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Advertised at the point of its publication on 15 November 1889 as 'the first novel written in English by a Russian',2 The Career of a Nihilist by 'Stępniak' ('Steppe-dweller') was actually one of the first novels written in English by any non-native speaker of the language. Why Stepniak wrote it in English is only one of the questions it raises. Others include why he wrote a novel at all, and, especially, why he published it under the imprint of a firm on Tyneside in north-east England when he had already published four non-fiction books with three different publishers in London.3 In focussing on these questions, the present essay pays particular attention to the last of them. its principal concern is to bring out the significance of a late nineteenth-century English publishing house whose activities centred on a place that was three hundred miles away from those of its main competitors.
'Stepniak' was the pseudonym of Sergei Mikhailovich Kravchinskii, Ф a leading figure in the left-wing Russian populist movement of the later fit nineteenth century. Born in 1851, he became politically active at the beginning of the 1870s. At first he wandered from village to village in the guise of a woodsman, felling trees whilst attempting to incite disgruntled peasants. Later, he turned to violence. In August 1878, in one of the most notorious of Russian terrorist outrages, he assassinated the head of the tsarist secret police on a square in St Petersburg. He then fled abroad, taking up residence first in Italy and subsequently, in 1884, in London. In the last decade of his life-he was hit by a train in London when walking across a railway line at the end of 1895-he was at least as well known among Russian revolutionaries outside Russia as Prince Kropotkin, Georgii Plekhanov, and Pyotr Lavrov. Although it is sometimes said that, in England, he modified his views, becoming, if anything, a constitutionalist or a liberal (whereas Plekhanov, in Switzerland, became a Marxist and a younger generation of Russian revolutionaries started thinking about a return to the terrorist methods that Stepniak had supposedly given up), to what extent he had really disavowed violence is another of the issues that The Career of a Nihilist raises.
Stepniak has attracted a...