Word: russianness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST, by Peter Kropotkin. The absorbing autobiography of a 19th century Russian prince turned anarchist, who paid for his ideals in stretches of penury and imprisonment...
...memoir is an incomparable record of the weird and wonderful Russian nobility, compared with whom the pious, drunken, sheepskin-clad serfs seemed like another race. The Czar's ramshackle empire was made up of three other races-the merchants, who were much like merchants anywhere; the official class, whose devotion to sacred paper could be compared only to a Tibetan monk operating a prayer wheel; and the student and professional intelligentsia, politically zealous to a pitch of almost mystical intensity...
Prince Kropotkin "passed" from one race to another, though not quite successfully. An anarchist among aristocrats, he remained an aristocrat among anarchists; paradoxically, this gave him a special strength in the revolutionary movements he helped to found. He was immune from the Russian intellectual's vice of soul-searching; as a prince, he never questioned his own actions...
Back in St. Petersburg, Kropotkin was soon busy with pamphlets, manifestos, and interminable Russian discussions with a circle of students, workmen and intellectuals. He found the true faith and a false name-Borodin, the first of many. It was not long before he endured his first imprisonment and betrayal. Typically, while his colleagues scuttled out of town to escape the police, Kropotkin was caught because he felt obliged to keep his date with the local geological society to expound his theory on the ice cap. A weaver in his "circle" broke his alias to the police. There was no trial...
...Atlantic Monthly. The present book is a facsimile edition of that text, as expanded and published a year later by Houghton Mifflin in Kropotkin's own flawless English (no class was more cosmopolitan than Russia's decadent nobility, who spoke French and English among themselves and considered Russian useful chiefly in the nursery and for addressing servants and soldiers...