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A Herzen Reader
Edited and translated from the Russian with an introduction by Kathleen Parthe
With a critical essay by Robert Harris
A Herzen Reader
A
HERZEN
READER
Edited and translated from the Russian with an introduction by Kathleen Parthe
With a critical essay by Robert Harris
ffl
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS EVANSTON, ILLINOIS
Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu
Copyright © 2012 by Kathleen Parthe. Critical essay copyright © 2012 by Robert Harris. Published 2012 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
This book was published under the auspices of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation TRANSCRIPT Programme to Support Translations of Russian Literature.
Printed in the United States of America
10 987654321
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Herzen, Aleksandr, 1812-1870.
[Selections. English. 2012]
A Herzen reader / edited and translated from the Russian with an introduction by Kathleen Parthe ; with a critical essay by Robert Harris. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8101-2847-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Herzen, Aleksandr, 1812-1870. 2. Russia—History—1801-1917. 3. Russia— Politics and government—1801-1917. 4. Socialism—Russia—History—19th century. 5. Intellectuals—Soviet Union. I. Parthe, Kathleen. II. Harris, Robert (Robert Neil) III. Title. DK189.H42 2012 947.°73—dc23
2012026561
©The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix Introduction
Kathleen Parthe xi
A Note on the Text xxxiii
A Herzen Reader
On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia
[1851/1858] 3
The Free Russian Press in London [1853] 27
St. George's Day! St. George's Day! [1853] 30
An Announcement About The Polestar [1855] 36
A Letter to Emperor Alexander the Second [1855] 41
A Note on "The Correspondence Between N. Gogol and
Belinsky" in The Polestar [1855] 45
Forward! Forward! [1856] 46
Baptized Property [1857] 51
The Bell: A Supplement to The Polestar [1857] 54
A Preface to The Bell [1857] 55
Venerable Travelers [1857] 58
Revolution in Russia [1857] 61
To Flog or Not to Flog the Peasant? [1857] 65
A Letter Criticizing The Bell [1858] 67
Lackeys and Germans Refuse Permission [1858] 69
Censorship Is on the Rise [1858] 71
Logophobia [1858] 72
July 1, 1858 [1858] 73
!9
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
A Letter to the Empress Maria Alexandrovna [1858] We Stand Accused [1858] A Bill of Indictment [1858] VERY DANGEROUS!!! [1859] Political Dinners in Moscow [1859]
The Supreme Council of Moscow University Pharisees [1859] The Year i860 [i860]
Count Viktor Panin's Speech to the Deputies [i860]
Letters from Russia [i860]
Five Years Later [i860]
Down with Birch Rods! [i860]
Konstantin Sergeevich Aksakov [i86i]
On the Eve [i86i]
Friends and Comrades! [i86i]
The Bell, Kovalevsky, Kostomarov, a Copy, and Cannibals [i86i] The Abuse of a Fiftieth Anniversary [i86i] Russian Blood Is Flowing! [i86i]
The Smell of Cigars and the Stench of the State Council [i86i]
April i2, i86i (The Apraksin Murders) [i86i]
Petersburg University Is Shut Down! [i86i]
A Giant Is Awakening! [i86i]
Bakunin Is Free [i86i]
Concerning the Assaults on Students [i86i]
The Cannon Fodder of Liberation [i862]
Jubilee [i862]
Academic Moscow [i862]
Young and Old Russia [i862]
Journalists and Terrorists [i862]
A Chronicle of Terror [i862]
A List of People Subject to Arrest by the Government Upon Their Return from Abroad [i862]
The Celebration of the Millennium [i862]
Land and Liberty [i863]
A Lament [1863] 1853-1863 [1863]
The Proclamation "Land and Liberty" [1863] 1831-1863 [1863]
What Kind of Government Does Russia Have? [1863]
The Volga Manifesto and Russia in a State of Siege [1863]
I. Kelsiev and N. Utin [1863]
Gallows and Journals [1863]
At This Stage [1863]
Mikhail Semyonovich Shchepkin [1863]
Scandal, Soot, a Candle Snuffer, etc. [1864]
The Furies [1864]
They've Gone Completely Out of Their Minds [1864] N. G. Chernyshevsky [1864] VII Years [1864]
Government Agitation and Journalistic Police [1864] 1865 [1865]
A Letter to Emperor Alexander II [1865]
To Our Readers [1865]
The Serno-Solovyovich Case [1865]
Russia Is Still Burning [1865]
As the Year Comes to an End [1865]
