Ben Eklof and Tat’iana Saburova. Druzhba, sem’ia, revoliutsiia

As much a biography of Nikolai Charushin as it is a meditation on the art and genre of biography, Druzhba, sem’ia, revoliutsiia: Nikolai Charushin i pokolenie narodnikov 1870-x godov (Friendship, Family, Revolution: Nikolai Charushin and the Generation of Populists of the 1870s) takes the reader on a journey from familiar territory (1870s radical populism) into the less well-charted lands of Charushin’s subsequent life in Siberia and Viatka Province. At first glance, one might reasonably wonder why Ben Eklof and Tat’iana Saburova have chosen to write a biography of a figure better known for his own memoir writing than for his career as a populist revolutionary, which was cut short early by arrest and exile. But for the version of biography proposed here, Charushin may just be the ideal subject. In this study, Charushin’s role is better characterized as a focal point or “organizing principle” than as the primary subject. More at the forefront of the authors’ interest seems to be the collective experience of the generation of populist revolutionaries that Charushin’s journey through life is a part of and serves to represent. The historical figure of Charushin emerges as a sort of lens through which to clearly observe the generation of the 1870s as its members follow the course of their lives from childhood in tsarist Russia to death in the Soviet Union. It must be said that the term “generation” used in its ordinary sense is far from an accurate descriptor here, since the study only explores the life course of a small group of politicized intelligentsia radicals. The term “cohort,” used by Alan Spitzer (The French Generation of 1820 [1987]) to describe the generation of French intellectuals that he studied, would be more accurate and applicable.

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