Scholars of Russian-American relations in the late nineteenth century have long been concerned with the personalities and writings of university-based experts, journalists, diplomats, and political activists. We are well acquainted with the observations of various American commentators on the backward state of Russian state, society, economy, and politics. While the activities of prominent men such as George Kennan have effortlessly dominated the historical agenda, the negative discourses that they produced about Russia have subsumed other important American representations of the country.Footnote ² Since the period of early modern history, European travelers had seen Russia as a barbarous land of slave-like people, responsive only to the persuasions of the whip and the knout wielded by an autocratic tsar. Subsequently, Larry Wolff has shown that Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers created images of a despotic and backward Eastern Europe in order to validate the idea of a progressive, enlightened, and civilized Western Europe.Footnote ³

While the American intelligentsia had always formed a peripheral wing of the European Republic of Letters, members disagreed with the overt denunciations of Russia that were popular in nineteenth-century Europe.Footnote ⁴ America for its part was grateful to Russia for the diplomatic support it had tendered during the Civil War, and untroubled by the obvious ideological discrepancies in the political orientation of the two empires. Russian-American relations seemed to be on solid ground, especially as they were based on growing commercial and business ties.Footnote ⁵

But by the late nineteenth century, as Russians and Americans developed competing imperial interests in East Asia and the Pacific, American journalists, diplomats, and professors began to echo many of the European diatribes against the oppressive autocracy, the backward status of the peasantry, and the lack of commercial and industrial development in Russia. They were supported in their dismal assessments by Jewish immigrant groups from Russia, and by progressive American liberals and radicals appalled at the treatment of the Russian intelligentsia and minorities. David Engerman in his recently published monograph argues American analysts of the Russian empire used Victorian racial categories to represent the Russian people as slavish, backward, and un-enterprising. According to these experts, a pervasive Asiatic legacy of passivity and sloth prevented Russia from joining the ranks of the civilized peoples, and they prescribed rapid modernization as the only cure for this malaise.Footnote ⁶

By training our lenses primarily on elite and expert characterizations, we have overlooked many other, more nuanced and ambivalent representations of Russia that were in circulation in the late-nineteenth-century press and literature.Footnote ⁷ More importantly, we have ignored to a certain extent the role Russians themselves played in shaping American perceptions of their history, politics, and culture. In the American popular imagination, Russia was more than a case of arrested development and terminal backwardness; Russia meant imperial romance, the glamorous lifestyle of exotic and privileged nobility, and the possibilities of political adventure in a diverse geographical locale. Although St. Petersburg and Moscow were never included as obligatory destinations in the Grand Tour of Europe, by the latter half of the nineteenth century affluent American men and women traveled to Russia for leisure and tourism. Americans explored the grand palaces and museums of St. Petersburg, admired the forty-times-forty churches in Moscow, sailed down the Volga, and, from the beginning of the twentieth century, traveled east on the Trans-Siberian Railway. An anonymous Russian nihilist lamented, “I have had occasion to meet several Americans in St. Petersburg, who charmed by the pleasant intercourse with representatives of the Russian court and high life, were rather inclined to consider the Russian government a sort of paternal and comfortable arrangement… .”Footnote ⁸

Russia was more than an exotic playground for the wealthier class of Americans who traveled to Europe and Russia in increasing numbers.Footnote ⁹ To many progressive Americans, the Russian political system appeared unbearably repressive, and they were attracted to the innovative Russian ideologies such as anarchism, nihilism, and populism that offered radical alternatives to the progress of liberalism and capitalism in the West.Footnote ¹⁰ American intellectuals were drawn also to the romantic fervor of exemplary Russian revolutionaries, and were deeply impressed by their capacity for self-sacrifice in pursuit of their cause. As Americans read Russian memoirs and literature both in the original and translation, and met notable Russian émigrés, they formed enduring images of Russia that wielded considerable influence both in the academy and in the popular consciousness.

REPRESENTATIONS AND SELF-PRESENTATIONS

In this essay I look at the role American popular fiction played both in creating these alluring visions of aristocratic lifestyles in Russia, and in representing the revolutionary figures, terrorist plots against autocracy, and radical philosophies that emanated from the country. Popular fiction was created and consumed at the intersection of various elite and popular discourses about Russia, and Russian émigrés, revolutionaries, and writers such as Turgenev and Tolstoy played a powerful role in shaping these transnational conversations. Since popular literature exists mostly because of the generic expectations of the reading public rather than exceptional talents of individual authors,Footnote ¹¹ formulaic fiction can offer us an interpretive window into the cultural patterns and fantasies of a particular period.Footnote ¹² These novels offered little historical information about Russia, but they reified notions of imperious nobles, exquisite women, ubiquitous secret police, and reckless but brave revolutionaries. Through repetition and reiteration in the pages of fiction and the press, Russia began to be associated with a powerful set of evocative and sedimentary images that seamlessly linked the possession of high culture and noble bearing with the capacity for violence and radicalism.Footnote ¹³

When examining the cultural representations of other societies, one has to perforce engage with the theories of orientalism advanced initially by Edward Said, and subsequently elaborated with great subtlety by Mary Louise Pratt.Footnote ¹⁴ Both Said and Pratt, influenced crucially by Foucault's theories of the interlocking nature of power and knowledge, see the various Western knowledge systems that have been developed about the rest of the world as masking the real intent of colonial classification, possession, and exploitation. According to Said, the various Western representations of the Orient, both scholarly and popular, were so pervasive and all encompassing that they prevented the Orient from describing itself. Moreover, Said fundamentally agrees with Foucault that systems of representations are deeply influenced by the systems of power within which they originate.Footnote ¹⁵