Our Future Peers and Our Former Anglomaniacs [1865]
Nicholas the Orator [1865]
The First Ban, the First Warning, the First Trial! [1865] Serf Owners [1866]
Prince Sergey Grigorevich Volkonsky [1866] From Petersburg [1866] 1789 [1866]
Irkutsk and Petersburg [1866]
Gentry Benefactors [1866]
The News from Russia [1866]
5i
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
A Second Warning and A Second Godunov [1866]
A Letter to Emperor Alexander II [1866] 285
From Petersburg [1866] 287
From the Sovereign to P. P. Gagarin [1866] 291
Katkov and the Sovereign [1866] 297
A Frenzy of Denunciations [1866] 299
A Quarrel Among Enemies [1866] 300
America and Russia [1866] 303
The Question of a Plot [1866] 305
Order Triumphs! [1866-1867] 306
A New "Velvet Book" of Russian Noble Families [1867] 322
Our System of Justice [1867] 325
Moscow—Our Mother and Stepmother [1867] 327
Rivals of the Big Bell and the Big Cannon [1867] 330
The Right to Congregate—New Restrictions [1867] 331
The Shot of June 6 [1867] 332
Venerable Travelers (Part Two) [1867] 334
1857-1867 [1867] 339
Critical Essay
Alexander Herzen: Writings on the Man and His Thought
Robert Harris 343
Bibliography 371
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A Herzen Reader owes its greatest debt to Russian scholars who worked on the thirty-volume edition of Herzen's collected works (Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh). Information about the translated documents not otherwise attributed comes from their notes to the original texts. The five-volume chronicle (Letopis' zhizni i tvorchestva A. I. Gertsena) of Herzen's life and works is another valuable source; references to it indicate the volume and page number (e.g., Let 2:37). For over a century, members of the Herzen family in Europe and the United States have been extraordinarily generous with materials in their possession, and the result has been a steady increase in the availability of important documents to the editors of the works mentioned above and to the scholars who organized Herzen volumes for Liter- aturnoe nasledstvo (Literary Heritage). Their generosity also helped furnish the house-museum on Sitsev Vrazhek in Moscow, whose existence is due in no small measure to the efforts of scholar Irena Zhelvakova. Alexander Herzen was no great fan of jubilees, but he was eager to make his observations about Russia available to readers in his homeland and abroad, and to stimulate further discussion, and it is with this goal that we offer A Herzen Reader to the public. We are grateful to the University of Rochester (Kathleen Parthe) and New College, Oxford (Robert Harris), and to Northwestern University Press for helping us to complete this project.
INTRODUCTION
He awaits his readers in the future.
—Tolstoy's 1905 diary entry on Herzen
There was a time when Russian readers were divided into followers of Alexander Herzen—willing to take considerable risks to acquire and discuss his works—and his implacable enemies, who saw in him a traitor to the nation. There was a time when leading European liberals and radicals engaged him in a lively and prolonged debate, while Marx and Engels treated Herzen and his friend Mikhail Bakunin as unwelcome distractions in the lead-up to their revolution. During his life (1812-1870), Herzen survived the dogged pursuit of the tsarist secret police at home and abroad, and after his death, he overcame Lenin's embrace to reemerge in the post-Stalin era as a beacon of individual conscience, free speech, and national self-determination. Despite Herzen's enduring reputation outside Russia as the author of Past and Thoughts and From the Other Shore, Isaiah Berlin was still moved to tell an interviewer that Herzen remained an unknown thinker "because he was not translated."1 In his early twenties, Herzen wrote to Natalya Zakharina, his future wife, that he wished to see part of his soul present in every piece of writing: "let their sum total serve as my biography in hieroglyphics."2 Two centuries after this illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman was born in the momentous year of 1812, Herzen's political writing and his personal correspondence remain largely unavailable in English. A Herzen Reader will add to the Herzen narrative, with a selection of one hundred essays and editorials written between 1850 and 1867.
