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Today, Lynn Ellen Patyk sat down with Lonny Harrison to discuss his book Personas of Revolutionary Terror in Russian Fiction and Memoirs from Dostoevsky to Zenzinov, which came out with Academic Studies Press earlier this year.
LP: Hello, Lonny, thank you for taking the time to sit down and respond to our questions. The first question to any author is invariably the same. What drew you to the topic of revolutionary terrorism? Was it somehow related to your previous work, or was there something in the current moment that inspired your interest?
LH: Thank you for your questions and for the chance to talk about the book. The subject of revolutionary terrorism grew out of my earlier work, rather than from contemporary events. Questions about political violence, radicalization, and the construction of revolutionary identity have, of course, become newly relevant in recent years, but my own interest began much earlier. My first book, published in 2016, examined archetypal patterns of the self in Dostoevsky’s fiction. That project led me to think more deeply about the psychology and moral imagination of nineteenth-century revolutionaries. I found myself asking less about their political doctrines than about the self-conceptions that sustained their commitment to revolution. My second monograph, in 2020, extended that line of inquiry by examining the language and metaphors through which revolutionaries imagined historical change, especially images of storms, natural disasters, seasonal cycles, and agricultural renewal. It became increasingly clear to me that revolutionary identity was not merely ideological. It was constructed through a shared repertoire of national myths, narratives of rebellion, heroic models, and symbolic archetypes.
That realization became the starting point for Personas of Revolutionary Terror. I wanted to understand not simply what revolutionaries did, but the identities they consciously fashioned for themselves. My argument is that these identities were not invented from scratch. They followed recognizable cultural patterns, drawing on familiar myths, literary traditions, and moral narratives that gave revolutionary violence both personal meaning and historical legitimacy.
LP: Why did you approach Russian revolutionary terrorism through the phenomenon of persona, what do you mean by that, and why does the persona of the terrorist play a particularly significant role in Russian revolutionary terrorism?
LH: I borrowed the term from depth psychologist Carl Jung as an analog of lichnost’, the Russian word for both individuality and personality. In the book, I explain that as Russian Populism developed in the late nineteenth century, lichnost’ became an increasingly important concept. Thinkers such as Pyotr Lavrov and Alexander Herzen viewed the moral and intellectual formation of the individual as essential to social transformation, emphasizing ethical knowledge, service to the people, and personal dignity. In this context, lichnost’ referred to a broad social and moral identity rather than merely a private or national one. Persona develops that broader meaning, treating identity as socially shaped, performative, and imitative. Drawing on Jung’s concept of the persona as a social mask, I use the term to emphasize the paradoxical nature of revolutionary identity: it both expresses and conceals the self while providing an archetypal role that revolutionaries consciously inhabited in pursuit of both political and personal ends.
LP: You use both literary fiction and memoirs as sources for your analysis. How did you approach these different types of sources, and did you find that they played the same role or used the same devices and framings in representing the persona of the terrorist?
LH: One of the premises I lay out in the introduction is that terror relied on discursive practices that fashioned revolutionary identities and endowed acts of violence with moral and political significance. As you argued in your 2017 bookWritten in Blood, revolutionary terror and Russian literature are inseparable parts of the same cultural history. I’ve added that biography is a natural corollary. The lives of Russian radicals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries readily became the stuff of revolutionary legend because they consciously cast themselves in the roles of heroic figures drawn from both history and literature. While researching the book, I read many memoirs and biographies and was struck by how often revolutionaries drew on the same stories, images, and heroic models they encountered in both historical accounts and literary fiction. From Stenka Razin and Pugachev to Rakhmetov and Vera Pavlovna, they internalized these archetypes and projected them to the public. Audiences, in turn, interpreted the revolutionaries through the same repertoire of folk heroes and literary characters. In that sense, revolutionary identity was a shared language, created through the interaction of performer and audience.
Fiction and memoirs, of course, serve different purposes, but they often work with the same archetypes and narrative patterns. The memoirs I read were not just records of what happened—they were also ways of shaping a revolutionary self, while literature provided some of the models through which those identities could be imagined. Looking at the two together helped me see how literary imagination and revolutionary experience were constantly influencing one another.
