(Article,
‘Bakunin’, first published in The Cambridge Wagner
Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
 |
| Photograph by Nadar |
Bakunin, Mikhail, (b. Priamukhino, Russia,
30 May [Old Style: 18 May] 1814; d. Berne, 1 July 1876), Russian anarchist. A
nobleman’s heir, Bakunin resigned his army commission to study philosophy in
Moscow. Part of the “Stankevich Circle,” he translated Fichte and Hegel
and fell under Alexander Herzen’s influence. There followed from 1840 an
itinerant revolutionary existence. In Berlin, he shared an apartment with Ivan
Turgenev, joined the Young Hegelian party, and penned The Reaction in Germany (1842). In Zurich, he travelled with Georg Herwegh, meeting Wilhelm Weitling and
other “German communists.” In Paris, he met fellow anarchist and later friend,
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and his eventual nemesis, Karl Marx. Sympathy for the
Polish cause distinguished him from many Russians and Germans, and got him expelled from Paris. In 1848, he attended
the First Slav Congress in Prague and made his Appeal to the Slavs, demanding continental revolutionary unity to
overthrow Russian, Austrian, and Prussian autocracy.
Following Wagner’s 1849
Palm Sunday performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Bakunin approached the
conductor, announcing: “if all music were to be lost in the coming world
conflagration, we should risk our own lives to preserve this symphony” (Wagner,
My Life, English translation 384).
Wagner writes a little of their ensuing discussions, generally of a political
nature, Bakunin rejoicing in his “creative passion” for destruction (Bakunin
58). Had Wagner not yet heard of Marx, he most likely would have done so during
these walks. Upon Bakunin’s next return from revolutionary Prague, he threw
himself into the Dresden
uprising, despite disapproving of its amateurism. He proposed
centralizing gunpowder reserves in the Rathaus to blow up approaching Prussian
troops.
Captured and arrested in
Chemnitz with other revolutionaries, including August Röckel but not Wagner, Bakunin received commuted death
sentences in Saxony and Austria, before extradition to Russia, where he was
held in solitary confinement in St Petersburg’s Peter-Paul Fortress from 1851
to 1857. Released into Siberian exile, he escaped via Japan to San Francisco,
whence he resumed his itinerant activities, through London, Lithuania,
Stockholm, Switzerland, Lyons, Bologna, etc. Disdaining participation in the
corruption of “bourgeois” political life, his anarchistic conflict with Marx’s “scientific
socialism” intensified, culminating in expulsion from the First International
in 1872. In the wake of this and the Franco-Prussian
War (1871), Bakunin wrote Statism
and Anarchy, perhaps the most complete statement of his beliefs.
Though as coherent a tract
as we have from Bakunin, arguably more powerful were: his insistence upon
revolutionary activity; his twin passions for destruction (cf. Götterdämmerung’s
Immolation Scene) and revolutionary
fraternity; and his provision of memorable dicta, e.g., inverting Voltaire to
say that, if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him (Bakunin 128).
Bakunin’s charisma impressed Wagner greatly; references persist in Cosima’s Diaries. During his final year,
1876, Bakunin seems, in startlingly later-Wagnerian fashion, to have lost some
of the Rousseauvian faith he had held since childhood in man’s natural goodness,
remarking from Lugano: “If there were in the whole world three people, two of
them would unite to oppress the third” (Carr 478). As rehearsals for the first
Bayreuth festival began, Bakunin – on his deathbed – requested the works of Schopenhauer.
Arthur Lehning (ed.), Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, tr.
Steven Cox and Olive Stevens (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973).
E.H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (London: Macmillan,
1937).