As the Reader begins, two years have elapsed since Herzen saw for himself the turbulent Europe of 1848 and learned of the official reaction to these events in Nicholas I's Russia. Having left his homeland for an indefinite period in 1847, Herzen was from time to time ordered to return, and then forbidden from returning. The Third Section (political police) debated the merits of kidnapping him or having the Russian government request his extradition, and more than one European state made him feel unwelcome. Both Herzen and his mother, Louisa Haag, were denied income from their properties until intervention by the Paris branch of the Rothschild banking family forced the tsar to relent. For Herzen, wealth meant the freedom to accomplish his political goals, and he also saw no great virtue in real or assumed poverty, and he enjoyed good wine, expensive cigars, and French snuff. Generous toward his family and friends, he resisted the entreaties of fellow Russians (and other political emigres), who requested—or demanded—loans, responding matter-of-factly that "money is one of my weapons, and it should not be squandered."3
The desire to please the Russian authorities and keep revolution at bay led Swiss officials to threaten the expulsion of Herzen's mother and his deaf six- year-old son Nikolay, who attended a special school in Switzerland. Herzen countered with a European-wide publicity campaign that shamed the officials into reversing their decision.4 In the turbulence of post-revolutionary Europe, even the cosmopolitan Herzen needed to be a citizen somewhere, and the Swiss canton of Freiburg finally obliged in March 1851, after substantial funds were deposited in a local bank.5 Rather than initiating a peaceful stage of his life, this turned out to be the beginning of a period of personal tragedy; in rapid succession, Herzen lost his mother and young son, and then his wife.
Isaiah Berlin claimed Past and Thoughts to be the "ark" in which Her- zen saved himself, but, for all that, it was still only the "accompaniment to Herzen's central activity: revolutionary journalism."6 After his August 1852 move to England, the forty-year-old Herzen spent several months in isolation while he decided what to do with the rest of his life, wishing to avoid the Russian pattern of beginning many projects and finishing none of them.7 For several years Herzen had worked to acquaint Europeans with progressive Russian literature (Doc. 1). Resolved to henceforth address Russia directly, he began writing his memoir in a more organized way, and established the Free Russian Press.8 In Berlin's terms, Herzen attempted, simultaneously, to save himself and his country. His memoir Past and Thoughts provides a general background to the work of the press and the personality of its chief writer, although the richest source of Herzen's thoughts about the purpose of The Polestar (Poliarnaia zvezda) and The Bell (Kolokol) can be found in the periodicals themselves and in his private correspondence.
In the memoir, we meet the Polish exiles who welcomed Herzen to London and worked tirelessly on the printing and distributing of Russian publications. We experience the early London years, when there were few customers and virtually no response from what was still a very rigid Nicho- laevan Russia. The death of Nicholas I in 1855 led Herzen to launch the almanac Polestar, which was printed with Cyrillic type acquired from the same Parisian firm that supplied official Russian printers, leading Herzen to humorously call his enterprise "The Imperial and Revolutionary Press."9
It took two additional years and the stimulus of poet Nikolay Ogaryov's arrival in London before activity reached an even higher level.
Herzen credited Ogaryov (1813-1877) with the idea of a newspaper supplement to The Polestar, which soon assumed its independent existence as The Bell.10 Friends since childhood, they were linked by their early oath on the Moscow hills to avenge the Decembrists. Presenting a united front to the outside world, their personal correspondence reveals substantial differences in tactics, priorities, judgments of people, and work habits. This decades-long relationship was, strangely enough, not weakened by the widower Herzen's liason with Ogaryov's second wife, Natalya Tuchkova- Ogaryova, with whom he had three children. By the mid-i86os, both men had tired of her difficult personality, and preferred each other's company to hers. What Herzen wrote from jail in 1834 remained true for the rest of their lives: "The worst thing for me is to be parted from Ogaryov . . . without him I am but a single volume of an unfinished epic, a mere excerpt."11
At the beginning of the reform era, Russians started sending Herzen fresh material and showing up at his door, as the newspaper grew in popularity and influence. Yakov Rostovtsev, who presided over the main Emancipation Committee, suggested that members read The Bell for its useful ideas. "While cursing us," Herzen wrote to his eldest son, the government "implements half of what we have been advocating."12 Officials from various government agencies read the paper in order to "know the enemy"; one way or another, keeping up with its contents was a necessity, and it was printed on lightweight paper to make easier its safe and prompt transport to readers.13 What Herzen calls the paper's "apogee" was not long-lived; the authorities saw how Russia was increasingly unsettled by the talk of emancipation, and they began to persecute Herzen's visitors, correspondents, and even his readers. This repression took a far more serious turn after the Polish uprising of 1863 and the first attempt on the tsar's life in 1866.
