Description
Book SynopsisOn April 4, 1866, just as Alexander II stepped out of Saint Petersburg''s Summer Garden and onto the boulevard, a young man named Dmitry Karakozov pulled out a pistol and shot at the tsar. He missed, but his unheard-of act changed the course of Russian historyand gave birth to the revolutionary political violence known as terrorism.
Based on clues pulled out of the pockets of Karakozov''s peasant disguise, investigators concluded that there had been a conspiracy so extensive as to have sprawled across the entirety of the Russian empire and the European continent. Karakozov was said to have been a member of The Organization, a socialist network at the center of which sat a secret cell of suicide-assassins: Hell. It is still unclear how much of this conspiracy theory was actually true, but of the thirty-six defendants who stood accused during what was Russia''s first modern political trial, all but a few were exiled to Siberia, and Karakozov himself was publicly hanged on Septem
Trade Review
The Odd Man Karakozov is a subtle, challenging, and imaginative work. It deserves to be widely read not just by students of modern Russian history but by all those interested in modern political violence and its interpenetration with forms of subjectivity, art, and mass culture.
-- Daniel Beer * Slavic Review *
Verhoeven argues that modern terrorism began in nineteenth-century Russia... on April 4, 1866, [when] Dmitry Karakozov attempted to assassinate Czar Alexander II.... Verhoeven's thesis is comprehensive and thought provoking. She places the attempted assassination within the political context of social changes in Russia and other parts of Europe. She achieves this goal, incorporating the roles of Russian law, technological change, the emerging and competing media, and the advent of modernity. It is an outstanding analysis.
-- Jonathan R. White * The Historian *
Verhoeven's careful inspection of Karakozov's failed assassination of Alexander II reads like an extremely well-researched detective story.
-- Lonny Harrison * Slavic and East European Journal *
Verhoeven's powers of observation are formidable, her insights startlingly original, and her narrative masterfully staged on the level of the scene, the sentence, and the word.
-- Lynn Patyk * Russian Review *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Note on Transliteration, Translation, Dates, and Dramatis PersonaeIntroduction
1. From the Files of the Karakozov Case: The Virtual Birth of Terrorism
2. The Real Rakhmetov: The Image of the Revolutionary after Karakozov
3. "A Life for the Tsar": Tsaricide in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
4. Raskolnikov, Karakozov, and the Etiology of a "New Word"
5. Armiak; or "So Many Things in an Overcoat!"
6. "Factual Propaganda," an Autopsy; or, the Morbid Origins of April 4, 1866
7. The Head of the Tsaricide
Conclusion: The Point of April 4, 1866Appendixes
A. Dramatis Personae
B. Individuals Involved in the Investigation and Trials
C. The Karakozov Case, 1866–Present: Sources and HistoriographyList of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
