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Written in
Blood
 Written in

Blood
Revolutionary Terrorism and
Russian Literary Culture,
1861–1881

lynn ellen patyk

the university of wisconsin press

 Publication of this book has been made possible, in part,
by a grant from the First Book Subvention Program
of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
and through support from Dartmouth College.

The University of Wisconsin Press

1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor
Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
uwpress.wisc.edu

3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden

London WC2E 8LU, United Kingdom
eurospanbookstore.com

Copyright © 2017
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and
reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written
permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to
[email protected].

Printed in the United States of America

This book may be available in a digital edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Patyk, Lynn Ellen, author.
Title: Written in blood: revolutionary terrorism and Russian literary culture, 1861–1881 /
Lynn Ellen Patyk.
Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2017] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016045013 | ISBN 9780299312206 (cloth: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Russian literature—Political aspects. | Terrorism—Russia—History—
19th century. | Terrorism in literature. | Alexander II, Emperor of Russia, 1818–1881—
Assassination. | Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881—Political and social views.
Classification: LCC PG2975 .P38 2017 | DDC 891.709/35847081—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045013

On the cover, clockwise from upper left: portrait of Alexander Pushkin (1827) by Orest
Kiprensky; portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1872) by Vasily Perov; portrait of Nikolai
Gogol (c. 1841) by Fyodor Moller; Explosion at the Winter Palace 5 February 1880 by Pyotr
Petrovich Sokolov
 In memoriam

david a. j. macey

In completion of an incomplete
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
A Note on Translation, Transliteration, and
Other Technicalities xiii

Introduction 3
Prologue: “Just You Wait! (Uzho tebe!)” 18

Part One: Enigmas of A-synchrony

1. What Do Nihilists Do? 43

2. “Very Dangerous!” 52
3. Extraordinary Men and Gloomy Monsters 60
4. “Daring and Original Things” (Assez causé!) 67
5. “Vous trouvez que l’assassinat est grandeur d’âme?” 73
6. Spoiling One Idea to Save Another 82
7. A Gloomier Catechism 93

Part Two: Apparitional Terrorism in Demons

1. “Again, Like Before” 105

2. “The Only Possible Explanation of All These Wonders” 110

vii
viii Contents

3. Tarantulas with a Heart? 118

4. Dostoevsky’s Counterterrorism: “The First Step” 125
5. Dostoevsky’s Counterterrorism (Continued):
Laughter through Fear 134
6. The Unity of All Terrorism(s) 141

Part Three: “The Little Devil Sitting in Your Heart”

1. A Change of Heart 151

2. An Original Plan 155
3. Emotions on Trial: Witness Testimony and
the Prosecution 159
4. Emotions on Trial II: The Defense 167
5. Whose Rebellion? 176
6. False Christs and Little Devils 181
7. “That Is the Whole Answer” 192
8. The Khokhlakov Principle: Russian Society
in the Mirror of Revolutionary Terrorism 197
9. Again, Like Before (Again) 202

Part Four: The Beautiful Dead (Deed)

1. Writing in Blood 211

2. An Icon with Death 215
3. Celebrity Icons 224
4. Terror in Search of a Face 236

Epilogue: “All of Europe Thrills to the Horror” 247

Notes 263
Bibliography 309
Index 323
 Acknowledgments

It seems like I have been writing this book all my life, or even longer,
and so the debt of gratitude I have amassed is understandably enormous.
For the sake of argument, let’s begin with Mr. Redding, my sixth grade
social studies teacher, who affirmed that “yes” Russia was a European
country and acquiesced to my desire to do my final report for our Europe
unit on Russia. That was a coup. And then there was my seventh grade
English teacher, who did not report me to the FBI for writing a story
about a socially conscious terrorist who planted bombs in public rest-
rooms. Times were different then. Skip ahead years to my good fortune
in meeting Jessica Stern at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Jessica offered kindness, inspiration, expertise, and research work on
her book, The Ultimate Terrorists (2000), which rekindled my interest in
terrorism as I embarked on a Ph.D. in Russian literature.
Enter the angels of my destiny: professors Monika Greenleaf, Gregory
Freidin, and Gabriella Safran in the Slavic Department at Stanford. Each
of them contributed in their own way to my intellectual development,
and all were models of brilliant writers and original thinkers. Their un-
flagging support and friendship sustained me during challenging years
when it seemed unlikely, at best, that I would finish my doctorate. If
they ever doubted, they never showed it. Dan Edelstein also joined, at a

ix
x Acknowledgments

critical moment, in helping me think about terror/ism in a French

revolutionary context, and my very collegial and talented cohort
(Anne Eakin-Moss, Amelia Glaser, Luba Golburt, Elif Batuman, Sarah
Pankenier-Weld, and Martha Kelley) was a great boon. For my daily
bread during these years, I want to acknowledge the support of a
Mabelle McLeod Lewis fellowship, a Whiting fellowship, and a Mellon
postdoctoral fellowship, and for my spiritual bread, I will always
treasure the friendship of Gabriella Bockhaus, Andrea Orzoff, and
Robin Lyday.
Another spin of the Wheel of Fortune landed me at the University
of Florida in Gainesville. Galina Rylkova, Alexander Burak, Frank
Goodwin, and Galina Wladyka were warm and welcoming colleagues,
and Ingrid Kleespies, Conor O’Dwyer, and Michael Gorham were both
wonderful colleagues and next-door neighbors! I am especially grateful
to Michael, for his ceaseless encouragement, and to Joseph Spillane
in History, for leaving no stone unturned in his quest for my hire. In
the European History section, Sheryl Kroen, Alice Freifeld, Howard
Louthan and Andrea Sterk also shared ideas and made me feel like a
valued colleague, rather than a “trailing spouse.”
The Russian Department at Dartmouth College plucked me from
the swelling ranks of non-tenure track faculty in 2012. I am grateful to
Deborah Garretson, John Kopper, Victoria Somoff, Mikhail Gronas, and
Alfia Rakova for their warmth, collegiality, and mentorship. The German
Department is something of a second home, with Irene Kacandes,
Yuliya Komska, and especially Petra and Michael McGillen offering
invaluable advice and unstinting friendship. The book that you hold in
your hands assumed its current and final form during these years, thanks
to Dartmouth’s resources, its impressive undergraduates (including my
research assistant, John Howard), and generous writing and research
time. I am grateful to those who graciously agreed to read portions of
the manuscript, especially to Susan Morrissey, Randall Law, Derek
Offord, Randall Poole, Martin Miller, Andrew Chapman, and John
Kopper for their insightful and generous comments. The University of
Wisconsin Press’s readers, Susan Morrissey and Anthony Anemone,
offered thoughtful and judicious suggestions and heartening encourage-
ment. I am also grateful to a third, anonymous reader, who alerted me
to how it was possible to read this book.
Gwen Walker at University of Wisconsin Press deftly shepherded
this book through the review and publication process, asking thoughtful
and thought-provoking questions when necessary. Where would I be
Acknowledgments xi

without editorial assistance? I am grateful to Adam Mehring and Judith

Robey of University of Wisconsin Press and to Avram Brown, for his
astute editorial assistance. Carla Marolt provided fantastic options for
the cover design. The index was prepared by J. Naomi Linzer.
An initial version of Part Four Chapter 3 first appeared in The Slavic
Review under the title “Remembering ‘The Terrorism:’ Sergei Stepniak-
Kravchinsky’s Underground Russia” (68, no. 4 [2009]: 758–781).
There are those who had almost nothing to do with the book, but
without whom . . . I’m proud and delighted to have as my lifelong
companions my sisters, Lisa and Laura. My in-laws, Fran and Larry
Finkel, provided every type of support and sustenance imaginable,
from childcare to beef brisket and beyond. By proofreading this manu-
script, Fran has exceeded anything in the annals of mother-in-lawhood,
and I am deeply grateful. My funny and adorable boys, Max and Leo,
are grateful to my book for the hours of extra screen time when Mom
was happily occupied, and Mom is grateful to Nintendo. Chloe, our
Golden Doodle, is also grateful to the book for long, meandering walks
and the absentminded second dinners. But there is someone who has
no reason to be grateful to this book; my husband, Stuart Finkel, who
has sacrificed months away from his family every year to return to the
University of Florida, so that I could enjoy the benefits of a tenure-track
position at Dartmouth. I am inexpressibly grateful for his love, support,
research assistance, and sacrifice.
My most enthusiastic and uncritical readers—my parents—long ago
passed from the scene. I hope heaven has a good interlibrary loan. This
book is in memory of Gloria Patyk née Czarnecki (1941–2002), Gary
Patyk (1939–2008), and Jean Patyk (1915–2016), all of whom I love, miss,
and see in my dreams.
 A Note on Translation, Transliteration,
and Other Technicalities

Many of the works cited are classics of Russian literature that have
been translated by professional translators and scholars. Where such
outstanding translations exist, I use and cite them. Where I have relied
instead on the original Russian in order to underscore a particular
nuance, I cite only the original in the notes. If no translation is cited, that
means that I have provided it. For the convenience of the Anglophone
reader, I have anglicized familiar Russian proper names; otherwise,
I used the Library of Congress system of transliteration. The word
“nihilist,” which occurs frequently in this text, presented a particular
problem. In contemporary Russian sources “nihilist” is not capitalized;
in Anglophone sources that refer much more specifically to Russian
radicals consecrated to revolutionary violence, “Nihilist” is capitalized.
I have observed this distinction to the best of my ability.

xiii
Written in
Blood
 Introduction
If we postulate as polar opposites “natural horror” (earthquakes,
ecological disasters, death by prolonged illness) and “art horror”
(the genre that includes Dracula and Stephen King, thrillers as well
as Artaud and Beckett) terrorism would be somewhere in between.
zulaika and douglass, Terror and Taboo

The Great Bequest

In July 1877, in the course of a lengthy review of his great compatriot

Leo Tolstoy’s latest novel Anna Karenina, Fyodor Dostoevsky struck an
unexpectedly plaintive note: “If we have literary works of such power
and execution, then why can we not eventually have our own science as
well, and our own economic and social solutions? Why does Europe
refuse us our independence, our own word? These are questions that
cannot help but be asked. It would be absurd to suppose that nature
had endowed us only with literary talents.”1
Yes, absurd, even at the zenith of literature’s social relevance in mid-
nineteenth century Russia, even to a writer such as Fyodor Dostoevsky.
For a great nation such as Russia, literary talents—however big—were
too little. Dostoevsky took the absurdity of this proposition as proof in
advance that Russia was destined to make an even greater bequest to
the world than mere words, and encouragement that his literary project

3
4 Introduction

was sure to work out precisely what this bequest might be. Arguably,
Dostoevsky’s quest was cut short when the writer died without pro-
ducing the capstone of his career, the planned sequel to The Brothers
Karamazov. But some two months later, on April 11, 1881, what may be
taken as a confirmation that Dostoevsky’s ambition for Russia had in
fact been realized came from an indubitable source. In a letter to his
daughter, Jenny, the aging Karl Marx inquired: “Have you been follow-
ing the trial of the assassins in Petersburg? They are sterling people
through and through, sans pose mélodramatique, simple, businesslike,
heroic. Shouting and doing are irreconcilable opposites . . . they try to
teach Europe that their modus operandi is a specifically Russian and
historically inevitable method about which there is no more reason to
moralise—for or against—than there is about the earthquake in Chios.”2
In 1881 Marx was struck by what became one of Russia’s most mo-
mentous contributions to political modernity, a new “modus operandi,”
a strategy of political violence that would become known as “terror-
ism.”3 Marx was most taken by its laconic heroism and unpretentious
stoicism—and by the fact that it did not upset his theory of revolution
too much. This form of flagrant voluntarism was, Marx temporized,
ultimately inevitable in Russia and no more subject to moral judgment
than a natural disaster. As far as Marx was concerned, Dostoevsky
needn’t have worried, much less moralized.
My study begins, in any case, with the point on which the two men
converged: the valorization of the deed over the word. Even for Dostoev­
sky, there were words and then there were words, by which he meant
something entirely different than those produced by even such literary
talents as Tolstoy. Written in Blood in fact argues that revolutionary
terrorism was just as much Russia’s (literary) word as its (revolutionary)
deed, and that it issued from the bourn of a literary culture whose
marks it indelibly bore. This is why there must be a literary history of
terrorism. Without Russia’s far from negligible “literary talents” it is by
no means certain that there would be any historical terrorism at all.