Even as the weakness of the reform program became clear by 1862, Her- zen refused to alter his moderately socialist principles and embrace the violent agenda of the newest group of Russian radicals. He subsequently refused to abandon the Poles in 1863 to satisfy his own generation of Russian liberals, proud to furnish "living proof" of protest against the "extermination of an entire people."14 Toward the end of Past and Thoughts, while wandering from one picturesque European "purgatory" to the next with no place to call his own, Herzen stoically embraced homelessness, serving out the Russian government's 1850 sentence of "perpetual exile."15 A veteran of decades of political struggle, he contemplated, with his "essential aloofness,"16 fellow exiles, including the latest Russian revolutionaries, who "throw themselves into the stream with a handbook on swimming."17 Publication of The Polestar, The Bell, and Past and Thoughts, all of which began on such a high note, came to an indeterminate and somewhat melancholy end two years before Herzen's death. At times, Herzen had considered going back to Russia, prompting Ogaryov to ask whether he would really take such a terrible risk "for a view of the fields and Staraya Konyushennaya street?"18 It was just a thought, and Herzen never acted on it. He had decided early on that his only return home would be through the Free Russian Press (Doc. 52). Scarcely a month after Herzen's death, Bakunin wrote to Herzen's oldest daughter Tata and Natalya Tuchkova-Ogaryova that the deceased was the last Russian "to act in isolation," and that the time had come for "clear thinking and collective action."19 One of Bakunin's chosen partners in this "clear thinking and collective action" was Sergey Nechaev, whom Herzen had never trusted and who turned out to be a fake revolutionary but a real murderer.
During his twenty-three years abroad, the prolific Herzen "poured out a mass of articles, letters, essays, proclamations, the best of which are original masterpieces of both journalism and art."20 The essays translated for this volume are less personal than his memoirs, and less abstractly philosophical than the longer analyses, but they are no less reflective ofHerzen's experiences and values, and carry a greater sense of urgency about abuses that needed to be publicized and corrected. Most of the translations from The Bell are editorials, a genre that Herzen virtually introduced to Russian journalism. As lead articles, they set the tone for the issue, and constituted its primary response to news from Russia. Because they are specific reactions to specific events, no two of these editorials are alike; they draw the reader in with their unique set of facts and their spirited, but logical, argumentation.21 Herzen also wrote lead articles that summarized the events of the year that had just ended (Docs. 25, 67) or that examined a longer period, from five to thirty years, in the life of the Free Russian Press or of Russia itself (Docs. 28, 52, 54, i00).
Herzen was, of course, one of Russia's first and most successful investigative journalists, and most of The Bell's 245 issues are "accusatory documents," which give an impression of "unrelieved political, cultural and moral darkness, with shocking revelations of systematic injustice, cruelty, oppression, and continuous abuses and misgovernment, some of which were actually remedied as a result of these revelations."22 He was obliged to depend on others for on-site reports, but he turned this raw material into brilliantly constructed attacks on public officials and their private supporters. Using publicity as a kind of "anti-police" force, he called to account those who punished the Russian people and who threatened him personally.23 It is hardly surprising that the Russian authorities and other opponents of meaningful reform were incensed by what appeared in the Free Russian Press, but Herzen was also criticized in print and in person by Boris Chicherin, a liberal professor, and by Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, the progressive voices of The Contemporary (Sovremennik), the most important thick journal of the reform years. Faced with conservatives who found him despicable, liberals who thought him immoderate, and the radical intelligentsia who called him naive, Herzen did not waver from positions which accorded with his openly stated values; he was happy to be corrected on facts, but never altered his principles.
