{"id":116795,"date":"2017-10-18T13:00:37","date_gmt":"2017-10-18T17:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=116795"},"modified":"2017-10-18T14:47:59","modified_gmt":"2017-10-18T18:47:59","slug":"oscar-wilde-colluded-russians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/18\/oscar-wilde-colluded-russians\/","title":{"rendered":"When Oscar Wilde Colluded with the Russians"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Oscar Wilde<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In 1880, Oscar Wilde made the uneventful decision to write a play about Russian terrorism. I say it was uneventful because the play (his first), Vera; or the Nihilists<\/em>, appeared amid a deluge of other crime thrillers, adventure tales, and even romance novels about Russian nihilists and their terror plots. The Vera of Wilde\u2019s play was inspired by the real-life figure of Vera Zasulich, whose attempted assassination in 1878 of the governor of Saint Petersburg made her an international lightening rod, especially in England where the public feared Russian nihilists might stoke domestic tensions and inspire Irish separatists. In many ways, fears of Russian interference unfolded in Victorian Britain in a manner not unlike what\u00a0we see today. As was the case in Wilde\u2019s era, the specter of an external threat had a way of unmasking internal strife.<\/p>\n

English publishers were eager for anything that satisfied the public\u2019s demand for terrorist intrigue, especially when seen through the lens of the Russian outside agitator. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s 1894 short story, \u201cThe Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez,\u201d Sherlock Holmes solves a murder involving fugitive Russian nihilists. Henry James\u2019s 1885 novel, The Princess Casamassima,<\/em> follows a London bookbinder named Hyacinth who becomes involved in a terrorist plot; the novel was James\u2019s homage to Ivan Turgenev\u2019s novel about Russian nihilism, Virgin Soil<\/em> (1877). These \u201cdynamite romances\u201d (as they were called) frequently starred Russian femmes fatales\u00a0who enticed innocent, unsuspecting British men into the dark underworld of nihilist conspiracy and terrorism. For instance, in George Alfred Henty\u2019s adventure novel\u00a0Condemned as a Nihilist<\/em> (1892), the protagonist, a young man named Godfrey Bullen, is seduced by an agent named Katia into taking part in a plot to secure the escape of a revolutionary leader. After unintentionally becoming implicated in the conspiracy, Godfrey is exiled to Siberia … of course.<\/p>\n

But with the specter of Irish terrorism looming large (and aided by a new invention called dynamite), the bombings and assassinations being carried out by nihilists in Russia hit uncomfortably close to home for British audiences. In September 1880, two alleged Russian assassination plots were reported on in Britain, one to blow up the tsar\u2019s yacht,\u00a0Levadia<\/em>, and the other to bomb the Grand Duke Konstantin\u2019s train. That neither threat was proven to be credible did little to calm public panic and media hysteria over the potential presence of Russian nihilists in England. The British press was especially prone to connecting those fears to national concerns about Irish independence. The humor magazine Punch<\/em> frequently described the Land War uprisings (1879\u20131882) as being the work of \u201cIrish Nihilists.\u201d And in September 1881, posters were distributed throughout Castlebar, in Ireland, declaring that \u201cnihilism is not confined to Russia\u201d and calling on the \u201cnihilists of Castlebar\u201d to rise up against the English.<\/p>\n

Wilde\u2019s play tells the story of Vera Sabouroff, a feared nihilist who has thrown all of Moscow into terror. In the opening scenes, she works in her father\u2019s inn in Siberia, which primarily caters to the officers who work at the nearby penal camps. Shortly after the play begins, Vera and her father, Peter, recognize her brother Dmitri (who they believed was studying medicine in Saint Petersburg) among a group of prisoners. Vera learns that Dmitri has been sentenced for revolutionary activities, and she decides to avenge him by joining the nihilists herself. However, she falls in love with another member of the terror cell, Alexei, who is eventually revealed to be the son of the tsar. Vera must choose between her love for Alexei and her commitment to ending tyranny.<\/p>\n

Taking on the Russian nihilist theme was a risky move for Wilde. His Irish background rendered Vera<\/em> immediately suspect in the eyes of the British. Wilde was not only Irish, his family was known for their Irish republican sympathies. Wilde\u2019s mother, Jane, known by her pen name Speranza, was a regular contributor to the Irish nationalist newspaper the\u00a0Nation<\/em>. She was closely associated with the Young Ireland cause, which called for armed Irish rebellion against the British. As the scholar Michael Newton, who has written about Vera<\/em>, explains, \u201cHere was a play by a noticeably Irish author, equivocally praising sedition, assassination, and republican rule.\u201d And though the governments of Great Britain and Russia were at the time competing militarily for dominance in Central Asia, they were united in their fight against radical terrorism. They feared collusion between the Russian nihilists and the radical Irish independence movements like the Fenian Brotherhood. When the Russian emperor Alexander II was successfully assassinated in Saint Petersburg in 1881, Wilde\u2019s play, originally planned to premiere in London, was put on indefinite hold.<\/p>\n