Terrorism: A Story about the Violence

“The assassins” whom Marx praised were six members of the first
revolutionary organization that devoted itself to terrorism, the People’s
Will (Narodnaia volia). After eighteen excruciating months and six
Introduction 5

failed attempts, they had achieved their ultimate goal: the assassination
of Tsar Alexander II on March 1, 1881. The three-day trial of the conspir-
ators, Andrei Zhelyabov, Sophia Perovskaya, Nikolai Rysakov, Timofei
Mikhailov, Nikolai Kibalchich and Gesia Gelfman, was covered more
thoroughly in the international press than in the severely censored
Russian media, and Karl Marx, along with the rest of the world, was
duly apprised of the efficacy of this innovation from the depths of a
backward “oriental despotism,” as the Russian Empire appeared to
“Western eyes.”4
Marx was struck by this peculiarly Russian “modus operandi,” but
the “Russian Method,” as it came to be known, was just one strategy of
sub-state political violence to mature in the last third of the nineteenth
century. Other—possibly more innovative—means were employed
by the Irish-American Fenians agitating for Irish independence from
England. The Fenians commenced a dynamite campaign in January 1881
with an attack on a military installation in Manchester, but followed by
planting bombs at key symbolic and strategic locations (Scotland Yard,
the offices of The Times, the Tower of London, the Nelson Column),
heedless of London’s bustling crowds.5 Yet the Fenians did not win
comparable recognition for their modus operandi from the likes of
Karl Marx or from historians of terrorism, who with few exceptions
have conferred the dubious honor of inventing terrorism upon the Rus-
sian revolutionaries—or “Nihilists,” as they were called—of the mid-
nineteenth century.6 In fact, the title of “first” has gone to the Russians
less on the basis of actual chronological priority (the movements were
roughly contemporaneous, as was Ku Klux Klan terrorism in the Resto-
ration South) than because Russia as the birthplace of modern terrorism
is a better story, as opposed to other stories that would locate the birth-
place of modern terrorism in the United States (as would be the case
with both the Irish-American Fenians and the Ku Klux Klan).7
How, then, did Russia win this unenviable distinction? If histories
and chronologies of terrorism are parsed, the Russians’ priority is justi-
fied on two counts: their “spectacular successes” (above all, the assassi-
nation of Alexander II) and the fact that the Russians wrote.8 A case in
point: Sergei Nechaev’s 1869 pamphlet Catechism of a Revolutionary in-
variably figures as a seminal event in all chronologies of terrorism (no
matter that Nechaev’s actual deed was anything but a “spectacular
success”), even while Dmitry Karakozov’s failed tsaricide in 1866 and
the Fenian-linked attempt on Queen Victoria in 1872 are frequently
6 Introduction

omitted.9 Without question, the Catechism is a notorious manual for

waging terrorist warfare that would school subsequent generations of
the most diverse national backgrounds.10 Yet the pages of the Catechism,
especially its first sections dealing with the revolutionist’s “attitudes,”
are torn directly from Russian literature, and Nechaev’s Revolutionist
is immediately recognizable as only the latest model of “gloomy mon-
ster”11 to roll off the literary assembly line following Turgenev’s Bazarov,
Chernyshevsky’s Rakhmetov, and Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov.12
In his foundational The Age of Terrorism, Walter Laqueur noted this
special relationship between terrorism and Russian literature, observing
that “[it] was easier for Russian [writers] to understand their own terror-
ists” than for Western writers to understand theirs, and concluding that
terrorists “emerge as credible human beings from Russian literature.”13
Of course Laqueur means that Russian writers succeeded in making
their terrorists fully believable, three-dimensional characters, but his
syntax creates an ambiguity that allows for another reading; namely,
that terrorists emerged from Russian literature in a sense similar to the
claim, attributed to Dostoevsky, that “All of Russian Literature emerged
from beneath Gogol’s overcoat.”14 As I will argue at greater length over
the course of the book, there is considerable—and even some literal—
merit in the metaphor that Russian literature served as revolutionary
terrorism’s “overcoat,” whosoever’s the generative overcoat is said to
be—Radishchev’s or Pushkin’s or Gogol’s or, most fittingly, Dostoev­
sky’s. From Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, to
Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, to Nechaev’s Catechism, to Turgenev’s
“The Threshold,” Russians wrote their terrorism into being in every
available genre—travelogue, pamphlet, lyrical poem, novel, prose
poem, profile, sketch, and memoir—in addition to writing it in blood.

For those outside of Russian studies, the assertion that literature played
a critical role in the historical emergence of terrorism may seem an
overblown and at the same time transparently opportunistic attempt to
claim some contemporary relevance for my chosen field of study. And
so I submit that in addition to and inseparably from terrorism, Russian
literature at the same time set forth a new ethos of nonviolence, the old
ethos having been long since established (and long since ignored) in the
Gospels.15 Terrorism and nonviolence were two branches of the same
tree, two sleeves of the same overcoat.
Introduction 7

It is no coincidence that the advent of what Walter Laqueur has called

“the age of terrorism” coincided with the “age of literature,” an age on
the threshold of a mass, global media in which literature—particularly
in the form of the great realist novel—enjoyed a particular intellectual
caché and social relevance.16 Literature enjoyed an especially authori-
tative moral status in Russia because, as the doyen of the radicals—
Alexander Herzen—so eloquently put it, “in a country where the people
is deprived of social freedom, literature is the sole pulpit from the
height of which the cry of the people’s indignation and conscience
makes itself heard.”17 Literature offered a public forum for the discus-
sion of politically charged social and economic issues, although this
discussion often proceeded obliquely, by allusion in various forms (the
famous Aesopian language). Readers therefore approached literature
with the utmost seriousness, expecting and demanding that it offer
solutions to the “accursed” and “eternal” questions, the most pressing
of which was how to live.
Literature was not shy about providing the most detailed models
on that score. As Russian pioneers in the semiotics of behavior have
demonstrated, beginning already at the dawn of secular literature in
the eighteenth century, it offered behavioral codes for emulation in the
day-to-day life of educated Russians.18 If Russians were more receptive
to such artificial models than Western Europeans, it was because a series
of “natural disasters” in the form of cataclysmic political overhauls
initiated from above (Peter the Great, the Great Reforms) disrupted
traditional behavioral models. Old ways were rendered obsolete, “re-
actionary,” or just plain nonsensical, and the behavioral wheel had to
be reinvented. In addition to models for discreet behaviors, literature
offered for imitation (not only in Russia) what Lydia Ginzburg has
termed “historical personalities” that resonated with an epoch: a
Werther or a Childe Harold or a Chatsky.19 However, it was literary
realism—a style that laid claim to unmediated mimesis—that was
charged with cutting the New Person from whole cloth at the most
fraught moment, at the dawn of Russia’s post-feudal order in the late
1850s.20 As the historian Susan Morrissey put it, “The ‘new person’ was
born on the boundary between literature and life,” with the literary
critic as midwife.21 It should little surprise that this was a double birth,
and that “the new person’s” fraternal twin, the terrorist, was born at the
same time. As Herzen remarked, “this mutual effect of people on books
8 Introduction

and books on people” resulted in some strange things; certainly, caution-

ary tales about the perils of “unnatural” births, the unholy offspring of
“art [horror]” and “life [horror]”abound, and this is one of them.22

Fantastic Realities

No study of terrorism, however, can progress very far in its narrative

before running up against the definitional problem, the problem that
there is no consensus, and much contention, about what “terrorism” is.
The deep roots of the controversy lie not in how one characterizes the
violence (as random, symbolic, extranormal); the underlying problem is
whether terrorism is in fact the violence, or whether it is something else.
The positivist or actor-based approach that has long held sway in terror-
ism studies assumed that an actor (usually an individual or non-state
group) committed an act of violence that was essentially, self-evidently
terroristic. Actor-based approaches concern themselves overwhelmingly
with identifying the causes of terrorism for the ultimate purpose of pre-
venting it: what causes terrorism on the social, economic, political, and
individual psychological level? By contrast, the social constructivist or
“critical” approach to terrorism took flight on the truism that “one man’s
terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” and that the “terrorist” exists
in contemporary discourse only as a pejorative, designating those whose
violence one opposes. From the critical point of view, “terrorism” is
largely a discursive product that “lacks any ontological fixity.” Instead,
it “only exists as the outcome of a complex, ceaseless dialectic between
acts of violence and those witnessing, describing and interpreting those
violences.”23
These approaches are hardly mutually exclusive; both are in fact
necessary to account for the emergence of terrorism in revolutionary
Russia. Whereas the social constructivist approach is a latecomer that
has been most fruitfully applied in the post factum analysis and decon-
struction of terrorism discourse, here I will argue that in Russia terrorism
existed as a “social fact” before it manifested as a “brute fact”—as
concrete acts of violence committed by revolutionary actors—and before
it was designated by the neologism “terrorism.”24 In Russia, the attribu-
tion of exceptional events (whether actual or anticipated) to political
actors with political intent was independent of the actual existence of
those actors and, in the context of revolutionary hopes and fears, con-
jured those actors. In short, terrorism and terrorists existed in fantasy
Introduction 9

before they manifested in reality, and to the extent that terrorism is

always an interpretation of an act (of violence), it hovers on the boundary
of the real and the imagined. The hallmark of the fantastic, according to
the literary theorist Tsvetan Todorov, is the reader’s irresolvable hesita-
tion as to the reality of narrated events, and it is precisely this hesitation
concerning whether an act (of violence) is terrorism or not that lends it
a fantastic quality.25 Ultimately, to the extent that terrorism enthralls
our emotions and imagination and derives its power from them, it is
“fantastic.”
It is no coincidence, I think, that from the 1840s Russia onward, the
“fantastic” and all such phenomena associated with what detractors
categorized as the non-real (German idealism, philosophical abstrac-
tions, the imaginary) were in retreat. In the context of the heated polem-
ics of the following decades, the word “fantastic” became a pejorative,
used to discredit and stigmatize one’s opponents’ most fundamental
ideals as ludicrous and absurdly unreal—and to stigmatize literature as
itself a confection suitable only for adolescent minds. With the addi-
tional impetus and luster lent by positivism and materialism, the “fact,”
the “real,” and “realism” became the radical intelligentsia’s touchstones
and relentless mantra, so that we might say that the literary history of
terrorism in Russia is one in which the fantastic becomes horrifyingly
real.
In Russia the political ground for such fantastic apparitions was
provided by the concept of kramola, which is most often translated as
“sedition” but refers much more broadly to any kind of open or con-
spiratorial revolt against the established order. In the original Old
Church Slavonic, it denoted a revolt against God, and its more modern
figurative usage referred to something prohibited or forbidden.26 In
key respects, kramola is a fitting counterpart to our modern “terrorism”
in that the term is a pejorative rhetorical (rather than legal) term denoting
an abstraction, but one that can be reified as the kramol’nik, the “sedition-
ist.” When terrorism and revolutionary terrorists appeared in Russia,
they were first experienced as part of this long familiar, intractable
kramola, and kramol’nik was used interchangeably in contemporary
discourse with other words, such as fanatik (fanatic), zlodei (villain, evil-
doer), or zloumyshlennik (villain, or literally “evil-thinker”) to denote
the figure that ultimately became known as the terrorist.27
It is worth emphasizing that in Russian “evil thinkers” are indis-
tinguishable from “evil doers.” Russia’s first “modern” law code, the
Ulozhenie of 1649, held word, deed, and intention of harm to the divinely
10 Introduction

anointed tsar equally culpable and punishable by excruciating death.

Most infamously, though, the Ulozhenie required anyone with knowl-
edge of such words, deeds, or intent on the part of another to inform
the authorities. The resonant phrase for declaring such knowledge and
initiating an investigation (in which torture was the primary means)
was “Word and Deed” (slovo i delo).28 Whereas in the West these two
concepts became increasingly separate and distinct in legal, moral, and
ontological terms, such distinctions remained hazy in Russia, providing
the atmospherics for fantastic realities. With the boundary between
word and deed thus blurred, depending upon “those witnessing, de-
scribing and interpreting,” the suspect word could easily cross the line
to become a sinister deed—to become, in other words, terrorism.
Despite these preexisting conditions, the terrorist and terrorism
were something new and unprecedented.29 The symbolic center of
modern terrorism was the individual subject/actor, precisely that crucial
component missing from terrorism as a “social fact.” And Russian liter-
ature fleshed out this center not only by default, because the individual
is the focal point of modern fiction and the bearer of the heroic, but
because the writer as emblematic of the modern subject was on a colli-
sion course with the autocratic state, predestined by the nature of his
craft for sedition. Therefore, the search for prototypes for the modern
terrorist leads not only to the early modern kramol’nik, but also inevitably
to the writer himself.

A Moral Monster

Historians certainly cannot be accused of neglecting the role played by

the writer and Russian literature in the genesis of the revolutionary
movement, but they have generally subsumed literature under the his-
tory of ideas, and terrorism under the history of the revolutionary move-
ment. Moreover, histories of the revolutionary movement have quite un-
derstandably foregrounded the contribution of radical writers to radical
thought, without inquiring how non-radical texts—how indeed literary
culture as a whole—might be implicated in the emergence of revolution-
ary terrorism.
As a literary history of terrorism this book does not attempt to trace
direct lines of causality, or identify points of one-to-one correspondence
between a literary model of the terrorist or of terrorism and actual
historical terrorists. To do so would be to begin our story too late:
Introduction 11

terrorists were not explicitly portrayed in Russian legal literature until

after 1905, by which time a “second wave” of revolutionary terrorism
was already breaking upon the shore. Nor should my argument be mis-
taken as a monocausal explanation “Russian literature caused terror-
ism” or a denial that the brute violence of terrorism in fact existed, and
exists. Instead, I attempt to describe a subtle and intricate feedback loop
between art and life, between cultural representations—many of which
preceeded the actual manifestation of terrorism—and political violence.
The tropes for conceiving and interpreting violent political opposition
and its agents crystallized in literature, and along with extra-literary
factors, shaped the modus operandi that won international notoriety as
“the Russian method.”
In their seminal study of terrorism discourse, Terror and Taboo,
Zulaika and Douglass observe that in contemporary discourse “the
terrorist” has taken the place of the “wild man,” “savage,” or “barbar-
ian” as the monstrous new enemy of the human race (hostis humani
generis).30 Like these early modern existential threats to civilization,
“the terrorist” is spun from dehumanizing and demonizing rhetoric,
rhetoric that not coincidentally mirrors the terrorists’ own. As a liminal
figure who unleashes chaos and destruction from the margins of society,
this concept of the terrorist exhibits a formlessness that lends itself to
dichotomies and the ability to encompass “the seemingly contradictory
functions of hero and criminal, guardian angel and demon, martyr and
murderer” in the social imaginary.31
As a literary history (or better, genealogy) of terrorism, my narrative
traces the interplay of formlessness and form—and therefore also the
wide variety of forms that terrorism and the terrorist assume over the
period of my study. Despite its misleading “ism,” terrorism does not
constitute an ideology but is a method that can be wielded in the name
of any ideology, from radical populism, to Christian fundamentalism,
to Islamism. At its most basic structural level, terrorism is “a frontal
assault on any norm, moral, political or social.”32 In a political context,
terrorism becomes a violent contest over political legitimacy, one best
understood not as a one-sided tactic but as a dynamic that involves “the
antagonistic interplay between state official and insurgent leaders.”33
This interplay has social/discursive and brute/physical dimensions,
which together determine the way in which terrorism is historically
actualized.
If the most salient feature of modern terrorism is the targeting of
“the noncombatant public and soft civilian targets of opportunity,”
12 Introduction

then the form that terrorism in Russia ultimately took begs the question
of whether the “first modern terrorism” was “modern” or not.34 The
fact that in autocratic Russia power was still personally embodied by
the tsar conditioned the emergence of what the historian Manfred
Hildermeier has called populist political terrorism, in which a self-
elected revolutionary elite targeted the tsar or other officials held respon-
sible for the regime’s malfeasance.35 In the face of government arbitrari-
ness and absence of rule of law, the terrorists presented themselves, to
borrow Herzen’s resonant phrase, as “the unwritten moral check on
power” that was otherwise lacking.36 Russian revolutionaries effectively
adapted the model of tyrannicide, a legible and valorized form with no
native antecedents, as the centerpiece of a systematic tactic of political
violence underwritten by legitimating modern ideologies (the will of
the people) and the most modern of destructive technologies—dynamite.
After the assassination of Alexander II, the Executive Committee of the
People’s Will addressed an open letter to his heir, Alexander III, de-
manding precisely the import of those rights and civil liberties necessary
for the unimpeded development of the individual. Thus the People’s
Will parlayed “backwardness” (absolutism) and “imitativeness” (tyran-
nicide) into originality—and murder into martyrdom.
Historians have wondered at the terrorists’ oversight or naïveté in
1) lacking an endgame for a political overthrow of monarchy; and 2) as-
suming that the murder of the tsar would dispose his son and heir to
accede to the murderers’ demands. The resources at the People’s Will’s
disposal were obviously insufficient to accomplish the revolutionary
transfer of power. Instead, their hope was that their deed, in rending the
fabric of the established order, would create the conditions for a radical
socio-political transformation. That proved an unrealizable fantasy;
nonetheless, even after the organizational demise of the People’s Will, its
legacy in the form of terrorism’s powerful representations inspired
“national liberation fighters” in revolutionary and anti-colonial struggles
across the globe.

