Authors

Discussion

Revolutionary obituaries stood as a literary memorial to the activities of Russia’s populist and socialist movements that emerged in the late nineteenth century and developed further in the earliest years of the twentieth. Scholars who have assessed the development of the obituary column as a genre elsewhere have sometimes concluded that the main aim of these was to function as a ‘record of the day’ that detailed the life of the deceased for posterity. This was not so in revolutionary Russia, where the obituary column stood as a political tool that lent itself to developing a narrative of the heroism and sacrifice of the individual revolutionary but, more widely, the story of the future triumph of the socialist movement. Building on the work of scholars such as Lynn E. Patyk and Deborah Pearl, this paper will contend that the obituary column was a particular genre of writing – like the revolutionary song and tales (skazki) of the movement – that came with its own set of cultural codes and political tools designed to appeal to a designated readership. Its longevity and appearance across the newspapers, journals and pamphlets of different groups and parties was testament to its success and the widespread applicability of the genre of writing. This paper will explore the development of the column as a ‘style’ through a carefully curated set of sources, exploring anarchist, populist and Marxist political cultures from the 1870s up to and including the 1905 Revolution.