Wilde\u2019s Vera<\/em>\u00a0was eventually produced in the safer milieu of New York City. It premiered at the Union Street Theater on August 20, 1883. Despite Wilde\u2019s celebrity and a huge marketing campaign (the costumes were on display in the windows of Lord and Taylor\u2019s department store on Fifth Avenue), Vera<\/em>\u00a0closed after just a week due to poor ticket sales and dismal reviews. The\u00a0New York Herald<\/em> described the play as \u201clong-drawn, dramatic rot,\u201d and a theater critic from the\u00a0New York Daily News<\/em> called it \u201ca foolish, highly peppered story of love, intrigue, and politics, with Russian accessories of fur and dark lanterns, and overlaid with bantam gabble about freedom and the people.\u201d It is \u201cVera\u201d that contains the oft-quoted line by Wilde: \u201cexperience, the name men give to their mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, the Russian nihilist theme continued to interest Wilde. In his 1891 short story, \u201cLord Arthur Savile\u2019s Crime,\u201d Lord Arthur, seeking a bomb to take out a family member, calls upon his friend Count Rouvaloff, \u201ca young Russian of very revolutionary tendencies.\u201d Rouvaloff, ostensibly in London to write a book about Peter the Great\u2019s time in England, is thought by many to be a nihilist. Wilde makes light of this, writing that Lord Arthur \u201cfelt bound to admit to [Rouvaloff] that he had not the slightest interest in social questions, and simply wanted the explosive machine for a purely family matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet\u00a0Vera<\/em>, Wilde\u2019s most explicit Russian nihilist work, is rarely staged. For scholars of Wilde\u2019s work, it is generally relegated to the status of a footnote, an aberration in an otherwise critically successful career. But the play\u2019s wider context, particularly that its London cancellation might have been effected by Wilde\u2019s Irish background (combined with the play\u2019s Russian theme), offers a lesson in what has traditionally underpinned charges of Russian “collusion.\u201d In the past, fears of an outside (Russian) agitator were often used to test the loyalty of people who had very little reason to feel loyal in the first place: the Irish in Great Britain, African Americans during the Red Scare. The present-day fears of Russian collusion have an altogether different tinge to them: they are associated with the powerful, not the powerless, a paradigmatic shift that has left many feeling confused as to what to believe. Perhaps the epistemological anxieties of the present, where news of Russian collusion is coming at a time when we don\u2019t know what news is real or fake, are best expressed by a character in Vera<\/em>, Prince Paul, one of the tsar\u2019s loyal advisors who changes sides and joins the nihilists. When told by the revolutionaries, \u201cThis must be a new atmosphere for you, Prince Paul. We speak the truth to one another here,\u201d he replies, in true Wildean fashion, \u201cHow misleading you must find it.”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jennifer Wilson is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of\u00a0Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  In 1880, Oscar Wilde made the uneventful decision to write a play about Russian terrorism. I say it was uneventful because the play (his first), Vera; or the Nihilists, appeared amid a deluge of other crime thrillers, adventure tales, and even romance novels about Russian nihilists and their terror plots. The Vera of Wilde\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1284,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[31114,31117,7287,1435,31111,31116,17111,31112,31113,31115,31109,31110],"class_list":["post-116795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-condemned-as-a-nihilist","tag-fenian-brotherhood","tag-ivan-turgenev","tag-oscar-wilde","tag-russian-nihilists","tag-saint-petersburg","tag-sir-arthur-conan-doyle","tag-the-adventure-of-the-golden-pince-nez","tag-the-princess-casamassima","tag-vera-sabouroff","tag-vera-zasulich","tag-vera-or-the-nihilists"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Oscar Wilde Colluded with the Russians<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Wilde's first play, \u2018Vera; or the Nihilists,\u2019 is rarely written about or staged.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/10\/18\/oscar-wilde-colluded-russians\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"When Oscar Wilde Colluded with the Russians by Jennifer Wilson\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 18, 2017 \u2013   In 1880, Oscar Wilde made the uneventful decision to write a play about Russian terrorism. 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