How have modern cultures of dissent learnt to narrate the experience of political imprisonment? From 1851 to 1853, M. A. Bakunin was incarcerated in St Petersburg's Peter and Paul Fortress. Here, the “father of Russian anarchism” wrote what has become known as his Confession: an account of his personal and political development, penned in the most notorious prison of the Russian autocracy at the behest of the tsar. Previous scholarship has focused entirely on the content of this peculiar text. The present article is the first to mobilize extensive archival research—on its carceral conditions of production and intellectual conditions of possibility—in order to understand the form of Bakunin's Confession. Doing so reveals the text as one of the first Russian Bildungsromane: the birth of a genre whereby the imprisoned self became legible through a new epistemology of self and history between Goethe and Hegel. Excavating the nature and afterlives of this novel political aesthetics provides original insights into the “politicization” of state incarceration in European history, the origins of modern Russian autobiographics, and the construction of the radical self.

中文翻译：

---

讲述沙皇俄国的政治监禁：巴枯宁、歌德、黑格尔

现代异议文化是如何学会叙述政治监禁的经历的？从 1851 年到 1853 年，马·巴枯宁被关押在圣彼得堡的彼得保罗要塞。在这里，“俄罗斯无政府主义之父”写下了他所谓的忏悔: 对他个人和政治发展的描述，在沙皇的授意下，在俄罗斯最臭名昭著的专制监狱中写下。以前的学术研究完全集中在这个特殊文本的内容上。本文是第一次动员广泛的档案研究——关于其生产的监狱条件和可能的智力条件——以了解巴枯宁的形式忏悔. 这样做表明该文本是最早的俄罗斯文本之一成长小说：通过歌德和黑格尔之间的自我和历史新认识论，被囚禁的自我变得清晰易读的体裁的诞生。挖掘这种新颖的政治美学的本质和来世，为欧洲历史上国家监禁的“政治化”、现代俄罗斯自传的起源以及激进自我的建构提供了独到的见解。