Memoirs of a Revolutionist
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~190,000 words · 911 passages
Cite this work
- APAPeter Kropotkin. (n.d.). Memoirs of a Revolutionist. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/peter-kropotkin/memoirs-of-a-revolutionist
- MLAPeter Kropotkin. "Memoirs of a Revolutionist." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/peter-kropotkin/memoirs-of-a-revolutionist.
- ChicagoPeter Kropotkin. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/peter-kropotkin/memoirs-of-a-revolutionist.
What it is about
Kropotkin's autobiography: childhood in a noble household with serfs, the Tsar's Corps of Pages, the Siberian expedition, the turn to anarchism, prison and escape.
Context and history
He wrote it in English and it appeared first in instalments in an American magazine, in 1898-99, before becoming a book. That explains the tone: it is meant for readers who did not know what an anarchist was and had to be told without being frightened. The account of the escape from the Peter and Paul fortress is the passage everyone remembers. It should be read for what it is: a work of propaganda in the good sense, written to persuade, not a neutral document.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
to the present time its different parts have wonderfully well retained the features which have been stamped upon them in the slow course of history. The Trans-Moskva River district, with its broad, sleepy streets and its monotonous gray-painted, low-roofed houses, of which the entrancegates remain securely bolted day and night, has always been the secluded abode of the merchant class, and the stronghold of the outwardly austere, formalistic, and despotic Nonconformists of the “Old Faith.” The citadel, or Kreml, is still the stronghold of church and state ; and the immense space in front of it, covered with thousands of shops and warehouses, has been for centuries a crowded beehive of commerce, and still remains the heart of a great internal trade which spreads over the whole surface of the vast empire. ‘The Tverskaya and the Smiths’ Bridge have been for hundreds of years the chief centres for the fashionable shops; while the artisans’ quarters, the Pluschfkha and the Dorogomilovka, retain the very same features which characterized their uproarious populations in the times of the Moscow Tsars. ach quarter isa little world in itself ; each has its own physiognomy, and lives its own separate ae MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST ae MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST life. Even the railways —— when they made an irrupticn into the old capital — grouped apart in special centres on the outskirts of the old town their stores and machineworks, their heavily loaded carts and engines. However, of all parts of Moscow, none, perhaps, is more typical than that labyrinth of clean, quiet, winding streets and lanes which lies at the back of the Kreml, between two great radial streets, the Arbat and the Prechistenka, and is still called the Old Equerries’ Quarter, — the Staraya Konytishennaya. | Some fifty years ago, there lived in this quarter, and slowly died out, the old Moscow