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The
Great Amateur NYRB
March 14, 1968 Alexander Herzen, like Diderot,
was an amateur of genius whose opinions and activities changed the direction
of social thought in his country. Like Diderot too, he was a brilliant and
irrepressible talker. He talked equally well in Russian and French to his
intimate friends and in the Moscow salons, and later in his life in Russian,
German, French, in Paris, Nice, London, Geneva—always in an overwhelming flow
of ideas and images; the loss to posterity (as with Diderot) is probably
immense; he had no Boswell, no Eckermann, to record his conversation, nor
would he have suffered such a relationship. His prose is essentially a form
of talk, with the vices and virtues of talk: eloquent, spontaneous, liable to
the heightened tones and exaggerations of the born storyteller unable to
resist long digressions which themselves carry him into a network of
intersecting tributaries of memory or speculation, but always returning to
the main stream of the story or the argument. Above all, his prose has the
vitality of spoken words—it appears to owe nothing to the carefully composed
formal sentences of the French philosophes whom
he admired or to the terrible philosophical style of the Germans from whom he
learned. We hear his voice—almost too much—in the essays, the pamphlets, the
autobiography, as much as in the letters and scraps of notes to his friends. Civilized, imaginative,
self-critical, Herzen was a marvelously gifted social observer; the record of
what he saw is unique, even in the articulate nineteenth century. He had an
acute, easily stirred, and ironical mind, a fiery and poetical temperament,
and a capacity for vivid, often lyrical, writing—qualities that combined and
reinforced one another in the succession of sharp vignettes of men, events,
ideas, personal relationships, political situations, and descriptions of
entire forms of life in which his writings abound. He was a man of extreme
refinement and sensibility, great intellectual energy and biting wit, easily
irritated amour propre, and a taste for polemical writing; he was
addicted to analysis, investigation, exposure; he saw himself as an expert
“unmasker” of appearances and conventions, and dramatized himself as a
devastating discoverer of their social and moral core. Tolstoy, who had
little sympathy with Herzen’s opinions, and was not given to excessive praise
of his contemporaries among men of letters, especially among his countrymen,
said toward the end of his life that he had never met anyone with “so rare a
combination of scintillating brilliance and depth.” These gifts make a good
many of Herzen’s essays, political articles, day-to-day journalism, causal
notes and reviews, and especially letters written to intimates or to
political correspondents, irresistibly readable even today, when the issues
with which they were concerned are for the most part dead and of interest mainly
to historians. Although much has been written
about Herzen, and not only in Russian, the task of his biographers has not been
made easier by the fact that he left an incomparable memorial to himself in
his own greatest work—translated by Constance Garnett as My Past and
Thoughts—a literary masterpiece worthy of being placed by the side of the
novels of his contemporaries and countrymen, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky.
Nor were they altogether unaware of this. Turgenev, an intimate and life-long
friend (the fluctuations of their personal relationship were important in the
lives of both; this complex and interesting story has never been adequately
told) admired him both as a writer and as a revolutionary journalist. The
celebrated critic Vissarion Belinsky discovered, described, and acclaimed his
extraordinary literary gift when they were both young and relatively unknown.
Even the angry and suspicious Dostoevsky excepted
him from the virulent hatred with which he regarded pro-Western Russian
revolutionaries, recognized the poetry of his writing, and remained
well-disposed toward him until the end of his life. As for Tolstoy, he delighted
both in his society and his writings: half a century after their first
meeting in London he still remembered the scene vividly.1
It is strange that this remarkable
writer, in his lifetime a celebrated European figure, the admired friend of
Michelet, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Victor Hugo, long canonized in his own
country not only as a revolutionary but as one of its greatest men of
letters, is, even today, not much more than a name in the West. The enjoyment
to be obtained from reading his prose—for the most part still
untranslated—makes this a strange and gratuitous loss. ALEXANDER HERZEN was born in
Moscow on April 6, 1812, some months before the great fire that destroyed the
city during Napoleon’s occupation after the battle of Borodino. His father,
Ivan Alexandrovich Yakovlev, came of an ancient family distantly related to
the Romanov dynasty. Like other rich and well-born members of the Russian
gentry, he had spent some years abroad, and, during one of his journeys, met,
and took back to Moscow with him, the daughter of a minor Württemberg
official, Luise Haag, a gentle, submissive, somewhat colorless girl, a good
deal younger than himself. For some reason, perhaps owing to the disparity in
their social positions, he never married her according to the rites of his
own Church. Yakovlev was a member of the Orthodox Church, she remained a
Lutheran.2
He was a proud, independent, disdainful man, and had grown increasingly
morose and misanthropic. He retired before the war of 1812,
and at the time of the French invasion was living in bitter and resentful
idleness in his house in Moscow. During the French occupation he was
recognized by Marshal Mortier, whom he had known in Paris, and agreed—in
return for a safe conduct enabling him to take his family out of the devastated
city—to carry a message from Napoleon to the Emperor Alexander. For this
indiscretion he was sent back to his estates and only allowed to return to
Moscow somewhat later. In his large and gloomy house in
the Arbat he brought up his son Alexander, to whom he had given the surname
Herzen, as if to stress the fact that he was the child of an irregular
liaison, an affair of the heart. Luise Haag was never accorded the full
status of a wife, but the boy had every attention lavished upon him. He
received the normal education of a young Russian nobleman of his time, that
is to say, he was looked after by a host of nurses and serfs, and taught by
private tutors, German and French, carefully chosen by his neurotic,
irritable, devoted, suspicious father. Every care was taken to develop his
gifts. He was a lively and imaginative child and absorbed knowledge easily
and eagerly. His father loved him after his fashion: more, certainly, than
his other son, also illegitimate, born ten years earlier, whom he had christened Yegor (George). But he was, by the 1820s, a
defeated and gloomy recluse, unable to communicate with his family or indeed
anyone else. Shrewd, honorable, and neither unfeeling nor unjust, a
“difficult” character like old Prince Bolkonsky in Tolstoy’s War and Peace,
Ivan Yakovlev emerges from his son’s recollections a self-lacerating, grim,
shut-in, half-frozen human being, who terrorized his household with his whims
and his sarcasm. He kept all doors and windows locked, the blinds permanently
drawn, and, apart from a few old friends and his own brothers, saw virtually
nobody. In later years his son described him as the product of “the encounter
of two such incompatible things as the eighteenth century and Russian life”—a
collision of cultures that had destroyed a good many among the more sensitive
members of the Russian gentry in the reigns of Catherine II and her
successors. The boy escaped with relief from
his father’s oppressive and frightening company to the rooms occupied by his
mother and the servants; she was kind and unassuming, crushed by her husband,
frightened by her foreign surroundings, and seemed to accept her almost
Oriental status in the household with uncomplaining resignation. As for the
servants, they were serfs from the Yakovlev estates, trained to behave
obsequiously to the son and probable heir of their master. Herzen himself, in
later years, attributed the deepest of all his social feelings, concern for
the freedom and dignity of human individuals (which his friend, the critic Belinsky,
diagnosed so accurately), to the barbarous conditions that surrounded him in
childhood. He was a favorite child, and much spoiled; but the facts of his
irregular birth and of his mother’s status were brought home to him by
listening to the servants’ gossip and, on at least one occasion, by
overhearing a conversation about himself between his father and one of his
old army comrades. The shock was, according to his own
testimony, profound. It was probably one of the determining factors of his
life. He was taught Russian literature
and history by a young university student, an enthusiastic follower of the
new Romantic movement, which, particularly in its German form, had then begun
to dominate Russian intellectual life. He learned French (which his father
wrote more easily than Russian) and German (which he spoke with his mother)
and European, rather than Russian, history—his tutor was a French refugee who
had emigrated to Russia after the French Revolution.
