What Is To Be Fictionalized? Novelizing Vera Figner’s Memoirs Through Rakhmetov’s Sainthood

Abstract

After the assasination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the Russian revolutionary movement faced a crisis of identity. Activists were contemplating on how to transform a single act of destruction into a start for the socialist revolution. My project argues that Vera Figner, a leader of the People’s Will, resolved this dilemma by fictionalizing her life through the ‘secular saint’ archetype of Rakhmetov from Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? Findings demonstrate that Figner did not seek the inspiration from the novel’s peaceful female protagonist, but instead actively constructed herself as Rakhmetov, an ascetic and Spartan-style ‘special man’ in her memoirs by sanctifying the violence in revolutionary path for the greater good, changing the God to political religion. My primary sources include Vera Figner’s memoirs, Zapechatlennyi Trud, and Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? To analyze these texts, I apply a theoretical framework combining Irina Paperno’s semiotics of behavior, which explores the literature-life-literature circular cycle, and Stephan Rindlisbacher’s concept of political religion, where revolutionary devotion replaces traditional religious worship. While Paperno’s article helps to explain the general literature process, Rindlisbacher and other authors describe the details. The analysis takes place within the realm of hagiographic conventions in radical literature. I compare the character of Rakhmetov to the life of Saint Aleksey “The Man of God,” noting how both figures renounce aristocratic privilege and material wealth for a higher ‘divine’ cause. A key finding of my research is Figner’s rejection of feminine reformist approach to the revolution, represented by the main female protagonist. Figner viewed the reforms as powerless and instead adopted Rakhmetov’s radical self-denial and ‘vow of celibacy’ to ensure the socialist agency against Tsarist tyranny. As Rakhmetov was denying the possibility for love commitment, Figner, in a similar way, abandoned her husband in Switzerland to pursue the revolution professionally in Russia. To present my writings, I provide a close reading of Figner's memoirs, treating her writings and commentaries on People’s Will executive committee posts as a unified narrative. I argue that these organizational rules function not simply as political statements, but as religious vows of chastity and obedience that mirror the asceticism of the literary archetype of Rakhmetov. This structure reveals the ‘Virgin with a Revolver’ paradox: Figner maintained a public persona of saintly purity even while orchestrating political assassinations. This ‘saint’ image became solid during her 20-year incarceration in Shlisselburg prison, where she transformed from a radical terrorist into a long-suffering martyr. Her purity was further constructed through the erasure of gender and sexuality. Through condemning femininity as an excess, she embraced a masculine identity defined, by that time, through independent thought and iron will. By that, I contribute to the field showing how 19th-century revolutionaries used literary fiction to sanctify their own political violence and erase the private self in favor of the prophecy of the revolution.