About

Welcome to the companion site for Writing Resistance: Revolutionary Memoirs of Shlissel’burg Fortress, 1884-1906. The book was published in June 2021 by UCL Press. You can download an open access pdf (or buy a copy) here.

Writing Resistance features translations of three memoirs by Populist revolutionaries incarcerated in the notorious Shlissel’burg Fortress near St Petersburg in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. This website will be a home for supporting materials for the book. It will build up a repository of texts on the fortress and its prison, including memoirs and other texts by the inmates and, where possible, secondary materials. All the works posted have been OCR’d, corrected, and updated to new orthography. This will also be a space for my own further investigations through the blog, and (hopefully) will encourage others to take up a truly fascinating subject populated with a cast of the most extraordinary characters.

I’ll be building up the website gradually, but at the moment it consists of a small selection of texts in Russian – English-language pieces will be coming soon – plus information on the prisoners, and a bibliography.

Original texts are in the public domain. Translations, blog posts and other new materials are by Sarah J. Young unless otherwise stated, and are covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA 4.0), unless specified otherwise. The bibliography owes a great deal to the work of Dr Ben Phillips, who compiled an extensive bibliography of primary texts on hard labour and exile in Imperial Russia.

This website was built by John Levin, using WordPress, the Donovan theme, and the Content Views plugin. It is hosted by Reclaim Hosting.