A Literar y Histor y of Terrorism

Possibly the most incisive definition of terrorism available is the one

offered by David Rapoport, as “the use of violence to provoke conscious-
ness, to evoke certain feelings of sympathy and revulsion.”37 Historians
Introduction 13

of terrorism have recognized that it is not so much grievance but the

consciousness of grievance that gives rise to terrorism.38 Consciousness
and its provocation were the province of Russian literature and the
métier of one writer in particular—the great novelist Fyodor Dostoev­
sky. Every major Russian writer of his era wrote about terrorism,
whether explicitly or obliquely, yet Dostoevsky stands out for his re-
markable attunement to and synchrony with revolutionary terrorism.
In a feat of dialectical virtuosity, Dostoevsky had reclaimed the pejora-
tive “fantastic” as his peculiar badge of honor, to later arrive at a syn-
thetic literary method of “fantastic realism”—a method ideally suited
to discern and anticipate such “fantastic realities” as terrorism. The
core three parts of this book are dedicated to what I refer to as Dostoev­
sky’s “terrorism trilogy”: Crime and Punishment (1866), Demons (1870–
72), and The Brothers Karamazov (1878–80), works that coincided with
watershed moments in the historical evolution of terrorism. These
novels far surpass the anti-nihilist novels of his contemporaries both in
their artistry and in the deeper, more nuanced, and more prescient
representation of political violence. Through close readings of these
works and their immediate historical context, I track Dostoevsky’s dy-
namic understanding and complex relationship to this still unknown,
unfolding phenomenon. As will become amply clear, Dostoevsky pos-
sessed unique insight into the discursive construction of terrorism, the
vicious circle of revolutionary and state violence, and terrorism’s trajec-
tory in the modern world.
While Dostoevsky is generally considered a loyal monarchist and
political conservative with little sympathy for nihilist ideas, my readings
uncover the deep-seated reasons for his unusual attunement to those
ideas, as well as the surprising alignment between Dostoevsky’s own
literary method and “the Russian” one. This is in no way to suggest that
Dostoevsky lent explicit support to radical ideas or tactics, or that his
writings served for young radicals as Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is
to Be Done? did, but that is not because Dostoevsky did not aspire to
such influence. Rather, my point is that Dostoevsky was preeminently
both creature and creator of the same literary culture whence terror-
ism issued. Moreover, unlike his peers Tolstoy and Turgenev, he never
ceded the field and was ceaselessly engaged in literary and journalistic
work on political themes from the advent of the Great Reforms to his
death in 1881. No less than his radical contemporaries, Dostoevsky
himself longed for the advent of the “new Russian man,” and his literary
14 Introduction

art provided the venue for the creation of this image according to his
own specifications—specifications that strangely mirrored those of his
ideological opponents.
Finally, it would be remiss to ignore the fact that Dostoevsky’s
own self-conception as a writer rested on audacity and that his literary
aspirations led him to alight on the same method that enticed the revo-
lutionaries: murder. In the three novels under discussion, Dostoevsky
employs a sensational act of violence with political implications to rivet
his audience’s attention and provoke “sympathy and horror.” Yet this
was all in the service of a higher goal, which for Dostoevsky consisted
in pronouncing a “new word”: a momentously field-shifting utterance
that would have the transformative efficacy of a deed.
Terrorism, like Dostoevsky’s “new word,” was a long time in coming.
In the spirit of a genealogy, the prologue of this book, “Just You Wait!”
(Uzho tebe!), begins before the concept (Begriff) and tactic of terrorism
do and marks the time between terrorism’s appearance as a literary-
discursive phantasm and its actual historical manifestation. This offers
fertile ground for probing terrorism’s “lack of ontological fixity” and
observing that with terrorism, as with ghost stories, the ghosts’/terror-
ists’ reality is beside the point: the stories are what scare. In fact, the first
blow struck against autocracy was not a bomb, but a book: Alexander
Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow was construed as an
assault on the sovereign by no less than Catherine II herself, who meted
out exemplary punishment. The writer Radishchev’s word/deed and
Catherine’s reaction to it, I argue, provides the schema for revolutionary
terrorism, and Russia’s most celebrated writers, Alexander Pushkin
and Nikolai Gogol, subsequently offer revisions and variations of this
scenario, driving it more deeply into the Russian cultural imaginary.
Moreover, Radishchev models the ethos and pathos of terrorism via his
surrogate narrators and ultimately offers the moral/legal justification
for retributive violence based on natural right. The prologue remains a
prologue, however, and the waiting doesn’t end soon enough for Fyodor
Dostoevsky, who in December 1849 suffered a repeat of Radishchev’s
fate and was arrested and sentenced to death for incautious words.
Luckily for everyone, Dostoevsky’s true culpability remained undis-
covered so that his sentence was commuted, and he lived to write an-
other day.
Part One, “Enigmas of A-synchrony,” examines the befuddlement in
store for contemporaries and posterity thanks to the historical advent
of terrorism without “terrorists” and terrorists without “terrorism,” in
Introduction 15

1862 and 1866, respectively. In the St. Petersburg fires of 1862, a narrative
of terrorism was fanned equally by Peter Zaichnevsky’s incendiary
pamphlet “Young Russia” and by rumors emanating from “literate
spheres,” while the presumed terrorist-arsonists were nowhere to be
found. In the meantime, writers and critics set the stage for the appear-
ance of “a man of action,” “an extraordinary man” suited to the peculiar
conditions of an uneven struggle against an internal enemy. Yet when
Dmitry Karakozov lurched out of the shadows on April 4, 1866, to
commit the first act of revolutionary terrorism, he failed to be the first
“terrorist.”39 By contrast, Rodion Raskolnikov, the hero of Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment, is the first fully—too fully—imagined terrorist in
Russian literature. Dostoevsky crams all of terrorism’s contradictions
into Raskolnikov, whose practice falls short of his theory so that he
commits an ordinary murder instead. This blunder becomes the source
of Raskolnikov’s self-recriminations in the second half of Crime and
Punishment and drives him to take his theory of political murder to the
“outermost pillars.” I then conclude by pointing to the ways in which
the revolutionary agitator, Sergei Nechaev, might have benefited from
the mistakes of his fictional predecessor, had he heeded Raskolnikov’s
lessons.
Part Two, “Apparitional Terrorism in Demons,” begins with the
premise that the historical incident upon which Dostoevsky’s novel
was based, Sergei Nechaev’s murder of the student Ivanov in November
1869, was not apprehended by contemporaries as “terrorism.” Rather,
it was Dostoevsky who made terrorism visible in his novel before it had
historically appeared. This accounts for the paradox that Demons simul-
taneously is and is not about terrorism. Dostoevsky consistently under-
mines the actual existence of a terrorist plot and an international revo-
lutionary conspiracy, the better to illustrate terrorism as a “social fact”
constituted by the town’s reception of Stavrogin’s and Peter Verkhoven-
sky’s outrages. Nonetheless, Dostoevsky’s prescience and penetration
extends to all forms of terrorism, and Part Two considers Demons as
both a project of preemption and a pioneering study of the phenome-
non. In addition to anticipating the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of
the individual terrorist as they would evolve in “the Russian Method,”
Demons exposes the sentimental tropes that underlie the novel’s narra-
tives of (self)destruction and the reciprocally constructing fantasies of
the “terrorist” and the “counterterrorist.” Ultimately, Demons (re)pre­
sents a fantastic menagerie of types of political violence that have been
called “terrorism,” and Dostoevsky offers unusual insight into the
16 Introduction

fundamental discursive mechanism underlying terror/ism in all of its

forms.
Historians have long regarded the trial of Vera Zasulich in March
1878 for the attempted assassination of the governor of St. Petersburg
as inaugurating the first wave of terrorism that culminated in tsaricide
in 1881. While literary scholars have noted the influence of Zasulich’s
trial on Dmitry’s trial for parricide at the end of The Brothers Karamazov,
its far-reaching influence in the novel has not been fully appreciated.
Part Three, “The Little Devil Sitting in Your Heart,” therefore begins
with a close reading of the Zasulich trial in order to demonstrate how
her lawyer, Peter Alexandrov, presented Zasulich as a sentimental
subject and her act of violence as “a cry of the heart.” Dostoevsky’s own
literary debt to the trial becomes clear in the pivotal chapter “Rebel-
lion,” but also in the children’s plot, where Dostoevsky recapitulates
the dilemma of outraged feeling and the desire to retaliate in order to
show that the little devil of terrorism sits in even the most innocent of
hearts: it is in crucial respects the reaction of innocence to evil in the
world. Yet the solution to retributive violence that Dostoevsky proposes
through the elder Zosima, as well as Alyosha’s foundational speech at
the stone, mirrors in important ways the phenomenon of terrorism that
the novel seeks to overcome.
Part Four, “The Beautiful Dead (Deed),” commences the story of
“the Terrorism’s” afterlife, when the party of the People’s Will had
been decimated in Russia. Only then does the terrorist’s image emerge
from obscurity to be broadcast to the world. Writers and visual artists in
Russia and abroad, such as Ivan Turgenev, Ilya Repin, Vsevolod Gar­
shin, and the émigré revolutionary Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky, sought
to create the terrorist’s body and face as legible signs, and yet the moral
duality implicit in their crime/deed of heroic martyrdom immensely
complicated the task of rendering an unambiguous image. The image
also posed a challenge to the writer’s word, and Part Four examines the
anxiety inspired in writers and government officials alike by the mimetic
power of terrorism and the terrorist.
The Epilogue, “All of Europe Thrills to the Horror,” sketches the
reception of Russian Nihilism cum terrorism in Western Europe in the
1880s as a preliminary investigation of how and why the Russian brand
won the distinction of being the first manifestation of “modern terror-
ism.” In conclusion, I come full circle by showing how Nihilism and
terrorism were instrumental in arousing Western interest in Russia
more generally, and especially in Russian literature, which was regarded
Introduction 17

as the privileged source for understanding this new scourge. On more

than one level, then, terrorism succeeded as “the use of violence to
provoke consciousness, to evoke certain feelings of sympathy and re-
vulsion”; in this case, to awaken the West to Russia as the birthplace of
the men—or “monsters”—of the future.
 Prologue
“ Just You Wait! (Uzho tebe!)”
As in Hamlet, the Prince of the rotten state, everything begins by
the apparition of a specter, more precisely, by the waiting for this
apparition. The anticipation is at once impatient, anxious, and
fascinated: the thing (“this thing”) will end up coming.
jacques derrida, Specters of Marx

K arl Marx’s Communist Manifesto famously begins with an act of

political prophecy that is cast as an act of ghost seeing. “A specter is
haunting Europe,” intones the manifesto, but in the ironic rather than
Gothic mode.1 For the inveterate materialist, Marx, there could of
course be no “real” specter. Instead, “the heads of Europe . . . Pope and
Tsar; Metternich and Guizot; French Radicals and German Spies”—
all alike are spooked by what amounts to “nursery tales” of commu-
nism that they themselves have fabricated. Marx’s sly intention is to
debunk these tales by turning on the lights and “manifesting” the real
thing!2
Since the excesses of the French Revolution had unsettled European
imaginations, Gothic tropes had been marshaled to frame the menace of
revolution and terror in terms of all the horrors—natural, supernatural,

18
Prologue 19

historical—known to man: demons and monsters, diabolical secret

societies and the Spanish Inquisition.3 Marx’s spectral metaphor, how-
ever, was certainly better suited to the acts of proto-terrorism that
punctuated the first half of the nineteenth century than to the proletarian
revolution that he heralded. Throughout the first half of the century,
individuals or small conspiratorial bands had materialized suddenly,
seemingly out of nowhere, and wreaked a terrible vengeance only to
suffer an equally terrible punishment. But they continued to live on in
popular memory and lore.4 These “specters,” wielding daggers and,
more devastatingly, “infernal machines,” haunted the nightmares and
waking hours of the heads of Europe.5 Napoleon I, the ultimate usurper,
political assassin, and “enemy of the human race,” himself constituted
one of the most frequent targets of assassination plots, as did the succes-
sion of restored Bourbon monarchs.
The emergence of terrorism in Russia is unthinkable without this
larger European context of social revolution and national liberation.
Indeed, la Grande Revolution was the fountainhead of the revolutionary
imaginaire, and revolutionary leaders such as Robespierre and Marat
served as the models and idols for Russian radicals, as did the charis-
matic leaders of national liberation movements such as Garibaldi and
Mazzini. Yet quite possibly the only thing that “the Russian Method”
owed directly to the French Terror was its very general means—
violence—and the dusty epithet “terrorist” that was used primarily to
refer to the historical actors of 1793 but had no real contemporary sa-
lience until after 1881, for reasons that will become clear. 6 In other
words, it would be a mistake to view Russian revolutionary terrorism
in a direct line of descent from the French rather than as a phenomenon
arising from a Russian cultural ground that had absorbed and adapted
those influences.
Debates about the old or new provenance of terrorism are not, in
fact, new. In Russia the People’s Will’s “Emperor Hunt” in 1880–81
generated vigorous public debate about the causes and genealogy of
terrorism/kramola, with some commentators harking back to Dmitry
Karakozov’s attempted tsaricide in 1866 and others to Vera Zasulich’s
attack on F. F. Trepov in 1878, and still others all the way to back to
antiquity, to the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton and Brutus.7
As is so often the case, this debate among contemporaries presaged the
still unresolved debate among scholars about terrorism’s historical
origins. This prologue stakes an intermediate position by beginning
20 Prologue

before the first actual occurrence of Russian revolutionary terrorism—

Karakozov’s—and illuminating the way in which presentiments and
prefigurations of terrorism both in and around literature laid the
ground for its moral-symbolic matrix long before the first shot was
fired.