Although Said's model of colonial knowledge production has been subject to a variety of critiques, from both the left and the right, it continues to hold considerable sway in the academy.Footnote ¹⁶ New research from the field of colonial and post-colonial scholarship has significantly revised our understanding of cultural transmission between the metropole and the colony, and historians have uncovered means through which these distinctive hierarchies were constructed in the first place. Not only did products, ideas, and people circulate both within and across empires; Western ideas were also deconstructed through the processes of native reception and often fundamentally transformed through local practice.Footnote ¹⁷ Despite these revisionist trajectories, there continues to be much consensus that Western understandings about the rest of the world were gained primarily through investigations conducted by Western scholars, bureaucrats, journalists, colonists, and travelers.Footnote ¹⁸

However, if we examine the process through which these systems of knowledge are constructed, we find they are often based on the building blocks of native self-representations in various genres and formats. If the country in question possesses a sophisticated intelligentsia who are able to produce authoritative forms of self-presentations that find purchase in transnational intellectual circuits, this can contaminate the original nature of Western knowledge and influence the tropes of representation. In the case of American-Russian relations, the powerful explanatory model of Orientalism, in which scholars, media experts, and literary figures produce the Orient through processes of narrative intertextuality and the proliferation of discourse, fails to capture the entire truth. In what follows, I first unpack the processes through which groups of Russian intelligentsia circulated cultural mythologies about their country, and then examine the relational and hybrid forms of knowledge subsequently created on these bases.

While American experts and scholars sought to comprehensively represent Russia through hegemonic discourses from within the academy, and by means of print media, American cultural imperialism was particularly effective because it refused to be monologic. Instead, it allowed a variety of Russian émigré voices to speak with authority from within American universities, write in elite journals, and publish a variety of fiction both in English and in translation from Russian. Popular literature emerged as a powerful site for and a location of various contestatory practices. Within this multitude of texts and cacophony of voices, certain groups of Russians played a significant part in creating models of themselves for American consumption, and in perpetuating myths about their own history and culture that subsequently captured the American imagination.

Amy Kaplan, in her fascinating study on fiction and the legitimization of American imperialism in the late nineteenth century, shows that many of the popular romances of the period, including George Barr McCutcheon's, Graustark (1901) and Richard Harding Davis's Soldier of Fortune (1897), plotted a narrative of the Spanish-American War as “chivalric rescue mission that in turn rejuvenates the liberator.”Footnote ¹⁹ In Kaplan's reading of the novels, the manly American hero, fleeing the constraints of feminization and industrialization at home, liberates a primitive land from a barbarous oppressor. He then returns home revitalized with his trophy wife whose admiring gaze legitimizes his imperial adventure. But the popular romances set in Russia, while they echoed some of these imperial fantasies, contained a more complicated narrative in which the American hero or heroine has to penetrate a glamorous imperial society, romance a hero or heroine of unmatched beauty and sophistication, match wits with a ruthless secret police, and redeem violent revolutionaries.Footnote ²⁰

If Westerners thought Russia was backward, they never considered it a primitive society like those found in the colonies of Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.Footnote ²¹ While it had certain exotic qualities of an older civilization such as China or even of Egypt, Russia was itself a major European power with vast imperial interests. Russia also had an established court society that very few Americans had penetrated with any degree of success. In the late nineteenth century, Russian salons were creating great works of art, music, and literature, and scholarship equaled only in Paris and to a lesser degree, in London.Footnote ²² Finally, Russian left-wing political thought constituted one of the major ideological challenges to the sweeping triumph of liberalism in the world.

In Kaplan's reading of the romances, the imperial context is usually flat and generic, and there is little to differentiate a Cuba, a Puerto Rico, or a Hawai'i except as sites of imperial intervention. The natives rarely play a meaningful role in the texts except as repositories of racial inferiority. Finally, Kaplan agrees with Michael Kammen's assertion that historical romances of the period de-revolutionize the American Revolution to such an extent that it cannot serve as a model for other uprisings in the Third World.Footnote ²³ As Kaplan says, “the novels render the revolution on the part of non-white people as anarchy in need of imperial salvation.”Footnote ²⁴ In the romances about Russia, to the contrary, the context played a very important role in shaping and constraining the activities of the American hero and heroine. Russia, embodied in the figure of the aristocratic Russian, became the object of American desire since he or she both possessed an enviable mastery of high culture and was engaged in a revolutionary fight against tyranny. Popular American fiction created a powerful exemplar of a Russian revolution that would soon eclipse the American model in much of the colonized world. Finally, as I will show, Russian émigrés (native informants), aided by Russian literature in translation that prepared the ground for their favorable reception in the West, materially created and manipulated the American discourses about Russia.

BACKGROUND TO THE NOVELS

From the mid-nineteenth century until the onset of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Russia proved to be a popular locale for the staging of various genres of Western fiction such as melodrama, romance, murder mysteries, and political thrillers. Perhaps the best-known Western literary works that used Russia as a backdrop were Oscar Wilde's play, Vera the Nihilist (1881), and Joseph Conrad's novels The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911).Footnote ²⁵ Some of the authors of these texts were native-born Americans while others were Russian émigrés to the United States writing for a Western audience, and this literature was part of a larger transatlantic popular literature about Russia produced simultaneously in England and France.

