PAUL AVRICH

Bakunin and His Writings

A century has passed since the death of , and the last few years have seen a flood of books and monographs devoted to his life and ideas. The purpose of this brief survey is to take stock of the more important recent works, with special reference to the monumental Archives Bakounine edited by Arthur Lehning of . To begin with, a number of early biographies, written in French, German, and English during the twenties and thirties, have been reprinted in paper and hardcover editions. These include H. E. Kaminski's Bakounine; la vie d'un revolutionnaire,l Fritz Brupbacher's Michael Bakunin, der Satan der Revolte,2 Ricarda Huch's Michael Bakunin und die Anarchie,3 and most important, E. H. Carr's Michael Bakunin.4 In addition, Eugene Pyziur's The Doctrine of of Michael A. Bakunin5 might be mentioned, although it is not a biography of Bakunin but a summary of his ideas. The works of Carr and Pyziur, of course, are the most familiar and accessible to Canadian and American readers. Both are scholarly efforts and full of valuable information, but both have serious drawbacks. Carr's book, though well written and still indispensable to anyone interested in Bakunin, places undue emphasis on the more curious and eccentric aspects of Bakunin's personality while paying too little attention to his ideas and their impact on the revolutionary and working-class movements. There is no serious discussion of The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social , and Statehood and is not even mentioned, though these are Bakunin's longest and most important works. Pyziur's book, while a useful compendium of Bakunin's philosophy, is marred by the author's strong antipathy to his subject and by his apparent lack of French, the language in which Bakunin did most of his writing. The six-volume Oeuvres6 are neither listed in the bibliog- raphy nor cited in the notes. Nor is there any mention of Max Nettlau's three-

1. (Paris: Aubier, 1938; rpt., Paris: Belibaste, 1971). 2. (Ziirich: Neuer deutscher Verlag, 1929); French translation with annotations and supplements by Jean Barrue (Paris: Editions du Cercle, 1971). In addition, Brupbacher's Marx und Bakunin (Berlin: G. Birk, 1922) is scheduled for republication in 1976. 3. (Leipzig: Insel-verlag, 1923; rpt., Frankfurt a/M. Suhrkamp, 1972). 4. (London: Macmillan, 1937; rpt., New York: Vintage Books, 1961) paperback, and New York: Octagon Books, 1975) hardcover. 5. (Milwaukee: Marquette Univ. Press, 1955; rpt., Chicago: Regnery, 1968). 6. (Paris: P. V. Stock, 1895-1913). volume biography in German,7 the most exhaustive source of information on Bakunin's life and thought, with copious extracts from his unpublished papers. Nettlau's biography has been reproduced in the original handwritten and auto- copied form by the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales of Geneva, but it deserves a proper printing under the supervision of a modern Bakunin specialist (Arthur Lehning, for instance). It would also be good to have a new edition of K. J. Kenafick's Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx,8 an interesting little book that has long been out of print. What is most urgently needed, however, is an up-to-date biography incorpora- ting all the latest research. None has yet appeared. Neither Henri Arvon's Michel Bakounine, ou la vie contre science nor Horst Bienek's curious Bakunin, eine Inven- tion sheds much fresh light on the subject;9 and Bakunin: The Father of Anarchism by Anthony Masters,1 characterized by hasty writing, skimpy research, and in- adequate documentation, has little to recommend it. Three more biographies are on the way, however, by Arthur Mendel of the University of Michigan, the author of an interesting study of Russian populism and Legal ,l by Arthur Lehning of the International Institute of Social History, a veteran historian with an un- rivaled multilingual knowledge of Bakunin, and by Jeanne-Marie (no last name is given), sponsored by the Centre International de Recherches sur 1'Anarchisme of Geneva.l2 In addition, Stephen Halbrook of Florida State University has com- pleted a doctoral thesis on Bakunin and Marx,13 while Marshall Shatz of the• University of Massachusetts (who edited an anthology of anarchism and wrote a valuable dissertation on the Polish revolutionary Machajski)14 is at work on a fresh study of the young Bakunin during his formative years in Russia and Western Europe before 1848. An absorbing contribution to our understanding of Bakunin's ideas and personality has been Michael Confino's Daughter of a Revolutionary, which throws new light on his relationship with Sergei Nechaev. 15 A number of Bakunin studies have recently appeared in the Soviet Union which, though far from being sympathetic to their subject, possess a degree of objectivity that has not been seen since Stalin's consolidation of power in the

7. Michael Bakunin: Eine Biographie, 3 vols. (London: n.p., 1896-1900). 8. (Melbourne, n.p. 1948). 9. (Paris: Seghers, 1966; Miinchen: C. Hanser, 1970). 10. (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1974). 11. Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia: Legal Marxism and Legal Populism: (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961). 12. Michel Bakounine: une vie d'homme, Editions "Noir." 13. "The Marx-Bakunin Controversy: Intellectual Origins, 1844-1870" (Florida State Univ., 1972). 14. T1se Essential Works of Anarchism (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971); "Jan Waefaw Machajski and 'Makhaevshchina' " (Columbia Univ., 1968). 15. (London and LaSalle, Ill.: Library Press, 1973). For Bakunin and his relationship to the Russian Populist movement the reader should also consult Franco Venturi's magisterial Roots of Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1960).