Nihilist Girl

Vera Barantsova has grown up with every advantage her aristocratic world offers and has found, on examination, that none of them are what she wants. She wants the things the nihilist movement has taught her to want: a life of purpose, a self accountable to reason rather than convention, the right to be taken seriously as a thinking person. She is prepared to pay for these things. She does not yet know what the payment will be.

When she agrees to marry a political prisoner condemned to Siberian exile - a man she barely knows, whose survival her legal status as his wife may make possible - she makes the decision with full knowledge of what she is giving up. Nihilist Girl is the story of how that decision is reached, and what it reveals about the world that makes it necessary.

Sofya Kovalevskaya - the first woman in modern Europe to earn a doctorate in mathematics and to hold a full university professorship, a woman who had spent her own life finding routes through walls that were not supposed to have doors - wrote this novella in the last years of her life, and it was published posthumously in 1892. It is both a precise portrait of the Russian nihilist movement and something more durable: a study of what it means to take an idea seriously enough to live by it, in a society that has arranged itself to make that as difficult as possible.

Spare, clear-eyed, and quietly devastating, Nihilist Girl is the work of a writer who understood, from long experience, exactly what she was describing.