Presentiments

In June 1790, when a travelogue entitled A Journey from St. Petersburg to

Moscow by an anonymous author was placed in the hands of Catherine II
of Russia, a few pages sufficed for her to recognize its true nature.8
“The purpose of this book is clear on every page: its author, infected
and full of the French madness, is trying in every possible way to
break down respect for authority and for the authorities, to stir up in
the people indignation [negodovanie] against their superiors and the
government.”9 Even while the identity of the author and his intentions
remained obscure, for Catherine the case was cut-and-dried. Her pri-
vate secretary recorded that the empress in an unguarded moment
“was graciously pleased to say that he [the author] is a rebel worse than
Pugachev,” referring to the audacious Cossack leader Emilian Pugachev,
who in the early years of Catherine’s reign had threatened her empire
by claiming to be the legitimate sovereign, Peter III, and leading a vast
and bloody rebellion in Southwest Siberia.10 Pugachev was ultimately
betrayed, captured, and brought to Moscow in an iron cage, where the
empress’s sovereignty was reasserted when the pretender was decapi-
tated, drawn and quartered before the massed public on Bolotnaya
Square.
As a matter of fact, the author turned out to be one of Catherine’s
own protégés, the upstanding chief of the St. Petersburg customs office,
Alexander Radishchev. While the mystery of the Journey’s authorship
was expeditiously solved, the mystery of the author’s motivation, in-
tentions, and above all abysmal timing baffled contemporaries and
posterity.11 The Journey, begun as early as 1780 and submitted to the
censor in May 1789, appeared in Petersburg bookshops in June 1790 at
precisely the moment when the political turmoil in France spurred
Catherine to drop the pose of enlightened monarch and revert to the
more tried-and-true forms of despotic rule. For whatever reason, Radi­
shchev failed to heed the signs and plunged ahead with the laborious
printing of the Journey and its distribution to local booksellers as well as
Prologue 21

to close friends and associates, who were not as oblivious as its author
to the folly and danger that it represented.12
Catherine’s intensely dialogic reading of the Journey is preserved in
ten pages of notes, written in her own hand in the book itself. Her
conjectures about the author and his motives are a model of police
hermeneutics and are worth quoting extensively for the profile of the
late eighteenth-century kramol’nik that they produce. “He is probably a
Martinist or something similar.” (Radishchev rejected Martinist mys-
ticism and quietism but dedicated the Journey to his close friend, the
Martinist Alexei Kutuzov). “He has learning enough, and has read
many books.” (Radishchev had been handpicked as one of a select
group of young noblemen to study abroad at the University of Leipzig.)
“He has a melancholy temperament” (Radishchev’s narrator frequently
succumbs to tears and recriminations) “and sees everything in a very
somber light; consequently he takes a bilious black and yellow view of
things.”13 Catherine repeatedly notes, in conjunction with specific pas-
sages, the author’s unorthodox metaphysics and his dispositional in-
disposition that lead in the end to “unbridled” (neobuzdannyi) pages
reflecting an “unbridled mentality” (neobuzdannoe umstvovanie).
Ultimately, of course, Catherine gravitated toward the explanation that
made the most sense to her. From the point of view of the Machiavellian
empress who had led the Imperial Guards in a coup that deposed (and
later murdered) her husband, Radishchev’s writings presented a classic
case of frustrated ambition and envy, or in Nietzsche’s terms, “ressen-
timent.” “He seems to have been born with unbridled ambition, to
have prepared himself for the highest offices, but since he has not yet
attained them, the gall of his impatience has poured out over everything
established.”14
In short, the writer/kramol’nik was a gloomy intellectual with a rebel-
lious, impatient streak whose frustrated dreams of grandeur led him to
lash out against the established order.
Once in prison and in the hands of Catherine’s notorious chief of the
Secret Chancellery S. I. Sheshkovsky, Radishchev was required to write
a confession, and then another, and finally a third, all of which failed to
satisfactorily account for his “crime” in the eyes of his persecutors as
well as his historians. Yet the first confession, deemed the most implau-
sible, is revelatory for what Radishchev thought he might say to mollify
the empress’s wrath, to deemphasize the Journey’s political content,
and, most importantly, to portray his “deed” as mere words, and highly
unoriginal words at that. To that end, Radishchev confessed to being
22 Prologue

motivated by literary ambition and under sway of first Laurence

Sterne’s Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) and later, the
Abbé de Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (1770). “I began reading it [His-
toire] in 1780 or 1781. I liked his style (slog). I admired his rhetorical
tone as eloquence, his audacious expressions I considered to be in excel-
lent taste, and seeing him universally esteemed, I wanted to imitate his
style (slog). . . . And so I may truthfully state that Raynal’s style, drawing
me on from delusion to delusion, led to the completion of my insane
book.”15 Significantly, Radishchev did not plead insanity for himself,
but for his book. Instead, he pleaded guilty to literary ambition and
attempted to divert attention from the Journey’s political content to its
style. Historians and literary scholars, following the lead of contempo-
raries such as Alexander Pushkin, have taken Radishchev to task for his
“barbaric” style and have singled out his sentimental excesses as the
most objectionable element.16 Yet as Radishchev’s personal correspon-
dence attests, these sentimental excesses were scarcely imitative literary
window dressing, but they were integral to Radishchev’s language of
the self, its perceptions, appraisals, values, and goals.17
For the record, though, it is necessary to note that Radishchev’s
travelogue is wildly heterogeneous and boasts a number of styles,
genres, and surrogate narrators. Radishchev’s own narrator presents a
rather incoherent personality, somewhat schizophrenically alternating
between the two antipodes/“antimodes” of the Enlightenment: satire
and sentimentalism.18 Scholars have recently underscored the problem
of saying what, exactly, satire is and have expanded the concept to en-
compass an aptitude, faculty, or even a disposition.19 The biggest mis-
conception about satire is that it must be funny, when in fact its most
fundamental requirement is that it be lethal.20 Historically, satire has
been a powerful and double-edged weapon, demolishing its targets
while endangering its practitioners if their victims were capable of retali-
ation.21 Centuries and even millennia abound with examples of repre-
sentational defamation in satire and caricature that laid the groundwork
for actual physical annihilation.
Quite clearly preferring its satirical aspect to its sentimental one,
Pushkin characterized the Journey as “a satirical call to vozmushchenie,”
a word that originally denoted political “revolt” but by the late eigh-
teenth century had been interiorized as an emotion—“outraged indigna-
tion.” Radishchev’s satire targets petty demons—corrupt bureaucrats,
fawning courtiers, and Prince Potemkin’s oyster fetish—and certainly
arouses contempt and derision, but is nothing so galvanizing as a “call
Prologue 23

to revolt.” By contrast, the emotional charge of Radishchev’s sentimental

effusions lights the fuse of indignation that would explode into political
violence.22 After languishing in critical ignominy, sentimentalism was
rehabilitated by literary and cultural historians who challenged the
truism that its tropes invariably served conservative values such as
duty, honor, and filial piety. Instead, scholars were struck by the way
its overtly emotional language and the supreme value of sensibilité at its
core coincided with progressive shifts in political, social, and cultural
norms.23 The historian of emotions William Reddy went further and
argued that sentimentalism’s lachrymose tropes offered a potent means
of converting benevolent feelings such as generosity and pity into
anger at tyranny and injustice. Thus sentimentalism led to self-sacrifice
and political action.24 In his study of French revolutionary rhetoric,
Reddy observes that it was a truism for “sentimentalist” Jacobins that it
did. Revolutionary publicists, most notably Jean Paul Marat, employed
what Reddy refers to as a “conceptual structure” in his daily diatribes
for L’ami du peuple, which began with graphic and heart-rending depic-
tions of misery and atrocity and ended with a rousing exhortation to
violence in the name of justice.25
The Peter and Paul Fortress where Radishchev was imprisoned as of
July 1790 did not subscribe to L’ami du peuple, so it is likely that Radi­
shchev discovered this “conceptual structure” long beforehand, possibly
thanks to Raynal’s anti-slavery invective. In any case, Radishchev’s
purpose was not to incite mobs of hungry Petersburgers to hang aristo-
crats from lampposts; his project was more subtle and far-reaching.
Much like his heirs, the Men of the Sixties, Radishchev intended to create
new men, not ab ovo, but from the indifferent material at hand—namely,
his own readers.26
Radishchev’s challenge was two-fold: first, he had to substantially
renovate the framework, such as it was, of emotional and moral norms,
so that it incorporated Enlightenment ideals of human dignity and
autonomy; and second, he had to create citizens who would respond
with moral indignation to their violation. Critics have bewailed the
Journey’s repetitiveness as a stylistic flaw, but it is better appreciated as
a conditioning device aimed at the reader. In the first several chapters
of the Journey the narrator, or his like-minded surrogates, recounts
dramatic experiences that repeatedly rehearse the same “conceptual
structure” or sequence of perception, appraisal, physiological response
and feeling that are the constituents of consciousness.27 The reader
must enter into the immediacy of experience entailed in the first-person
24 Prologue

narration, to be drawn into the fictional simulation of the proper re-

sponse. This would be all well and good, were it not for the fact that the
chain reaction inevitably ends in violence. Through the repetition and
intensification of this conceptual structure, Radishchev lays the ground-
work for the moral, emotional, and legal sanction of political murder.
The first and most basic task of Radishchev’s traveler is to direct
attention and awaken perception to the injustices that have hitherto
remained invisible to him and his compatriots. No sooner does the
traveler take tearful leave of his dear ones in St. Petersburg, than he
notices a peasant serf plowing his land on Sunday. After making in-
quiries, the traveler discovers the extent of the peasant’s exploitation by
his master. Radishchev’s narrator is subsequently overcome by visceral
feelings of outrage and indignation (“This thought made my blood
boil!” [Siia mysl’ vsiu krov’ v mne vospalila!]),28 whereupon the boiling
blood provokes an unexpected outburst that gleefully prophesies popu-
lar retribution: “Tremble, cruel-hearted landlord! On the brow of each of
your peasants I see your condemnation written.”29
The traveler and his reader are now primed for an even more
shocking perception and appraisal, which follows forthwith. “I hap-
pened to notice my servant, who was sitting up on the box in front of me,
swaying side to side. Suddenly, I felt a chill coursing through my veins,
sending the blood to my head and mantling my cheeks with a blush. I
felt so ashamed of myself that I could scarcely keep from bursting into
tears. ‘In your anger,’ I said to myself ‘you denounce the proud master
who wears out his peasants in the field: but are you not doing the same
or even worse yourself?’”30
The physiological experience of shame (the chill, the blush, the tears)
accompanies the narrator’s realization of his own hypocrisy. 31 As a
social emotion, shame entails an alienation from the self and the inter-
nalization of the other’s view of contempt and opprobrium. This inter-
subjective understanding of the self as an object of another’s righteous
indignation and hostility leads Radishchev to sanction that very vio-
lence, but this time against himself. “Do you know what is written in the
fundamental law, in the heart of every man? He whom I strike has the
right to strike me [italics mine].”32
A notion of reciprocity underlies all sociability as one of the primary
moral foundations, and the traveler’s maxim is recognizably a hybrid
of Biblical formulations of reciprocity (the Old Testament “An eye for an
eye” and the New Testament “Do unto others as you would have them
do unto you”) but receives a secular update through the Enlightenment
Prologue 25

language of rights. At the next station, Chudovo, the circuit repeats it-
self, but this time through the narrative offices of the traveler’s friend,
Ch . Whereas the traveler’s reflections at Lyubani took the form of an
internal monologue, Ch of mortal terror of shipwrecked sailors fac-
ing imminent death and Ch ’s outrage when subordinates refuse to
wake their sleeping commander to mount a rescue operation. Ch ’s
indignation is a full-body affair that requires multiple outlets (trembling,
spitting, tearing his hair) when he finally is admitted to the commander.
“I trembled with the anger of outraged humanity. ‘If you are a hard
sleeper, you should have yourself waked with a hammer on your head
when people are drowning and crying for your help. . . . I was unable
to finish my speech, almost spat in his face, and walked away. I tore
my hair with rage. I made a thousand plans to wreak vengeance on this
beastly commander, not on my account but on behalf of all humanity.”33
Radishchev reiterates the proposition, this time through Ch , that
one who does harm or allows harm to happen ought to be harmed
himself—better yet, by his own hand (hammer). What is new is the
spur to Ch ’s indignation; it is not merely a case of individual injustice,
but of one done to “all humanity.” His “thousand plans to wreak ven-
geance . . . not for myself, but on behalf of all humanity” [ne za sebia, no
za chelovechestva] go beyond any petty scheme for individual revenge.
Radishchev’s surrogate narrator relents only when he realizes that his
humanitarian vengeance was doomed to illegibility. “But when I came
to my senses, I realized, from many similar instances, that my revenge
would be fruitless and that I would only be taken for a madman [be­
shenyi] or an evildoer [zloi chelovek]; so I reconciled myself.”34 Yet far
from reconciling himself, after Ch discovers that society shares neither
his moral framework nor his acute sense of indignation, he abandons
St. Petersburg in search of something resembling Rousseau’s “state of
nature.”
Clearly, Radishchev’s circuits are not mere repetitions, but elabora-
tions in which narrative detail, emotional intensity, and moral claims/
imperatives mount. They culminate at Zaytsovo, in the account of an-
other of the traveler’s old friends, the judge Krestyanin. An exemplar of
Enlightenment humanitarianism, Krestyanin presided over a case that
involved an exploitative landlord and his equally abusive family. In
Krestyanin’s extended telling, the entire family gleefully participated
in devising increasingly refined ways to oppress and torture their serfs.
Krestyanin (Radishchev) heaps abuse upon abuse and detail upon detail
so that the reader’s indignation and horror reach a pitch. In the end, the
26 Prologue