While I have found American plays and novels on Russia written as early as the 1850s, the bulk of the fiction emerged in the 1890s and into the early 1910s.Footnote ²⁶ A reviewer in the journal The Nation in 1892 bemoaned, “The popularity of everything Russian has called into existence a mass of worthless books which profess to enlighten and amuse the public.”Footnote ²⁷ While this was an apt description for many of the books, they were nonetheless extremely popular. Richard Savage's 1891 novel My Official Wife received glowing reviews in all the notable Americans journals, such as The New York Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Advertiser, The Chicago Times, and The New York World, and was even turned into a play with the help of another popular novelist, Archibald Clavering Gunter.Footnote ²⁸ Other well-known writers of the genre included Marriott Crittenden, Walker Kennedy, Amelia Barr, Mary J. Holmes, John K. Leys, Kathleen O'Meara, Julien Gordon, Ruth Kedzie Wood, and Olive Gilbreath. Periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine serialized many of these works. Russian émigré writers who contributed to this body of work included the well-known revolutionary S. M. Kravchinsky (who wrote under the pseudonym Stepniak), notable writer about American-Jewish life Abraham Cahan,Footnote ²⁹ Barbara MacGahan, the widow of the well-known American reporter Januarius MacGahan and a journalist in her own right,Footnote ³⁰ and Lydia Pimenov Noble.

The American writers, while more sober in their assessments of Russian revolutionaries, were nonetheless influenced by the translated works of French authors such as Jules Verne, Ernest Lavigne, and Louise Gagneur. Russia-based thrillers by popular British writers such as William Le Queux and George Alfred Henty proved equally influential.Footnote ³¹ During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, romances enjoyed a special revival, which also included historical fiction, supernatural tales, mysteries, and works of science fiction.Footnote ³² Richard Henry Savage was the most prolific of all the American writers who employed a Russian theme. He had been, in turn, a soldier, lawyer, and novelist, and had traveled widely in Russia, Siberia, the Middle East, and the Far East.Footnote ³³ A man of conservative political interests and a fervent admirer of the natural aristocracy of Europe, Savage had served in the American army, especially in the war against Spain in 1898. In his works, he brought together the glamour and romance of imperial adventure as exemplified in the books by Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard, and Anthony Hope.

The taste for aristocratic Russia had been assiduously cultivated by the substantial literature of travel and exploration popular among the American reading public during earlier decades. There were genteel accounts published by Victorian lady travelers, as well as more masculine tales of exploration of the unknown Russian empire.Footnote ³⁴ George Kennan's travelogue, Tent Life in Siberia (1870), a dashing tale of romantic adventure, sold extremely well. His work was ably seconded by writings of the intrepid American journalist Januarius MacGahan, who was present at the Russian military advance on Khiva in Central Asia in 1873.Footnote ³⁵ Popular fiction located itself in an immediately recognizable landscape of the endless steppes dotted by noble estates, and few writers ventured beyond the most commonplace descriptions of the desolate Russian countryside, the long winters, and the dense forests. Most authors chose St. Petersburg as the favored locale for the action, which moved from Nevsky Prospekt (the Piccadilly Circus or the Champs Elysées of St. Petersburg), to the gypsy parties in the islands on the river Neva, to the exclusive Yacht Club and the English Club, and dinners at the ultrafashionable Donon's restaurant (often compared to the exclusive Delmonico's of New York). Events usually culminated in a ball at the Winter Palace.

These novels brought together two major images of Russia, namely, an aristocratic Russia, and Russia, the land of revolutionaries. There was little American interest in the peasants, the Russian Orthodox Church, or the merchants, and Russian imperial advances in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia held only limited popular appeal. There was a reason for the selection of this particular set of images about Russian aristocrats. Beginning in 1867 with the appearance of the first translations of Turgenev's works in English, the transatlantic English-speaking world was gripped by a Russia-fever that was only exacerbated by the appearance of works by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in subsequent decades.Footnote ³⁶ As Harriet Waters observed in a review of Russian literature in The Atlantic Monthly, “Suddenly it has come to pass that these books are everywhere. The selfsame volumes, wearing that glaringly democratic badge, the stamp of the circulating library, make their way into the houses of high and low.”Footnote ³⁷

Turgenev's good looks, courtly manners, and command of English, French, and German did much to project the image of the Westernized Russian nobleman at ease in European salons.Footnote ³⁸ Tolstoy's influence spread far beyond the confines of a literary-minded public, and his philosophical and political writings were greatly admired by a range of American intellectuals including Mark Twain and William Dean Howells.Footnote ³⁹ Many famous Americans such as Jane Addams, George Kennan, Eugene Schuyler, and Isabel Hapgood visited Tolstoy at his spacious country estate near Moscow.Footnote ⁴⁰ While Turgenev commiserated with the lot of the Russian peasant, and Tolstoy idolized the peasant as the savior of a corrupt and degenerate Russia, it was Anna Karenina, the ultrafashionable and adulterous countess of Tolstoy's creation, who seized the American imagination.Footnote ⁴¹

