Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Sofya Perovskaya was a terrorist and organizer of the movement called Narodnaya Volya (Will of the People). Born into an aristocratic family (her father, General Lev Perovsky, was at one time the governor of St. Petersburg), at the age of 12 she went to Geneva, where her uncle lived. Most of the Russian émigré writers worked there, and Perovskaya may have known about 1860s nihilism when, in 1866, the nihilist student Karakozov attempted to assassinate Tsar Alexander II. In 1869 she attended the recently opened Alarchinsky courses for young women instigated by the tsar, where she learned physics, mathematics, geometry, Russian, and pedagogy. In 1870 she rebelled against her strict father and ran away from home, deciding not to return. In 1871 she joined the Chaikovsky Circle (1869–74), one of the revolutionary movements in St. Petersburg with the project to go among people in the country to teach the peasantry their moral imperative to revolt, without positive results. In the same year she was arrested for the crime of collaborating with Nikolai Goncharov, the son of a general, who printed 40 copies of a revolutionary sheet in his own home, but she was soon freed. In 1872 Perovskaya went to a village not far from Kazan' and assisted the local zemstvo doctor (the zemstvo was the electoral district council in pre-revolutionary Russia). In 1873 she came back to St. Petersburg ... log in or subscribe to read full text