landlord’s family schemes to commit the ultimate outrage—the ab-

duction and rape of a beautiful serf girl on the eve of her wedding.
Radishchev orchestrates a scene of nail-biting suspense and emotional
tension as the girl’s fiancé and his old father are first flogged for trying
to intervene, then forced to flee for their lives, and finally cornered
while they fend off their masters’ attack. At this point, the peasants
(and the reader with them) are primed to join the melee. “They sympa-
thized with the young peasant and, infuriated against their masters, they
gathered around their fellow to defend him. Seeing this, the assessor
himself ran up, began to curse them, and struck the first man he met
so violently with his cane that he fell senseless to the ground. This was
the signal for a general attack. They surrounded their four masters
and, in short, beat them to death on the spot.”35 This is not the end of
the story, for Krestyanin tells how he scandalized local society by taking
the peasants’ side. “The peasants who had killed their master were
guilty of murder. But was it not forced upon them? Was not the mur-
dered assessor himself the cause of it? . . . The innocence of the defend­
ants was at least for me, a mathematical certainty” [matematicheskaia
iasnost’].36
Krestyanin first frames the peasants’ murder of the landlord as an
act self-defense: “am I guilty if I draw my sword in self-defense and
deliver society from a member who disturbs its peace?”37 But later he
elaborates an argument based on Enlightenment ideas of the equality
of all individuals and the priority of the law of nature over positive law,
insisting that by the commission of his heinous acts, the landlord placed
himself outside the jurisdiction of positive law: “Then natural law
[zakon prirody] was born, and the power of the insulted citizen, who
receives no redress through positive law, became a reality.”38
Krestyanin/Radishchev drew on natural right theory that was
well established in Western Europe and had an avid following among
Girondists and Jacobins alike (As Catherine observed: “The French
venom is poured out”).39 Natural law is the ultimate foundation of the
citizen’s right to kill, to exact justice outside the positive legal frame-
work of the state, and Krestyanin articulates its foundational premises:40
“whosoever dares wound him [the citizen] in his natural and inviolable
right is a criminal. Woe to him, if the civil law does not punish him. He
will be marked as a pariah by his fellow citizens, and may whosoever
has sufficient power exact vengeance against him for his evildoing.”41
The notion that “whosoever has sufficient power” may rectify wrong
and exact vengeance has a long genealogy, extending back to ancient
Prologue 27

justifications of tyrannicide.42 The malefactor who stands in violation of

natural law is in violation of nature itself, is condemned to the status of
“pariah” or in the Latin formulation to hostis humani generis (“enemy
of the human race”).43 As such, he loses not only the protections of
positive law but the status of citizen and may be killed by anyone with
impunity. The discourses of natural law and sentimentalism share fun-
damental premises, and in its Enlightenment incarnation, natural law
is in many respects the rationalization of the feeling of what is right, as
Krestyanin’s formulation so pithily illustrates: “On rational grounds
my heart finds them not guilty, and the death of the assessor, although
violent, just.”44
Catherine’s initial response to these passages was a coolly common-
sensical rebuttal: “But this whole argument can be easily overthrown
by a single question: If someone does evil, does that give someone else
the right to do even greater evil? Answer: of course not.”45 This “dia-
logue” between Catherine and Radishchev established the terms of the
debate that was to go on for more than a century. On the one hand,
Krestyanin’s peasants were “guilty but not guilty”: guilty of murder, yes,
but not guilty according to the head, the heart, and natural law. On the
other hand, reciprocity in the form of vengeance is neither more moral
nor legal within the framework of the state’s positive law. Catherine
recognized that Krestyanin’s disquisition was founded on principles
“completely destructive of the laws and which have turned France
upside down,” and her observation, “It would not have been surprising
if the governor had arrested the loose talker,” leaves no doubt that she
would have.
It is difficult to say what influence Radishchev’s own “loose talk”
had on his direct contemporaries, although his legacy is beyond dis-
pute.46 According to his own uncertain estimate, he printed several
hundred copies of his Journey, and once the incendiary content was
discovered, supposedly all but twenty-two copies were burned. Both
before and after they were, the Journey was a hot commodity in the
Russian capital, and multiple dispatches of foreign envoys attest to the
fact that Radishchev had become a cause célèbre in Russia and in
Western Europe.47 In the short run, Radishchev’s attempt to reform his
fellow men by micro-engineering their responses bore little fruit. Many
of Radishchev’s social peers and even his closest associates were dis-
mayed and alarmed by the content of the Journey, even if they regretted
his harsh fate (some did not).48 Pushkin declared, perhaps for the censor-
ship’s sake, that Radishchev’s sentimental histrionics bored him and
28 Prologue

made him laugh—undoubtedly not the reaction that Radishchev had

hoped for.49 It seems, however, that Radishchev hoped for very little. In
the end, his outraged humanitarians reject acts of violence because of
their futility and illegibility, not their immorality. In the meantime,
Radishchev has done all he could to make such acts legible, moral, and
exemplary.
When Radishchev was charged for his crime, it was not under laws
governing speech or the press, since Catherine had legalized private
presses in 1783 and Police Chief Ryleev, Catherine’s lackadaisical censor,
had passed the innocuous-seeming travelogue without, apparently,
bothering to read it.50 Instead, the prosecution threw the book at Radi­
shchev and marshaled every law from the archaic Ulozhenie of 1649 and
Peter’s Military and Naval statutes that applied to disorderly conduct,
disturbing the peace, and open revolt against the sovereign.51 It goes
without saying that none of these statutes were remotely applicable to
writing a book. In trying Radishchev, the St. Petersburg Criminal Court
proceeded with extraordinary precautions, as if Radishchev were the
resurrected Pugachev himself rather than an unassuming customs of-
ficer. Fettered and under heavy guard, Radishchev was not told the
crime with which he was charged, nor was he given an opportunity to
defend himself. The text of the Journey was considered so inflammatory
that the chancery clerks were dismissed while excerpts of his book were
read out in court, and the sentence was a foregone conclusion: exile to
faraway Nerchinsk (on the Chinese border) bound in irons, followed
by death by beheading.52 However, thanks to the timely conclusion of
peace with Sweden on September 4, Catherine was provided the neces-
sary pretext to indulge her love of mercy, and Radishchev’s sentence
was commuted to ten years exile in faraway Ilimsk, in Siberia. This
mitigation did not prevent Radishchev from becoming the first martyr
in a two-fold martyrology of Russian literature and the Russian revo-
lutionary movement, as Alexander Herzen, echoing the traveler’s sen-
timental idiom in the preface to his 1858 edition of the Journey, enthused,
“How can the memory of this martyr be anything but dear to our
hearts?”53

Apparitions

In 1836 an unprecedented vision crystallized for the poet Alexander

Pushkin. Less than a year before his death in a duel, Pushkin made his
Prologue 29

final attempt to produce a publishable version of his narrative poem

The Bronze Horseman (Mednyi vsadnik), and he wrote one of the first
exemplars of secular biography for inclusion in the Contemporary, a
biography of Alexander Radishchev. Neither work could appear in
print as written: Pushkin was able to legally publish only the Prologue
of the Bronze Horseman, and the biography of Radishchev had to wait
until 1857 to see the light of day.54 Scholars have recognized that the two
texts are linked by factors besides their frustrated publication histories
and in fact present distinct visions of the same phenomenon, seen from
different angles and with varying degrees of ambivalence.55
For his biographical sketch, Pushkin assumed the role of historian
and made use of all the available documentary material, including oral
histories with prominent contemporaries such as Anatoly Speransky.56
He begins by rehashing the official explanation for Radishchev’s deed
as author(iz)ed by Catherine. In this version, Radishchev fell under the
influence of the Martinists, and the “mysteriousness [tainstvennost’] of
their conversations inflamed his imagination.”57 However, through a
series of subtle rhetorical moves, Pushkin arrives at a completely dif-
ferent picture. Pushkin asks his reader to recall “the political circum-
stances of 1791, the severity of the laws, the cruelty of the people who
surrounded Catherine.”58 When the positively brutish spirit of the times
is recalled, Radishchev’s crime “will seem to us the act of a madman”
(pokazhetsia nam deistviem sumasshedshego). Pushkin has insured
that the opposite will be the case, and Radishchev’s “crime” appears
more than justified. Here begins a carefully calibrated shift from a
profile of the seditionist as “madman” to a profile of a morally and psy-
chologically competent agent.

An inconsequential person [mel’kii chelovek], a person entirely without

power, entirely without support, dares to take up arms against the
general order, against autocracy, against Catherine! And notice: a con-
spirator relies upon the united forces of his comrades; the member of
a secret society, in the case of failure, prepares to win mercy with a
denunciation, or, given the multiplicity of the like-minded, relies upon
their impunity. But Radishchev is alone. He doesn’t have comrades
or any like-minded. In the case of failure—but what success could he
expect?—he answers for everything, he alone presents himself as the
victim of the law. We never honored Radishchev as a great man. His act
always seemed to us a crime, something inexcusable, . . . but with all of
that, we can’t not acknowledge in him a criminal with an unusual spirit; a
30 Prologue

political fanatic of course, but acting with unusual selflessness and with
some kind of chivalric conscientiousness.59

