A generation ago it appeared that the radical populist movement had already been plumbed to its depth in numerous studies written by the leading lights of Soviet and western scholarship. By the late 1980s, it seemed high time to move on from Russia's revolutionary tradition. And move on historians did into that fecundity of new subjects that have characterized the historiography of imperial Russia since the end of the Soviet Union. In the discipline of history, however, all funerals are premature. A new generation of scholars, interested primarily in the origins of terrorism, has turned again to radical populism and begun to explore it from a variety of unexpected perspectives. Lynn Ellen Patyk's Written in Blood, an interdisciplinary study of the idea of terrorism in imperial Russian history and literature, may be the most original approach to date.

Early in the book's introduction, Patyk seems to assert the bold claim that literature in some sense produced radical populist terrorism: “revolutionary terrorism was just as much Russia's (literary) word as its (revolutionary) deed and…it issued from the bourn of a literary culture whose marks it indelibly bore” (4). Historians will understandably react with skepticism to such an assertion, and it must be said that at various points in the text Patyk emphasizes this literary-origins argument, implying that without the attention Russian writers paid to the nexus of violence, fear, and political power, populist revolutionaries might never have conceived of the violent tactics they would eventually adopt. If indeed this contention forms a part of Patyk's argument, it inevitably falters on the lack of causality. Whatever connections may have existed between Russian writers and populist terrorists remain largely obscure, so the supposition that literary imagination influenced violent actions can only rest on a foundation of parallels and continuities that are not very convincing.

Skepticism may be unnecessary, however, because Patyk assures the reader that Written in Blood eschews the question of causality and ought to be considered a “literary history (or better, genealogy) of terrorism” (11). As a study of Russian literature, the book is on much more solid ground and manages to open up an expansive realm of innovative analysis. It is, of course, well understood that pre-Revolutionary Russian literature was saturated, both allegorically and directly, with political intent. But Patyk's analysis moves into different territory. It focuses specifically on the politics of violence and fear, and this approach yields a series of fascinating interpretations of familiar texts. Patyk's readings expose Russian literature's long chain of interest in the interrelationship between violence, fear, and power, which she characterizes as “terrorism” avant le mot.

Composed in a vigorous and engaging style, this study twists a red thread through many of imperial Russia's best known literary works, from Aleksandr Radishchev's Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow and Aleksandr Pushkin's Bronze Horseman to Nikolai Gogol΄’s Overcoat and, by far most importantly here, Fedor Dostoevskii's Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov. Patyk argues convincingly that the essential concept of terrorism lies more in the realm of imagination and interpretation than of radical activism, since the label “terrorist” always depends upon the eye of the beholder. She adds to this point that the agitated imaginations of Russia's leading literary lights first raised the specter of political violence and its consequences. Methodologically, Patyk's approach runs counter to many contemporary studies of terrorism. At a time when the term “terrorism” is increasingly under attack as inaccurate, judgement-laden, and in need of replacement, here it is used to refer to virtually all types of political violence from state oppression to bureaucratic bullying to revolutionary bomb throwing. Casting the net wide enables Patyk to shift away from the usual focus on ideology and political authority into more deadly questions about political violence, which still mostly remained in the hands of the state but potentially threatened to work its way into the hands of the state's detractors. One might well describe Written in Blood as a study of the menace of political violence that permeated imperial Russian literature, a sense of anxiety that would eventually seem to be prescience in the works of writers like Dostoevskii. Attention to this premonition of political violence is especially powerful in the book's long middle section on Dostoevskii's novels.

While the notion that literature inspired revolutionary terrorism is unlikely to prove the final word in the ongoing debate over the radical populist turn to violence, Patyk's search for answers in literature serves as a demonstration that the case is far from closed. In the meanwhile, as a result of her thoroughgoing analysis of “terrorism” in the evolution of Russian literature, this book will be enthusiastically welcomed by anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the dark forebodings that helped drive imperial Russia's world-historical literary tradition.