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In August 1908, a white mob attacked Springfield, Illinois’s Black community, destroying homes and businesses and lynching two Black men. National outrage over the violence helped spur the movement that created the NAACP the following year.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
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| Vera; or, The Nihilists | |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Written by | Oscar Wilde |
| Genre | Tragedy |
| Setting | Russia, 1800 |
| Premiere | |
| Date | 20 August 1883 |
| Place | Union Square Theatre, New York, US |
Vera; or, The Nihilists is a play by Oscar Wilde. It is a tragedy set in Russia and is loosely based on the life of Vera Zasulich.[1] It was Wilde's first play, and the first to be performed. A draft of the script was completed in 1880 and the following year arrangements were made for a one-off staging in London with Mrs. Bernard-Beere in the title role, but the production was cancelled. The first performance was in 1883 at New York’s Union Square Theatre, and was based on revisions made by Wilde while lecturing in America in 1882. The play, which starred Marie Prescott as Vera, was not a success and folded after only one week.[2] It is rarely revived.
At the time of writing, the reform-minded Tsar Alexander II was involved in a struggle with revolutionaries who sought to assassinate him (and eventually succeeded). Though none of Wilde's characters correspond to actual Russian people of the time, the above situation was well-known both to Wilde and to the audience for which he was writing. It has been suggested that the plot was inspired by true events. In 1878, three years before the play's completion, Vera Zasulich shot the Governor of St Petersburg, Trepov.[3] Wilde described himself as a Socialist, although Ellmann describes his Socialism as more "a general hatred of tyranny" than a specific political belief.[4]
Marie Prescott and her husband William Perzel purchased the rights to perform the play, and Prescott was the leading actress in its first performance at the Union Square Theatre on 20 August 1883. Wilde travelled to America for the second time in his life specifically to oversee the production.[5]
The play was withdrawn after one week. Perzel told newspaper reporters that "the play is withdrawn simply because it did not pay," adding that he had lost $2,500 on the piece the previous week. He also implied that he had hoped Wilde himself would lecture between the acts, allowing him to capitalise on Wilde's popularity as a public speaker.[6]
PERSONS IN THE PROLOGUE.
PERSONS IN THE PLAY.
Nihilists.
Soldiers, Conspirators, &c.
Vera is a barmaid in her father's tavern, which is situated along a road to the prison camps in Siberia. A gang of prisoners stop at the tavern. Vera immediately recognises her brother Dmitri as one of the prisoners. He begs her to go to Moscow and join the Nihilists, a terrorist group trying to assassinate the Czar, and avenge his imprisonment. She and her father's manservant Michael leave to join the Nihilists.
Five years later, Vera has become the Nihilists' top assassin, and is wanted across Europe. She is in love with a fellow Nihilist named Alexis: however, Nihilists are sworn never to marry. A Nihilist meeting is nearly broken up by soldiers, but Alexis thwarts the soldiers by revealing his true identity: he is the Tsarevich, heir to the Russian throne. This act earns him the further admiration of Vera and the hatred of the Nihilists.
At a council meeting, Tsar Ivan and his cruel epigrammatic minister Prince Paul Maraloffski criticise Tsarevitch Alexis's democratic leanings, but the Tsar is assassinated by Michael after the Tsarevitch opens the window.
Alexis ascends the throne and exiles Prince Paul Maraloffski, not to Siberia, but to Paris. Maraloffski joins the Nihilists to kill Alexis. The task of assassinating the Tsar is given to Vera. She must infiltrate the palace, stab the Tsar and throw the dagger out the window as a signal to Nihilist agents below. If she does not, the agents will break in and kill him. Vera is reluctant to kill the man she loves, though.
Alexis returns to the palace after his coronation, intending to end injustice in Russia during his reign. Vera enters the palace, knife at the ready. Alexis asks her to marry him. She accepts, but then she hears the agents outside crying out for the signal. She stabs herself and throws the dagger out the window, and the agents depart satisfied.
Alexis: Vera, what have you done?
Vera: I have saved Russia. [dies]
The play’s original reception was mostly critical.
Reviewing the first production, the New York Mirror described it as "among the highest order of plays," "masterly," and "the noblest contribution to its literature the stage has received in many years".[7] Other newspapers reviews were very critical: "Long-drawn dramatic rot" (New York Herald), "wearisome" (New York Times), and "little better than fizzle" (New York Tribune).[8] Punch printed that it was "from all accounts, except the Poet's own, Vera Bad".[9] Pilot, meanwhile, complimented the script, and laid blame on Prescott as an "inferior actress".[10]
Since its original production, Vera has been very rarely revived. In 1987, Wilde's biographer Richard Ellmann described Vera as "a wretched play," yet noted that "it did not fall disastrously below the standard set by drama in a century when, as Stendhal said, plays could not be written."[11]
Scenes from the play were featured in the HBO drama, The Gilded Age, season 2, episode 3, "Head to Head".[12]
A full-length revival of the play (the first of its kind) was staged in London in 2025 and attracted significant critical acclaim, with the Wildean magazine calling it "almost certainly the most effective production of the play ever mounted"; the run was a sellout success.
