The Russian radical writer and philosopher Alexander Herzen loved Rome for its warmth and spontaneity, but he was a little chagrined to find himself there when the revolution of 1848 erupted in Paris, seven hundred miles away. Luckily, the Romans were equal to the event. As Herzen watched, they gathered at the embassy of the oppressive Austrians, pulled down the enormous imperial coat of arms, stomped on it, then hitched it to a donkey and dragged it through the streets. “An amazing time,” Herzen wrote to his Russian friends. “My hand shakes when I pick up a paper, every day there is something unexpected, some peal of thunder.” He raced to Paris, where the provisional government was handing out grants, like some gonzo arts foundation, to anyone willing to spread the revolution abroad. Herzen’s old friend the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin had already started east to foment revolution against the Tsar; another friend, the German Romantic poet Georg Herwegh, was raising a battalion of émigré workers and intellectuals to march on Baden-Baden. Herzen stayed in Paris to see what would happen next.

Nothing good, as it turned out. The liberal provisional government, challenged by the radical Paris workers, called in the National Guard and unleashed a slaughter. Bakunin was arrested in Dresden, commencing a long journey through the prisons of Europe. And Herwegh’s battalion was routed by the Prussian Army outside Baden-Baden, the poet returning to Paris in disgrace. “Our hero could no more bear the smell of gunpowder,” his rival Heinrich Heine jeered, “than Goethe could that of tobacco.” Within a few months, the revolutionary tide had rolled back all across Europe.

Herzen, heartbroken by the developments, announced that he was turning inward: if society was not ready to be liberated from a crumbling order, individuals could at least save themselves, as he put it, “from the danger of falling ruins.” He and Herwegh began to discuss plans for a two-family commune. The events of 1848 had left the Herweghs without resources, but Herzen had managed to get his assets out of Russia, foiling the Tsar’s attempt to seize them. “Money is independence and power, it is a weapon,” he explained, unapologetically. “And no one throws away a weapon in time of war, even if it comes from the enemy and is a little rusty.” He found the two families a house in Nice, and together they moved there in the middle of 1850. Herzen was unaware that six months earlier his beloved wife, Natalie, had begun a serious affair with Herwegh.

On the day that Herzen finally learned about it, he found himself standing with Herwegh on a sheer rock cliff overlooking the sea at Nice. He was out of his mind with rage. “Why didn’t I immediately start a conversation or push him off the bluff into the sea?” he later wondered. He’d been betrayed by Herwegh—but how, exactly? Didn’t he believe that people should break away from traditional bonds of family and religion? That the old world was dying? And how, assuming that Herwegh was unequivocally at fault, was Herzen to take revenge? He was an aristocrat, and aristocrats—Pushkin, for example—fought duels, but Herzen believed that duelling was barbaric. Lamely, he asked Herwegh whether he’d read a certain novel by George Sand; Herwegh claimed not to remember, and slithered off to the bookshop. It was the last they saw of each other.

What happened next—in a cascade of vicious letters, letters in response, unopened letters, letters that were claimed to have been unopened, and letters spread around Nice and Zurich and Geneva—became a major scandal on the European left. It seemed to carry a lesson about the dangers of the new ideas. The German socialist Arnold Ruge wrote a five-act verse drama, “The New World,” based on the events; Marx gossiped about them to Engels. Herwegh told everyone who would listen that Herzen was keeping Natalie against her will; Herzen defended himself to his allies in the revolutionary movement. “I belong to the new society to which you and your friends belong,” he wrote to the French anarchist Proudhon. “I belong to the revolution to which Mazzini and his disciples belong.” They responded warmly, politely. But what could they do?

The episode is both awful and absurd. Even Tom Stoppard’s witty, crowded nine-hour play about Herzen and his circle, “The Coast of Utopia”—over the next several months, it will be performed at Lincoln Center in three parts—skirts most of this material, despite managing to incorporate just about every significant event (and speech!) in Russian intellectual history between 1833 and 1868. For Stoppard, a playwright who has made a specialty of illuminating, with a gentle, probing intelligence, the private lives of public figures, what Herzen called his “family drama” may have been too private. It is also just too sad: In late 1851, at the height of the scandal, Herzen’s mother and his young son Kolya drowned at sea. Natalie fell ill, a situation that was compounded by another pregnancy. In the spring of 1852, she and the child died.