Interest in aristocratic Russian lifestyles was also fueled by the writings of American travelers and translators such as Isabel Hapgood and Eugene Schuyler.Footnote ⁴² Hapgood, at the risk of being branded a tsarist sympathizer,Footnote ⁴³ wrote widely in American periodicals about various aspects of noble life in Russia, in order to counter more sensational narratives about Russian censorship and oppression circulated by American journalists such as George Kennan, and other émigré revolutionaries.Footnote ⁴⁴ Interest in the Russian court and ways of the nobility was also fed by well-orchestrated visits to America by the latter.Footnote ⁴⁵ The coronations of Alexander III in 1883 and Nicholas II in 1894 were well attended by wealthy Americans and journalists.Footnote ⁴⁶ Finally, the marriage of Julia Dent, granddaughter of American President Ulysses Grant, to the Russian Prince Cantacuzène-Speranksy in 1899 sparked a media extravaganza. The American press heavily covered their lavish wedding in Newport, Rhode Island, which the aristocratic Speransky family considered vulgar and inappropriate.Footnote ⁴⁷

RUSSIAN NOBILITY AND AN AMERICAN ARISTOCRACY?

I will analyze representations of three pairs of stock characters featured in most of the novels: the Russian nobleman and noblewoman, the American hero and heroine in Russia, and the male and female Russian anarchist. In the novels, the Russian nobility possessed vast estates and participated in a brilliant social life replete with dangerous liaisons centered on the imperial court in St. Petersburg. The American interest in the Russian nobility was a part of the ongoing American fascination with the high society of London and Paris, and the general Europhilia of American elites. As both Lawrence Levine and Sven Beckert have demonstrated, the new bourgeoisie of the Gilded Age self-consciously appropriated parts of European high culture and institutionalized them in museums, concert halls, and art galleries.Footnote ⁴⁸ Access to this culture both cemented their status and marked their exclusivity within American society. Moreover, information about the society life of London and Paris facilitated the acceptance of an American aristocracy, one whose conduct was patterned by social rituals that stressed social decorum, exclusivity, consumerism, and mannered socialization.Footnote ⁴⁹

Accordingly, American characters in the pulp fiction were more than a match for their aristocratic counterparts in Russia. The American hero or heroine, always of upper class origin,Footnote ⁵⁰ possesses all the social graces and accomplishments of the Russian nobility, including the requisite wardrobe tailored in Paris. These protagonists effortlessly penetrate the St. Petersburg social scene, gamble at the exclusive clubs, and waltz elegantly at the balls in the Winter Palace. The list of American heroes includes a cosmopolitan and rich landowner from Kentucky who is intimately acquainted with Paris, London, and Berlin, and can shoot and fence with the best marksman that Russia has to offer.Footnote ⁵¹ American heroines, in turn, dazzle St. Petersburg with their Parisian wardrobes, aristocratic manners, and romantic sensitivity to imperial society.Footnote ⁵² When their radical friends fall into the clutches of the Russian secret police, American heroes and heroines swing into action. Like their counterparts in the contemporary British imperial fiction of the era, American heroes save the day, rescue victims from the jaws of the Russian secret police, or plot ingenious escapes across the Polish border or through Siberia. American heroes and heroines usually marry their aristocratic and revolutionary Russian lovers and bring them home to live happily ever after in the United States.

The novels, like etiquette manuals, contained detailed instructions on how to enter a noble society, and once there, how to comport oneself with due decorum. At the same time, they problematized the notion of a natural American aristocrat. The American heroes, while sharing the social graces of their Russian counterparts, differed from them in their capacity for hearty republican action. They also possessed the ability to redeem the Russian revolutionary and neutralize the threat of violence. In the late nineteenth century, as the major capitals of Europe were rocked by a series of spectacular assassinations and bombings, and especially in the aftermath of Chicago's 1886 Haymarket riots, the word “anarchist” began to carry connotations similar to “terrorist” today. American fiction on Russia dwelt at length on the character of the revolutionary, the sinister male nihilist (Russian anarchist), and the equally sinister but infinitely more beautiful female nihilistka. Yet, even as they sought to demonize the revolutionaries, fiction provided space for the metaphorical victory of liberalism over nihilism. Also, by narrating the activities of the revolutionaries, fiction turned the dreaded anarchists into human beings who often possessed rational motives for their violent actions.

These novels create a unique ecoscape of St. Petersburg composed of troikas careening down the snow-covered avenues, promenades on the fashionable Nevsky Prospekt, the opulent mansions of noblemen, and the balls at the Winter Palace. In the words of Walker Kennedy, “The Balls at the Winter Palace … were the most magnificent in the world. Rich American mammas, had they been very numerous in Russia, would doubtless have parted with some of the goldmines of their husbands for the privilege of lifting the veil and passing the threshold of the delicious terra incognita. Nothing in the way of social glory that France in the grasp of le grand monarque had celebrated, or England in her fabulously wealthy present has attempted, or Germany with the prestige of her powerful Kaiser, could be compared with the receptions of the Man who owned absolutely the people of half of Europe and half of Asia.”Footnote ⁵³ Kennedy goes on to describe the handsome Chevaliers, the dashing Lancers, the showy Cossacks, and, of course, the Hussars of the Guard without whom no American story could be complete.Footnote ⁵⁴ But if their pedigrees were spotless, their conduct was less so. The novels describe a charming but feckless caste of Russian aristocrats who gamble recklessly, sport beautiful mistresses, fight duels, drive around madly in their horse-drawn carriages, and spend their life in search of romantic intrigues.