In Boris Savinkov’s case, the relationship between life and literature is especially revealing because he wrote both a memoir (Memoirs of a Terrorist)and a novel (Pale Horse, 1909) at roughly the same time, drawing on many of the same events. Comparing the two versions raises fascinating questions about how and why he reshaped his own experience through different forms of narrative. Rather than viewing Pale Horse simply as a fictional adaptation of his memoir, I approach it as a space where Savinkov merged life and art, transforming the revolutionary hero-martyr image he embodied into a literary persona. Through this process of self-representation, fiction became a means of reflection, moral inquiry, and the ongoing negotiation of his revolutionary identity.
I also looked beyond the well-known and extensively studied revolutionaries to memoirs by figures like Grigorii Gershuni, founder of the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s Battle Organization, its secret terrorist wing, and Vladimir Zenzinov, a member of the organization who later spent decades in exile, where he reflected on the revolutionary movement in a series of memoirs. In Zenzinov’s case, I drew on archival materials, including his unpublished biography of Gershuni. Together, these sources have received relatively little scholarly attention but provide valuable insight into how revolutionaries later understood their experiences, remembered their comrades, and reconstructed their own identities.
I should add that Dostoevsky’s life and work form a connective thread linking many of the book’s themes because his biography and fiction are deeply intertwined with the history of Russian revolutionary terrorism. His novels, especially Crime and Punishment and Demons, engage many of its central moral and political questions, while his own life intersected, directly or indirectly, with several key revolutionary figures, including Nikolai Speshnev, Dmitry Karakozov, Sergei Nechaev, Vera Zasulich, and Boris Savinkov. The book therefore returns to Dostoevsky at pivotal moments when his life or writings help illuminate the development of revolutionary terrorism.
His own experience was foundational. After spending nearly a decade in Siberian exile for his involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle, he later acknowledged the influence of Speshnev—his ‘personal Mephistopheles’—on his understanding of revolutionary psychology. It is striking that Dmitry Karakozov attempted to assassinate Alexander II while Crime and Punishment was appearing in serial form, linking Dostoevsky’s literary exploration of crime and moral responsibility with the emergence of revolutionary terrorism as a political force. That experience, together with his fascination with the Nechaev affair, shaped Demons, where I argue he recasts the revolutionary persona by weaving together enduring myths embedded in the Russian cultural imagination. Dostoevsky also witnessed the 1878 trial of Vera Zasulich, correctly anticipating that public sympathy would elevate her to heroic status, and he later drew on the courtroom speeches in shaping the trial scene in The Brothers Karamazov. Read alongside the revolutionary memoirs and biographies, his life and fiction illuminate not only the evolution of revolutionary violence but also the myths and personas through which it was understood.
LP: Your chapter structure and analysis clearly reflect gender differences in the personas of female and male terrorists. What were these and do you see them as fixed and invariable, or more fluid?
LH: One of the most interesting contrasts is between the public image of female revolutionaries and their actual roles within the underground movement. The trial of Vera Zasulich became a national sensation, generating widespread public sympathy and culminating in her acquittal by a jury of educated men despite her admission of guilt. Gender played an important role in both the legal defense and press coverage: Zasulich was portrayed less as a dangerous political radical than as an innocent woman driven to act by the brutality of a corrupt regime. A similar dynamic shaped the public image of Maria Spiridonova, who was cast as a martyr in the mold of the Russian Bogoroditsa, or Blessed Virgin. Within the revolutionary movement itself, however, gender distinctions were often less pronounced. Men and women generally regarded one another first as comrades, and although romantic relationships and marriages certainly existed, they were expected to remain secondary to the revolutionary cause. In some cases, marriage even became a practical tool of conspiracy. During one of the plots to assassinate Alexander II, for example, Anna Yakimova and Yuri Bogdanovich posed as a married couple to open a cheese shop on Malaya Sadovaya in St. Petersburg, where they provided cover while fellow conspirators dug a tunnel beneath the street from the cellar, intending to mine the road along one of the tsar’s expected routes (a plot that ultimately failed).
Gender also strongly shaped revolutionary life narratives. Populist ideals of emotional restraint and self-sacrifice carried particular weight for women, who often defined themselves against conventional femininity. While men joining the movement primarily rejected the privileges of their social class, women also distanced themselves from traditional gender roles, presenting themselves as gender-neutral or unfeminine. For women, abandoning marriage, motherhood, and domestic life symbolized both a rejection of patriarchy and a commitment to overturning the Tsarist order.