Herzen defended the many exposes of government misconduct in The Bell, with some of his most explicit arguments presented in 1858-59 (Docs. 20-22). When Chernyshevsky was arrested in 1862, Herzen, himself a former political prisoner, dropped their quarrel and focused on the shame that Russia brought on itself through its treatment of a man who only wished the best for the Russian people (Doc. 64). He was appalled that Russia's liberals failed to offer the fallen man their support. In their private correspondence, Herzen and Ogaryov frequently debated the function of their paper; for Herzen, its role was "uncompromising propaganda," a profound sermon which "could be transformed into political agitation, but was not itself agitation."24
During the second half of the 1850s, while the reforms were under discussion, Herzen's essays offered a nuanced picture of Alexander II. At the beginning of the new tsar's reign in 1855, Herzen had made it clear that it should not matter whence liberation came; Herzen was principled, but not rigid or dogmatic. His letters to the tsar were respectful and positive, understanding that change from above was the preferred nonviolent alternative. Still, there was ample evidence by 1858 that conservative figures surrounding Alexander II continued to influence the censorship, the universities, and other institutions. When Herzen's elaborately planned London celebration of the March 1861 emancipation announcement was ruined by news of bloody repression in Poland, it was rightly seen as a poor omen. The government's subsequent response to fires in St. Petersburg, upheaval among students and peasants, and the Polish uprising of 1863 bore no signs of a progressive spirit. For the 1867 essay "Our System of Justice" (Doc. 94) one of The Bell's correspondents provided evidence that even when the criminal chamber recommended moderate sentences, the State Senate substantially increased them, while military tribunals routinely handed out corporal punishment and even death sentences. The exalted tone often used by memoirists and historians to describe the Russian judicial reforms of the 1860s is absent from Herzen's account, especially when the inauguration of a modern court system coincided with the closed proceedings and vindictive atmosphere surrounding the case of Dmitry Karakozov.
A dozen of the hundred essays in this volume are reflections on this first assassination attempt against Alexander II on April 4, 1866. Herzen's initial reaction (Doc. 80) was disapproval of such individual "surprises" as a way of changing history. "The shot was insane, but what is the moral condition of a state when its fate can be altered by chance actions, which cannot be foreseen or prevented, exactly because they are insane?" (Doc. 82). Three years earlier, a group of young Russians visiting England had offered to kill the tsar, but Herzen convinced them to abandon the plan.25 He called Karakozov a "fanatic" who did much more harm than good by bringing the reform era to an abrupt conclusion. That the peasant Komissa- rov, who reportedly deflected the shot, was elevated to the nobility seemed absurd to Herzen. He reminds his reader that while the tsar escaped harm, Nikolay Serno-Solovyovich, the founder of the first Land and Liberty group and a member of The Contemporary's editorial staff, lay dying in Siberian exile. Having resolved early on to put information-gathering above ideological abstractions, Herzen developed the ability to vividly juxtapose facts and events, which became one of his greatest strengths as a political analyst.
Herzen's main point in the essays on Karakozov from 1866 and 1867 is that there was no conspiracy, no matter how hard the Investigative Commission tried to manufacture one (Docs. 82, 84, 86, 91). Therefore, no justification existed for the widespread repression in the wake of the April 4 shot (Docs. 85, 88, 92). He deplored the efforts of the formerly liberal Mikhail Katkov to whip up enthusiasm for Karakozov's execution; the rhetoric in The Moscow Gazette may remind modern readers of Katkov's professional descendants during the 1930s (Docs. 87, 88). Herzen asks "who can fail to see that we were right in pointing out all the absurdity of bringing socialism, nihilism, positivism, realism, materialism, journal articles, student dissertations, etc. into the Karakozov case?" He even laments the split in the conservative forces, pitting Moscow against Petersburg, because political truth and national unity suffered as a result. "Won't this enormous em- pire—whose peripheries are held together by lead and blood . . . crack at its very center?" (Doc. 89).
At the time, only an incomplete record of the investigation and trial was available even to pro-government journalists; a more thorough recent study of the archives in Claudia Verhoeven's The Odd Man Karakozov adds interesting details to the picture painted by Herzen. While the lengthy secret dossier points to the Russian Free Press as one of the foreign stimuli for Karakozov's act, the condensed version published at the time left out Herzen's name; in Russia, he could not be mentioned officially even to cast blame.26 The Moscow Gazette still felt free to speculate on the failed assassin as an agent of the Russian revolutionaries Herzen, Ogaryov, and Bakunin, with their links to radical Polish circles, while government officials spread a rumor that Ogaryov was the young villain's relation.27 The numerous searches carried out in the hunt for co-conspirators turned up illegal Russian publications and photos of the heroic editors.28 At the end of her monograph, Verhoeven focuses on the "odd" nature of Karakozov's act. When asked by the tsar what he wanted, his answer was "Nothing," underscoring the terrorists' belief that the tsar had no power to act; Karakozov's vision on April 4, i866, was of "power's void."29 In "Order Triumphs!" one of Herzen's final essays on the subject, a similar observation is made: "The echo of Karakozov's shot exposed a terrifying vacuum in the Winter Palace" (Doc. 92).
