The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution

3 Pioneers Diverted

3 PIONEERS DIVERTED Like most European cities of its size in the late nineteenth century, Zurich bustled with activity. With the majestic, snow-kissed Alps that hugged the clear, pale-green waters of Lake Zurich towering in the background, merchants , artisans, financiers, and industrial workers darted off to work each weekday morning along the well-groomed streets of this cosmopolitan city.1 On the weekends, families strolled along the quays bordering the Limmat River to any number of Zurich’s public squares and lush green parks. Here they would often cross paths with the poets and artists who traveled to Zurich to indulge their creativity amid the breathtaking scenery and political freedom that the Swiss canton offered. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Zurich was a center of finance, industry, art, and culture. But it was also a center of learning. With its colleges of theology, arts, jurisprudence, and medicine, the University of Zurich attracted students from across Switzerland and Europe. In the streets that surrounded the university, students babbled to one another in most of the languages of Europe. While this polyglotism surely characterized the corridors and courtyards at any number of the major universities on the Continent, Zurich was unique in that many of the student voices that rose above the clamor of the horse-drawn streetcars trotting by the college belonged to women. As the first university in Europe to admit women on the same basis as men, the University of Zurich exerted a magnetic pull on young women who were anxious to expand their minds 38 The Defiant Life of Vera Figner andprofessionalopportunities.Betweenthewinterof1864–1865andthesummer of 1872, “a total of 203 women were enrolled as auditors or students” at the University of Zurich; of these “there were 23 English, 10 Swiss, 10 Germans, 6 Austrians, 6 Americans and 148 Russians,”2 including two provincial noblewomen from the province of Kazan. A light, persistent rain muted Zurich’s natural beauty as Vera; her husband , Alexei; and her sister Lidia alighted from their long journey. As they weavedtheirwaythroughthestreetsfromthenewlyconstructedHauptbahnhof railroad station to their hotel on the Limmatquai in the historic part of the city, the contrasts with Mother Russia were great. Churches in the Romanesque style replaced the colorful cupolas that adorned Russian Orthodox churches, and fashionable shops that serviced the rising financial and industrial elites surpassed the standard retail fare in the group’s native Kazan. The well-groomed streets, distinctive Swiss architecture, and the sounds of the German language made it clear to the newly arrived trio just how far from home they had ventured. But as they left the narrow streets of historic Zurich and neared the university and its polytechnic institute, Vera, Alexei, and Lidia entered a “corner of Russia” in the shadow of the Alps.3 Here the dozens of newly arrived female medical students mingled with young Russian men who came to Zurich to take advantage of the stellar reputation of the city’s university. For a generation of Russians enraptured by the promiseofscience,Zurichbeckonedbothwithitsuniversity’scollegeofmedicine and the neighboring Federal Polytechnic Institute, which offered some of the best scientific instruction on the Continent while at the same time having relatively lax entrance requirements.4 Vera was beside herself with anticipation when she arrived in Zurich with her husband and sister. As she walked up the broad steps that led to the polytechnic’s main building to seek permission to join the ranks of other pioneering women in the college of medicine, her twentieth birthday was a few weeks away. But at this moment she felt that she was being reborn and baptized into the world of science. Religious imagery pervades the section of Vera’s autobiographical writings that deal with her early days at the University of Zurich as she recounts medicineasaveritablyholymissiontowhichsheconsecratesherself.Actively recalling the religious imagery of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, standing at the peak of a cathedral and extending her arms to the world, Vera recasts Suslova in the Madonna role and interjects herself as her disciple: “Golden threads stretched out from Suslova to me, and then continued further, into the vil- Pioneers Diverted 39 lage, to its inhabitants and from there further still—to people in general, to my country and to humanity.”5 Imbued with the scientific fanaticism of the age and the hopeful prejudice of youth, Vera invested scientific disciplines, especially medicine, with fantastic powers that could cure the world—or at least...