Reeling and agitated—“I feel all the faintheartedness of my behavior,” he wrote to a friend, “but everything is so terribly broken inside”—Herzen moved to London, and began to write his bitter tale.

The result, “My Past and Thoughts,” is one of the most remarkable books in the Russian canon. In attempting to explain Herwegh’s perfidy, Herzen had first to explain whom it had been perpetrated against. And who was Herzen? In 1852, he was forty years old, a sharp-tongued aristocrat, a fervent revolutionary, and a writer of genius. He had refused the Tsar’s order to return to Russia, and so had also become an exile. “I have lived too long as a free man,” he explained, “to allow myself to be chained again.” This last fact was especially notable because, more than anyone in his generation, Herzen identified himself with Russia. From the very first sentence of his memoirs, he was able to connect his life with the great currents of the preceding half century. He was born in 1812, the year Napoleon’s Grand Armée entered Russia—and not only in 1812 but in Moscow, as it was being evacuated and set on fire. Herzen’s father had neglected to remove his family in time, so he had to seek a special audience with Napoleon to get them all out. “Tales of the fire of Moscow, of the battle of Borodino . . . of the taking of Paris were my cradle songs, my nursery stories, my Iliad and my Odyssey,” Herzen wrote.

How did someone born to the top caste of a rigid, traditional society—and imbued with this deep patriotism—come to reject the bases of that society? That is the central question of the memoirs. As always with Herzen, the personal was bound up with the political. In early adolescence, he learned that his father had never got around to marrying his mother, rendering Herzen illegitimate. Then, on December 14, 1825, a group of officers who had returned from Western Europe after the Napoleonic Wars held a demonstration in Petersburg demanding that the Tsar grant a constitution. The so-called Decembrists were crushed, and the leaders—the flower of the educated nobility, friends of Pushkin and readers of Voltaire—were hanged.

The executions made an indelible impression on Herzen, who watched Nicholas I’s subsequent march into Moscow (“He always looked like a slightly bald Medusa”) with disgust. He soon befriended a young man named Nicholas Ogarev, and the two swore a “Hannibalistic oath” to avenge the fallen heroes of December 14th. Less than a decade later, Herzen and Ogarev were under arrest for having formed what was little more than an anti-tsarist book club.

Herzen’s Russian, in the memoirs, is clear and classical, like that of his friend and contemporary Turgenev, and Herzen, like Turgenev, has a romantic tenderness for Russia and for childhood. But, every few pages, Herzen’s memoir interrupts itself to make quick, acerbic comments about a screaming injustice. “That was my first journey through Russia,” he writes at the end of his story about the family’s exit from Moscow in 1812, escorted first by Napoleon’s cavalry, then by Ukrainian Cossacks. His second journey, he continues dryly, took place without such exalted company: “I was alone, and next to me sat a drunken gendarme.”

The gendarme escorted Herzen to his first stint of internal exile, where he would spend four years for his anti-tsarist sentiments. During this time, he struck up an intense correspondence with his cousin Natalie and eloped with her in the middle of 1838. They had a son, Sasha, and the next year were allowed to return to Moscow.

Herzen found the city in an intellectual frenzy: the Russians had discovered Hegel, and, as always, they were taking things too seriously. Herzen’s friend Vissarion Belinsky, the literary critic, was an especially rhapsodic Hegelian, unhampered by his lack of German. But young Bakunin was the worst: He “learned German from Kant and Fichte and then set to work upon Hegel, whose method and logic he mastered to perfection—and to whom did he not preach it afterward? To us and to Belinsky, to ladies and Proudhon.”

