kolokol, or The Bell. They quarreled, they debated, they loved, and they hated; they drank and smoked and threw themselves into their culture and their studies. Taken together, these psychological arguments are a textbook example of the fallacy of begging the question, that is, basing a conclusion on an assumption that itself needs proving. To recap, the fallacious argument goes like this: political ideas the historian finds distasteful are offered as proof of mental imbalance. It is then argued that since people who hold those views are unbalanced, we can reject their political ideas without bothering to examine them.[117]

Bakunin and Herzen were alienated, that is, separated from, the regime in the sense that Russia had no place for them, no reasonable career they could take up. There is some truth to this, but it is easy to forget that both men rejected the regime before it rejected them. That is, it was their criticism of Russia that made them unemployable, not the lack of jobs that made them critics. The first source of their disenchantment was their social role as intellectuals. The regime had devoted considerable resources to educating young men as it tried to modernize and renew. The problem with education, however, is that once you encourage people to think, it becomes increasingly difficult to restrict what they will think about. Even engineers must be taught to think critically, to go beyond the surface appearance of structure and materials, to follow ideas where they lead, to insist that claims about truth be proved, not merely asserted by authority. Indeed, the first duty of the intellectual is to criticize, for only by stripping away false ideas can they begin to discover the truth. Roping off areas of inquiry only inspires intellectuals to trespass. That is why it is often argued that there is no such thing as a conservative intellectual. Conservative journalists, writers, academics, pundits there may be in plenty, but not intellectuals, for in accepting and supporting the status quo, they have given up meaningful criticism. Thus for a generation of Europeans, mostly men from a certain class and stratum, their first duty was, as Marx put it, to ruthlessly criticize everything. When they ran into orthodoxy and authority, they turned their criticism on the regime itself and launched themselves into politics. Bakunin and his generation did not retreat into fantasy worlds or strike out blindly. Romanticism was not a refuge: It was the first step in their critical, active response to the strictures of the regime. The next step was as obvious to them, and they turned eagerly to German idealism, especially the work of Fichte and Hegel, to change reality, not to praise it.

[83] Randolph, pages 232–5.

[84] See Randolph; Marshall Shatz, “Mikhail Bakunin and the Priamukhino Circle,” pages 1–29.

[85] Randolph, pages 241–5; Shatz, “Mikhail Bakunin and the Priamukhino Circle.”

[86] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his parents and Varvara, 11 June 1833.

[87] Cited in Randolph, page 239; letter to Beyer sisters, 18 December 1832.

[88] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his sisters, September 1833.

[89] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Liubov, autumn 1833.

[90] Shatz, “Mikhail Bakunin and the Priamukhino Circle.”

[91] Bakunin, letter to his sisters, 26 January 1834, cited in Randolph, pages 288–9.

[92] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, “Note extraite d’un resume d’histoire,” April-July 1834.

[93] Mendel, pages 18–9; Carr, pages 16–7.

[94] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his parents, 19 December 1834.

[95] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Beyer sisters, 11 July 1834.

[96] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to his parents, 4 October 1834; letter to his sisters, 19 December 1834, again indicates his loneliness and desire to be with his family; in the same letter he also comments on bad shape of his uniform and staving off depression; letter to Sergei N. Muraviev, end of January 1835.

[97] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Muraviev, end of January 1835.

[98] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to J. M. Neverov, 15 February 1836.

[99] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Neverov, 15 February 1836; see Shatz, “Michael Bakunin and the Priamukhino Circle,” page 9.

[100] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Varvara, 15 March 1840.

[101] Aksakov, Annenkov, and Belinsky, cited in Martine Del Giudice, “The Young Bakunin and Left Hegelianism: Origins of Russian Radicalism and the Theory of Praxis, 1814–1842,” Ph.D. thesis, McGill University, 1981, pages 85–6.

[102] Ivan Turgenev, Rudin, Richard Freeborn, trans., London: Penguin Books, 1975, page 98.

[103] Shatz, “Michael Bakunin and the Priamukhino Circle.”

[104] Turgenev cited in Marshall Shatz, “Bakunin, Turgenev, and Rudin,” in The Golden Age of Russian Literature and Thought, Derek Offord, ed., New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992, page 108.

[105] Cited in Carr, page 42.

[106] Edward J. Brown, in Stankevich and His Moscow Circle, 1830–1840, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966, outlines the relationships clearly, as does Shatz, in “Michael Bakunin and the Priamukhino Circle.” Brown also argues, correctly, that it is a mistake to attribute the rebellions of his sisters to Michael’s interference. Belinsky cited in Randolph, pages 342–53.

[107] Lydia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, Judson Rosengrant, ed., trans., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, pages 58–107.

[108] Belinsky cited in Shatz, “Bakunin, Turgenev, and Rudin,” page 107.

[109] See Mendel, pages 117–21; Shatz, “Bakunin, Turgenev, and Rudin”

[110] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Stankevich, September 1838; cited in Mendel, page 123.

[111] Cited in Randolph, pages 260 and 332.

[112] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Varvara, 11 October 1836, cited in Shatz, “Michael Bakunin and the Priamukhino Circle,” pages 13–4. In this letter, Bakunin was making reference to Liubov, who was faced with another potential suitor at the time.

[113] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Varvara, 9 March 1836; see also Randolph, page 289.

[114] See Randolph, page 314; Shatz, “Michael Bakunin and the Priamukhino Circle.”

[115] Bakounine: Oeuvres completes, letter to Alexandra and Natalie Beyer, 22 April 1835, cited in Shatz, “Michael Bakunin and His Biographers: The Question of Bakunin’s Sexual Impotence,” page 223. The section that follows borrows heavily on this work.

[116] Shatz, “Michael Bakunin and His Biographers: The Question of Bakunin’s Sexual Impotence,” page 224; Mendel, pages 142–3; Carr, pages 81 and 86–8.

[117] I am indebted to Randolph and Del Giudice, “The Young Bakunin and Left Hegelianism,” and especially Paul McLaughlin, Mikhail Bakunin: The Philosophical Basis of His Anarchism, New York: Algora Publishing, 2002, for this argument. Berlin’s take may be found in his article “A Remarkable Decade,” in Russian Thinkers, Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly, eds., Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978. Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin.