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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.)↩ |