The event is online only. Join the meeting here.
Standing at the very heart of the Russian imperial capital, the bastions and ravelines of the Peter and Paul Fortress not only served as the dread political prisons of the tsars. Over the course of the long nineteenth century, St. Petersburg’s central citadel was also invested by successive generations of revolutionary actors as a primary stage for the articulation of agential struggle and radical subjecthood. In this talk, Nicholas Bujalski (Oberlin College) presents elements of his novel cultural, intellectual, and spatial history of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Particular focus is placed on how this carceral site grew to house a certain lineage of oppositional self-narration in the 1860s – as well as the questions this process poses for the ways in which historians approach the very concepts of ‘agency’ and ‘the self.’
SPEAKER: Nicholas Bujalski (Oberlin)
SOBESEDNIK: Andrea Gullotta (Univ. of Palermo)
