government, from the adverse outlook, took a similar view.[1] The poet Polonskii, although he acted as censor, wrote in 1877–1878 an enthusiastic description of a girl propagandist languishing in gaol. Turgenev's prose poem The Threshold is an apotheosis of the woman terrorist Perovskaja.
Girls often consecrated their lives to the revolution when they were still little more than children.[2]
Many writers on the Russian revolution ascribe a religious character to the movement, but it is necessary here to be precise in our use of terms. The revolutionist, especially if still quite young, believed in the revolution as shortly before he had believed in heaven. He delighted in self-sacrifice, and had a certain resemblance to the early Christians with their love of martyrdom. Nolens volens the terrorist shunned self-indulgence; he had no taste for bodily pleasures; despite his theories he was not, could not possibly be, a practical materialist and hedonist. He sacrificed everything to his ideal, even personal inclinations, even love and marriage. There was something of the ascetic about him.
The Russian terrorist was frequently a mystic; he had a mystical faith in the revolution; he had exchanged his religious creed for a philosophical and political creed, for a kind of revolutionary gnosis. Just as the religious mystic immerses himself wholly in the anthropomorphic idea of his god, so did the revolutionary devote himself wholly to the contemplation of the deed to be performed and of the person to be destroyed. The horror of crime, the horror of assassination, had a deliriant influence upon these young minds, made them drunken with death, and in proportion as it did this, it unfitted them for detail work. The Russian revolutionist could die for his idea, but he could not always live for it.
Not infrequently the Russian revolutionist became utterly indifferent to life; he grew accustomed to the dangers, the
- ↑ Cf. the article entitled, Woman, in the collective work, Russia by Russians. In this article we find the 1874 report of Count Pahlen, Minister for Justice, who ascribed the success of the revolutionary organisations to the collaboration of women and girls. Amfiteatrov, the writer of the article, estimated that among the revolutionists the numerical proportion of the women to the men was as 1:4.
- ↑ We find, for example, in the reminiscences of Breškovskaja, "By sixteen I had read much of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, and I knew by heart French revolution."
