A version of this article was published on the Inside History Substack
On November 14, 1879, a young man was observed acting suspiciously at Odessa railway station. He was lugging around an obviously heavy suitcase but when a porter offered his services, he refused. This seemed odd. The man looked wealthy. He was dressed like a dandy and gave off an air of entitlement. Why wouldn’t he hire a porter?
The suspicious porter alerted the police but by now the man was on a train out of Odessa. The police sent a telegram to the next station, Elisavetgrad, where the man got off. A unit of gendarmes was waiting for him.
Realising he was surrounded, he pulled out a revolver and pointed it at anyone who approached, including members of the public. Far from being cowed by his threatening behaviour, the other passengers joined the gendarmes in forcing him to the ground. The gun was wrestled off him, and the angry crowd proceeded to lay into him.
In fact, the gendarmes had to intervene to stop them killing him.
The man was 24-year-old Grigory Goldenberg, a member of the People’s Will, a new radical organisation committed to murdering the tsar. The suitcase that Goldenberg was dragging about contained nitroglycerine. No wonder he didn’t want to hand it over to a porter.
The meeting at Lipetsk
When I first read about this incident, I thought, wow, that would make a great scene in a movie. Unfortunately, no one’s ever asked me to write a screenplay. But I am a novelist. Perhaps I could make use of it in my fiction one day? I just had to wait eighteen years for the right story to come along.
My novel Death of a Princess concerns a group of fictional terrorists who come to the sleepy Russian spa town of Lipetsk in 1880. I’m reluctant to give away too many spoilers, so I won’t reveal what their plans are.
The reason I chose Lipetsk as the setting was because a group of eleven revolutionaries, ten men and one woman, gathered there in the summer of 1879. One of those present was Grigory Goldenberg. The son of a Jewish merchant, Goldenberg had earned his revolutionary stripes by assassinating the governor general of Kharkiv.
Many things were discussed at the 1879 congress in Lipetsk. A programme of violence and terror was put to the vote and approved. The central plank of the programme was the assassination of the tsar. The main weapon they would use to implement their plans was dynamite. The explosives that Goldenberg was dragging around Odessa and Elisavetgrad stations were intended to blow up the tsar’s train.
Turning history into fiction
The way I work as a historical novelist is to use real events like this as a springboard for creating fiction. I’m not trying to write a dramatized version of what happened. My stories go off in their own directions. Grigory Goldenberg doesn’t appear in Death of a Princess, nor do any of the other revolutionaries who were present at the actual meeting in Lipetsk.
In working in this way, I’m following the lead of Fyodor Dostoevsky himself, whose novel Crime and Punishment first inspired me to write historical fiction set in 19th century Russia. I even purloined his great creation Porfiry Petrovich and made him the central character in four novels. Porfiry also appears as a secondary character in my latest trilogy of books, Law of Blood, The Crimson Child and Death of a Princess.
Dostoevsky often took inspiration from newspaper accounts to create his fiction. For example, he was particularly fascinated by the 1860 murder of a student called Ivan Ivanov by a group of proto-revolutionary agitators led by Sergey Nechayev. He used the incident as the basis for his novel Demons. In Demons, Nechayev is reimagined as Pyotr Verkhovensky and Ivanov becomes Shatov. But the characters and story are Dostoevsky’s own.
Historical fiction vs history podcasts
This is pretty much the technique I use when writing fiction. However, I am not just a historical novelist. I also write scripts for True Crime and History podcasts. When I have my podcast hat on, I’m obliged to stick to the historical record and hold my fictionalising instincts in check.
It can be a challenge. The house style of the production company I work for is to create genuinely immersive podcasts. But we can’t just make stuff up. As writers, we’re encouraged to put ourselves in the action and imagine we’re looking over the shoulder of one of the principal participants.
One thing you’re never allowed to do is jump inside the head of the person you’re writing about. You can’t speculate what they might be thinking or feeling. Unless that is on record somewhere, in a diary for example.
So, to go back to the Goldenberg incident that I started with. If I was writing the scene as a historical novelist, naturally I would put myself inside Goldenberg’s head – or the head of the fictional character inspired by Goldenberg. I would be trying to think what it would have felt like to be in his situation. Writing fiction is essentially an act of empathy, where you try to imagine what it feels like to be inside someone else’s skin.
But if that was the opening scene in one of my podcasts, I would convey the drama and tension purely by describing what Goldenberg sees without speculating on his emotional or mental response. In some ways, podcast writing is more filmic – it’s almost as you are watching an imaginary film and describing what you see to a blind person. There is obviously an overlap. Descriptive or action passages in fiction can be constructed in the same way.
Incidentally, the Goldenberg episode has an interesting denouement. Under questioning from the tsar’s political police, the young radical is duped into believing that the tsar is on his side and wants to introduce a socialist government. His interrogators tell him that the Tsar just wants to reach out to Goldenberg’s comrades in the People’s Will and tell them about the reforms he has planned. Goldenberg must have been very naïve, because he falls for it and hands over a list of names and addresses.
When he realises what he has done, Goldenberg kills himself in his cell.
Now that would make a great movie. Or historical novel. Or podcast.