Login

Publications  •  Project Statistics

Glossary  •  Schools  •  Disciplines
People Search: 
   
Title/Abstract Search: 

Dissertation Information for Claudia Verhoeven

NAME:
- Claudia Verhoeven

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2004)

ADVISORS:
- Stephen P. Frank

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- David Warren Sabean
- J. Arch Getty
- Irina Paperno

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: April 4, 1866: The Karakozov case and the making of revolutionary terrorism

Abstract: As Dostoevsky knew when he insisted on naming Alyosha Karamazov the hero of his final novel, "it sometimes happens that it is precisely [the odd man], perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole." 1 Likewise, the subject of this dissertation, Dmitry Vladimirovich Karakozov, was certainly strange, and yet his exceptional case happens to hold the core of one of modernity's most complex political phenomenona: revolutionary terrorism. On April 4, 1866, Karakozov attempted to assassinate Tsar Alexander II--an event that was "unheard-of" in its own time and retrospectively came to look like the prologue to the historical birth of terrorism. But because Karakozov was strange, sick, and suicidal, because he failed, and because his timing was off--according to the traditional historiography, Russia's first modern tsaricide was fifteen years 'too early' to be considered a 'real' terrorist--he has largely been framed as the odd man out of the revolutionary movement. Precisely because scholarship has parenthesized April 4, 1866, as an untimely failure, however, the Karakozov case casts unfamiliar, yet unusually crisp light on the norms of a tradition that, having followed narrative trajectories slanted by nearly a century of ideological division, stands in obvious need of revision. In the wake of Karakozov's unprecedented act of political violence, law, literature, market, medicine, media, fashion, fine arts and religion all struggled to find a language with which to tell the story of a case that defied the logic of their respective worlds. In making sense of the senseless, each of these fields contributed to the construction of terrorism and the way terrorism later entered the historiography. In turn, caught in their reflections, the image of the odd Karakozov offers a novel perspective on one of the richest cultural periods of the modern era.

1 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov , trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 3; Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1972).

MPACT Scores for Claudia Verhoeven

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-10 16:11:56

Advisors and Advisees Graph

generating graph, please reload

Students under Claudia Verhoeven

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None