Herzen himself was soon immersed in Hegel. He recognized the significance of the debate: in the wake of Napoleon, Hegel had announced a philosophy of history in which each country contributed through its genius to the development of the World Spirit. Mired in serfdom, tyranny, and daily violence, Russia had been left out. In response, the Russians split into two camps: Westernizers, who wanted to remedy Russia’s backwardness, and Slavophiles, who thought it should be lovingly preserved. Herzen became a Westernizer, though he argued with one camp and then the other, wrote abstruse articles about the Weltgeist for the literary magazines, and then argued some more.

These arguments—as well as the irresistible historical connections afforded by such a small and influential élite—are the main reason that Stoppard’s play is nine hours long. Audiences may even suspect that they’ve seen these Russians before, on their country estates, arguing interminably among themselves about the meaning of life and the direction of history. This is Peter from “The Cherry Orchard,” this is Uncle Vanya. But two generations separate Chekhov from Herzen; by the eighteen-nineties, history had indeed overtaken Uncle Vanya. It had not done so when Herzen began his journey. Then, as he wrote beautifully, “The Russia of the future existed exclusively among a few boys, hardly more than children, so insignificant and unnoticed that there was room for them between the soles of the great boots of the autocracy and the ground.” His generation was the best educated and most privileged in Russian history, and incarnated a uniquely optimistic moment: the old world was on its way out; the question was merely what they would replace it with. If, for the time being, they talked and talked, it was because they lived in a police state that outlawed everything other than talk, and sometimes that, too.

They hashed over their personal relationships with equal fervor. The last of the European Romantics—the British historian E. H. Carr shrewdly titled his 1933 book about them “The Romantic Exiles”—they believed they must be progressive in their private as well as their political lives. The men and women of Herzen’s circle kept a constant surveillance of their feelings and the feelings of those around them, to make sure that everyone was happy. In the course of their endless correspondence, their all-night conversations, their complicated marriages, they analyzed and analyzed. “Tell Melgunov that there may really be some element lacking in our friendship,” Herzen wrote offhandedly to one friend. To the mild-mannered Ogarev he remarked, “You have the strongest character of anyone I know—it is the strength of weakness. . . . You have a broad comprehension of everything that is human, and a dull incomprehension of everything that is particular to Ogarev.” The courtship letters of Natalie and Herzen are filled with reflections on Schiller and the religion of love. When Ogarev’s first marriage began to fall apart—his wife cheated on him with every literary journalist in Moscow—all their friends reread Goethe, and George Sand, and talked about the morality of matrimony. Herzen concluded that marriage without love was a crime; Natalie believed this with all her heart.

As the eighteen-forties progressed, Herzen became a fixture in the literary magazines; he even wrote a novel, “Who Is to Blame?,” about a love triangle. (Everyone was to blame.) But real thought and real action were impossible under the police regime of Nicholas I. “So long as we were arguing that Goethe was objective but that his objectivity was subjective,” as Herzen put it, “while Schiller as a poet was subjective but that his subjectivity was objective, and vice versa,” things were fine; but the censorship would become ruinous, he knew, as soon as writers began to address political subjects. Many of Herzen’s contemporaries succumbed to despair, retiring to their estates and various forms of dissipation. They became—gentle, alcoholic Ogarev for a time was a perfect specimen—“superfluous men.” Some of the more ambitious went abroad. In 1847, a year after Herzen’s father died and made him the richest socialist revolutionary in Europe, he followed them.

He was, it seemed, right on time. The steppes of Russia closed behind him—a year after his departure, Nicholas I imposed severe travel restrictions—while Europe stood on the brink of the transformation he’d been waiting for since the Decembrists were hanged. And then it failed. The simultaneous collapse of both his marriage and the 1848 uprisings was the major blow of Herzen’s life. Politically, he concluded that a premature revolution would inevitably lead to a crushing reaction. (Lenin, who loved Herzen’s writings, drew a slightly different conclusion: one can picture him reading with glee the scenes of social-democratic incompetence that Herzen describes so well.) Personally, he decided that everything was finished for him. In the years to come, he repeatedly returned to this moment. “The event draws a line through my life,” he wrote. It was, he believed, an “end to my personal life.”

