Boris Godunov and the Terrorist EMILY FREY O n April 4, 1866, Tsar Alexander II narrowly avoided an assassin’s bullet outside the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg. The inexpert marksman was one Dmitry Karakozov, a recent university expellee who moved in revolutionary circles. Karakozov, who had donned both a peasant disguise and a pseudonym for the occasion, was quickly apprehended by guards. His pockets were found to contain a number of items that promised to illumi- nate his extraordinary act: strychnine, cyanide, morphine; a letter, a radical man- ifesto, a scribbled name. But convincing accounts of Karakozov, his motives, and his associations would prove elusive. First there was the issue of his question- able mental state: the frustrated regicide seemed manifestly unbalanced, attempting suicide no fewer than three times while awaiting trial. Beyond this, however, the documentary contents of Karakozov’s pockets offered conflicting images of the crime and its perpetrator. Karakozov’s letter suggested that he had acted on behalf of an organized conspiracy of young urban radicals, while his manifesto (entitled “Druz’iam-rabochim!,” or “To My Worker-Friends!”) depicted a solo ideologue with delusions of martyrdom. According to a witness, the tsar himself leapt to a third conclusion—one that the conservative press, ever suspicious of foreign treachery, was only too eager to publicize. Mindful of the Polish uprising quashed by his army only three years earlier, Alexander immediately queried his would-be assassin: “Are you Polish?” 1 He was not—but that detail was often forgotten in the epidemic of herme- neutomania that ensued. In its combination of public spectacle and ideological motivation, Karakozov’s attempt on Alexander II’s life has been called a founding event in the history of modern terrorism, 2 and Russians struggled to interpret the significance of this unheard-of act. Seizing on Karakozov’s Thanks are due to Richard Taruskin, James Davies, Luba Golburt, and the anonymous reviewers of this Journal for their detailed and insightful comments. Thanks also to Anna Berman and Julie Buckler, my thoughtful copanelists at the 2013 meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages, where I presented an early version of this article. Russian words and names in bibliographical citations have been transliterated according to a simplified Library of Congress System. The composers’ names “Musorgsky” and “Chaikovsky” are spelled in accordance with modern American scholarly practice. Pre-revolutionary Cyrillic quotations in the notes are given in modern orthography. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 1. “Ты Поляк?” This anecdote was first printed in “Korrespondentsii iz Peterburga,” 3. 2. See Verhoeven, Odd Man Karakozov. Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 70, Number 1, pp. 129–169 ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN 1547-3848. © 2017 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions webpage, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2017.70.1.129.