CIAO DATE: 9/07
Culture and Conflict: Volume 55 (Fall 2004)
The Russian populist Vera Figner, responsible of several attacks among which the murder of Tzar Alexander II was imprisoned during twenty years in the Schlusselburg fortress for her participation in the People’s Will movement. During her time in prison, and then later in 1906 when she was freed, she undertook the peculiar action of resistance through writing. The Revolution’s Venus indeed chose to make her autobiographical detention story a weapon against the tsarist power arbitrary. If prior to 1917 this meant constituting the long and painful incarceration she and her comrades went through into a symbol of repression, the writing of her memories after the Revolution participated in writing the story of prisons and of resistance movements within them.