The Frenchman did not reveal his political opinions, so Herzen tells us,
until one day, when his pupil asked him why Louis XVI had been executed; to
this he replied in an altered voice, “Because he was a traitor to his
country,” and, finding the boy responsive, threw off his reserve and spoke to
him openly about the liberty and equality of men. Herzen was a lonely child,
at once pampered and cramped, lively and bored; he read voraciously in his
father’s large library, especially French books of the Enlightenment. He was
fourteen when the leaders of the Decembrist conspiracy were hanged by the
Emperor Nicholas I. He later declared that this event was the critical
turning point of his life; whether this was so or not, the memory of these
aristocratic martyrs in the cause of Russian constitutional liberty later
became a sacred symbol to him, as to many others of his class and generation,
and affected him for the rest of his days. He tells us that a few years after
this, he and his intimate friend Nick Ogaryov, standing on the Sparrow hills
above Moscow, took a solemn “Hannibalic” oath to avenge these fighters for
the rights of man and to dedicate their own lives to the cause for which they
had died. In due course he became a student
at the University of Moscow, read Schiller and Goethe, and somewhat later the
French utopian socialists, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and other social prophets
whose works were smuggled into Russia in defiance of the censorship, and
became a convinced and passionate radical. He and Ogaryov belonged to a group
of students who read forbidden books and discussed dangerous ideas. For this
he was, together with most other “unreliable” students, duly arrested and,
probably because he declined to repudiate the views imputed to him, condemned
to imprisonment. His father used all his influence to get the sentence
mitigated, but could not save his son from being exiled to the provincial
city of Vyatka, near the borders of Asia, where he was not indeed kept in
prison, but put to work in the local administration. To his astonishment, he enjoyed
this new test of his powers; he displayed administrative gifts and became a
far more competent and perhaps even enthusiastic official than he was later
prepared to admit, and helped to expose the corrupt and brutal governor, of
whom he painted an unfavorable and repulsive portrait. In Vyatka he became
involved in a passionate love affair with a married woman, behaved badly, and
suffered agonies of contrition. He read Dante, went through a religious
phase, and began a long and passionate correspondence with his first cousin
Natalie, who, like himself, was illegitimate, and lived as a companion in the
house of a rich and despotic aunt. As a result of his father’s ceaseless
efforts, he was transferred to the city of Vladimir, and with the help of his
young Moscow friends, arranged the elopement of Natalie. They were married in
Vladimir against their relations’ wishes. He was in due course allowed to
return to Moscow and was appointed to a government post in Petersburg. WHATEVER HIS AMBITIONS at the
time, he remained indomitably independent and committed to the radical cause.
As a result of an indiscreet letter, opened by the censors, in which he had criticized the behavior of the police, he was
again sentenced to a period of exile, this time to Novgorod. Two years later,
in 1842, he was once more permitted to return to Moscow. He was by then
regarded as an established member of the new radical intelligentsia, and,
indeed, as an honored martyr in its cause, and began to write in the
progressive periodicals of the time. He always dealt with the same central
theme: the oppression of the individual; the humiliation and degradation of
men by political and personal tyranny; the yoke of social custom, the dark
ignorance, and savage, arbitrary misgovernment which maimed and destroyed
human beings in the brutal and odious Russian Empire. Like the other members of his
circle, the young poet and novelist Turgenev, the critic Belinsky, the future
political agitators Bakunin and Katkov (the first in the cause of revolution,
the second of reaction), the literary essayist Annenkov, his own intimate
friend Ogaryov, Herzen plunged into the study of German metaphysics and
French sociological theory and history—the works of Kant, Schelling, and,
above all, Hegel: Saint-Simon, Augustin-Thierry, Leroux, Mignet, and Guizot.
He composed arresting historical and philosophical essays, and stories
dealing with social issues; they were published, widely read and discussed,
and created a considerable reputation for their author. He adopted an uncompromising
position. A leading representative of the dissident Russian gentry, he owed
his socialist beliefs less to a reaction against the cruelty and chaos of the
laissez faire economy of the bourgeois West—for Russia, then in its
early industrial beginnings, was still a semi-feudal, socially and
economically primitive, society—than to a direct response to the agonizing
social problems in his native land: the poverty of the masses, serfdom and
lack of individual freedom at all levels, and a lawless and brutal autocracy.3
In addition, there was the wounded national pride of a
powerful and semi-barbarous society, whose leaders were aware of its
backwardness, and suffered from mingled admiration, envy, and resentment of
the civilized West. The radicals believed in reform along democratic,
secular, Western lines; the Slavophiles retreated into mystical nationalism,
and preached the need for return to native, “organic” forms of life and faith
that, according to them, had been all but ruined by Peter’s reforms which had
merely encouraged a sedulous and humiliating aping of the soulless, and, in
any case, hopelessly decadent West. Herzen began as an extreme “Westerner,”
but he preserved his links with his Slavophile adversaries. He regarded the
best among them as romantic reactionaries, misguided nationalists, but
honorable allies against the Tsarist bureaucracy, and later tended
systematically to minimize his differences with them, perhaps from a desire
to see all Russians who were not dead to human feeling ranged in a single
vast protest against the evil regime. In 1847 Ivan Yakovlev died. He
left the greater part of his fortune to Luise Haag and her son, Alexander
Herzen. With immense faith in his own powers, and burning with a desire (in
Fichte’s words that expressed the attitude of a generation) “to be and do
something” in the world, Herzen decided to emigrate. Whether he wished or
expected to remain abroad during the rest of his life is uncertain, but so it
turned out to be. He left in the same year, travelling in considerable state,
accompanied by his wife, his mother and two friends as well as servants; he
slowly crossed Germany, and toward the end of 1847 reached the coveted city
of Paris, the capital of the civilized world. He plunged at once into the
life of the exiled radicals and socialists of many nationalities who played a
central role in the fermenting intellectual and artistic activity of that
