Who Are Vera and Tatiana? The Female Russian Nihilist in the Fin de Siècle Imagination

Focusing on a close, contextualized reading of a single case of invented identity from 1906, this article illustrates how, in fin de siècle Europe, a mutually generative relationship between the real, the imagined, and the rapidly proliferating mass media transformed the female “nihilist” from an apocryphal Russian figure into a durable Russian archetype—an archetype that had significant consequences in the shaping of European public opinion about Russia.