But life never ends just like that. Herzen wrote the first four parts of “My Past and Thoughts” between 1852 and 1855. It was immediately acknowledged as a masterpiece and widely translated. “It’s a wonder,” Turgenev told him. “It possesses a kind of manly and artless truth.” Marx learned to read Russian by studying it; Nabokov, a few generations later, recalled that it was his father’s favorite book. Isaiah Berlin considered it “a literary masterpiece to be placed by the side of the novels of his contemporaries and countrymen, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky.”

This is not quite right. Herzen’s book is a loose, baggy monster that lacks the dramatic tension and economy of “Fathers and Sons.” Turgenev was the first realist novelist in Russia; his books were wonderfully normal, as if Russia were like other places, even if Russians weren’t quite like other people. Herzen’s memoirs are, in contrast, fundamentally generative: he saw everything in Russia as though for the first time. Perhaps it was just his natural skepticism (“I see you are going to poke fun,” Bakunin tells him), or perhaps it was his reading of Hegel, but nothing seems natural to Herzen. “Where do these people come from?” he asks upon seeing an uncommonly disciplined-looking officer in full military regalia. “He must have flogged soldiers in his day for the way they paraded.” He is never so amused by absurd injustice that he ceases to be outraged, but never so outraged that he ceases to be amused. Having been told to report for an interrogation by the head of the secret police, he is struck by the aristocratic collegiality of the request: “It was exactly as if we’d agreed to go to Smurov’s for oysters.”

And whereas Turgenev’s characters are always rendered with a distanced precision, Herzen is frankly enamored of his friends. “He could not preach or lecture; what he needed was a quarrel,” he wrote of Belinsky, who died of consumption in 1848:

If he met with no objection, if he was not stirred to irritation, he did not speak well, but when he felt stung, when his cherished convictions were called in question, when the muscles of his cheeks began to quiver and his voice to burst out, then he was worth seeing; he pounced on his opponent like a panther, he tore him to pieces, made him a ridiculous, a piteous object, and incidentally developed his own thought, with unusual power and poetry. The dispute would often end in blood, which flowed from the sick man’s throat; pale, gasping, with his eyes fixed on the man with whom he was speaking, he would lift his handkerchief to his mouth with shaking hand and stop, deeply mortified, crushed by his physical weakness. How I loved and how I pitied him at those moments!

This is much more than the description of an individual. Like Emerson’s early essays, it inaugurates a national style. Herzen does this sociologically and through the dramatic retelling of literary and intellectual history; Emerson did so through exhortation and reflections on nature. (This is why Russia has literary and philosophical debate, and we have “Snow Falling on Cedars.”) The memoirs became, as Isaiah Berlin beautifully put it, a Noah’s Ark, into which Herzen stowed the people he loved before the terrible storm that was sure to sweep them away.

The composition of the memoirs returned Herzen to the world. In early 1853, he purchased a printing press and Cyrillic fonts and, with the help of a group of Polish exiles, began printing books and sending them to Russia. He started by publishing his own work, including his book of essays on 1848, “From the Other Shore,” with its famous dedicatory preface to his teen-age son, Sasha: “We do not build, we destroy; we do not proclaim a new truth, we abolish an old lie. Contemporary man only builds the bridge; another, unknown man of the future will walk across it. You perhaps will see it. I beg of you: Do not remain on this shore.” Soon came the Crimean War, which Russia lost, and the death of Nicholas I, whom Herzen loathed. Change was afoot! He launched a literary magazine, The Polar Star, in which he serialized “My Past and Thoughts.” In 1856, his childhood friend Ogarev arrived from Russia with his new wife. Encouraged by tales of his work’s reception in his homeland, Herzen joined Ogarev to start the monthly, and later fortnightly, newspaper, The Bell.