Borrowing heavily from the models of charismatic heroines found in the works of Tolstoy and Turgenev, American novelists depicted the Russian noblewomen as fascinating, unbearably beautiful, and splendidly dressed.Footnote ⁵⁵ A Murray guide to the Russian empire warned female visitors that the season in St. Petersburg was comparable to that of Paris and that Russian women dressed impeccably.Footnote ⁵⁶ Walker Kennedy, in his description of Valerie Melnikoff, the exquisite heroine of In the Dwellings of Silence, wrote, “So elusive is the essential charm of beauty that words are pale and inadequate to picture it with its unheard harmony, its ghost of frail color, its indefinable and subtle graces.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Harriet Waters Preston, writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1887 observed ruefully, “those marvelous Russian women who dazzle and reduce to despair all the rest of the feminine world.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Style and charisma aside, Russian noblemen and women are essentially undemocratic and treat their underlings with unjustified harshness. The aristocratic and beautiful Sibyl in Narka the Nihilist (1887) compares her servants to horses and believes that the knout is the best cure for most of Russia's problems.Footnote ⁵⁹ Contrary to reality, in the novels the Russian nobility seem untouched by the social and economic problems that beset much of the European nobility in this period, and live in a feudal world of haughty aristocrats and obsequious peasants.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the world of popular fiction, the Russian nobility seems impervious to the travails of history and the rigidly stratified court society appears frozen in a time capsule of ceremonious court ritual and elaborate spectacle. As T. J. Jackson Lears has shown, Americans in the late nineteenth century became obsessed with images of the medieval order, Catholicism, oriental mysticism, and other forms of anti-modernist art and ideologies as a means to adjust to the demands of modernity and secularism.Footnote ⁶¹ Imperial Russian society represented the antithesis of modern fragmentation and social dislocation as the place of each nobleman was preordained by rules of blood and honor and unscathed by destabilizing effects of bourgeois commerce, social mobility and peasant uprisings.

At the same time, the opulent life of the Russian nobles exists only at the sufferance of the tsar, who can denounce them at will to the ubiquitous secret police that surround them.Footnote ⁶² Often the tsar is ill advised by evil and conniving ministers, but the nobles exist at his caprice and the imperial anger can turn the highest nobleman of the realm into an outcast in Siberia.Footnote ⁶³ These novels capture the personalized nature of power and position in an autocratic society. America and Americans, by contrast, are predictable, staid, and slightly bland. Savage, in his novel For Her Life (1897), repeatedly talks about the boring life of his upper class protagonist, Walter Grahame, a lawyer from Philadelphia. Grahame cannot help but compare his demure American fiancée unfavorably to the exotic Russian beauties who so effortlessly excite his passions. As it turns out, predictability is America's chief asset and selling point abroad. Russia, then, functions like the Western and imperial frontier where the American hero can be revitalized and regain his manliness.Footnote ⁶⁴

At the same time, Russia is not an escape from the restraints of civilization and modernity; in a way, it represents the apotheosis of an Old World civilization trapped in the new iron cage of bureaucratic politics. The American hero in Russia has to thereby combine an anthropological knowledge of elite social mores with a capacity for individual republican action. Savage more than any other writer exemplifies this tension in his work. His 1891 novel My Official Wife creates the portrait of a gruff and cosmopolitan American soldier. The hero, the middle-aged Arthur Bainbridge Lenox, is traveling to St. Petersburg to visit his daughter, who has married into an aristocratic Russian family. Lenox's susceptibility to beautiful young women leads him to befriend the fascinating and mysterious adventuress, Helene Marie, and he takes this radical imposter to St. Petersburg as his wife. She claims to be a relation of the Vanderbilt-Astor family and Savage makes several overt comparisons between the Four Hundred families of New York and the noble society of St. Petersburg, and notes the easy social intercourse between the two. As the Russian Colonel Petroff observes, “Americans of your class always are great favorites on the Neva.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Likewise, Baron Friedrich, head of the dreaded Third Section of the secret police in St. Petersburg, treats Lenox with obsequious respect, and remarks, “Americans have the entrée everywhere in Europe.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Indeed, Lenox is welcomed everywhere in St. Petersburg: at the soirees, the receptions, and even the Yacht Club where he gambles and carouses with the dissipated noblemen. Nonetheless, he is a reluctant hero, and throughout the novel, he is petrified about being in Russia and suffers repeated nightmares of arrest by the dreaded secret police immortalized in Stepniak's book, Underground Russia (1883). Only at the end, when Helene Marie, actually a nihilist in disguise, reveals her plans to plans to assassinate the tsar, does Lenox spring into action. He laces Helene Marie' champagne with opium rendering her immobile and consequently saves the Russian tsar and his empire!

