Editing Mikhail Bakunin (section)

=== Early life ===

On {{OldStyleDate|30 May|1814|18 May}}, Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin was born into [[Russian nobility]].{{sfn|Shatz|2003|p=35}} His family's [[Priamukhino]] estate, in the [[Tver Oblast|Tver]] region northwest of Moscow, had over 500 serfs.{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=308}} His father, [[Alexander Mikhailovich Bakunin]], was a Russian diplomat who had served in Italy. Upon returning to Priamukhino and marrying the much younger Varvara Aleksandrovna Muravyeva, the elder Bakunin raised his ten children<!-- add note here for the eleventh who died young--> in the [[Rousseauan]] pedagogic model.{{sfn|Shatz|2003|p=35}} Mikhail Bakunin, their third child and oldest son,{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=309}} read the languages, literature, and philosophy of the period and described his youth as idyllic and sheltered from the realities of Russian life. As an early teenager, he began training for a military career at the [[St. Petersburg]] Artillery School, which he rejected.{{sfn|Shatz|2003|p=35}} Becoming an officer in 1833, he availed himself of the freedom to participate in the city's social life, but was unfulfilled. Derelict in his studies, he was sent to Belarus and Lithuania as punishment in early 1834, where he read academic theory and philosophy. He deserted the school in 1835 and only escaped arrest through his familial influence.{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=309}} He was discharged at the end of the year and, despite his father's protests, left for Moscow to pursue a career as a mathematics teacher.{{sfnm|1a1=Shatz|1y=2003|1p=35|2a1=Eckhardt|2y=2022|2p=309}}

Bakunin lived a bohemian, intellectual life in Moscow, where [[German Romantic]] literature and [[German idealism|idealist philosophy]] were influential in the 1830s.{{sfn|Shatz|2003|p=35}} In the intellectual circle of [[Nikolai Stankevich]], Bakunin read German philosophy, from [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]] to [[Johann Gottlieb Fichte|Fichte]] to [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]],{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=309}} and published Russian translations of their works.{{sfn|Shatz|2003|p=36}} Bakunin produced the first Russian translation of Hegel and was the foremost Russian expert on Hegel by 1837.{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|pp=309–310}} Bakunin befriended Russian intellectuals including the literary critic [[Vissarion Belinsky]], the poet [[Nikolay Ogarev]], the novelist [[Ivan Turgenev]], and the writer [[Alexander Herzen]] as youth prior to their careers.{{sfn|Shatz|2003|p=36}} Herzen funded Bakunin to study at the [[University of Berlin]] in 1840. Bakunin's plans to return to Moscow as a professor were soon abandoned.{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=310}}

In Berlin, Bakunin gravitated towards the [[Young Hegelians]], an intellectual group with radical interpretations of Hegel's philosophy,{{sfn|Shatz|2003|p=36}} and who drew Bakunin to political topics.{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=310}} He left Berlin in early 1842 for [[Dresden]] and met the Hegelian [[Arnold Ruge]],{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=310}} who published Bakunin's first original publication. {{Lang|de|Die Reaktion in Deutschland}} ("The Reaction in Germany") proposes a continuation of the [[French Revolution]] to the rest of Europe and Russia.{{sfn|Shatz|2003|p=36}} Though steeped in Hegelian jargon and published under a pseudonym, it marked Bakunin's transition from philosophy to revolutionary rhetoric.{{sfn|Eckhardt|2022|p=310}}