For Pushkin it is tremendously significant that Radishchev was a lone

and “mel’kii” individual (he was neither the member of a political
conspiracy nor a military uprising) who “dared” not just to oppose
Catherine, but to tilt against the entire established order. While accepting
and even exaggerating Catherine’s perception of Radishchev’s book as
the ultimate attack (“dares to take up arms against the general order,
against autocracy, against Catherine!”), he reverses her valuation. Push-
kin cannily evades authorial responsibility for his new vision with for-
mulations that suggest the consensus of polite society (“it will seem to
us,” “we never honored,” and “we can’t not acknowledge”), but these
same phrases enable him to mint a newly authorized image of Radi­
shchev. This new image retains the requisite condemnation (indicated
by the expressions “crime,” “inexcusable,” and “political fanatic”) but
is tinged with admiration—Pushkin even implicitly concedes the possi-
bility of considering Radishchev a “great man!”—and the unmistakable
aura of the heroic. Like all of Pushkin’s famed characterizations, this
image is distilled to its essence: an “inexcusable crime” committed by
a selfless and moralistic political fanatic who is a martyr for his cause.
Yet it bears repeating that Radishchev’s “inexcusable crime” took place
entirely within the symbolic order and consisted of writing a book.
A similar, equally symbolic assault forms the climactic episode of
Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, when the poem’s protagonist, Evgenii,
challenges the looming equestrian statue of Peter I. The poema begins
with a Prologue that is an ambivalent paean to Peter the Great’s cre-
ation of a new, Western capital hewn from the primeval wilderness, but
it shifts quickly to the story of his protagonist, Evgenii, in the devastating
flood of 1824.60 Evgenii, as Pushkin takes pains to emphasize, is a new
type of literary hero. He is not the noble grandee or the Childe Harold
manqué, but the “householder” who seeks contentment and meaning
within the sphere of work, love, and family happiness.61 As natural
disaster strikes and the flood waters rise, Evgenii is thwarted in his
frantic quest to reach his fiancée on Vasilevsky Island. Stranded atop
the life-saving perch of a stone lion, Evgenii watches helplessly while
the islands are engulfed. Pushkin’s emphasis is on his captive position
as a helpless witness unable to tear his eyes from the scene of destruction,
while the monument of Peter I “turns its back” on Evgenii’s plight.62
When the storm abates, Evgenii discovers the city’s and his own life’s
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tribes change, but the description of physical characters remains the
same.
The finest of these Teutonic barbarians were the Goths who,
according to their historian, Jordanes, crossed over from Sweden
about 300 B.C. and settled on the banks of the Vistula, whence they
expanded into South Russia, which they occupied for centuries. In
fact, a remnant of their language (Krim Götisch) was spoken in the
Crimea until the seventeenth century. The Gepidæ were a branch of
the Goths who lay to the west of the main body, and the Alans, a
closely related tribe, were located well to the east. It is interesting to
note that some of the Alans, fleeing from the Huns, took refuge in
the Caucasus where the Ossetes to this day show occasional Nordic
physical characters.
The main body of the Gothic nation was split in two in 375 A.D. by
the invasion of the Huns, a Tatar people from Central Asia. Those
who took refuge in the west, in South Germany and Gaul, were
called Visigoths. A part of the Visigoths, however, fled across the
Danube, devastated the provinces of the Byzantine Empire and slew
the reigning emperor, Valens, in 378 A.D.
The eastern branch, or Ostrogoths, were conquered by the Huns and
remained in Dacia. Later, after Attila's death and the disruption of his
empire, the Ostrogoths, under the great Theodoric, invaded Italy
and came near to building a unified Italian nation nearly fourteen
hundred years ago.
The Visigoths, who had been long in contact with Roman civilization,
occupied Gaul. When Attila crossed the Rhine in 451 A.D. they
fought on the side of the Romans at Chalons, one of the decisive
battles of history, and their king, the Visigothic Theodoric, fell in the
battle. The Ostrogoths, on the other hand, were the best troops of
the Hunnish host.
The Visigoths entered Spain in 412 A.D. Their allies, the Suevi,
conquered and ruled Galicia and the provinces on the Atlantic which
now constitute Portugal. The invasion of Spain by the Visigoths
resulted in the expulsion of a closely related Teutonic people, the
Vandals, who, with their allies, a remnant of the Alans, crossed over
into Africa in 428 A.D. On the site of Carthage the Vandals erected a
kingdom which lasted a hundred years. They ruled the African coast
westward to the Atlantic, conquered and settled in Corsica and
under their king, Genseric, sacked Rome in 455 A.D.
These Vandals, originally from Sweden, first appear in history on the
Baltic coast, thence they passed down through Central Europe and
westward into France and thence into Spain, where they settled and
remained until they were driven into Africa. They may have left
behind some of their blood to mingle with the later-coming Germanic
tribes in Spain. It is possible also, though not probable, that to them
are due some of the blond characters still found in the Atlas
Mountains. As a race, however, their disappearance is complete.
The Visigoths maintained their control in Spain until 711 A.D. when
the Mohammedan Arabs crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and
completely defeated the Visigothic armies. Why the power of this
people collapsed so suddenly and completely is one of the mysteries
of history, but after the great seven days' battle on the Guadalquivir
in which their king, Roderick, was slain, the whole peninsula was
easily conquered by the Arabs. At this time, it is true, the blood of
the Visigoths had been greatly mixed with that of the subject races,
resulting perhaps in a weakening of their fighting power.
One of the reasons for the easy conquest of the Visigoths by the
Moors lay in the hatred for them as Arians by the old Orthodox
Catholic population who regarded their conquerors as heretics, and
the assistance rendered by the Jews whom the Visigoths had treated
harshly and who are reputed to have induced the Moors to make
their invasion.
A remnant of the Visigoths fled northerly into southern Gaul, which
was called Gothia Septimania. There the name Visigoths was
corrupted into Vigot or Bigot, which was a term of reproach used by
the orthodox natives.
It is important to note that the relations between the populations of
the Roman Empire and the invading Teutonic Nordics were greatly
affected by the fact that the latter were the followers of the
schismatic monk Arius who, about 350 A.D., converted the Goths to
a Unitarian form of Christianity. The denial of the Trinity by the
Barbarians roused a fierce hatred among their subject peoples.
Ostrogoths and Visigoths, Vandals and Alans, Burgundians and
Lombards, all were Arians. The Franks alone among the Barbarians
were converted directly to Orthodox Christianity. This greatly
facilitated their conquest of Gaul. In consequence, France for more
than a thousand years was regarded as the eldest son of the church.
Down to our time, the aristocracy of Spain, and more especially that
of Portugal, shows a marked inheritance of blondness coming down
largely from Visigothic and Suevic ancestry. The province of Galicia
still retains very appreciable marks of Gothic blood, especially in a
high percentage of light-colored eyes.
The Visigoths left behind them in Spain a legacy of names which
now are regarded as most typically Spanish, as for instance Rodrigo,
Alfonso, Alvarez, Guzman, and Velasquez. In the same manner we
find a Nordic legacy of names reaching from Italy into France even
where little Nordic blood is left. In other words, while blood dies out,
names persist.
At the time of Spanish greatness the predominant blood in the
peninsula was still Gothic,[3] and the adventurers who went overseas
and were lost to the race were of this blood. In Portugal, the one
great poet, Camoens,[4] and in Spain Cervantes, who was his
contemporary, were descendants of the old Gothic nobility and had
marked Nordic characteristics, as had the Cid Campeador. The case
was the same in Italy[5] at this period. The great men were from the
northern part of the peninsula. Dante, Michaelangelo, Leonardo Da
Vinci, and virtually all of the leading men of the Renaissance were
blond Nordics. Columbus himself, supposed to have come from
Genoa, is described as having blue eyes and fair hair. In southern
France, in the so-called Gothic Septimania and in the country around
Toulouse, the home of the Troubadours, Gothic names abound.[6] A
similar condition prevails throughout France. French names are
Gothic, Frankish, or Burgundian today, though disguised by their
spelling, as, for example, Joffre from Gotfrid. In the opinion of Count
deLapouge, France as late as the settlement of America was more
Nordic than is the Germany of today.
The main body of the Visigoths who survived the conquest by the
Arabs took refuge in the northwestern part of Spain where they
maintained some small kingdoms which ultimately coalesced and
became the nucleus of a Christian Spain, which in the course of a
seven-hundred-year crusade gradually reconquered the peninsula
and finally expelled the Moors in 1492.
The Arabs who conquered Spain, and the Islamized Persians and
Moors, had a wonderful period of intellectual expansion during the
seventh and following centuries. This amazing outburst of genius,
which preserved for us much of the science and learning of the
Greeks, came to an end when the Mediterranean Mohammedans
began mixing their blood with that of their Negro slaves.
Mohammedanism has always appealed to the lower races, especially
the Negro, because when they became followers of the Prophet they
were admitted to social and racial equality with the superior race.
This and the lure of the Negro women ruined the Arab race. Today,
all through Africa and Egypt and in parts of Arabia, the so-called
Arabs are often Negroid in appearance. In this case polygamy was a
racial curse because the richer and abler men had the most slave
women and left a larger progeny of half-breed children than did their
poorer countrymen.
The exact reverse happened in the case of the Turks, who were
originally Alpines from Central Asia strongly mixed with Mongol.
They conquered Asia Minor and the nations of Southeast Europe up
to and including Hungary. Everywhere they seized the most beautiful
women and, being polygamists, the ablest Turks had the most
children by the finest women of the subject countries. Thus the
Turks bred up as the Arabs bred down. To this day the Turks are the
superior race in Asia Minor and have eliminated, at least from the
ruling classes, practically all the physical traces of their Asiatic origin.
The women of the Caucasus, especially the Circassians and
Georgians, who retain some remnants of the Nordic Alans, have
always been noted for their physical beauty. They were in great
demand in Turkish Harems.
Incidentally the Kurds are, or rather were, Nordic and it is interesting
to note that Saladin, of Crusading fame, was a Kurd.
Concerning other Teutonic Nordics, we need mention only those
whose blood enters largely into modern nations. Of these, one of the
most interesting peoples were the Burgundians, who settled on the
western bank of the upper Rhine in what is now Alsace, and in
Burgundian France and French-speaking Switzerland. They were a
very promising and flourishing nation until their overthrow in the
middle of the fifth century by Attila and his Huns, a tragedy which
supplies the subject matter of the Niebelungenlied. Appollonius
Sidonius refers to the Burgundians as being seven feet high; while
this is an obvious exaggeration, it is interesting to note that in the
old Burgundian provinces we find the tallest stature in France today.
When the Lombards first appear in history about 165 A.D. they were
in northern Germany. They entered Italy in 568 A.D. and conquered
the Peninsula even more thoroughly than had their predecessors,
the Ostrogoths. They not only occupied Italy north of the Apennines
for three hundred years, but also established several large duchies in
the south. The valley of the Po, where they settled, had been for
centuries Cisalpine Gaul, and this Lombard territory is today the
backbone of modern Italy. The percentage of light-colored eyes
around Milan is high, and blondness through this district is as
common a characteristic of the peasantry as it is of the aristocracy
throughout the rest of Italy.
The Lombards were Arians and were in constant conflict with the
Popes and their Orthodox followers and were consequently generally
maligned. Just as a similar situation facilitated the conquest of Spain
by the Moors, so the destruction of the Lombard Kingdom by the
Franks was made the easier by this antagonism.
In passing, we need only remark that there were small bands of
other Nordics, who entered Italy as Saxons, Alemanni, and Suevi,
and who entered France as Alans and Saxons. These small bands
differed in few respects from the larger Nordic peoples and were
quickly absorbed in them. All these barbarian tribes were closely
related racially.
Before we leave the Alemanni who occupied southwest Germany
with Alsace and German-speaking Switzerland, we may note that
their name, Alemanni, did not mean 'All Men' in the sense of a mixed
company, but rather The Men "par excellence,"—the German "All"
being the analogous of the Greek "Pan."
We come next to the Franks, who appear in history about the time
of the Battle of Chalons in 451 A.D. in which they took an
unimportant part, but in the following centuries they rapidly gained
the ascendency throughout Gaul and western Germany. The
conquests by the Franks were the most important and enduring of
those of the Teutonic Nordics in Continental Europe. We know very
little about the Franks from the Romans, although they may have
been the Varini, who were located in northwestern Germany in
classic times. As a result of the Crusades, Roman Orthodox, as
contrasted with Greek Christians, are known as "Ferangi" to this day
in the Levant. Being Orthodox Christians and not Arians, the Franks
had the support of the Roman Church in all their conquests.
The Flemings of Belgium are remnants of the original Franks who
retained their own language. Most of these invaders, like the Franks,
Visigoths, Lombards, and Normans, adopted the Latin language of
their subject peoples when they settled within the confines of the
Roman Empire.
Except in eastern England and northern France the numbers of the
conquering Nordics were not sufficient entirely to evict and replace
the conquered populations, but they everywhere formed the upper
classes and land-owning aristocracy and to this day these same
classes in all European nations continue to show, in more or less
purity, the physical characters of the Nordic race.
During the Middle Ages, the dominating and war-like Nordics paused
long enough from fighting each other to carry on the Crusades and
to beat back the onrush of the Saracens at Tours in 732 A.D. They
saved Europe from the Mongols in 1241 A.D. at the Battle of Liegnitz
(now Wahlstatt) in Silesia where the Duke of Liegnitz and the Nordic
nobility, outnumbered five to one, lay dead upon the field of battle;
but checked the advance of the Asiatic hordes and saved the
budding civilization of Europe from the fate of Asia.
This race supplied the navigators of the expansion period, when the
world was for the first time opened up in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, and since then they have formed the fighting men,
soldiers, sailors, explorers, hunters, adventurers, and frontiersmen of
Europe and her colonies.
After mastering the north of France, the Franks subjugated the
remnants of the Burgundians and destroyed the Visigothic kingdom
which still flourished in the south of Gaul. They also conquered the
country on the east bank of the Rhine known as Franconia, and
under Charlemagne seized northern Italy. In 800 A.D. Charlemagne
revived the Western Roman Empire, which under various guises
lasted down to 1807.
Charlemagne's greatest and most difficult conquest, however, was
that of the Saxons, who were pure Nordics. They occupied the
districts of northwest Germany, centering in Hanover, and even
today this part of Germany is still the most Nordic portion of that
country.
When Charlemagne reached the Elbe in his conquests he found
beyond it the heathen Alpine Wends and from his day down to the
World War, the history of Central Europe has been the pushing back
of the frontier of Alpine Asia from the Elbe eastward toward the
Urals.
These eastern lands were conquered and little by little Christianized
and civilized from the west. This process went on as far as the
Vistula, where it met the culture, and Greek Orthodox religion, of the
Byzantine Empire, which had followed up the rivers of Russia from
the Black Sea and had given to Moscovia and to the Ukraine their
religion, alphabet, and art.
The Northmen were the last of the Nordic barbarians to appear on
the scene. In the ninth and tenth centuries they raided the coasts of
Europe from England to Greece. They established themselves as
permanent settlers on all the Scottish islands and on many parts of
the Scottish coast. In Caithness, the northernmost corner of
Scotland, Norse was spoken as late as the seventeenth century.
They formed settlements and left place names all around the coasts
of Wales and England. In the tenth century as Danes they
subjugated northeastern England and imposed their rule east of the
line of Watling Street, which runs from London to Chester. These
Danes had barely been overcome by the Saxons when a new group
of Nordics arrived as Normans from France and conquered England
in 1066.
Ireland was attacked by the Norse who came in from the north and
by the Danes who entered from the south. The island was overrun
by these two peoples who have left many traces in the place names
and in the blood of Ireland.
On the Continent the coasts of France and Germany were harried by
the Northmen and the country since called Normandy was
conquered by them in 911 A.D. The Danish conquest of England,
referred to above, must have been largely Norse while, in France,
Rollo's followers were probably to an overwhelming extent Danes.
The Norman element in England and to some extent in America
down to this very day has supplied a very large proportion of the
conquerors, seamen, explorers, and frontiersmen. This same ruling
and restless strain showed itself in the individual adventurers who
went to South Italy and Sicily, which they thoroughly conquered in
the twelfth century. They even attacked the Byzantine Empire. To
this day blue eyes in Sicily are called "Norman eyes" and are to some
extent characteristic of the upper classes there.
It was in this period that the Norse rovers under Leif Ericson
discovered the northeast mainland of America about 1000 A.D.,
nearly five hundred years before Columbus, who probably knew of
their voyages, crossed the Atlantic.
At the time of this Norwegian and Danish expansion, there was a
similar outpouring of Swedes who, as Varangians, crossed the Baltic
into Russia, which they conquered and ruled for many centuries. The
name Varangian is strongly suggestive of Varini or Franks and the
name "Russian" means "rowers." The Varangians came across the
seas precisely as their ancestors, the Goths, had done a thousand
years earlier. After the expansion of this so-called Viking period,
Scandinavian activities came to an end.

