The Defiant Life of Vera Figner by Hartnett Lynne Ann

Author:Hartnett, Lynne Ann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2014-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

9

RESURRECTION IN EXILE

IN THE DAYS BEFORE VERA LEFT Shlisselburg, her dear friend Nikolai Morozov composed a poem to commemorate her release. In it he expressed his wish that fate would treat his cherished comrade well and that soon she would put the horrors of prison behind her.1 But Vera had spent too many years in Shlisselburg to believe that Morozov’s good wishes for her would be realized. She knew that inmates did not move easily from fortress to freedom. On the contrary, the steamer ride down the Neva from Lake Ladoga was just the first leg of a long journey that brought former Shlisselburg prisoners to new, untried terms of incarceration. For most this fresh incarceration was physical, as newly released Shlisselburg inmates faced periods of varying length in other prisons of the tsar or in distant exile settlements. But even those lucky few who quickly passed from imprisonment to freedom soon realized that they still remained captive to the fortress that had stolen their youth. Though the former inmates might never see the white walls of the fortress again, they never completely left Shlisselburg, nor did it leave them. As Vera explained almost a decade after her release, “I cannot erase twenty years during which I experienced more than in the rest of my life combined. Shlisselburg always hangs over me. I cannot shake it off, nor do I want to.”2

Vera did not expect her release from Shlisselburg to bring liberation. She felt too damaged, too transformed. With her nerves frayed from years of near-total isolation and her spirit demoralized by decades spent without the power to control even the most basic elements of her life and body, she simply wanted to remain entombed under the conditions to which and with the people to whom she had grown accustomed. If she had retained any autonomy over her fate, she certainly would have rejected the “resurrection” that her now deceased mother and the tsarist government had foisted upon her.

Four weeks after she left the prison where she had been confined for two decades, Vera was still behind bars.3 After almost a fortnight in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where the new electric lamps signaled the passage of time from her last stay, she landed in a prison in the northern town of Archangel.4 Although she expected to be transferred to a distant exile outpost such as Irkutsk or Sakhalin Island in the eastern section of the country,5 Russia’s recent war with Japan dictated the need to send her north. As her family and officials from the Ministry of Internal Affairs debated about her ultimate place of exile, Vera waited, confined to the Archangel Prison. In spite of the government’s intentions to send her to a remote location in the far northern part of the province, the state finally acceded to her family members’ requests to place Vera in a less severe environment. Both parties settled on the small town of Nenoksa, a mere 128 miles northwest of the provincial capital.6

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.