city. By 1848, when a series of revolutions broke out in country after
country in Europe, he found himself with Bakunin and Proudhon on the extreme
left wing of revolutionary socialism. When rumors of his activities reached
the Russian Government, he was ordered to return immediately. He refused. His
fortune in Russia and that of his mother were declared confiscated. Aided by
the efforts of the banker James de Rothschild who had conceived a liking for
the young Russian “baron” and was in a position to bring pressure on the
Russian Government, Herzen recovered the major portion of his fortune, and
thereafter experienced no financial want. This gave him a degree of
independence not then enjoyed by many exiles, as well as the financial means
for supporting other refugees and radical causes. SHORTLY AFTER his arrival in
Paris, before the revolution, he contributed a series of impassioned articles
to a Moscow periodical controlled by his friends, in which he gave an
eloquent and violently critical account of the conditions of life and culture
in Paris, and, in particular, a devastating analysis of the degradation of
the French bourgeoisie, an indictment not surpassed even in the works of his
contemporaries Marx and Heine. His Moscow friends for the most part received
this with disfavor: they regarded his analyses as characteristic flights of a
highly rhetorical fancy, irresponsible extremism, ill-suited to the needs of
a misgoverned and backward country compared to which the progress of the
middle classes in the West, whatever its shortcomings, was a notable step
forward toward universal enlightenment. These early works—The Letters from
Avenue Marigny and the Italian Sketches that followed—possess
qualities which became characteristic of all his writings: a rapid torrent of
descriptive sentences, fresh, lucid, direct, interspersed with vivid and
never irrelevant digressions, variations on the same theme in many keys,
puns, neologisms, quotations real and imaginary, verbal inventions,
gallicisms which irritated his nationalistic Russian friends, mordant
personal observation, and cascades of vivid images and incomparable epigrams,
which, so far from either tiring or distracting the reader by their
virtuosity, add to the force and swiftness of the narrative. The effect is
one of spontaneous improvisation, of exhilarating conversation by an
intellectually gay, brilliant and unusually honest man endowed with singular
powers of observation and expression. The mood is one of ardent political
radicalism imbued with a typically aristocratic (and even more typically
Muscovite) contempt for everything narrow, calculating, self-satisfied,
commercial, anything cautious, petty, or tending toward compromise and the juste
milieu, of which Louis Philippe and Guizot are held up as particularly
repulsive incarnations. Herzen’s outlook in these essays is a combination of
optimistic idealism—a vision of a socially, intellectually, and morally free
society, the beginnings of which, like Proudhon, Marx, and Louis Blanc, he
saw in the French working class; faith in the radical revolution which alone
could create the conditions for their liberation. But with this went a deep
distrust (something that his allies did not share) of all general formulae as
such, of the programs and battle cries of all the political parties, above
all, of the great, official, historic goals—progress, liberty, equality,
national unity, historical rights, human solidarity—principles and slogans in
the name of which men had been, and doubtless would soon again be, violated
and slaughtered, and their forms of life condemned and destroyed. Like the more extreme of the
left-wing disciples of Hegel, in particular like the anarchist Max Stirner,
Herzen saw danger in the great magnificent abstractions the mere sound of
which precipitated merely into violent and meaningless slaughter—new idols,
it seemed to him, on whose altars human blood was to be shed tomorrow as
irrationally and uselessly as the blood of the victims of yesterday or the
day before, sacrificed in honor of older divinities—church or monarchy or the
feudal order or the sacred customs of the tribe, that were now discredited as
obstacles to the progress of mankind. Together with this skepticism about the meaning and value
of abstract ideals as such, in contrast with the concrete, short term,
immediate goals of identifiable living individuals—specific freedoms, reward
for the day’s work—Herzen spoke of something even more disquieting—a haunting
sense of the ever widening, unbridgeable gulf between the humane values of
the relatively free and civilized elites (to which he knew himself to belong)
and the actual needs, desires, and tastes of the vast voiceless masses of
mankind, barbarous enough in the West, wilder still in Russia or the plains
of Asia beyond. The old world was crumbling
visibly, and it deserved to fall. It would be destroyed by its victims—the
slaves who cared nothing for the art and science of their masters; and
indeed, Herzen asks, why should they care? Was it not erected on their
suffering and degradation? Young and vigorous, filled with a just hatred of
the old world built on their fathers’ bones, the new barbarians will raze to
the ground the edifices of their oppressors, and with them all that is most
sublime and beautiful in Western civilization. Such a cataclysm might be not
only inevitable but justified, since this civilization, noble and valuable in
the eyes of its beneficiaries, has offered nothing but suffering, a life
without meaning, to the vast majority of mankind. Yet he does not pretend
that this makes the prospect, to those who, like him, have tasted the ripest
fruits of civilization, any less dreadful. IT HAS often been asserted by both
Russian and Western critics that Herzen arrived in Paris a passionate, even
utopian social idealist, and that it was the failure of the Revolution of
1848 which brought about his disillusionment and a new, more pessimistic
realism. This does not seem sufficiently borne out by the evidence.4
Even in 1847, the skeptical note, in particular, pessimism about the degree
to which human beings can be transformed, and the still deeper skepticism
about whether such changes, even if they were achieved by fearless and
intelligent revolutionaries or reformers, ideal images of whom floated before
the eyes of his Westernizing friends in Russia, would in fact lead to a
juster and freer order, or on the contrary to the rule of new masters over
new slaves—that ominous note is sounded clearly before the great debacle.
Yet, despite this, Herzen (unlike Heine who was prey to not dissimilar
doubts), remained a convinced, ultimately optimistic revolutionary. The spectacle of the workers’ revolt and its
brutal suppression in Italy and in France haunted Herzen all his life. His
first-hand description of the events of 1848-9, in particular of the drowning
in blood of the July revolt in Paris, is a masterpiece of “committed”
historical and sociological writing. So, too, are his sketches of the
personalities involved in these upheavals, and his reflections upon them.