Vera; or the Nihilists public domain audiobook at LibriVox| Novel | |
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| Essays | |
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| Based on Wilde's life and works |
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Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Vera; or, The Nihilists is a play by Oscar Wilde. It is a tragedy set in Russia and is loosely based on the life of Vera Zasulich. It was Wilde's first play, and the first to be performed. A draft of the script was completed in 1880 and the following year arrangements were made for a one-off staging in London with Mrs. Bernard-Beere in the title role, but the production was cancelled. The first performance was in 1883 at New York’s Union Square Theatre, and was based on revisions made by Wilde while lecturing in America in 1882. The play, which starred Marie Prescott as Vera, was not a success and folded after only one week. It is rarely revived.
The Russian nihilist movement was a philosophical, cultural, and revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from which the broader philosophy of nihilism originated. In Russian, the word nigilizm (Russian: нигилизм; meaning 'nihilism', from Latin nihil 'nothing') came to represent the movement's unremitting attacks on morality, religion, and traditional society. Even as it was yet unnamed, the movement arose from a generation of young radicals disillusioned with the social reformers of the past, and from a growing divide between the old aristocratic intellectuals and the new radical intelligentsia. Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, as stated in the Encyclopædia Britannica, "defined nihilism as the symbol of struggle against all forms of tyranny, hypocrisy, and artificiality and for individual freedom." As only an early form of nihilist philosophy, Russian nihilism saw all the morality, philosophy, religion, aesthetics, and social institutions which were in place as worthless and meaningless but did not necessarily see meaninglessness in all ethics, knowledge, and human life. It did however, incorporate theories of hard determinism, atheism, materialism, positivism, and egoism in an aim to assimilate and distinctively recontextualize core elements of the Age of Enlightenment into Russia while dropping the Westernizer approach of the previous generation. Russian nihilism developed an atmosphere of extreme moral scepticism, at times praising outright selfishness and championing those who held themselves exempt from all moral authority. In its most complete forms it also denied the possibility of common ideals, instead favouring a relativist and individualistic outlook. Nihilists predictably fell into conflict with the Russian Orthodox religious authorities, as well as with prevailing family structures and the Tsarist autocracy. Although most commonly associated with revolutionary activism, most nihilists were in fact not political and instead discarded politics as an outdated stage of humanity. They held that until a destructive programme had overcome the current conditions no constructive programme could be properly formulated, and although some nihilists did begin to develop communal principles their formulations in this regard remained vague. With the widespread revolutionary arson of 1862, a number of assassinations and attempted assassinations of the 1860s and 70s, and the eventual assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, Russian nihilism was characterized throughout Europe as a doctrine of political terrorism and violent crime. Kropotkin argues that while violence and terrorism were used, this was due to the specific revolutionary context and was not inherent to nihilist philosophy, though historian M. A. Gillespie adds that nihilism was nevertheless at the core of revolutionary thought in Russia throughout the lead-up to the Russian Revolution. Professor T. J. J. Altizer further states that Russian nihilism in fact had its deepest expression in a Bolshevist nihilism of the 20th century.
Marie Prescott (June 15, 1850 – August 28, 1893) was an American stage actress and playwright. She is best known for starring in and co-producing Vera; or, The Nihilists, the first play by Oscar Wilde.
Moral nihilism (also called ethical nihilism) is the metaethical view that nothing is morally right or morally wrong and that morality does not exist. Moral nihilism is distinct from moral relativism, which allows for actions to be wrong relative to a particular culture or individual. It is also distinct from expressivism, which asserts that moral claims are expressions of emotions, desires, and intents. Moral nihilism today broadly tends to take the form of an error theory: the view developed originally by J. L. Mackie in his 1977 book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, although prefigured by Axel Hägerström in 1911. Error theory and nihilism broadly take the form of a negative claim about the existence of objective values or properties. Under traditional views, some moral properties or methods hold objectively in some sense beyond our contingent interests, which morally obligate us to act. For Mackie and the error theorists, such properties do not exist in the world, and therefore, morality conceived of by reference to objective facts must also not exist. Therefore, morality in the traditional sense does not exist. However, holding nihilism does not necessarily imply that one should give up using moral or ethical language; some nihilists contend that it remains a useful tool. In fact Mackie and other contemporary defenders of error theory, such as Richard Joyce and Jonas Olson, defend the use of moral or ethical talk and action even in knowledge of their fundamental falsity. The legitimacy of this activity is a subject of debate in philosophy.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