The translated essays from The Bell are presented in chronological order, but out of their original context, since the biweekly issues carried material by Ogaryov and others, along with reports and letters from Russia. The commentary at the beginning of each essay addresses the question of reading in context, but for Herzen the articles were also contributions to an ongoing discussion with fellow Russians, a vigorous debate that began in student groups of the i830s, continued most famously in Moscow and its environs in the i840s, and never ceased while he drew breath. He even refused to have his memoir called a chronicle, insisting to Ivan Turgenev that it was a conversation, full of "facts, and tears, and theory."30 In an i868 letter he told his daughter Tata that "nothing is as boring as a monologue," and Herzen dreaded boredom most of all.31 He enjoyed leaping from topic to topic, from Russian peasants to Polish rebels, and from ridiculous government ceremonies to the censorship, all the while deftly parrying blows from the right and left. Along with the Russian government's weak commitment to reform, Herzen addressed the desert-like sterility of homegrown Russian journalism.32 Accused by some of trying to dominate political discourse, he responded that while demanding and exercising freedom of speech, he did not claim an exclusive "concession on Russian speech in foreign lands" (Doc. 2i).
The strength of the essays in A Herzen Reader comes from astute political commentary married to the formidable literary talent of a man with a deeply personal approach to history; Thomas Masaryk saw this as an unusual and unbeatable combination that could not fail to attract attention.33 Dostoevsky characterized Herzen as, in all things, first and foremost a poet.34 Herzen's "lyrical journalism" was sufficiently distinctive to make unworkable a proposal to publish several essays in Russia under a pseudonym; it was clear that the author's "voice" was easily recognizable, and everyone knew the identity behind the pseudonym Iskander.35 The unique Herzen style comes through in all genres, but it is perhaps strongest in his lead articles, where the goal is more immediate and the timing precise, resembling to a degree the telegrams that were altering the speed—and even the nature—of mid- nineteenth-century communication.36 He placed a great value on precision, even "terseness," which was for many a welcome change from the "opaque, intractable atmosphere of so much Russian thought."37 For Herzen, who funded the Free Russian Press from his inheritance, and who placed at risk himself and others involved in its publication and distribution networks, every word counted and cost; the editorial was never a leisurely literary form. Each comparison and ironic twist, each well-chosen foreign expression, was there to address a weighty matter.
"Vivos voco" (I summon the living) serves as the epigraph to Herzen's announcement in The Polestar of a supplement called The Bell that would commence in mid-1857 (Docs. 9, 10). The Polestar offered hitherto repressed manuscripts and had a retrospective orientation, looking back to the Nicholaevan era and, in particular, the martyred Decembrists; in 1855 Herzen called its goal "a continuation of the legend and the work" (Doc. 4). In contrast, The Bell was entirely forward-looking; the Russia of both the bullying Nicholas I and the soft-spoken historian Timofey Granovsky had passed away, and the possibilities for change were palpable, even from faraway London. Herzen's use of the phrase "Vivos voco" can stand on its own, but he could safely assume that educated readers would recognize this as a borrowing from Friedrich Schiller's 1798 poem "The Song of the Bell" ("Das Lied von der Glocke"). Schiller himself had appropriated the Latin phrase traditionally inscribed on church bells (he apparently knew it from a fifteenth-century church bell in Schaffhausen, Switzerland). In full, the inscription reads:
Vivos voco. I summon the living.
Mortuous plango. I weep for the dead.
Fulgura frango. I shatter the lightning.
This epigraph perfectly describes the "voice" of The Bell, with its unrelenting insistence on greater participation in the process of bringing change to Russia. In the 1857 announcement "summoning the living," Herzen explains that The Polestar came out too rarely, while "events in Russia are moving quickly, and they must be caught on the fly and discussed right away." An urgent tone entered Herzen's style and remained there for as long as he published this newspaper. He reiterates the general principles governing the two publications: "everywhere, in all matters, to be on the side of freedom against coercion, the side of reason against prejudice, the side of science against fanaticism, and the side of advancing peoples against backward governments." The urgent and necessary steps are announced in capital letters:
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION FROM CENSORSHIP
FREEDOM OF THE SERFS FROM THE LANDOWNERS
FREEDOM FROM CORPORAL PUNISHMENT
The editor would not limit himself, though, and "The Bell . . . will ring out from whatever touches it—absurd decrees or the foolish persecutions of religious dissidents, theft by high officials or the senate's ignorance. The comical and the criminal, the evil and the ignorant—all of these come under The Bell." He asks fellow countrymen who share his love for Russia "not only to listen to our Bell but to take their own turn in ringing it."