Most of these essays and letters remain untranslated. Herzen could not and would not
return to Russia. He became a Swiss citizen, and to the disasters of the
Revolution was added a personal
tragedy—the seduction of his adored wife Natalie by the most intimate of his new friends, the radical
German poet Georg Herwegh, a
friend of Marx and Wagner, the “iron lark” of the German Revolution as he was
called half ironically by Heine. Herzen’s
progressive, somewhat Shelleyan, views on love, friendship, equality of the
sexes, and the irrationality of bourgeois morality, were tested by this
crisis and broken by it. He went almost mad with grief and jealousy: his
love, his vanity, his deeper assumptions about the basis of all human
relationships, suffered a traumatic shock from which he was never fully to
recover. He did what few others have ever done: described every detail of
his own agony, every step of his altering relationship with Natalie, with
Herwegh and Herwegh’s wife (as they seemed to him in retrospect). He noted
every communication that occurred between them, every moment of anger,
despair, affection, love, hope, hatred, contempt; every tone and nuance
in his own moral and psychological condition are raised to high relief
against the background of his public life in the world of exiles and
conspirators, French, Italian, German, Russian, Austrian, Hungarian, Polish,
who move on and off the stage on which he himself is always the central,
self-absorbed, tragic hero. The account is not unbalanced—there is no obvious
distortion—but it is wholly egocentric. All his life Herzen perceived the
external world clearly, and in proportion, but through the medium of his own
self-romanticizing personality, with his own impressionable, ill-organized
self at the center of his universe. No matter how violent his torment, he
retains full artistic control of the tragedy which he is living through, but
also writing. It is, perhaps, this artistic egotism, which all his work
exhibits, that was in part responsible both for Natalie’s suffocation and for
the lack of reticence in his description of what took place: Herzen takes
wholly for granted the reader’s understanding, and still more, his undivided
interest in every detail of his own, the writer’s, mental and emotional life.
Natalie’s letters and desperate flight to Herwegh show the measure of the
increasingly destructive effect of Herzen’s self-absorbed blindness upon her
frail and exalté temperament. We know comparatively little of
Natalie’s relationship with Herwegh: she may well have been physically in
love with him, and he with her: the inflated literary language of the letters
conceals more than it reveals; what is clear is that she felt unhappy,
trapped, and irresistibly attracted to her lover. If Herzen sensed this, he
perceived it very dimly. He appropriated the feelings of
those nearest him as he did the ideas of Hegel or George Sand: that is, he
took what he needed, and poured it into the vehement torrent of his own
experience. He gave generously, if fitfully, to others; he put his own life
into them, but for all his deep and lifelong belief in individual liberty and
the absolute value of personal life and personal relationships, scarcely
understood or tolerated wholly independent lives by the side of his own; his
description of his agony is scrupulously and bitterly detailed and accurate,
never self-sparing, eloquent but not sentimental, and remorselessly egocentric.
It is a harrowing document. He did not publish the story in full during his
lifetime, but now it forms part of his memoirs. SELF-EXPRESSION—the need to say
his own word—and perhaps the craving for recognition by others, by Russia, by
Europe, were primary needs of Herzen’s nature. Consequently, even during
this, the darkest period of his life, he continued to pour out a stream of
letters and articles in various languages on political and social topics; he
helped to keep Production going, kept up a correspondence with Swiss radicals
and Russian émigrés, read widely, made notes, conceived ideas, argued,
worked unremittingly both as a publicist and as an active supporter of
left-wing and revolutionary causes. After
a short while Natalie returned to him in Nice, only to die in his arms.
Shortly before her death, a ship on which his mother and one of his children,
a deaf-mute, were traveling from Marseilles, sank in
a storm. Their bodies were not found. Herzen’s life had reached its lowest
ebb. He left Nice and the circle of Italian, French, and Polish
revolutionaries to many of whom he was bound by ties of warm friendship, and
with his three surviving children went to England. America was too far away
and, besides, seemed to him too dull. England was no less remote from the
scene of his defeats, political and personal, and yet still
a part of Europe. It was then the country most hospitable to political
refugees, civilized, tolerant of eccentricities or indifferent to them, proud
of her civil liberties and her sympathy with the victims of foreign
oppression. In 1851 he went to London. He and his children wandered from
home to home in London and its suburbs, and there, after the death of
Nicholas I had made it possible for him to leave Russia, his most intimate
friend, Nicholas Ogaryov, joined them. Together they set up a printing press,
and began to publish a periodical in Russian called The Polar Star—the first organ wholly dedicated to
uncompromising agitation against the Imperial Russian regime. The earliest
chapters of My Past and Thoughts
appeared in its pages. The memory of the terrible years 1848-51 obsessed
Herzen’s thoughts and poisoned his bloodstream: it became an inescapable
psychological necessity for him to seek relief by setting down this bitter
history. This was the first section of his Memoirs to be written. It was an
opiate against the appalling loneliness of a life lived among uninterested
strangers5
while political reaction seemed to envelop the entire world, leaving no room
for hope. Insensibly he was drawn into the past. He moved further and further
into it and found it a source of liberty and strength. This is how the book which he
conceived on the analogy of David Copperfield came to be composed.6
He began to write it in the last months of 1852. He wrote by fits and starts.
The first two parts were probably finished by the end of 1853. In 1854 a
selection which he called Prison and Exile—a title perhaps inspired by
Silvio Pellico’s celebrated I Miei Prigioni, was published in English.
It was an immediate success; encouraged by this, he continued. By the spring
of 1855, the first five parts of the work were completed; they were all
published by 1857. He revised Part IV, added new chapters to it, and composed
Part V; he completed the bulk of Part VI by 1858. The sections dealing with
his intimate life—his love and the early years of his marriage, were composed
in 1857: he could not bring himself to touch upon them until then. This was
followed by an interval of seven years. Independent essays such as those on
Robert Owen, the actor Shchepkin, the painter Ivanov, Garibaldi (Camicia
Rossa), were published in London7
between 1860 and 1864; but these, although usually included in the memoirs,
were not intended for them. The first complete edition of Parts I-IV appeared
in 1861. The final section—Part VIII and almost the whole
of Part VII—were written, in that order, in 1865-7. Herzen deliberately left some
sections unpublished: the most intimate details of his personal tragedy
appeared posthumously—only a part of the chapter en-titled Oceano Nox
was printed in his lifetime. He omitted also the story of his affairs with
Medvedeva in Vyatka and with the serf girl Katerina in Moscow—his confession
of them to Natalie cast the first shadow over their relationship, a shadow
that never lifted; he could not bear to see it in print while he lived. He
suppressed, too, a chapter on “The Germans in Emigration” which contains his
unflattering comments on Marx and his followers, and some characteristically
entertaining and ironical sketches of some of his old friends among the
Russian radicals. He genuinely detested the practice of washing the
revolutionaries’ dirty linen in public, and made it clear that he did not
intend to make fun of allies for the entertainment of the common enemy. The
first authoritative edition of the Memoirs was compiled by Mikhail Lemke in
the first complete edition of Herzen’s works, which was begun before, and
completed some years after the Russian Revolution of 1917. It has since been
revised in successive Soviet editions. The fullest version is that published
in the new exhaustive edition of Herzen’s works, a handsome monument of
Soviet scholarship—which at the time of writing is still incomplete. The memoirs formed a vivid and
