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Title: Remembering Tatiana Bakunin Author: CrimethInc. Date: July 30, 2019 Language: en Topics: Mikhail Bakunin, biography, history, Russia Source: Retrieved on 17th June 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2019/07/30/remembering-tatiana-bakunin-and-all-the-other-women-invisible-to-history
To observe the 204^(th) anniversary of her birth, we remember Tatiana
Bakunin, sister of the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. On the
basis of all the available information, Tatiana and her sisters were as
courageous and creative as Mikhail. Tatiana repeatedly played a pivotal
role behind the scenes in her brother’s life and in the intellectual
development of several other important thinkers. The fact that her name
and ideas are not widely known today attests to the barriers she faced
and the deficiencies of the “great man” model of history.
Nearly all of what we know about Tatiana appears in the margins of
stories written about men. She is one of the countless people who remain
invisible through the lens of patriarchal memory, which conceals both
her contributions and the things she could have accomplished if the
institutions and conventions of her time had not denied her personhood.
Her correspondence and writings have yet to be translated.
Tatiana and her sisters grew up in the Russian countryside studying
literature, music, and history. Their father raised them to speak
several languages, bringing in tutors from Western Europe; he had picked
up liberal ideas during his youth working in Italy as a diplomat, though
his politics shifted to the reactionary end of the spectrum as he aged.
In this environment, Tatiana Bakunin distinguished herself for her love
of reading and writing and her reflective spirit.
While her brother Mikhail left home at the age of fourteen to attend
military academy, Tatiana and her sisters continued their studies into
adulthood. They developed a private mysticism based in poetry, powerful
feeling, and asceticism, which they referred to among themselves as la
religion. The sisters were the first ones in the family to rebel,
revolting against the role prescribed for women in 19^(th)-century
Russia as wives and mothers. When their parents pressured the eldest
daughter, Lyubov, to marry a military officer, the sisters opposed this
choice and eventually forced their parents to let her break off the
engagement. Tatiana herself never married.
In 1835, Mikhail was serving as an artillery officer in the Russian
occupation of Poland. Likely inspired by his sisters’ rejection of their
socially ordained role, Mikhail went AWOL and left the military. When he
arrived home, Tatiana and Lyubov took him to Moscow to introduce him to
their friends, including Nikolai Stankevich, a student of philosophy and
the organizer of an independent reading group. Together, Nikolai,
Mikhail, Tatiana, and the other Bakunin sisters studied, Kant, Fichte,
and Hegel and began to develop the ideals for which Mikhail later became
famous.
Tatiana also maintained passionate intellectual relations with Vissarion
Belinski, one of the most influential critics in the history of Russian
literature, and later, Ivan Turgenev, the author who popularized the
concept of nihilism with his novel Fathers and Sons.
“My love does not fit in any of your categories. Call it folly or what
you will. I was simply in love; and before I had realized it, I spent
days which it is even now joy to remember… I lived with my whole heart
and soul, every vein in me throbbed with life, everything around me was
transfigured. Why must I now renounce all this?”
-Tatiana Bakunin, reflecting on her relationship with Turgenev in
correspondence with her brother in the 1850s
After the repression of the revolutions of 1848, Mikhail Bakunin was
captured and sentenced to death in three countries, then condemned to
life imprisonment in Russia. Defying the hostility of the Russian
government, Tatiana repeatedly visited him and smuggled secret messages
out of the prison at great risk to herself. Petitioning the authorities,
she and her mother and siblings eventually managed to effect Mikhail’s
transfer to Siberia, from which he was ultimately to escape and resume
his revolutionary activities. If not for Tatiana, Mikhail Bakunin’s name
might also be unknown to us today.
In his contributions to the development of contemporary anarchism,
Mikhail always emphasized the importance of women’s liberation. The
credit for this is due to Tatiana and her sisters, who set an example by
advocating for themselves and teaching him much of what he knew about
self-emancipation. The best way we can honor Tatiana is by recognizing
the important roles that all those whose names are unknown to us—the
majority of them women—have played in history.
“Women almost everywhere are slaves, and we ourselves are the slaves of
their bondage; without their liberation, without their complete,
unlimited freedom, our freedom is impossible; and without freedom, there
is no beauty, no dignity, no true love. We love only to the extent to
which we desire and call for the freedom and independence of the
other—total independence in relation to everything and even and
especially in relation to ourselves. Love is the union of free beings
and only this love uplifts, ennobles us. All other love disgraces the
oppressed and the oppressor and is a source of depravity.”
-Mikhail Bakunin, letter to his siblings, May Day, 1845