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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

CrimethInc.

Remembering Tatiana Bakunin

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