broken background accompaniment to Herzen’s central activity: revolutionary journalism, to which he
dedicated his life. The bulk of it is contained in the most celebrated of all
Russian periodicals published abroad, Kolokol—The
Bell—edited by Herzen and Ogaryov in London and then in Geneva from 1857 until 1867, with the motto vivos
voco. The Bell had an immense success. It was the first systematic instrument of revolutionary propaganda directed
against the Russian autocracy, written with knowledge, sincerity, and mordant
eloquence. The journal gathered round itself all that was uncowed not only in
Russia and the Russian colonies abroad, but also among Poles and other
oppressed nationalities. It began to penetrate into Russia by secret routes
and was regularly read by high officials of State, including, it was rumored,
the Emperor himself. The copious information that reached Herzen and his
friends in clandestine letters and personal messages, describing various
misdeeds of the Russian bureaucracy, was used to expose specific
scandals—cases of bribery, miscarriage of justice, tyranny, and dishonesty by
officials and influential persons. The Bell named names, offered
documentary evidence, asked awkward questions, and exposed repulsive aspects
of Russian life. Russian travelers visited London in order to meet the
mysterious leader of the mounting opposition to the Tsar. Generals, high
officials, and other loyal subjects of the Empire were among the many
visitors who thronged to see him, some out of curiosity, others
to shake his hand, to express sympathy or admiration. He reached the peak of his fame, both political and
literary, after the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War and the death of
Nicholas I. The open appeal by Herzen to the new Emperor to free the serfs
and initiate bold and radical reforms “from above,” and (after the first
concrete steps toward this had been taken in 1859) his paean of praise to
Alexander II under the title of “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean,” helped to
create the illusion on both sides of the Russian frontier that a new liberal
era had at last dawned, in which a degree of understanding—perhaps of actual
co-operation—could be achieved between Tsardom and its opponents. This state
of mind did not last long. But Herzen’s credit stood very high—higher than
that of any other Russian in the West. In the late Fifties and early Sixties,
he was the acknowledged leader of all that was generous, enlightened,
civilized, humane in Russia. MORE THAN BAKUNIN and even
Turgenev, whose novels formed a central source of knowledge about Russia in
the West, Herzen counteracted the legend, ingrained in the minds of
progressive Europeans (of whom Michelet was perhaps the most representative),
that Russia was nothing but the Government jack-boot on the one hand, and the
dark, silent, sullen mass of brutalized peasants on the other—an image that
was the by-product of the widespread sympathy for the principal victim of
Russian despotism, the martyred nation, Poland. Some among the Polish exiles spontaneously conceded
this service to the truth on Herzen’s part, if only because he was one of the
rare Russians who genuinely liked and admired individual Poles, worked in
close sympathy with them, and identified the cause of Russian liberation with
that of all her oppressed subject nationalities. It was, indeed, this
unswerving avoidance of chauvinism that was among the principal causes of the ultimate collapse of The Bell
and Herzen’s own political undoing. After Russia, Herzen’s deepest
love was for Italy and the Italians. The closest ties bound him to the
Italian exiles, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Saffi and Orsini. Although he supported
every liberal beginning in France, his attitude toward her was more
ambiguous. For this there were many reasons. Like Tocqueville (whom he personally
disliked), he had a distaste for all
that was centralized, bureaucratic, hierarchical, subject to rigid forms or
rules. France was to him the incarnation of order, discipline, the worship of
the state, of unity, and of despotic, abstract formulae that flattened all
things to the same rule and pattern—something that had a family resemblance
to the animating principle of the great slave states—Prussia, Austria,
Russia. With it he constantly contrasts the decentralized, uncrushed, untidy,
“truly democratic” Italians, whom he believes to possess a deep affinity with
the free Russian spirit embodied in the peasant commune with its sense of
natural justice and human worth. To this ideal even England seemed to him
to be far less hostile than legalistic, calculating France: in such moods he
comes close to his romantic Slavophile opponents. Moreover, he could not forget the betrayal of the
revolution in Paris by the bourgeois parties in 1848, the execution of the
workers, the suppression of the Roman revolution by the troops of the French
Republic, the vanity, weakness, and rhetoric of the French radical
politicians—Lamartine, Marrast, Ledru-Rollin, Felix Pyat. HIS SKETCHES of the lives and
behavior of leading French exiles in England are masterpieces of amused,
half-sympathetic, half-contemptuous description of the grotesque and futile
aspects of every political emigration condemned to sterility, intrigue, and a
constant flow of self-justifying eloquence before a foreign audience too
remote or bored to listen. Yet he thought well of individual members of it:
he had for a time been a close ally of
Proudhon, and, despite their differences, he continued to respect him; he regarded Louis Blanc as an honest and
fearless democrat, was on good terms with Victor Hugo, and he liked and
deeply admired Michelet. In later years he visited at least one Paris
political salon—admittedly, it was that of a
Pole—with evident enjoyment: the Goncourts met him there and left a vivid
description in their journal of his appearance and his conversation.8
Although he was half German
himself, or perhaps because of it, he felt, like his friend Bakunin, a strong
aversion from what he regarded as the
incurable philistinism of the Germans, and what seemed to him a
peculiarly unattractive combination of craving for blind authority with a
tendency to squalid internecine recriminations in public, more pronounced
than among other émigrés. Perhaps his hatred of Herwegh, whom he knew
to be a friend both of Marx and of Wagner, as well as Marx’s onslaughts on
Karl Vogt, the Swiss naturalist to whom Herzen was devoted, played some part
in this. At least three of his most intimate friends were pure Germans; Goethe and Schiller meant more to him
than Russian writers; yet there is something genuinely venomous in his
account of the German exiles, quite different from the high-spirited
sense of comedy with which he describes the idiosyncracies of the other
foreign colonies gathered in London in the Fifties and Sixties—a city, if we
are to believe Herzen, equally unconcerned with their absurdities and their
martyrdom. As for his hosts, the English,
they seldom appear in his pages. Herzen had met Mill, Carlyle, and Owen. He
was on reasonably good terms with several editors of radical papers (some of
whom, like Linton and Cowen, helped him to propagate his views, and to
preserve contact with revolutionaries on the continent as well as with clandestine
traffic of propaganda to Russia), one or two radically inclined Members of
Parliament, including a minor minister. In general, however, he seems to have
had even less contact with Englishmen than his contemporary and fellow exile,
Karl Marx. He admired England. He admired her constitution; the wild and
tangled wood of her unwritten laws and customs brought the full resources of
his romantic imagination into play, The entertaining passages of My Past
and Thoughts in which he compared the French and the English, or the
English and the Germans, display acute and amused insight into the national
characteristics of the English. But he could not altogether like them: they
remained for him too insular, too indifferent, too unimaginative, too remote
from the moral, social, and aesthetic issues which lay closest to his own
heart, too materialistic and self-satisfied. His judgments about them, always
intelligent and sometimes penetrating, are distant, acid, and tend to be
conventional. A description of the trial in London of a French radical who
had killed a political opponent in a duel in Windsor Great Park is
wonderfully executed but remains a piece of genre painting, a gay and
brilliant caricature. The French, the Swiss, the Italians, even the Germans,
certainly the Poles, are closer to him. He cannot establish any genuine
personal rapport with the English. When he thinks of mankind he does
not think of them. Apart from his central
