THE IMPORTANCE OF LOVING A NIHILIST: OSCAR WILDE'S VERA AND THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF RUSSIAN RADICALISM

Though best known to fin-de-siecle Russian audiences as a decadent purveyor of anti-political aestheticism, Oscar Wilde's interest in Russia stemmed precisely from its political radicalism. Wilde's very first play, Vera, or the Nihilists (1881), was his contribution to a growing trend in British literature to offer fictionalized portraits of Russian terrorists. The threat of Irish radicalism at home made the nihilist-led assassinations in imperial Russia a common subject in the British press. In Vera, Wilde focuses on the sexual mores of the nihilist movement including their rejection of romantic love and sublimation of sex. Wilde's heroine, an extremely fictionalized version of the real-life Vera Zasulich, struggles to deny her lust for the tsar in order to carry out the assassination she has been tasked to lead. This paper frames Wilde's characterization of revolutionary asceticism within broader questions raised by socialists at the end of the nineteenth century (in both Russia and Britain) regarding the relationship between sex and socialism.