Other American heroes and heroines appear more sensitive to the political ardor of the Russian revolutionaries and prove adept at devising exit strategies when political exigencies threaten their Russian idyll. They help revolutionaries outwit the secret police and smuggle them out of Russia in various disguises.Footnote ⁶⁷ Frank Devereux, hero of the novel In the Dwellings of Silence (1894), rescues Valerie Melnikoff from the infamous gold mines of Kara, and after a chase through Siberia escapes with her on an American ship from Kamchatka.Footnote ⁶⁸ “The presence of Devereux alone prevented her excitement from degenerating into absolute terror… . He was absolutely indifferent to the rigid laws and customs with which the country was encrusted. He bade defiance to them all. The Czar's holy powers had no authoritative terrors for him. Valerie could not deeply admire the American spirit, which was so free from all trammels save those imposed by liberty, conscience, and truth.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The adventures end with the safe return of the protagonists to America, where tempestuous beauties and charismatic nobles marry their American counterparts, part with their revolutionary ideals, and settle down to a placid and domesticated existence.Footnote ⁷⁰

THE NIHILIST IN FACT AND FICTION

The American protagonist in Russia is engaged on a dual quest, one in which he has to outwit the omniscient secret police in Russia, and more importantly, redeem the nihilist and neutralize the power of violent revolution. The ambiguity of the response to revolution is exemplified, once again, in Savage's work. In the preface to his well known 1894 book The Anarchist: A Story of Today, Savage says anarchism, socialism and communism are trying to destroy the fabric of society in France, Spain, Italy, and Russia, and calls for “organized cosmopolitan repression” on behalf of the civilized world to wipe out the menace.Footnote ⁷¹ In his novels set in Russia, however, Savage exhibits a far more complex response to nihilism and, more often than not, his American hero is terribly attracted to a beautiful and bewitching nihilist heroine. Imaginative geography in this instance displaced the threat of revolution and instead created the myth of redeeming the revolutionary. Different genres of transnational literature played a significant role in customizing Russian revolutionaries for Western consumption.

In this section, I will analyze counter-narratives by émigré Russian authors that introduced the self-representation of Russian revolutionaries as selfless and highly cultured individuals who turned reluctantly to violence, and then only to assuage the oppression of the masses. I will also plot the process through which the Russian revolutionaries used their mastery of high culture and literature to deflect attention away from their terrorist acts toward their infinitely more noble cause of revolution. The model of the cultured revolutionary was initially popularized in Russia, and subsequently introduced into the realm of nineteenth-century world politics through the prodigious output of Russian memoirs, autobiographies, and novels. We see the elaboration of this figure first in elite literary and political discourse, but later it was refracted throughout Europe and America through the means of popular literature, which played a significant role in whitewashing the violent activities of the revolutionaries.

Beginning in the late 1880s, anarchism was seen as a serious threat to the existence of a civilized world already encircled by the rise of an international labor movement. Anarchism was used interchangeably with nihilism, communism, and socialism, and few commentators bothered to distinguish the philosophical ideas from the ongoing violence.Footnote ⁷² The chosen methods of the anarchists—the use of bombs and dynamite to kill prominent government officials—received wide coverage in the media. The decade of the 1890s was inaugurated by a series of anarchist bombings in Paris in 1892, followed by the 1894 assassination of President Lazar Carnot in France, and of many other European monarchs, prime ministers, and presidents. Anarchists detonated explosives in crowded public places, exacerbating public fear and hysteria. In the United States, the chronology followed a slightly different trajectory. The severity of the police repression following Chicago's Haymarket riots resulted in a cessation of anarchist violence except for Alexander Berkman's unsuccessful 1892 attempt to kill the manager of Carnegie Steel. President McKinley's 1901 assassination was an isolated act and not a grand conspiracy.

Scholars have shown that both the press and popular novelists on both sides of the Atlantic offered crude caricatures of the anarchists as essentially violent, criminal, degenerate, undesirable aliens who were more often than not of Jewish origin. Anarchism was linked to fears of the rise of organized labor and disorganized mob violence.Footnote ⁷³ At the same time, parallel discourses about Russian revolutionaries played out in both the press and the pages of popular fiction.Footnote ⁷⁴ While the Russian noblemen Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1866) and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) were publicly reviled in the Western press as the architects of a fiendish international conspiracy of terrorist cells with global reach, Russian revolutionaries sought to present a civilized face to the Western world through memoirs and both literary and popular fiction.Footnote ⁷⁵

The typical Russian nihilists of 1860s Russia were idealistic young men and women who advocated the use of science and education to civilize the Russian masses.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the 1870s, Russia's major revolutionary party, Land and Freedom, was composed of the narodniki or populists, who believed propaganda would rouse the peasants to revolution. When the peasants proved deaf to populists' exhortations, a group of Russians formed the party People's Will (Narodnaia Volia). Members believed that assassination of the Tsar Alexander II would unlock the revolutionary potential of the masses. People's Will was composed of dedicated and effective individuals, who assassinated the tsar on 1 March 1881. The government destroyed the organization by executing and jailing most of its members, but the Socialist Revolutionary Party formed thereafter and continued to assassinate key members of the Russian government as part of its revolutionary strategy.