preoccupations, he devoted himself to the education of his children, which he
entrusted in part to an idealistic German lady, Malwida von Meysenbug, afterwards a friend of Nietzsche and
Romain Rolland. His personal life was intertwined with that of his intimate friend Ogaryov, and of
Ogaryov’s wife who became his mistress. In spite of this the mutual
devotion of the two friends remained unaltered—the Memoirs reveal little of
the curious emotional consequences of this relationship. For the rest, he lived the life of
an affluent, well-born man of letters, a member of the Russian and, more
specifically, Moscow gentry, uprooted from his native soil, unable to achieve
a settled existence or even the semblance of inward or outward peace, a life
filled with occasional moments of hope and even exultation, followed by long
periods of misery, corrosive self-criticism, and, most of all, overwhelming,
omnivorous, bitter nostalgia. It may be this, as much as objective reasons,
that caused him to idealize the
Russian peasant, and to dream that
the answer to the central “social” question of his time—that of growing
inequality, exploitation, dehumanization of both the oppressor and the
oppressed—lay in the preservation of the Russian peasant commune. He
perceived in it the seeds of the development of a non-industrial,
semi-anarchist, “free” socialism. Only such a solution, plainly influenced by
the views of Fourier, Proudhon, and George Sand, seemed to him to avoid the
crushing, barrack-room discipline demanded by Western Communists from Cabet
to Marx; and from the equally suffocating, and, it seemed to him, far more
vulgar and philistine ideals contained in moderate, half-socialist doctrines,
with their faith in the progressive role of developing industrialism preached
by the forerunners of social democracy in Germany and France and of the
Fabians in England. At times he modified his view: toward the end of his
life he began to recognize the historical significance of the organized urban
workers. But all in all, he remained faithful to his belief in the Russian
peasant commune as an embryonic form of a life in which the quest for individual freedom was reconcilable with the need for
collective activity and responsibility. He retained to the end a romantic
vision of the inevitable coming of a new, just, all-transforming social
order. Herzen is neither consistent nor
systematic. His style during his middle years has lost the confident touch of
his youth, and conveys the consuming nostalgia that never leaves him. He is
obsessed by a sense of the power of blind accident, although his faith in the
values of life for its own sake, of art, of social freedom, of personal
relationships, remains unshaken. Almost all traces of Hegelian influence are
gone. “The absurdity of facts offends
us…it is as though someone had promised that everything in the world will be
exquisitely beautiful, just and harmonious. We have marvelled enough at the
deep abstract wisdom of nature and history; it is time to realise that nature
and history are full of the accidental and senseless, of muddle and
bungling.” This is highly characteristic of his mood in the Sixties; and
it is no accident that his exposition is not ordered, but is a succession of
fragments, episodes, isolated vignettes, a mingling of Dichtung and Wahrheit,
facts and poetic license. His moods alternate sharply.
Sometimes he believes in the need for a great, cleansing, revolutionary
storm, even were it to take the form of a barbarian invasion likely to
destroy all the values that he himself holds dear. At other times he
reproaches his old friend Bakunin, who joined him in London after escaping
from his Russian prisons, for wanting to make the revolution too soon; for
not understanding that dwellings for free men cannot be constructed out of
the stones of a prison; that the average European of the nineteenth century
is too deeply marked by the slavery of the old order to be capable of
realizing true freedom, that it is not the liberated slaves who will build
the new order, but new men brought up in liberty. History has its own tempo;
patience and gradualism—not the haste and violence of a Peter the Great—can
alone bring about a permanent transformation. At such moments he wonders
whether the future belongs to the free, anarchic peasant, or to the bold and
ruthless planner; perhaps it is the industrial worker who is to be the heir
to the new, unavoidable, collectivist economic order.9
Then again he returns to his early moods of disillusionment and wonders
whether men in general really desire freedom: perhaps only a few do so in
each generation, while most human beings only want good government, no matter
at whose hands; and he echoes de
Maistre’s bitter epigram about Rousseau: “Monsieur Rousseau has asked why it is that men who are born free are
nevertheless everywhere in chains; it is as if one were to ask why sheep, who
are born carnivorous, nevertheless everywhere nibble grass.” Herzen develops this theme. Men desire
freedom no more than fish desire to fly. The fact that a few flying fish
exist does not demonstrate that fish in general were created to fly, or are
not fundamentally quite content to stay below the surface of the water,
forever away from the sun and the light. Then he returns to his earlier optimism
and the thought that somewhere—in Russia—there lives the unbroken human
being, the peasant with his faculties intact, untainted by the corruption and
sophistication of the West. But this Rousseau-inspired vision,
as he grows older, begins to fade, His sense of reality is too strong. For
all his efforts and the efforts of his socialist friends, he cannot deceive
himself entirely. He oscillates between pessimism and optimism, skepticism
and suspicion of his own skepticism, and is kept morally alive only by his
hatred of all injustice, all arbitrariness, all
mediocrity as such—in particular by his inability to compromise to any degree
with either the brutality of reactionaries or the hypocrisy of bourgeois
liberals. He is preserved by this, buoyed up by his belief that such evils
will destroy themselves, by his love for his children and his devoted
friends, and by his unquenchable delight in the variety of life and the
comical absurdities of human character. On the whole, he grew more
pessimistic. He began with an ideal vision of mankind, largely ignored the
chasm which divided it from the present—whether the Russia of Nicholas, or
the corrupt constitutionalism in the West. In his youth he glorified Jacobin radicalism and condemned its
opponents in Russia—blind conservatism, Slavophile nostalgia, the cautious
gradualism of his friends Granovsky and Turgenev, as well as Hegelian appeals
to patience and rational conformity to the inescapable rhythms of history,
which seemed to him designed to ensure the triumph of the new bourgeois
class. His attitude, before he went abroad, was boldly optimistic. There followed, not indeed a change of
view, but a cooling-off, a tendency to a more sober and critical outlook.
All genuine change, he began to think
in 1847, is necessarily slow; the power of tradition (which he at once mocks
at and admires in England) is very great; men are less malleable than was
believed in the eighteenth century, nor do they truly seek liberty, only
security and contentment; communism is but Tsarism stood on its head, the
replacement of one yoke by another; the ideals and watchwords of politics
turn out, on examination, to be empty formulae to which devout fanatics
happily slaughter hecatombs of their fellows. He no longer feels certain that
the gap between the enlightened elite and the masses can ever, in principle,
be bridged (this becomes an obsessive refrain in later Russian thought),
since the awakened people may, for unalterable psychological or sociological
reasons, despise and reject the gifts of a civilization which will never mean
enough to them. But if all this is even in small part true, is radical
transformation either practicable or desirable? From this follows Herzen’s growing sense of obstacles that
may be insurmountable, limits that may be impassable, his empiricism,
skepticism, the alternations of hope and gloom, the latent pessimism, and
intermittent despair of the middle Sixties. THIS IS the attitude10
which some Soviet scholars interpret
as the beginning of an approach on his part toward a quasi-Marxist
recognition of the inexorable laws of social development—in particular
the inevitability of industrialism, and of the central role to be played by
the proletariat. This is not how the majority of Herzen’s Russian left-wing
critics interpreted his views in his lifetime, or in the half century that
followed. To them, rightly or wrongly, these doctrines seemed symptomatic of
retreat, vacillation, and betrayal.