In reading the essays selected for A Herzen Reader—and in comparing them to other Herzen writing that appeared in The Bell—what is striking is the forcefulness of the style and the frequent mood swings, offering indignation, outrage, irony, sarcasm, satire (Docs. 11, 36, 43, 99), bitter scorn, wistfulness, and sympathy, alongside encouragement, civic prayers, and priceless puns (Docs. 27, 34, 57). In 1947, Ioann Novich spoke of the "assorted literary references, analogies, and comparisons" familiar to Herzen's readers, and goes on to say that the author's expressiveness was found in "the clash of naturally contrasting attributes, images and juxtapositions."38 The somewhat "extravagant vocabulary" was full of foreign words and phrases, but often no more than one would expect in the speech of an educated Russian member of the gentry who grew up in a trilingual household and spent long years in Europe—what was different was the cause they served.39 Herzen felt at home in other languages, but Engels, at least, complained that Herzen's French was "totally repulsive."40 For the most part, the journalism translates with relative ease, although the title of a lead article (Doc. 33) from the April 15, 1861, issue posed a challenge. In the end, the English version of " 'Kolokol,' Kovalevskii, Kostomarov, kopiia, kanni- baly" preserved most, but not all, of the alliteration ("The Bell, Kovalevsky, Kostomarov, a Copy, and Cannibals").
Herzen's laughter is "no mere diversion," but "his alternative to doctrinal or pedagogical fervor."41 In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin remarked on the way that Herzen was drawn to the power of laughter, although, as he notes, "Herzen was not acquainted with the laughing Middle Ages."42 Bakhtin's first chapter begins with an epigraph from "A Letter Criticizing The Bell" (Doc. 14), stating the need for a history of laughter.
Laughter is one of the most powerful weapons against something that is obsolete but is still propped up by God knows what. . . . I repeat what I said previously [in Letters from France and Italy]: "what a man cannot laugh about without falling into blasphemy or fearing the pangs of conscience is a fetish. . . ."
Laughter is no joking matter, and we will not give it up. . . . It would be extraordinarily interesting to write the history of laughter. . . . Laughter is a leveler, and people don't want that, afraid of being judged according to their individual merits.
Later in the same chapter Bakhtin refers to other "profound" comments on the subject by Herzen in the essay 'VERY DANGEROUS!!!" (Doc. 22).
Laughter is convulsive, and if, during the first minute a man laughs at everything, during the second moment he blushes and despises his laughter and that which caused it. . . . Without a doubt, laughter is one of the most powerful means of destruction. . . . From laughter idols fall. . . . With its revolutionary leveling power, laughter is terribly popular and catchy; having begun in a modest study, it moves in widening circles to the limits of literacy.
Herzen exploited a number of comic possibilities in his writing, "from a brilliant joke to cruel sarcasm."43 At times he offered skilled parody of the bombastic style (vysprennyi slog) of official communiques (Doc. 27). Irony was by far his favorite verbal weapon, a form of "controlled intensity."44 In notebook entries on irony from 1970-71, Bakhtin described a kind of laughter that "lifts the barrier and clears the path," which was Herzen's aim, to make a more open political debate work for Russia's future.45 His style in The Bell is remarkable for the "purposefulness" and "accuracy" of his rage.46 Rejecting the "false monastic theory of passivity" that he saw in some of his fellow Russians in the early 1840s, Herzen boldly declared that he "loved" his anger as much as they loved a sense of peace.47 Her- zen professed an interest in the further development of "our own native irony, irony-the-consoler and the avenger" (rodnaia nasha ironiia—ironiia uteshitel'nitsa, mstitel'nitsa).48 In the midst of the public debate with Boris Chicherin, Herzen proclaimed his goal to be "not just Russia's revenge, but its irony" (Doc. 21).
Herzen's use of irony is bound up with his awareness of the pain (bol) experienced by a Russian people yearning for liberty. In "Ends and Beginnings," a series of open letters to Turgenev from the early 1860s, he characterized the preliminary nature of work that he and Ogaryov had undertaken.
