Narrating Political Imprisonment in Tsarist Russia: Bakunin, Goethe, Hegel

Abstract

How have modern cultures of dissent learnt to narrate the experience of political imprisonment? From 1851 to 1853, M. A. Bakunin was incarcerated in St Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress. Here, the “father of Russian anarchism” wrote what has become known as his Confession: an account of his personal and political development, penned in the most notorious prison of the Russian autocracy at the behest of the tsar. Previous scholarship has focused entirely on the content of this peculiar text. The present article is the first to mobilize extensive archival research—on its carceral conditions of production and intellectual conditions of possibility—in order to understand the form of Bakunin's Confession. Doing so reveals the text as one of the first Russian Bildungsromane: the birth of a genre whereby the imprisoned self became legible through a new epistemology of self and history between Goethe and Hegel. Excavating the nature and afterlives of this novel political aesthetics provides original insights into the “politicization” of state incarceration in European history, the origins of modern Russian autobiographics, and the construction of the radical self.