The Decembrists played an outsized part in the history of revolution in Russia. Though the revolts of both the Northern and Southern societies failed spectacularly, they were seen as Russia’s first true uprisings against autocracy. And whether executed or exiled, Decembrists were immortalized as martyrs in the name of freedom and justice. The nihilists of the 1860s, the “to the people” movement of the 1870s, and the terrorist groups of the 1880s and beyond—all of these were nurtured on stories and poems about the brave heroes like Kondraty Ryleev, who gave all for the sake of a better Russia.

Given their legacy, the comparative dearth of scholarship on the Decembrists in English is notable. The last major monograph on the Decembrist revolts is Marc Raeff’s in 1966. Emily Wang’s concise book on Pushkin and the Decembrists is therefore a welcome contribution to a better understanding of the Decembrist worldview.

Wang’s approach to the Decembrists is through the lens of the history of emotions, and she uses poetry as evidence for the “emotional communities” Russian elites created to further their revolutionary aims. Her focus on poetry leads her to reexamine the role of Aleksandr Pushkin in Decembrism, a role that has heretofore been minimized by scholars because of Pushkin’s absence from the major Decembrist events and the ambivalent relations he had with the participants. According to Wang, the Decembrists belonged to a “civic sentimentalist” community that emphasized the “elevated” emotions of those dedicated to civic virtue, whereas Pushkin was a “libertine,” who eschewed the serious attitude toward sentiment and “used feeling playfully” (28). Despite their differences, the Decembrists and Pushkin mutually influenced one another. Wang effectively illustrates this point in multiple places in the book, such as in her analysis of Pushkin’s poem “Liberty,” which was received as a “sentimentalist” poem despite potential libertine readings. For Wang, the complicated relationships between different emotional communities helps to explain how Pushkin, who was not a Decembrist, was “nevertheless their ‘singer,’ or their fellow traveler” (137).

Wang reveals an excellent understanding on the literature on emotions, and her book is well researched. The new material on Pushkin and Byronism, for example, is quite interesting. There is only one aspect of the question of sentiment that is left somewhat unexplored—the European history of the sentimentalism that so heavily influenced the characters in Wang’s story. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is mentioned, as is England’s Lord Byron, but Wang jumps immediately into the reception of these European figures without considering them first in their own right. It might have been better to consider more fully the eighteenth and early nineteenth century development of theories of “sentiment” or “sensibility” in the works of not only Rousseau, but also Adam Smith and David Hume. This would have helped the reader to understand the appropriate and engagement with European ideas more fully.

Overall, however, Pushkin, the Decembrists, and Civic Sentimentalism is a very stimulating contribution to the history of revolution and civic engagement in Russia, revealing the complexities and varieties of Decembrist communities and of political engagement in the early nineteenth century.