Man undoubtedly crossed back and forth on dry land from Europe to
England in Neolithic and earlier times. In fact, some of the earliest
records of man have been found in England and the recent
discoveries in Norfolk of chipped implements and hearths show that
man made tools and used fire in England before the appearance of
the first glaciers—something over a million years ago.
These early species and genera of men largely died out or were
exterminated and were succeeded at the beginning of Neolithic
times by invasions of the small, dark, long-skulled Mediterranean
race which for many thousands of years formed the basis of the
population of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
About the beginning of the Bronze Age, some 1800 B.C., a tall,
round-skulled type from the Continent called the Beaker Makers
appeared on the scene in England. They resembled somewhat the
present Dinaric race, a tall, round-skulled branch of the Alpines now
found from the Tyrol southward to Albania on the east side of the
Adriatic. It is clear that the Beaker Makers entered from the east
across the narrow seas and their remains indicate a tall, masterful
type which seems to have disappeared to a large extent, although
some of the round-skulled, heavily built Englishmen, found
numerously among the commercial classes, may be their
representatives today.
The racial composition of the British Isles when the Nordic first
appeared on the scene may be safely said to have been composed
of small, brunet Mediterraneans interspersed with a small number of
round-skulled types and including, very probably, remnants of still
earlier races.
The Celtic-speaking Nordics appear to have crossed the Rhine into
France and the countries to the southwest about 800 B.C. At about
the same time they forced their way into the British Isles which they
thoroughly conquered. These Nordics were called Goidels or "Q"
Celts and their language is represented today by the remnants of
Erse in Ireland, Gaelic in Scotland, and Manx on the Isle of Man.
These "Q" Celts, as contrasted with the later coming "P" Celts, are
now represented by the Macs (meaning son) just as the later Cymric
or Brythonic Celts are called "P" Celts because in their language Ap
means son.
The aborigines were called Picts in Scotland. These Mediterranean
Picts spoke a language related to Hamitic or Egyptian, and many
place names of this origin are still to be found.
It is not definitely known whether the Gaelic speech of Scotland is a
remnant of early Goidel invasion or whether it was reintroduced from
Ireland in the early centuries of our era. The latter appears probable,
because the second conquest by the Celts was nearly complete
throughout Britain, although it did not reach Ireland. This second
subjugation of Britain was by the "P" Celts or Brythons, speaking a
Cymric form of Celtic. It occurred in the fourth century B.C. and was
so thorough that it is not probable that remnants of the earlier
Goidelic speech could have survived in Scotland.
These Brythons were represented on the continent by the Belgæ,
who, in Cæsar's time, occupied Gaul between the Rhine and the
Seine. A remnant of their speech survives in Brittany as Armorican.
The "P" Celts gave their speech to all England and remnants of it are
found in the recently extinct Cornish in Cornwall and in the Cymric of
Wales. Both the "Q" Celts and the "P" Celts were, on their arrival in
Britain, pure Nordics, but in many cases they soon merged with the
aboriginal population. They were everywhere the ruling military
class, in Britain as well as in Gaul.
Having imposed their language on the conquered people, they died
out almost completely, leaving, as in Wales, their speech on the lips
of the little Mediterranean native. Whatever truth there is in the
legends of King Arthur and his resistance to the Saxons they clearly
indicate a blond, Celtic aristocracy ruling over an underclass of small
Mediterraneans. The same condition is indicated in Irish legends
where the Celts appear as a distinct, fair-haired military class.
The next Nordic invasion of Britain was by the Saxons from the
country around the present duchy of Holstein and by the Angles and
Jutes from farther north on the mainland of Denmark or Jutland.
These tribes which entered England in the fifth century were
probably more purely Nordic than the continental Teutons and this
also was true of the Norse and Varangians of a later date. Their
conquest was almost completed during the century after their arrival
but there was sufficient resistance in the western part of England to
postpone its final subjugation for several centuries. However,
gradually the population of practically all England and the lowlands
of Scotland became purely Nordic. This racial stock was reinforced
by the invasion of Danes, who occupied most of northeast England.
The Norsemen settled around the coasts of Ireland, Scotland,
England, and, especially, Wales, and added a very considerable
contribution to the pure Nordic element of the population.
The next and last invasion of Britain by the Nordics was the Norman
conquest in 1066. The Norman leaders and soldiers were pure
Nordics from the most Nordic part of France. In fact, the Normans
were heathen Danes speaking a Teutonic tongue when they arrived
in Normandy in 911 A.D. so that on coming to England they had
been in France only a little over one hundred and fifty years. In
those years they had accepted Christianity, had learned French, and
had become the exponents of the highest culture in Europe. Into
England they brought with them many followers of Alpine origin, and
the clergy whom they imported was also composed very largely of
Latinized Alpines.
At this point we may remark that Wales, especially along the coasts,
has a very large Nordic population. It is absurd to distinguish
between England, Scotland, North Ireland, and Wales as is done in
the census of the United States. We might just as well distinguish
between North England and South England on the ground that the
first is Anglian and Danish and the other Saxon and Jutish. The
lowlands of Scotland are pure English territory and have been such
for a thousand years. The Ulster Scots who came to America were
only two or three generations removed from the Scottish and English
borderers and had not mixed with the native Irish. It is also to be
remarked that the Norman conquest of England was that of one
Nordic people by another, and that Great Britain and Ireland
constitute a group, the membership of which is overwhelmingly
Nordic in its racial inheritance.
At the time of the discovery of America, all Europe was far more
Nordic than it is today. Germany at that time had not witnessed the
expansion of the Alpines of the south and east which is characteristic
of the present era. In England, before the industrial revolution
created a demand for little brunet Mediterraneans to drive spindles,
the Nordic had the field to himself. As farmer, soldier, sailor, explorer,
and pioneer he was pre-eminent. The brunet Mediterranean
element, formerly called Iberians, had been forced back into the
extreme west of England and into Wales, and was not an important
economic or political factor. Nor was there any considerable
immigration of that racial stock into the American colonies. These
were settled primarily by the descendants of the Normans, Saxons,
Anglians, and Danes coming from the distinctly Nordic districts of the
mother land.
Norfolk and Suffolk were settled by the Angles and afterwards
formed a part of the Danish kingdom. As said above the lowlands of
Scotland and the English borders were Anglian and Dane, while the
coasts and islands of Scotland were everywhere Norse. The
Highlands were Celtic with an admixture of Norse, Anglian, and
Norman. There were also remnants of the old Mediterranean
populations, probably Picts. Curiously enough these Mediterraneans
contributed their dark eyes and hair color, but not their short stature.
The population of West Scotland has the greatest height of all the
peoples of Europe.
Ireland, like England, was settled as we have seen originally by the
Neolithic Mediterraneans. They in turn were conquered by the
Goidelic or "Q" Celts, blond Nordics who imposed their language on
the aborigines. In the ninth century, Ireland was overrun by the
Norse and Danes, whose descendants today constitute a very
considerable portion of the population. The very name Ireland is
Danish. Most of the big blond Irish of today, although they like to
claim "Celtic" descent, are, in fact, of Norse, Danish, Saxon, Norman,
or Scotch derivation.
The Nordic elements in Ireland were reinforced again and again by
the English and Normans, who, from the days of their original entry
into the island down to our day have formed the great majority of
the nobility and upper classes of the country. The Celtic Goidel in
Ireland today is a negligible quantity which cannot be racially
identified. The brunet elements in western Ireland, though to some
extent Celtic in speech, are descended from the old Neolithic or
Mediterranean population of the British Isles, mixed with a primitive,
aboriginal race of great antiquity, the Firbolgs.
Ireland has shown a singular power of absorbing its conquerors. The
descendants of Danish, Norman, and English settlers consider
themselves pure Irish "Celts." It is a strange fact that the English,
Scotch, Norman, Danish, and even the French Huguenots who have
settled in Ireland have acquired and have handed down an
extraordinary temperamental unity. As to language, by the time of
Elizabeth the English Pale constituted a part of eastern Leinster, and
there English was uniformly spoken. The English language ultimately
spread over the whole of Ireland, leaving only a few remnants of
Celtic speech in the extreme west.
From the times of James I to those of William III, large numbers of
English and Scotch borderers passed over to the northeast corner of
the island into the province of Ulster. They were fervent
Presbyterians and hated the native Catholic Irish. It was the sons
and grandsons of these immigrants who came to America in the
eighteenth century and are sometimes miscalled the "Scotch Irish."
They had special grievances of their own against England on account
of economic restrictions imposed upon their industries.
Before this time a large number of Cromwellian soldiers had settled
in Leinster, but not having their own women with them they
intermarried with the Catholic Irish and their descendants today are
most intensely Irish in national feeling. The Reformation never had
much hold on Ireland, so that the Catholic Irish today represent the
mixed population of Ireland before the sixteenth century, together
with numerous converts from the Scotch and English immigrants.
With this brief survey of the distribution of the Nordic race in Europe
down to the time of the discovery of America and the beginning of
emigration to the colonies of the New World, we can pass on to one
of the most dramatic mass-migrations of man.
From West Central Asia where it was in contact with the Mongoloids
on the east, the Nordic race pushed across Europe to the extreme
western coasts. We shall show how it traversed the Atlantic Ocean
and then in three centuries subdued a continent. Generation after
generation it fought its way westward, until it reached the Pacific
Ocean, where today it stands confronting Asia and its immemorial
rivals, the Mongols, this time on the west.
 FOOTNOTES:
[2] In Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades, by J.K.
Wright of the American Geographic Society, p. 320, the author
says: "In these authorities we find that the differences between
the inhabitants of the northern and southern parts of Italy were
fully appreciated in the twelfth century. 'The Lombards,' Gunther
says, 'are a keen, skillful, and active people; foresighted in
counsel; expert in justice; strong in body and spirit, full of life and
handsome to look upon, with slight, supple bodies that give them
great power of endurance; economical and always moderate in
eating and drinking; masters of their hands and mouths;
honorable in every business transaction; mighty in the arts and
always striving for the new; lovers of freedom and ready to face
death for freedom's sake. These people have never been willing
to submit to kings.... But what a contrast the people of Apulia in
the south present to the Lombards. Dirty, lazy, weak, good-for-
nothing idlers that they are.'"
[3] The Spanish popular heroes, Don Rodrigo and the Cid
Campeador, were Gothic, to judge by their names, as was the
brave crusader, Count Raymund of Toulouse. L. Wilser has called
attention to the number of Gothic names still in use in the Iberian
peninsula: Alfonso or Affonso, Alonzo (Gothic Athalafuns); Alvaro
and Alvarez (Gothic Alavair); Bermuy (Gothic Berimud); Bertran
(Gothic Bairhtram); Diego and Diaz (Gothic Thiudareiks, Dietrich);
Esmeralda; Fernando and its genitive Fernandez (Gothic
Ferdinanths); Froilaz and Fruela (Gothic Fravila); Gelmirez
(Gelimer); Gomez (Gothic Guma); Gonzalo and Gonzalez (Gothic
Gunthimir, Gundemar); Guilfonso (Gothic Viljafuns); Guzman
(Gothic Godaman, Gutmann); Ildefonso (Gothic Hildifuns);
Isabella; Marques (Gothic Markja); Menendez (Gothic
Herminanths); Mundiz and Munnez (Gothic Mundila); Pizarro
(Gothic Pitzas); Ramiro (Gothic Radomir or Ragnimir); Ramon and
Renmondez (Gothic Ragnimund); Rodrigo and Rodriguez; Ruiz
(Gothic Rudoreiks); Sesnandes (Gothic Sisenand); Vasco and
Vasquez (Nordic Wasce); Velasquez (Gothic Vilaskja?). See p. 107,
vol. II, of book Die Germanen, by Doctor Ludwig Wilser.
[4] Describing Camoens, George Edward Woodberry (The Torch,
pp. 203-4; New York, 1920) says: "He was of the old blue blood
of the Peninsula, the Gothic blood, the same that gave birth to
 Cervantes. He was blond, and bright-haired, with blue eyes, large
and lively, the face oval and ruddy—and in manhood the beard
short and rounded, with long untrimmed mustachios—the
forehead high, the nose aquiline; in figure agile and robust; in
action 'quick to draw and slow to sheathe,' and when he was
young, he writes that he had seen the heels of many, but none
had seen his heels. Born about the year 1524, of a noble and
well-connected family, educated at Coimbra, a university famous
for the classics, and launched in life about the court at Lisbon, he
was no sooner his own master than he fell into troubles."
[5] Wilser cites Woltmann's essay, "Have the Goths disappeared
in Italy?," which shows that even in the latter part of the Middle
Ages many people lived according to Gothic law; that in some
cities there even existed Gothic sections; and that many Gothic
names can be traced, as Stavila, Nefila, Leuuia, Hermia, Hilpja,
Ansefrida, Gilliefredus, Totila, Vila.
[6] In fact, almost all the names of the Troubadours are Teutonic,
says Wilser, giving the following examples of French names, with
the Teutonic original in parentheses: Arnaut (Arnold); Aimeric
(Emerich); Bernart (Bernhard); Bertrand (Bertram); Gaucelm
(Walchelm); Gautier (Walther); Guillem (Wilhelm); Guiraut
(Gerold); Gunot (Wido); Jaufre or Joffre (Gotfrid); Raimon
(Raginmund); Rambaut (Raginbald); Rudel (Rudolf); Savaric
(Sabarich). See p. 107, vol. II, of Die Germanen, by Doctor
Ludwig Wilser.

