MIKHAIL BAKUNIN and the PRIAMUKHINO CIRCLE: LOVE and LIBERATION in the RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA of the 1830S

MARSHALL S. SHATZ (Boston, U.S.A.)

MIKHAIL BAKUNIN AND THE PRIAMUKHINO CIRCLE: LOVE AND LIBERATION IN THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA OF THE 1830s

The biography and political evolution of Mikhail Bakunin have always seemed marked by a peculiar bifurcation. Until his emigration to Germany in 1840, at the age of twenty-six, he was preoccupied with philosophical pursuits and family matters and showed no interest in political and social issues; just two years later, with the publication of his article "The Reaction in Germany," he embarked on the revolutionary path that he was to follow for the rest of his life. How could this scion of the Russian nobility have been transformed with such seeming abruptness into a political radical and ultimately into the leader of European anarchism? What was the relation- ship between his early life in Russia and his later social and political doc- trines? It is the contention of this article that at least part of the answer to these questions can be found in the family conflicts that engaged Bakunin for much of the 1830s. These conflicts formed an essential link between his early experiences and his subsequent political development. Moreover, not only are they crucial to an understanding of Bakunin's own life and thought, but they formed a hitherto neglected episode in the collective biography of the Russian intelligentsia. During the 1830s, Bakunin engaged in a series of battles within his family over the marriages of his four sisters. He devoted an enormous amount of time and energy to these battles and discussed them at length in his correspondence. In league against their elders, Bakunin, his sisters, their closest friends Natal'ia and Aleksandra Beer, and to a lesser degree his five younger brothers, formed an intimate band. Although its members themselves did not call it such, it can fairly be termed the Priamukhino Cir- cle, after the Bakunin family estate in Tver' guberniia.1 The Priamukhino Circle, in turn, was closely connected with the more illustrious circle of young intellectuals which had formed around Nikolai Stankevich in Moscow

1. I have followed prerevolutionary usage in the spelling of this name. In Soviet sources it is spelled Premukhino. and to which Mikhail Bakunin belonged. The Stankevich Circle was drawn into the Bakunin family's conflicts because several of its members, like suc- cessive dominoes, fell in love with one or another Bakunin sister: first Stan- kevich himself, then Vissarion Belinskii, then Stankevich again, then Vasilii Botkin, and finally Ivan Turgenev. The Priamukhino Circle formed a kind of erotic adjunct to the Stankevich Circle, and its affairs of the heart, there- fore, affected not just Bakunin himself but other prominent members of the emerging intelligentsia. Historians have not ignored the conflicts over the Bakunin sisters' marriages, but for the most part they have considered them to be of little historical significance. Some have dismissed them as mere products of al- leged psychosexual disturbances on Bakunin's part: an unresolved Oedipus complex, sexual dysfunction, incestuous undercurrents.2 Not only are such contentions highly speculative and notoriously difficult to prove, but they neglect the fact that Bakunin had considerable support in those conflicts from his sisters themselves and their friends; they were not merely the imaginary products of an individual pathology. There were undoubtedly psy- chological tensions and conflicts within the Bakunin family and within Baku- nin himself. Their precise nature, however, cannot be determined in any convincing fashion. What can be documented, and what is of real historical interest, is the terms in which the various parties to the conflicts over the sisters' marriages expressed themselves, and the significance of those conflicts in the context of the 1830s. Other historians have viewed them less as a product of Bakunin's psy- chological defects than of his philosophical excesses. In this they have followed Belinskii, who, initially enraptured by the Bakunin family, eventually accused Bakunin of having filled his sisters' heads with abstract thought at the expense of their natural feminine emotions. Even aside from his rather misogynistic view of women's intellectual capacities, Belinskii, as we shall see, was by no means a disinterested observer of the Bakunins. Neverthe- less, Belinskii's view that Bakunin was guided entirely by philosophical ab- straction in his approach to personal relations and imposed similar views on his sisters has become the standard one in works that have focused on the

2. See particularly lu. Steklov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin: ego zhizn' i deiatel'nost'(1814-1876), vol. 1 (Moscow: Kn-vo I. D. Sytina, 1920), pp. 25, 35-36; I. Ma- linin, Kompleks Edipa i sud'ba Mikhaila Bakunina (Belgrade: Nova Stamparija, 1934); E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (New York: Vintagei 1961; first pub. 1937), chaps. 1-7; Arthur P. Mendel, Michael Bakunin: Roots of Apocalypse (New York: Praeger; 1981), pp. 28- 31. For a critique of this historiographical tradition, see Marshall S. Shatz, "Michael Bakunin and His Biographers: The Question of Bakunin's Sexual Impotence," in Ezra Mendelsohn and Marshall S. Shatz, eds., Imperial Russia, 1700-1917: State, Society, Opposition (DeKalb, IL.: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 219-40.