At the same time, Russian revolutionaries were extraordinarily adept at sanitizing their violent record and persuading large sections of the world of their sincerity. While other modern revolutionaries such as Mao and Gandhi depended on adept translators such as Edgar Snow, or on a Louis Fischer or Margaret Bourke-White to broadcast their ideologies, Russian revolutionaries were able to transmit their messages to influential centers of world opinion. This was because of their own consummate literary skills and familiarity with Western culture, and due to the good offices of outstanding Russian novelists who through their fiction prepared Western audiences to understand the ‘noble’ motives of Russian revolutionaries.Footnote ⁷⁷ In their memoirs, revolutionaries of various persuasions created memorable self-portraits of sensitive, intellectual, self-sacrificing individuals who wanted to educate and enlighten the masses.Footnote ⁷⁸ Only because they were caught in the throes of a vicious Russian despotism did they reluctantly turn to terror. Ultimately, they martyred themselves for the sake of the people and endured the horrors of prison, exile, and death.Footnote ⁷⁹

Alexander Herzen, the brilliant Russian thinker, in his memoirs written in exile, created the enduring image of the cultured and aristocratic intellectual who was also a revolutionary.Footnote ⁸⁰ The well-known Russian socialist Leo Deutsch (Lev Deich) wrote that when packing in preparation for his exile in Siberia he gave away his watch, rings, and cigarette case, and kept only his volumes of Shakespeare, Goethe, Heine, Molière and Rousseau.Footnote ⁸¹ The paradigm had such power within the Russian context that it survived into the Bolshevik regime. Not only did Lenin and Trotsky stress their deep knowledge of literature, philosophy, and political economy, but even the more proletarian Stalin fancied himself as a literary critic of considerable discernment.Footnote ⁸²

Even Turgenev, who has been praised for advocating a gradual Westernization of Russian society, regarded the Russian nihilists primarily as ideologues rather than terrorists.Footnote ⁸³ He was perpetuating a well-established Russian literary trope when in his novels such as Rudin (1855), On the Eve (1860), Fathers and Sons (1862), and Virgin Soil (1877) he presented the nihilist as a parlor revolutionary, more given to talk and debate than the bloody execution of the idea. Thus Bazarov, the doctor-turned-nihilist in Turgenev's immensely popular Fathers and Sons, is forever dissecting frogs while pontificating on philosophical materialism. Henry James, a devotee of Turgenev, in his novel Princess Cassamasima, modeled his protagonist Hyacinth very much in the manner of the superfluous man of Russian novels. Hyacinth is incapable of action, torn as he is between revolution and his commitment to art and culture.Footnote ⁸⁴

George Kennan, one of the main conduits of information between the Russian revolutionaries and the Western world, perpetuated the image of the cultured Russian revolutionary in his masterly expose on the tsarist penal system, Siberia and the Exile System (1891).Footnote ⁸⁵ Kennan was tireless in his support of the revolutionary movement in Russia, and to that end gave hundreds of public lectures in various American cities, clad in the ragged costume and heavy chains of a Siberian convict. Kennan noted on numerous occasions that Russian political exiles were “refined and educated people, fully half of them spoke French, German or English.”Footnote ⁸⁶ He went on to say that they were versed in English and American culture, that some of them were scientists, and that they were for the most part exactly like his American friends.Footnote ⁸⁷

Kennan was aided in his endeavors by the prodigious literary talents of the Russian revolutionaries themselves. Thus in 1898 and 1899 The Atlantic Monthly serialized Kropotkin's memoir, Autobiography of a Revoliutionist. The most important publicist for the Russian revolutionary cause, however, was Sergei M. Kravchinsky, or Stepniak, as he called himself. Stepniak in his own persona embodied the American myth of redemption through immigration. A propagandist of formidable skills, he candidly said his dream was to “conquer the world for the Russian revolution; to throw upon the scales the huge weight of the public opinion of civilized nations.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Stepniak was originally a member of Land and Freedom, and the perpetrator of one of its first planned terrorist acts. In 1878, he executed General N. V. Menzenstsev, chief of the Gendarmes in St. Petersburg, and fled to England where he helped found the influential organization Society for the Friends of Russian Freedom. Free Russia.Footnote ⁸⁹ He had considerable success in the United States, and prominent intellectuals such as George Kennan, Julia Ward Howe, William Lloyd Garrison, and William Dean Howells helped him in his international anti-tsarist crusade.Footnote ⁹⁰

Stepniak's extremely popular and essentially hagiographical account of the lives of famous Russian revolutionaries, Underground Russia (1883), played an important role in stirring world opinion against the Russian autocracy.Footnote ⁹¹ His friend Mark Twain was deeply impressed with the selfless martyrdom of the Russian nihilists after reading the book. In a letter to Stepniak dated 23 April 1891, Twain described their “superhuman heroism which fixes its eyes upon the gallows under the far horizon, years away, and marches steadily to it through the flames of hell without tremor of body or blanching of cheek or spirit, and proposes to itself to get for its personal share, only the gallows.”Footnote ⁹² Stepniak himself said that two developments had changed international attitudes towards Russia: the creation of Russian literature, and the generations of self-sacrificing Russian revolutionaries.Footnote ⁹³ He translated Vladimir's Korolenko's novella In Two Moods into English and claimed in the introduction that the writer had accurately portrayed the idealism and high-mindedness of the young revolutionaries.Footnote ⁹⁴ Stepniak also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Career of the Nihilist (1889), in which he tried to bring together Russia's pre-eminent cultural exports: literature and revolutionary ideologies. Several reviewers compared the novel to Turgenev's Father's and Sons, and it enjoyed considerable popularity in Europe and America, as well as in Russia.Footnote ⁹⁵

Andrey Kozhukhov, the hero of Career of a Nihilist, is a far cry from a bloody terrorist. He is a sincere, slightly melancholic soul whose own love affair with the beautiful Tania accounts for a good half of the story. Other revolutionaries in the novel also fall in love, go on picnics, and sing innocent songs at woodland gatherings. For the most part Andrey is rather pathetic in his revolutionary attempts and the Russian police outwit and outflank him at every twist and turn of the novel. Nonetheless, he has a burning desire to save the masses and avenge the brutal oppression of the revolutionaries. In the end, he is put to death after he fails in his attempt to kill the tsar.