LP: Your book encompasses a large swath of history and different phases or “waves” of Russian revolutionary terrorism. How did you perceive that the persona of the revolutionary terrorist changed over this time, and what were the most significant factors influencing this change?
LH: I found that as the persona evolved over time, it became progressively more radicalized. From intellectuals like Pyotr Lavrov and Nikolai Chernyshevsky to dedicated conspirators like Nikolai Speshnev, Nikolai Ishutin, Dmitry Karakozov, and Sergei Nechaev, both the rhetoric and the methods of revolutionary struggle became increasingly uncompromising. What changes most dramatically, though, is the performative dimension. Revolutionaries became ever more conscious of the symbolic meaning of their actions and of the public image they projected. By the time we reach figures like Grigorii Gershuni and Boris Savinkov—whom I describe as ‘terror artists’—terrorism had become not only a political strategy but also a form of symbolic performance. Their memoirs show that they carefully cultivated a revolutionary persona grounded in heroism, sacrifice, and martyrdom, drawing on a shared repertoire of historical and literary archetypes.
LP: You include Lev Tikhomirov, who is a more complicated case than almost anyone but Boris Savinkov. Can you speak to why you thought it was important to include him, and what he specifically contributes to the persona of the revolutionary terrorist?
LH: Not every revolutionary followed a path of increasing radicalization, and that’s why Lev Tikhomirov is such an important figure. He serves as a foil to the revolutionary persona: someone who ultimately rejected the identity he had once embraced. After playing a leading role in the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya, he recanted, renounced terrorism, and eventually became a monarchist. His trajectory also reflects a broader but often overlooked pattern among former revolutionaries, from Vera Zasulich to Vera Figner, who came to question the effectiveness and moral consequences of revolutionary violence. I wanted to bring that countercurrent of disillusionment into the story because it complicates the familiar narrative of relentless radicalization. Tikhomirov reminds us that the revolutionary persona, however compelling, was never fixed. It could be renounced, reshaped, and ultimately abandoned.
LP: Last question. Does “persona” or any key aspects of the persona of the Russian revolutionary terrorist play a role in contemporary terrorism, and if so, how?
LH: Persona certainly plays a role in contemporary terrorism, but I deliberately leave it to readers to draw their own comparisons. I was careful not to make direct parallels because the historical circumstances of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia are fundamentally different from those of today. For that reason, the book does not attempt to explain contemporary terrorism or predict its social consequences. If there is an obvious point of comparison, it’s in the public reception of acts of political violence. I’ll mention one recent example: when Luigi Mangione killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, some people cast the shooter as a hero or avenger acting on behalf of the powerless against a symbol of an unjust economic system. That kind of public mythmaking has echoes in the Russian case, where acts of terrorism were also interpreted through familiar narratives of heroism, sacrifice, and justice. My purpose, however, is not to suggest that these cases are equivalent or to romanticize revolutionary violence in any way. The book is a study of how revolutionary identities were constructed, performed, and remembered in a particular historical setting. What the Russian experience demonstrates is that lofty ideals and heroic self-images could coexist with, and ultimately give way to, escalating cycles of political violence whose consequences often diverged sharply from the aspirations that inspired them.
LP: Thanks so much for your time and your thoughtful responses!
LH: My thanks to you for the insightful questions and for this opportunity to talk about the book. It’s been a pleasure to share some of the ideas behind it.
Lonny Harrison is Associate Professor of Russian and Director of the Charles T. McDowell Center for Global Studies at The University of Texas at Arlington. His research explores the intersections of Russian literature, revolutionary thought, and responses to Soviet authoritarianism. He is the author of Archetypes from Underground: Notes on the Dostoevskian Self (2016) (read our interview about it here!), Language and Metaphors of the Russian Revolution: Sow the Wind, Reap the Storm (2020), and Personas of Revolutionary Terror in Russian Fiction and Memoirs from Dostoevsky to Zenzinov (2026).
Lynn Ellen Patyk is Professor of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture, 1861-1881 (2017) and Dostoevsky’s Provocateurs (2023) (read our interview about it here!), as well as co-editor with Irina Erman of Funny Dostoevsky (2024). Her two sons can testify that she can relate almost anything to Dostoevsky.