Remembering “The Terrorism”: Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii'sUnderground Russia

Abstract

How was terrorism first remembered when it surged up from the Russian underground in the third quarter of the nineteenth century? In this article, Lynn Ellen Patyk argues that memory is indispensible to terrorism and that historians’ attribution of the “invention of modern terrorism“ to Russian revolutionaries in the mid-nineteenth century is as much a testament to these revolutionaries’ mnemonic savvy as to their tactical innovation. The revolutionary-litterateur Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii (1852-1895) was at the avant-garde of this innovation, and this article analyzes his mastery of the implicit mnemonics of the terrorist deed and then of its literary commemoration inUnderground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life(1882). Stepniak-Kravchinskii uses historical narrative to perform essential plot revisions and linguistic reclamations (for example, of the wordNihilist)and employs the device of “personal recollections” to authenticate and lend emotional and sensual immediacy to his representation of “the Terrorism” and its place of origin, Underground Russia.