"Laughing Allegra" Meets an Ogre

One of my earliest meetings with a noted man was when Michael Bakunin dined at our house, November 27, 1861. The Century dictionary defines him as 'Michael Bakunin, a Russian Socialist and political agitator, regarded as the founder of Nihilism.' My father wrote of him, 'Mr. Bakunin is a Russian gentleman of education and ability, a giant of a man with a most ardent, seething temperament. He was in the Revolution of Forty-eight, has seen the inside of prisons of Olmiitz, where he had Lafayette's room, was afterward in Siberia, whence he escaped in June last, down the Amoor and then in an American vessel by way of Japan to California and across the isthmus hitherwards. An interesting man.' But I had one short, simple word to describe him ogre. I had not been brought up on Grimm's Fairy Tales for nothing, and when I came down to dinner, a little late I fear, and saw sitting in my wonted place at my father's right hand, this big creature with a big head, wild bushy hair, big eyes, big mouth, a big voice and still bigger laugh, I had no doubts. Some things you don't have to be told, you just know. No entreaties or persuasion could induce me to cross the

Art · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Latin American and Latino Studies

• Bakunin and the United States

  Open Access•Paul Avrich•International Review of Social…•1979

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