What do the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, German composer Richard Wagner, and Hungarian novelist Mór Jókai have in common? All three participated in the Revolution of 1848 which unfolded with thunderous fury from Paris to Budapest and Warsaw to Naples and ripped open the contradictions that remained unresolved after the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 – from human rights and civic representation to state sovereignty and national self-determination.

Richard Wagner joined the democratic-republican movement during the May Uprising in 1848 and fought against conservative monarchist rule on the barricades in Dresden.

Mór Jókai joined the Hungarian fight for independence from the Austrian Empire starting with the Budapest Uprising on March 15, 1848 – and was on the verge of suicidal despair when the Russian imperial army under the leadership of Tsar Nicholas I crushed the Hungarian independence aspirations in 1849.

And it was the same tsar, Nicholas I, who sentenced Dostoevsky to death by firing squad in December of 1849 for his participation in the revolutionary Petrashevsky Circle. The sentence was commuted to penal labor in Siberia.

The creative output of Dostoevsky, Wagner, and Jókai was informed by their brush with revolution and death – which reverberated in such works as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov, Jókai’s Stone Hearted Man’s Sons – Novel of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, and Wagner’s Lohengrin and the Ring Cycle.

Revolutionary intersections of history, culture, literature, and music will be explored in Professor Barker’s talk.