The Bell and The Polar Star were a revelation. They were mailed into Russia and smuggled into Russia—and read by everyone. The Polar Star contained long philosophical essays, Herzen’s memoirs, and classic banned works, like Pushkin’s pro-Decembrist poems. The Bell, more timely, consisted of political statements, compromising materials on government officials, and letters from all corners of the empire. Above all, though, they were written by free men, who did not cringe before the censor, who could call plainly for the abolition of serfdom, say, instead of “the rational allocation of economic forces.” Finally, they were mostly written by Herzen, and Herzen could really write. His words leaped from the page and danced, and when they needed to they stung. Here he is thundering at the gentry about serfdom:

We are slaves because our great-grandfathers sold their human dignity for inhumane rights, and we profit from them. We are slaves because we are masters. We are servants because we are landowners, and landowners without any belief in our rights. We are serfs because we keep our brothers against their will who are our equals by birth, by blood, and by language.
 

With Herzen’s publications, the years between 1855 and 1861 became one of those strange, hopeful interludes that punctuate Russian history, when it seems as if all the country’s humiliations and failures might be righted by the efforts of a few just men. Young people collected money and travelled to London to tell Herzen they would die for him—and to ask him how they should live. (Herzen invariably suggested that they help with distribution.) He gave money to poor political émigrés, and to those in Russia he gave hope. Bakunin, upon escaping from Siberia, in 1861, headed straight to the Herzen household. Two forces contended in Russia during those years: Alexander II, Tsar of all the Russias, and Alexander Herzen, whose name couldn’t even be mentioned in print.

Even as Herzen achieved success with The Bell, he managed to get involved, incredibly, in another love triangle. Ogarev had lost his riches during his divorce, and so he and his second wife, Natalie—who had once been the closest friend of Natalie Herzen—had moved into Herzen’s house upon arriving in London. Before long, Natalie Ogarev developed feelings for Herzen. Ogarev let her go quietly—he did not believe in marriage, and, what’s more, he was sterile. Soon Natalie was pregnant with a daughter, Liza, and Ogarev had taken up with an English prostitute named Mary Sutherland, whom he’d met at a bar.

Stoppard, this time, is more than equal to the madness of the triangle. He weaves it into the fabric of Herzen’s political life: as the domestic arrangement begins to unravel, so, too, does the standing of The Bell. In the years leading up to the emancipation of the serfs, in 1861, Herzen threw his support behind the liberal policy of emancipation “with land.” But the young people who had been reared on Herzen’s political writings wanted more. Morbidly sincere where Herzen was quick and ironic, “scientific” where he was romantic, contemptuous of art and unable, in Herzen’s words, to eat a good meal without gnashing their teeth, they were the “sons,” depicted with a certain amount of sympathy by Turgenev; ten years later, having radicalized and degenerated, they became “the Possessed” depicted with pure venom by Dostoyevsky. They criticized Herzen for thinking that tsarist Russia could be reformed when it needed to be destroyed, and they repeatedly pleaded with him to call for Russians to rise up against their oppressors. Herzen resisted.

In an inspired scene, Stoppard imagines the famous but unrecorded London visit of the young radicals’ leader, Nikolai Chernyshevsky. He has come from Petersburg to have it out at last with Herzen, whom he used to worship, but finds the great man surrounded by bedlam: Natalie is hysterical, Ogarev has brought Mary Sutherland over for the first time, the kids are running around, and the nearsighted Chernyshevsky can’t tell whose children are whose. (They’re all Herzen’s.) He feels humiliated. In the play, as in history, the radicals and Herzen never see eye to eye again. The emancipation, when it came, was onerous to the peasants, proving the radicals right. Two years later, Herzen supported a Polish uprising against the tsarist Army and lost the liberals. (In a clash between Russian serfs and Russian landowners, your sympathies might be determined by your politics. But a clash between Russians and Poles was a clash between Russians and Poles.) The circulation of The Bell plummeted. And though Herzen and Natalie and Ogarev and Mary settled down somewhat, no one was entirely happy or calm or in the right.

Herzen’s last years were spent fitfully trying to revive The Bell and dashing through Europe to sort out the tangled lives of his children. Sasha had earned a medical degree but wasn’t practicing medicine; his eldest daughter, Tata, kept getting involved with men Herzen didn’t approve of. Natalie threatened to take their daughter Liza back to Russia if Herzen didn’t marry her. Meanwhile, Chernyshevsky was arrested; the younger generation grew more radical. “The Decembrists were our great fathers,” Herzen wrote to Ogarev. “These . . . are our prodigal sons.” In 1866, a student in Petersburg fired a pistol at the Tsar, inaugurating the modern age of political terror. He, too, would have read Herzen as a youth.