For in the Fifties and Sixties, a new generation of radicals grew up in
Russia, then a backward country in the painful process of the earliest, most
rudimentary beginnings of slow, sporadic, inefficient industrialization.
These were men of mixed social origins, filled with contempt for the feeble
liberal compromises of 1848, with no illusions about the prospects of freedom
in the West, determined on more ruthless methods; accepting as true only what
the sciences can prove, prepared to be hard, and if need be unscrupulous and
cruel, in order to break the power of their equally ruthless oppressors;
bitterly hostile to the aestheticism, the devotion to civilized values, of
the “soft” generation of the Forties. Herzen realized that the criticism
and abuse showered upon him as an obsolete aristocratic dilettante by these “nihilists” (as they came to be
called after Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, in which this conflict
is vividly presented for the first time) was not altogether different from
the disdain that he had himself felt in his own youth for the aristocratic
and ineffective reformers of Alexander I’s reign; but this did not make his
position easier to bear. That which was ill-received by the tough-minded
revolutionaries pleased Tolstoy, who said more than once that the censorship
of Herzen’s works in Russia was a characteristic blunder on the part of the
government; the government, in its anxiety to stop young men from marching
toward the revolutionary morass, seized them and swept them off to Siberia or
prison long before they were even in sight of it, while they were still on
the broad highway; Herzen’s had trodden this very path; he had seen the chasm
and warned against it, particularly in his “Letters to an Old Comrade.”
Nothing, Tolstoy argued, would
have proved a better antidote to the “revolutionary nihilism” which Tolstoy
condemned, than Herzen’s brilliant analyses. “Our young generation would not have been the same if Herzen had been
read by them during the last twenty years.” Suppression of his books,
Tolstoy went on, was both a wicked, and from the point of view of those who
did not desire a violent revolution, an idiotic policy. At other times, Tolstoy was less
generous. In 1860, six months before they met, he had been reading Herzen’s
writings with mingled admiration and irritation: “Herzen is a man of
scattered intellect, and morbid amour-propre,” he wrote in a letter,
“but his breadth, ability, goodness, elegance of mind are Russian.” From time
to time various correspondents record the fact that Tolstoy read Herzen, at
times aloud to his family, with the greatest admiration. In 1896, during one
of his angriest, most anti-rationalist moods, he said, “What has Herzen said
that is of the slightest use?”—as for those who maintained that the
generation of the Forties could not say what it wanted to say because of the
rigid Russian censorship, Herzen wrote in perfect freedom in Paris, and yet
managed to say “nothing useful.” What irritated Tolstoy most was
Herzen’s socialism. In 1908 he complained that Herzen was “a narrow
socialist,” even if he was “head and shoulders above the other politicians of
his age and ours.” The fact that he believed in politics as a weapon was
sufficient to condemn him in Tolstoy’s eyes. From 1862 onward, Tolstoy had
declared his hostility to faith in liberal reform and improvement of human
life by legal or institutional change. Herzen fell under this general ban.
Moreover, Tolstoy seems to have felt a certain lack of personal sympathy for
Herzen and his public position—even a kind of jealousy. When, in moments of
deep discouragement and irritation, Tolstoy spoke (perhaps not very
seriously) of leaving Russia forever, he would say that whatever he did, he
would not join Herzen or march under his banner: “he goes his way, I shall go
mine.” He greatly underrated Herzen’s revolutionary temperament
and instincts. However skeptical Herzen may have been of specific
revolutionary doctrines or plans in Russia—and no one was more so—he believed to the end of his life in the
moral and social need and the inevitable coming, soon or late, of a
revolution in Russia—a violent transformation followed by a just, that is a
socialist, order. He did not, it is true, close his eyes to the possibility,
even the probability, that the great rebellion would extinguish values to
which he was himself dedicated—in particular, the freedoms without which he
and others like him could not breathe. Nevertheless, he recognized not
only the inescapable necessity but the historic justice of the coming
cataclysm. His moral tastes, his respect for human values, his entire style
of life, divided him from the tough-minded younger radicals of the Sixties,
but he did not, despite all his distrust of political fanaticism, whether on
the right or on the left, turn into a cautious, reformist, liberal
constitutionalist. Even in his gradualist phase he remained an agitator, an
egalitarian, and a socialist to the end. It is this in him that both the
Russian populists and the Russian Marxists—Mikhailovsky and Lenin—recognized
and saluted. It was not prudence or moderation
that led him to his unwavering support
of Poland in her insurrection against Russia in 1863. The wave of
passionate Russian nationalism which accompanied its suppression,
lost him sympathy even among Russian liberals. The circulation of The Bell
declined. The new, “hard” revolutionaries needed his money, but made it plain
that they looked upon him as a liberal dinosaur, the preacher of antiquated
humanistic views, useless in the violent social struggles to come. He left
London in the late Sixties and attempted to produce a French edition of The
Bell in Geneva. When this periodical, too, failed, he visited his friends
in Florence, returning to Paris early in 1870, before the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War. There he died of pleurisy, broken both morally and
physically, but not disillusioned; still writing with concentrated
intelligence and force. His body was taken to Nice, where he is buried beside
his wife. A life-sized statue still marks his grave. HERZEN’S IDEAS have long since
entered into the general texture of Russian political thought—liberals and radicals, populists and
anarchists, socialists and communists, have all claimed him as an ancestor.
But what survives today of all that unceasing and feverish activity, even in
his native country, is not a system or a doctrine, but a handful of essays,
some remarkable letters, and the extraordinary amalgam of memory,
observation, moral passion, psychological analysis, and political
description, wedded to a major literary talent, which has immortalized his
name. What remains is, above all, a passionate and inextinguishable
temperament and a sense of the life and ferment of nature, an
infinity of unpredictable possibilities, which he felt with an
intensity which not even his uniquely rich and flexible prose could fully
express. He believed that the ultimate goal of life was life
itself; that the day and the hour were ends in themselves, not a means to
another day or another experience. He believed that remote ends were a dream,
that faith in them was a fatal illusion; that to sacrifice the present, or
the immediate and foreseeable future, to these distant ends must always lead
to cruel and futile forms of human sacrifice. He believed that values were
not found in an impersonal, objective realm, but were literally created by
human beings and changed with the generations of men, but were nonetheless
binding upon those who lived in their light; that suffering was inescapable,
and infallible knowledge neither attainable nor needed. He believed in
reason, scientific method, individual action, empirically discovered truth.