Others émigré Russian writers such as Abraham CahanFootnote ⁹⁶ and Lydia Pimenov Noble also used their novels to disseminate portraits of romantic and sensitive nihilists, caught in the vice of despotism and only resorting to terror when they have exhausted all other options of fostering change. While in their memoirs Russian revolutionaries were extremely taciturn and reserved about their private lives, émigré writers were quick to adopt the conventions of Western melodrama to propel their tales about revolutionaries. Thus in the novels of Stepniak, Abraham Cahan, and Lydia Pimenov Noble, the chaste love-affairs of the protagonists receive as much attention as their revolutionary activities.Footnote ⁹⁷

In American fiction, the Russian nihilist is less intellectual and more prone to action than philosophical debates. In Savage's novel For Her Life (1897), Hermione is feminine and yielding, but returns to Russia in the face of intense danger carrying ciphers crucial to sustaining the nihilist code. Although Savage refers to an established anarchist conspiracy that matches the secret police in organization, terror, and cruelty, he focuses on remaking Hermione, who soon realizes violence is not the answer. She falls in love with the American hero, who arranges to have her rescued from the prison island of Sakhalin. In most novels, the American hero or heroine redeems the Russian nihilist. While initially they defend their cause, they soon abjure propaganda by deed, and their subsequent immigration to the United States further mitigates the theme of violence.Footnote ⁹⁸ The original model of the Russian revolutionary loses valence and potency as it travels west and becomes a pale, bourgeois version of its former self. Violent and exotic women lose their power to seduce and destroy. When they come to America, they are transformed into domesticated helpmeets because, as observed by Marie, the nihilist heroine of Out of Russia (1911), “The world has nothing to offer that is better than America and American husbands.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Like most imported products, Russians lose their flavor in transit, travel, and translation, but this facilitates their integration into American society.

RECONSIDERING SYSTEMS OF REPRESENTATIONS

Romances and mysteries grappled with philosophical problems of good and evil, democracy versus absolutism, republican equality and aristocratic distinction, violence and gradual change, and for the most part offered ambiguous resolutions to the ordering of society. If popular fiction reified the life of aristocrats, the writers were not entirely untouched by the revolutionary ardor of the nihilists that threatened to destroy the same society of nobles. While the novels demonized the nihilist to a certain extent and perpetuated stereotypes of the international brotherhood and ubiquitous anarchist cells, they also provided a space in which the abstract terrorist took on a series of recognizable forms and the putative threat became concretized through the means of narrative. American popular literature, shaped by transnational and émigré influences in the late nineteenth century, made the Russian revolutionary a living reality in the minds of millions. While it may have inflamed anti-anarchist feelings in the United States, it simultaneously humanized the Russian revolutionaries and gave their cause enduring legitimacy.

In this essay, rather than study American popular fiction about Russia as a series of static texts containing an American master narrative about Russia, I see them as a locus of dynamic activity that gave voice to many discourses, elite and popular, national and international, and native and immigrant. In turn, we can analyze popular fiction as a microcosm of the way American cultural hegemony functioned in the world. American discourses, unlike other national systems of representation, were distinctive because of their ability to absorb a variety of oppositional, subversive, and émigré texts, and to serve as a transnational space where ideas and myths fought for legitimacy.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ While American experts continued to thunder from their academic and state-sponsored pulpits about Russian backwardness and the urgent need for economic modernization, popular fiction painted seductive images of aristocratic and revolutionary Russians who represented cultural modernity. The power and novelty of American knowledge of Russia lay both in its receptivity to Russian interpretations and its selective use of myths created by the Russian intelligentsia. Throughout the twentieth century, influential Russian émigrés such as Trotsky and Solzhenitsyn tried to sell their version of Russian history to the American academy and a larger American public. Influenced by their writings and politics, many of the American histories of Russia became organically enmeshed in concentric circles of Russian self-representations. This heteroglossia gave American discourses about Russia their aura of authenticity and deep expertise.

Because of the conflicting solutions contained within the pages, it is hard to imagine which particular messages readers selected out of the maelstrom of voices and events, but the practical effect of the literature is easier to discern. Access to and mastery of high culture sanitized both the aristocrat and the revolutionary, making it easier for select groups of Americans to continue their love affair with both Russian culture and radicalism through much of the twentieth century. I refer not only to committed American communists such as John Reed and Anna Louise Strong, who joined the Bolshevik Party, but rather to legions of fellow travelers and sympathizers who championed the Soviet revolution through the grim decades of Stalinist repression. Later, liberal opinion in the West was once again obsessed with the plight of the oppressed intellectuals in the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The Western media helped publicize the voices of the Soviet dissident movements of the 1960s and 1970s and played a crucial role in toppling the communist regime. In the post-Soviet era, as American fascination with radicalism seems to be on the wane, we are witnessing a revival of interest in imperial Russian culture. Not only have there been a series of major exhibitions on Tsarist art, artifacts, and memorabilia in American museums over the last two decades; organizations such as the American Friends of the Russian Country Estates are helping to restore the Russian noble mansions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from decades of neglect and disrepair. The glamorous lifestyles of the Russian nobility continue to fascinate us from beyond the grave.