Stoppard ends his monumental play in 1868, on a note of despair and futility and impending disaster. Herzen is left with his ten-year-old daughter, Liza, whom he asks for a kiss. She obliges happily. But, as the lights fade, we know that the revolution is coming, merciless and terrible—and we also know, if we know about Herzen, that five years after his death little Liza, seventeen and depressed about an unhappy love affair, committed suicide by smothering herself with a chloroform-soaked cloth.

Alexander Herzen, the most noble, humane, passionate, and touching figure of the Russian nineteenth century, gets dusted off every fifty years or so, when liberalism feels that it is in crisis. This happened in 1912, his centenary, when Lenin fought over him with those he called “the knights of liberal verbiage,” and again in the nineteen-fifties, when Isaiah Berlin produced the essays about Herzen that later formed the core of his classic “Russian Thinkers.” And this is fair enough: Herzen was one of the first to experience fully, in both his personal and his political life, the crisis of in-betweenness that was to characterize the best of progressive thought for the next century and a half.

The trouble with this in-betweenness, of course, is that it makes it difficult to say what, exactly, Herzen was for. (“The abolition of serfdom from above or below,” Stoppard’s Ogarev says, “except from below.”) Berlin solved the problem by turning him into the ultimate skeptic of history and progress, explaining very clearly what he was against. “We have marveled enough at the deep abstract wisdom of nature and history,” Berlin quotes Herzen declaring. “It is time to realize that nature and history are full of the accidental and the senseless, of muddles and bungling.” This is a Herzen of perpetual negation and disillusionment, a Cold War Herzen, a British Herzen, and, for the most part, this is Stoppard’s Herzen, too.

There were other Herzens, though, and other possible endings to Stoppard’s play. Herzen was a great negative thinker, but he was also the founder of Russia’s peculiar brand of messianic socialism, whereby the backward nation would save Europe by bypassing all forms of capitalist development and simply performing, as Marx put it, a “somersault into the anarchist-socialist-atheist millennium.” He thought that Russia would win the Crimean War, that the peasant commune could form the basis for socialist government, that Europe was exhausted and beyond rescue. He told the students to go “to the people,” and they did. He became a gradualist, but he was never a liberal; he approvingly quotes Proudhon: “I reject your constitution, not only because it is bad, but because it is a constitution.”

As a political prophet, then, Herzen was a bust. What one finds so moving about him is, instead, his capacity for self-examination and his commitment to ordinary life. Unlike the great, blithe fanatics of the revolutionary movement, he always wondered if he might be wrong. “I am angry with you and with myself,” he wrote to Ogarev in 1866, “that we weren’t able to make anything out of our lives for ourselves.” In his diary, he confessed, “We all thought we could get away with everything. No one got away with anything.”

But he never made an idol of his disillusionment; he never turned his failure into a principle of action. Herzen had failed to save Natalie, and then failed with the other Natalie, but when he heard, in late 1869, that his daughter Tata was in trouble, he raced to Florence to help her. Tata had experienced a nervous breakdown after a failed engagement to an Italian intellectual, who had begun to behave viciously in the wake of the affair. “I have found my Herwegh,” she told her father. Yet she had also found her Herzen. He sat by her bedside until she recovered. Then he took her to Paris.

It was January, 1870, and the capital of world revolution was once again in turmoil. The streets were filled with protesters, and the halls were filled with meetings. Herzen took it all in. “History is being decided here,” he wrote excitedly to Ogarev, who, Herzen lamented, was wasting his time in provincial Geneva. In those final weeks of his life, before he succumbed suddenly to inflammation of the lungs, the most sardonic member of his generation—the scourge not only of the Tsar but of radical blowhards and utopian schemers—was seen going from meeting to meeting, like a young revolutionary.