IV
THE NORDIC SETTLEMENT OF AMERICA
Before considering the question of the origin of the English settlers of
the Atlantic seaboard, it is important to understand the motives that
actuated the newcomers.
The impelling motive of the settlers who crossed the ocean to
America from the earliest Colonial times down to 1880 was land
hunger, and just as we speculate in stocks today, so down to one
hundred years ago our ancestors speculated in lands on the frontier.
It is difficult to realize the extent to which the ownership of the land
in Europe was monopolized, largely through the exercise of Royal
favor, by the upper classes in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. This established English tradition and practice, brought to
America by the early settlers, coupled with the favoritism of the royal
governors in land grants, was one of the causes which led to the
Revolution. After the American victory much land was confiscated on
the plea that the owners were Loyalists.
The distribution of free land in the United States came substantially
to an end about 1880, when the public domain became exhausted.
Up to that date, the immigration into America had been assimilated
readily. Certain exceptions will be dealt with later. Practically all of it
was from northwestern Europe, and the immigrants came mostly of
their own volition. It took some degree of enterprise to leave home,
cross the Atlantic, and establish oneself in a new country amid
strange surroundings. Settling new land meant clearing the forests
and destroying the game, as well as buying off or fighting the
Indians, whose ideas about land ownership were vague. To the
frontiersman in early days, the term "a clearing" was synonymous
with "a settlement."
Religious motives and the desire for political and economic
independence, of course, were also great factors in the Pilgrim and
Puritan migration to New England from 1620 to 1640.
The New England Puritans represented only a part and relatively a
small part of the exodus from England. They were pure English from
the most Anglo-Saxon part of England and consisted largely of
yeomen and the lesser gentry, who found the religious and political
conditions in England under the Stuarts intolerable for freemen.
They were essentially dissenters, who refused to bend the knee to
prelate or to king.
In 1640, under the Commonwealth the Puritans seized the reins of
government in England and only permitted the return of royalty in
1660 under conditions which established for all time the supremacy
of Parliament. In fact, during the Commonwealth the power of
Parliament had become so great that many of the best minds of
England felt that a restoration of the monarchy was needed as a
check.
The settlers of New England may be regarded as essentially rebels
against established religion and established authority when the
religion and authority were not of their own choosing. This non-
conformist spirit persisted in the successive new frontiers as they
were settled by New Englanders. The early New England settlers of
western New York and the old Northwest Territory gave birth to an
astonishing number of new sects, religions, "isms," and
communities, ranging all the way from Mormonism to Shakers and
the Oneida Community. They were, however, law-abiding in their
own way and murders and crimes of violence were relatively
infrequent.
This is in sharp contrast to the southern frontiersmen, who were and
are addicted to killings and physical violence. That, however, is
chiefly true of the inhabitants of the Appalachian valleys, who always
have been lawless. The dissent and predisposition to rebellion
among the New Englanders dates back to the Puritans in England
and the lawlessness and violence of the Ulster Scots to the endless
border warfare on the Scottish frontier. The southern frontiersman
was originally a Presbyterian, but he found his religion too
intellectual for isolated communities and turned in many cases to the
more emotional creeds of the Methodist and Baptist. The hatred of
England by the Ulster Scotch frontiersmen dated back to the unjust
and oppressive interference with their industries in the north of
Ireland, as well as to a deep-seated impatience of all authority.
After the Revolution this hatred of authority was transferred to the
tidewater aristocrats and was accentuated by the debtor complex,
which has characterized all our frontiers.
The character of the frontier from the very beginning remained the
same. Each generation of the restless, the discontented and the
failures pushed West, carrying with them some of the fine qualities
of the original settlers of the seaboard, but more often developing a
new complex of intolerance for the restraints and usages of the older
communities.
There is an amusing and significant evolution of these traits in
families who settled around Massachusetts Bay and then moved to
the Connecticut Valley; thence to Vermont, western New York, Ohio,
Illinois, Iowa, and Los Angeles, where they now flourish.
At the time of the Revolution the intense hatred in New England of
the mother country was due partly to a desire to confiscate the lands
of the Loyalists and partly to that which they considered unfair
restrictions on their overseas trade, as well as to an unwillingness to
being taxed to pay a part of the great cost of conquering Canada.
The net result of these forces was a widespread anti-British and,
later, anti-governmental complex, which has characterized our
country ever since. In contrast to England and to Canada, we are an
essentially lawless people.
 Ireland.
In the North the Revolution was largely a movement of various
Calvinist communities. The few Episcopalians in New England and
the more numerous adherents of that church in New York,
Pennsylvania, and Maryland were almost all Loyalists. In Virginia,
however, and further to the south the numerous Church of England
planter class took the American side and as a result retained their
leadership as an aristocracy down to the time of the Civil War. Even
at the time of the Revolution this church contributed more than its
quota of leaders. Of fifty-six signers of the Declaration of
Independence, thirty-four are classified as Episcopalians, twelve as
Congregationalists, five as Presbyterians, two Quakers, one Baptist
and one Roman Catholic. Of the Continental Congress which ratified
this Declaration, nearly two-thirds are said to have been
Episcopalians.
In the North following the expulsion of the Loyalists, the Church of
England was left prostrate, and it was some time after the
Revolution before it was successfully reorganized and was definitely
designated as the Protestant Episcopal Church to become, after a
century, the fashionable church of the Atlantic seaboard. The
Protestant Episcopal Church has never had any substantial hold in
the Middle or Far West and even today it is there largely a
missionary church with a tendency towards ritualism, which has
checked its normal development.
The Roman Catholic population of the colonies was negligible. In
1790 out of a white population of a little over 3,000,000, there were
not more than 35,000 Catholics in the United States. This number
included 5000 Negroes and some Germans. They were located for
the most part in Maryland and Pennsylvania, showing that the South
Irish Catholics had not come over in appreciable numbers during
Colonial times. Many of the colonies legislated against Roman
Catholics.
The Revolution itself was political and social, carrying to an extreme
development the political theories of the English Whigs. The distrust
of officialdom in power, engendered by the Revolution, led to all
manner of constitutional and legal restrictions, in place of a reliance
on the personal character of office holders as in England.
During Colonial times two distinct types of population developed.
First, the older communities along the tidewater districts, closely in
touch with Europe and having a long tradition of culture and wealth.
Second, a type grew up on the frontier which from the very
beginning showed itself intolerant of the control of the older and
richer settlements. This found its expression in Shays's Rebellion in
West Massachusetts in 1786-87, in the Whiskey Rebellion in
Pennsylvania in 1794, and, still earlier, in 1770, when the
"Regulators" in North Carolina were in open rebellion. After the
Revolution this tendency became more and more marked until the
then West under Andrew Jackson took over the control of the
country and, with many unfortunate results, carried Jefferson's
ideals to an extreme.
The Revolution emphasized this second attitude of mind and resulted
in the loss, by expulsion, of some of the best Nordic blood in the
country. The Loyalists from Boston, for instance, comprised many of
the oldest and most distinguished families. The representative
families of that city today are not descended wholly from the
aristocratic Colonial families, but largely from the population of the
small towns and villages in its neighborhood. It is said that a total of
eighty to a hundred thousand Loyalists left the colonies and went to
Canada and England and to the English West Indies.
New England to a greater extent than any other colony had been at
war with France and her Canadian Indians for the best part of one
hundred and fifty years, but the memory of this prolonged and
bloody struggle was obliterated by the Revolution. In its place there
arose in America a sentiment for France, caused largely by the
romantic personality of Lafayette, which survives to this day. The
Jeffersonian emotional sympathy with the French Revolution also
played a large part. The fact nevertheless is that we had a naval war
in 1798 with the French, although no formal war was declared. It
was caused by French depredations on American commerce,
resulting in several duels between American and French frigates. All
this is conveniently forgotten or ignored in some of our school text-
books.

The earliest permanent settlements of importance in New England

were around Massachusetts Bay, and in Virginia along navigable
streams. From such centers settlements spread up and down the
coast until all the desirable lands accessible to salt water became
occupied. In New England the coasts of southern Maine, of Rhode
Island, and of Connecticut were quickly occupied. Migration then
went overland from Massachusetts Bay, westward to the Connecticut
River. This was our first real northern frontier, and it took more than
a century to populate southern and western New England.
The settlement of Connecticut westward was blocked by the colony
of New York, while the Indians delayed the advance of
Massachusetts to the north. Connecticut in turn threw out colonies
at an early date, such as Newark in New Jersey in 1666.
Vermont was not settled until just before the Revolution, owing to
the danger from the Indians and a serious dispute between New
Hampshire and New York as to its ownership. At the time of the
Revolution it was a typical frontier with all of its bad features. At that
time it was about as rough and tough as Kentucky or Tennessee.
After the Revolution some of the best of its population migrated to
western New York, along with settlers from all over New England
who went for the most part through Vermont.
Early in the eighteenth century nearly all the desirable lands within
reach of salt water had been occupied from New Jersey southward,
and later coming immigrants were forced back into the uplands of
the West beyond the so-called Fall Line at which the Atlantic rivers
cease to be navigable.
New York interposed an absolute bar to westward migration because
the Iroquois Indians held almost all the fertile lands to the west of
the Hudson River. The east bank of the Hudson was more or less
filled up with New Englanders and the west bank with its undesirable
lands was turned over to late coming immigrants, chiefly Germans.
The Dutch population of New York was but small. The total
population of the colony at the time of its seizure by England in 1664
was little more than 10,000 and there were already many English
among them.
The English settlers occupied both banks of the Delaware around
Philadelphia, forcing the later-coming Germans and Ulster Scots to
the west. The Swedish settlement along the river was trifling and
was soon absorbed. There is very little trace of it left in place or
personal names. On the upper reaches of the Delaware River, in
Pennsylvania, and in New York, there were some small settlements
of French Huguenots, who suffered severely from Indian
depredations during the Revolution.
Delaware and the country east of Chesapeake Bay are purely
English, as was Maryland, except that western Maryland was really
part of western Pennsylvania and western Virginia.
Virginia itself was the mother of States and in Colonial times
extended in fact, as other colonies did in theory, to the Mississippi,
without mentioning claims to the South Sea. The tidewater
population of Virginia differed profoundly from that of the western
part of the State, including the Shenandoah Valley, which was settled
largely from western Pennsylvania.
There was a marked difference between the settlement of New
England and that of Virginia. To New England the earliest settlers
brought their women and families, while in Virginia the early arrivals
were nearly all males. Women were afterwards sent over by the
shipload, but this was only during the early days of the colony.
Like Virginia, North Carolina in Colonial times extended nominally to
the Mississippi. Its population lacked the tidewater aristocrats of the
Old Dominion and contained many Scots, straight from the
Highlands, who, strangely, took the British side during the
Revolution, as well as a very large number of Ulster Scots in the
western mountains, and in the counties which were afterwards
Tennessee.
Kentucky and Tennessee were both settled from the colonies
immediately to the east, but largely by the Ulster Scots, coming from
western Pennsylvania through the mountainous districts of Virginia
and North Carolina. These Ulster Scots came south along the
Appalachian valleys, which trend in a southwesterly direction. They
were reinforced by the numerous groups of the same people, who
came up from South Carolina. Kentucky was much more purely
English than Tennessee.
It is a fact but little understood, that the frontier was not much
reinforced from the coast but extended itself. In other words, the
frontier from the beginning was pushed onward by the
backwoodsmen, each generation advancing a little farther westward
and making new clearings.
The people along the coast, after a couple of generations of severe
privation, became relatively rich as compared with the frontiersmen.
The inhabitants of the coast cities for the most part preferred a sea-
faring life rather than the hewing out of a homestead in the
wilderness. There have been many cases in our Colonial history
where men went from the coast towns to the wilderness, but for the
most part they were content to stay at home.
As to the original racial complexion of the colonies, New England
was purely Nordic and English. The handful of Ulster Scots in New
Hampshire was not to be distinguished from the English, and the
individual Huguenot families around Boston were only trifling in
number. This remained true of all New England during the Colonial
period.
In New York, however, conditions were different. Dutch New
Amsterdam, afterwards English New York City, was always an
important port and attracted to itself from the earliest times a
substantial number of foreigners. In addition to the Dutch founders
a considerable number of French Huguenots were among the earlier
settlers. There were also a few Germans and Portuguese.
The west bank of the Hudson was less accessible and desirable than
the east bank, but there were some substantial colonies of Palatine
Germans settled there and up the valleys of the Mohawk and its
connecting streams. These last played a creditable part in the heavy
fighting which raged in this district with the British settlers, who
were for the most part Loyalists. There were also some small
colonies of pure Scotch along the Mohawk.
One of the results of the Revolution was the expulsion of the
Iroquois Indians, who had occupied New York westward from near
Albany to Buffalo. They had sided with the British and had
committed many atrocities. Their lands were immediately occupied
by New Englanders, coming chiefly from or through Vermont, so that
New York State west of Albany became little more than an extension
of New England, except that the settlers had become Presbyterians.
Many of the colonists who came to New York from Holland were
refugees from the provinces now included in Belgium—in other
words, they were either Flemings or French Huguenots. The real
Dutch in the province came from the north of Holland and were
mostly Nordic Frisians.
In addition to the large migration from Ulster very many English
Protestants from Leinster came to America by way of New York
immediately after the Revolution. The Catholic Irish did not come in
any numbers until after 1845.
The Huguenots were pre-dominantly Nordic. For example, New
Rochelle in New York was settled directly from Old Rochelle which is,
even today, one of the purest Nordic districts remaining in France. It
is entirely safe to say that the Huguenots from Brittany, Normandy,
and Picardy, who came to the American colonies by way of England
and Holland were overwhelmingly Nordic. Some of those from
southern France were probably Mediterranean.
Outside of the Port of New York the Dutch population was confined
to the Hudson River towns, chiefly on the east bank, up to and
including Albany and Schenectady. The Dutch element of New Jersey
was very small.
New Jersey was almost all English, except a few Scotch settlements.
It was settled directly from England by way of Perth Amboy,
Elizabeth, and Freehold in the north. South Jersey was settled from
Pennsylvania. There were a few German communities scattered
throughout the north-central part of New Jersey, but, on the whole,
the State can be counted as purely English.
The case of Pennsylvania was somewhat different. The original
settlers on the west bank of the Delaware, around Philadelphia, were
English Quakers with a certain number of Welsh, who probably were
for the most part Nordic. This section was the most cultured and
important part of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia was the port of entry of
two important migrations in the eighteenth century. First, the Ulster
Scots, who came in great numbers after 1720. In fact, most of the
Ulster Scots in America entered the colonies through Philadelphia
and, to a less extent, through Charleston, South Carolina. These late
comers found the desirable land along the Delaware had been taken
up, so they moved westward to the Indian frontier. They were a
restless, brave, and pugnacious people, and immediately assumed
the burden of the Indian fighting, often without the support or even
the sympathy of the Philadelphia Quakers. They were numerous and
soon spread along the foothills and valleys of the Appalachians
southwestward through western Maryland and Virginia into North
and South Carolina, whence they again crossed the ridges westward,
until, by the time of the Revolution, they had laid the foundations of
Kentucky and of Tennessee. They were, of course, pure Nordics and
of North England and Lowland Scotch origin. They had resided for
two or three generations in North Ireland. Being fervent
Presbyterians, they had not mingled with the Catholic Irish.
In 1790 these Ulster Scots in the colonies numbered about 200,000
and the pure Scots about 300,000 and taken together they were,
next to the English, the most important element. They were, as said
above, pre-eminently pioneers and Indian fighters and the same fact
appears in the history of practically every frontier of British colonies
during the next century. They were a highly selected group when
they first went to Ireland, which was at that time to all intents a
frontier. Since that time the Scots and the Ulster Scots have
everywhere shown the characteristics of the ideal pioneer. They
played a predominant part in the settlement of the southern part of
the Middle West.
The next most important racial element was the Germans. In fact, it
was the only non-British element of importance in the colonies. At
the time of the Revolution the Germans numbered about a quarter
of a million and by 1790 they have been computed to have been
about 9 per cent of the total population of the colonies. They settled
in the districts of Pennsylvania immediately west of Philadelphia
around York and Lancaster, where they are to be found today. They
were a peaceful and industrious people, and have to some extent
retained their language and customs down to the present time. A
very few of them joined their neighbors, the Ulster Scots, in the
migration to the Southwest. They were not particularly loyal to the
American cause during the Revolution nor in the preceding French
Wars, and their presence in the colonies excited much hostility. They
were refugees, who had fled down the Rhine from Alsace and the
Palatinate to escape the French when Louis XIV invaded and
devastated their country. With them were many refugees from
German-speaking Switzerland together with Hussites from Moravia.
While there were some Lutherans and Calvinists among them, most
of the "Pennsylvania Dutch," as they were called by the English
colonists, belonged to small and obscure sects. Dunkards,
Schwankenfelders, Amish, and Mennonites still maintain their special
religious communities. Their language is Alemannish and this
German dialect is still spoken in Alsace and Switzerland. In addition
to their colonies in Pennsylvania, there was a small settlement of
Moravian Brothers in the western part of North Carolina.
Maryland was originally settled under a charter to Lord Baltimore as
a refuge for English Catholics, but from the beginning these latter
were very few in number and by 1690 were so thoroughly
outnumbered that they were deprived of the franchise.
Virginia, the most important of the colonies next to New England, if
the latter be taken as a whole, was pure English in the tidewater
district, that is, as far west as Richmond. Beyond were many Ulster
Scots, who, it must be remembered, were very largely English.
North Carolina was much the same, except that the Ulster Scots
were relatively more numerous.
South Carolina had an English planter aristocracy and was much
purer English and had less Ulster Scotch than her northern neighbor.
It had also a considerable French Huguenot element, by far the
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