Physically she was like a novelist's heroine. She had golden hair and her eyes were blue. A lissom figure, a musical voice, a charming laugh.[27] Pure with a maiden's modesty, chaste with a virginal shyness. So graceful and girlish that she never looked more than eighteen—even when she was twenty-six. Of such a sympathetic nature that when she became a nurse, sufferers whose nerves quivered in distress, claimed their agony abated as soon as she entered. Her mother she loved to adoration, and often at the risk of her life, she left her hiding-place to give Varvara Sergyevna the joy of folding her hunted child in her aching arms. Her father had human form, but was in reality a fiend, yet rejoice that he lived, for from his ultra-reactionary loins was born the white queen of the red revolution.
From her sixteenth year, Sonya was ready to die for the Cause—with a smile on her beautiful lips and a wave of her graceful hand, with the crimson banner above her head, and upon her bosom a red carnation. I speak figuratively. She would not have worn these things. She was altogether too simple.
Hers was a life full of pain, and in 1881 came the supreme sorrow. Her heart twitched with the torture, for Andrew Geliabov, the man she loved so fondly, was in the casemate of the fortress, and all knew, and Sonya knew too, that soon around his beloved neck would be a bluish streak. Yet her brilliant intellect was not dimmed or darkened. That will of iron and those nerves of steel, neither broke nor faltered. It was then that she arranged every detail for the assassination of Alexander II. She may have wept in private, but to her comrades she said with dry eyes, "When I give the signal, throw the bomb."
The appointed day came. In a metal-clad carriage, the czar drove to the parade. Behind him in a sledge rode Colonel Dvorjitsky. Burning eyes looked at a girl. A handkerchief fluttered in the air—Sonya's signal! Rysakov threw his bomb. The Emperor alighted—unhurt. Then Grinevetsky too, flung a blessed ball of Kibalkitch's make, and within a few hours the old despot and the young martyr passed out of the world.
Sophia Perovskaya inspired the greatest stanzas of the Poet of the Sierras, for usually the verse of the slangy Joaquin Miller is mediocre. But how grand are these!:
"A storm burst forth! From out the storm
The clean, red lightning leapt,
And lo, a prostrate royal form ...
And Alexander slept!
Down thru the snow, all smoking, warm