But he tended to suspect that faith in general formulae, laws, prescription
in human affairs was an attempt, sometimes catastrophic, always irrational,
to escape from the uncertainty and unpredictable variety of life to the false
security of our own symmetrical fantasies. He
was fully conscious of what he believed. He had obtained his knowledge at the
cost of painful, and, at times, unintended, self-analysis, and he described
what he saw in language of exceptional vitality, precision, and poetry. His
purely personal credo remained unaltered from his earliest days: “Art, and the summer lightning of individual
happiness: these are the only real goods we have,” he declared in a
self-revealing passage of the kind that so deeply shocked the stern young
Russian revolutionaries in the Sixties. Yet even they and their descendants
did not and do not reject his artistic and intellectual achievement. Herzen was not, and had no wish to
be, an impartial observer. No less than the poets and the novelists of his
nation, he created a style, an outlook, and, in the words of Gorky’s tribute
to him, “an entire province, a country astonishingly rich in ideas,”11
where everything is immediately recognizable as being his and his alone, a
country into which he transplanted all that he touched, in which things,
sensations, feelings, persons, ideas, private and public events,
institutions, entire cultures, were given shape and life by his powerful and
coherent historical imagination, and have stood up, untouched by the forces
of decay, in the solid world which his memory, his intelligence, and his
artistic genius recovered and reconstructed. My Past and Thoughts is
the Noah’s ark in which he saved himself, and not himself alone, from the
destructive flood in which many idealistic radicals of the Forties were
drowned. Genuine art transcends its immediate purpose and lives on. The
structure that Herzen built in the first place, perhaps, for his own personal
salvation, built out of material provided by his own predicament—out of
exile, solitude, despair—survives intact. Written abroad, concerned largely
with European issues and figures, these reminiscences are a great, perhaps
the greatest, most lasting monument to
the civilized, sensitive, morally preoccupied and gifted Russian society to
which Herzen belonged, and for which alone he wrote; their vitality and
fascination have not declined in the hundred years that have passed since the
first chapters saw the light. Letters Herzen's
Circle June 20, 1968 1 P. Sergeyenko, in his book on Tolstoy, says that Tolstoy
told him in 1908 that he had a very clear recollection of his visit to Herzen
in his London house in March 1861. "Lev Nikolaevich remembered him as a
not very large, plump little man, who generated electric energy. 'Lively, responsive, intelligent, interesting,' Lev
Nikolaevich explained (as usual illustrating every shade of meaning by
appropriate movements of his hands) 'Herzen at once began talking to me as if
we had known each other for a long time. I found his personality enchanting.
I have never met a more attractive man. He stood head and shoulders above all
the politicians of his own and of our time.' " (P.
Sergeyenko, Tolstoi i ego sovremenniki, Moscow, 1911, pp. 13-14.)↩ 2 There is evidence, although it is not conclusive, that she was
married to him according to the Lutheran rite, not recognized by the Orthodox
Church.↩ 3 The historical and sociological explanation of the origins of
Russian socialism and of Herzen's part in it cannot be attempted here. It has
been treated in a number of (untranslated) Russian monographs, both pre- and
post-revolutionary; the best, most detailed and original study of this topic
is Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism by Martin
Malia.↩ 4 The clearest formulation of this familiar and almost
universal thesis is to be found in Mr. E. H. Carr's treatment of Herzen in The
Romantic Exiles and elsewhere. Mr. Malia's book almost alone avoids it.↩ 5 Herzen had made no genuine friends in England, although he had
associates, allies, and admirers. One of these, the radical journalist W. J.
Linton, to whose English Republic Herzen had
contributed articles, described him as "short of stature, stoutly built,
in his last days inclined to corpulence, with a grand head, long chestnut
hair and beard, small, luminous eyes, and rather ruddy complexion. Suave in
his manner, courteous, but with an intense power of irony, witty,…clear, concise and impressive, he was a subtle and
profound thinker, with all the passionate nature of the 'barbarian,' yet generous
and humane" (Memories, London, 1895, pp. 146-7). And in his European
Republicans, published two years earlier, he spoke of him as
"hospitable and taking pleasure in society,…a
good conversationalist, with a frank and pleasing manner," and said that
the Spanish radical Castelar said that Herzen, with his fair hair and beard,
looked like a Goth, but possessed the warmth, vivacity, "verve and
inimitable grace" and "marvellous variety" of a Southerner.
Turgenev and Herzen were the first Russians to move freely in European
society. The impression that they made did a good deal, though perhaps not
enough, to dispel the myth of the "Slav soul," which took a long
time to die. Perhaps it is not altogether dead yet.↩ 6 "Copperfield is Dickens's Past and Thoughts,"
he said in one of his letters in the early Sixties; humility was not among
his virtues.↩ 7 In The Bell: see below.↩ 8 See entry in the Journal for 8th February,
1865—"Dinner at Charles Edmond's (Chojecki)…A Socratic mask with
the warm and transparent flesh of a Rubens portrait, a red mark between the
eyebrows as from a branding iron, greying beard and hair. As he talks there
is a constant ironical chuckle which rises and falls in his throat. His voice
is soft and slow, without any of the coarseness one might have expected from
the huge neck; the ideas are fine, delicate, pungent, at times subtle, always
definite, illuminated by words that take time to arrive, but which always
possess the felicitous quality of French as it is spoken by a civilized and
witty foreigner. "He
speaks of Bakunin, of his eleven months in prison, chained to a wall, of his
escape from Siberia by the Amur River, of his return by way of California, of
his arrival in London, where, after a stormy, moist embrace, his first words
to Herzen were 'Can one get oysters here?"' Herzen
delighted the Goncourts with stories about the Emperor Nicholas, after the
fall of Eupatoria during the Crimean War, walking in the night in his empty
palace, with the heavy, unearthly steps of the stone statue of the Commander
in Don Juan. This was followed by anecdotes about English habits and
manners—"a country which he loves as the land of liberty"—to
illustrate its absurd, class-conscious, unyielding traditionalism,
particularly noticeable in the relations of masters and servants. The
Goncourts quote a characteristic epigram made by Herzen to illustrate the
difference between the French and the English characters. They go on to
report the story of how James de Rothschild managed to save Herzen's property
in Russia. ↩ 9 This is the thesis in which orthodox Soviet scholars claim to
discern the beginnings of a belated approach to the doctrines of Marx.↩ 10 See footnote 9.↩ 11 Istoriya Russkoy Literatury.
p. 206. (Moscow, 1939.)↩ |