Book Project

Citizens and Comrades: The Interplay of French and Russian Revolutionary Cultures

Few countries are as associated in the popular imagination with the concept of revolution as France and Russia. From 1789 through the nineteenth century, France was the predominant shaper of global ideas about revolution; after 1917, the Soviet Union cast itself in that defining role. While each country claimed primacy at different points in time, the relationship between the two revolutionary traditions nevertheless irrevocably shaped each claim. While the French tradition of course predates the Russian, as France grappled with the meaning of its revolutionary heritage during the Third Republic, revolutionary Russia provided a new lens for the French and the Russians alike to interpret that heritage and its global influence.

Through an array of interactions that included the movement and adaptation of texts, images, symbols, objects, and performances, the revolutionary cultures of France and Russia were intimately connected and, over time, mutually formative. Citizens and Comrades is the first cultural history of this enduring, symbiotic relationship. Focusing on the pivotal period that began with the Paris Commune of 1871 and extended through the Popular Front era of the mid-1930s, this book charts how revolutionary histories and traditions crossed geographical borders and moved among different levels of culture—from the elite to the popular and back again. Citizens and Comrades provides a new, connected view of the French and Russian revolutionary traditions, revealing a relationship that was deeper, more popular, more creative, more cultural, more protracted, and ultimately more influential to a broader range of historical actors than has previously been elucidated by historians of either tradition.

Academic Writing

“Nihilist, Fenians and Revolutionary Martyrdom in Transnational Context”

The Slavonic & East European Review 102, no. 1 (special issue: Political Martyrdom in Late Imperial Russia) (2024): 66-97

Although their goals and the cultural contexts in which they were operating differed, both the so-called nihilists and the so-called Fenians described themselves and were described by others — in the press, in fiction — as martyrs willing to die for their cause. Whether employed with approval or opprobrium, Victorian print culture in particular drew these two sets of radicals together: fear of an impending ‘union of Nihilists and Fenians’, as one Lancaster newspaper put it in 1882, was a recurring theme in the late Victorian press. However, so too was the idea, expressed in 1896 by an English journalist who had worked in Russia, that it was unbelievable that nihilists would have ‘any connection whatsoever’ with the Fenians, because the high-minded nihilists supposedly perceived Irish radicals as prosaic dilettantes. By examining such contradictory representations of revolutionary sacrifice and martyrdom in comparative and transnational context, we can begin to trace the contours of a shared language of sacrifice both among and outside of these respective movements. In doing so, this article begins to define the role of Russia (and its ‘martyrs’) as both a focus and a foil in the fin de siècle European imagination.

“Un féminisme feuilletoniste : Les Vierges russes de Marie-Louise Gagneur” [A Feuilleton Feminism: Marie-Louise Gagneur’s The Russian Virgins]

Revue d’histoire du xixe siècle 66, no. 1 (special issue: Féminismes en revolution(s) (Europe/Amériques)) (Spring 2023): 89-105

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the real Russian women who committed acts of political violence with revolutionary aims coexisted with myriad imagined counterparts who were the subjects of a raft of novels, plays, and other representations in the mushrooming mass-media landscape of Western Europe. This changing media landscape was exemplified in France by the linked genres of the fictional roman-feuilleton and the factual fait divers—genres in which the boundaries between fiction and fact were often not especially clear cut. One renowned and prolific feuilletoniste was the feminist writer and activist Marie-Louise Gagneur (1832-1902), whose 1880 novel The Russian Virgins tackled the topic of the female Russian revolutionary and used her as an opportunity to scrutinize the feminist issues of the day.

This article employs a close reading of Gagneur’s novel to argue that fictionalized accounts of nihilist women were key in creating an archetype of a Russian revolutionary woman that persisted well into the twentieth century, circulating widely and influencing the thinking and work of Western European feminists like Gagneur.

“Who Are Vera and Tatiana?: The Female Russian Nihilist in the Fin de Siècle Imagination”

Representations 150, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 1-31

Focusing on a close, contextualized reading of a single case of invented identity from 1906, this article illustrates how, in fin de siècle Europe, a mutually generative relationship between the real, the imagined, and the rapidly proliferating mass media transformed the female “nihilist” from an apocryphal Russian figure into a durable Russian archetype—an archetype that had significant consequences in the shaping of European public opinion about Russia.

This article won the Association for Women in Slavic Studies’ 2021 Barbara Heldt Prize for Best Article in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Women’s and Gender Studies.

Other Writing

• How the Female Russian Nihilist Became a Tenacious Archetype, NYU Jordan Center All the Russias’ Blog (February 2022)

• Time for a Revolution, The Activist History Review (July 2017)

• The Americans and “Knowing” Russia in the Age of Trump, The Activist History Review (May 2017)

Talks

• "Bloody Virgins, Beautiful Avengers: The Female Russian Nihilist in the European Imagination," NYU Jordan Center 19v Seminar Series (March 2022)