Killer Fabulations. Terrorists-Writers and the Propaganda of the Deed in the Russian Empire

Abstract

This paper examines the structural affinity between terrorist violence and literary fiction in the Russian Empire through the concept of autofabulation: a mode of discourse in which testimony and invention, sincerity and deception, and factuality and counterfactuality become inseparable. It argues that the ‘propaganda of the deed’ was not merely a political use of violence but a communicative practice that necessarily assumed an aesthetic narrative form. Like narrative, terrorist communication generates both a plot – a sequence of transgressive events – and a perspective that seeks to control their interpretation. Like fiction, it recursively embeds mental states and splits communicative roles between direct participants and a wider audience, incorporating the communicative situation itself into the act of communication. The article traces this logic through Nikolai Leskov’s anti-terrorist writings and the self-representations of Boris Savinkov and other writers. It argues that autofabulation operates at a level above the distinction between fact and non-fact: it concerns the distinction between discourses subject to the demand to distinguish truth from untruth and those that, like fiction, suspend that distinction. Autofabulation thus emerges as a mode in which violence, narration, and self-fashioning jointly destabilize meaning precisely through the attempt to control it strategically.