Consciousness . . . is a very different thing from practical applications. Pain does not give treatment but calls for it. The pathology may be good, but the therapy may be bad. . . . To demand medicine from a man who points out some evil is exceedingly precipitate. . . . We are not the doctors, we are the pain; what will come of our moaning and groaning we do not know; but the pain has been declared.49
Isaiah Berlin, who valued the Russian intelligentsia's passion for thrashing ideas out in spontaneous discussion, acknowledged Herzen as a "vigorous" presence in his life, with his "wit, malice, imagination."50 While many admired Herzen's targeted witticisms in his own time and afterward and refer to his hearty and infectious laughter, even his friends encouraged him to show some restraint, and his ideological opponents attributed his verbal humor to a lack of basic decency and even of emotional balance.51 Ivan Aksakov spoke for many when he complained of Herzen's "morbid desire to be witty at all times," and an article about the intelligentsia in The News (Vesti) mentioned Herzen's high-spirited sarcasm, while adding that he was a poor philosopher and an even worse political thinker.52
When government officials considered in late 1857 the possibility of launching a specifically anti-Herzen magazine, the head of the Third Department reminded the minister of enlightenment that it would be difficult to achieve the same level of popularity with a public that voraciously read "reprimands, abuse, and mockery. . . . But what would prevent an opposing sexton from ringing out sharply, amusingly, and cleverly in answer to this? Those who read the London Bell—or at least half of them—will be curious about finding out what his rival has to say."53 A successful journalistic challenge to The Bell would have to come from one or more equally formidable writers who would be free to speak their minds. This proposal by the poet and censor Fyodor Tyutchev was rebuffed by the head of the Third Department, who said that it was the equivalent of killing oneself out of a fear of being killed.54 Another suggestion, to reprint articles from The Bell in order to refute them, was also judged unworkable.55 In the end, the decision was made not to try matching Herzen's approach, but to find a way of stopping him, whether by bribery, threats, or some other means.56
For Herzen, nothing leisurely or long-winded could be permitted in the printed messages sent back to Russia. In a letter to Ogaryov, Herzen insisted that in publitsistika "one must sharply cut, throw out, and, most importantly, one must compress phrases." This remark conveys the energy of Herzen's writing, by means of which he launched phrases like missiles in order to strike the enemy.57 Vasily Rozanov wrote bitterly in pre-revolutionary years of Herzen's introduction of "a whole stream of expressions into Russia," of being the "founder of political nonsense," and a bad influence on high- school students.58 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in a newspaper article of i965, noted that in Herzen "we find a great number of bold formations which firmed the step of Russian letters and reached out for the unexpected, concise, and energetic control of words."59 Brevity and well-aimed wit become strategies, with each phrase and punctuation mark playing a role in his journalism. There is a decided preference for the exclamation, which appears in the titles of Herzen essays (e.g., "St. George's Day! St. George's Day!" "Forward! Forward!" "Down with Birch Rods!", "Russian Blood Is Flowing!" "A Giant is Awakening!" "Order Triumphs!"), and even more frequently within the body of his essays.60
Herzen's style is both emphatic and interrogative, as he poses numerous questions, some genuine, others with the goal of rhetorically engaging his readers. One feels the presence of a masterful prosecutor, arguing his case before the court of public opinion, as well as an inspired preacher trying to get the faithful to sit up in their seats and pay close attention, because the stakes were so high. To sustain a style whose essence was more oral than written, Herzen required "supporters, opponents, conversationalists, and readers."61 The author's acceptance of multiple voices and of dialogue over monologue was already evident in his essay From the Other Shore, something that had impressed the otherwise skeptical Dostoevsky. In the process of gathering material for what eventually became the novel Demons, Dostoevsky found Herzen to be essential reading.62 His own publication Diary of a Writer (i873-8i) carried on The Bell's practice of reacting to specific events in a passionately political, and yet still very literary voice.63 Dostoevsky lacked Herzen's gift for irony, but took his sarcasm to a much higher level.
Herzen mistrusted oratory and rhetoric, but he understood the power of direct address and saved its impact for his public letters to the tsar and, on one famous occasion, to the empress (Doc. i9). In these letters he exercised considerable control over his style, muting any strong emotion except deep concern for the Russian people. His conservative foes criticized the brazen inappropriateness of unsolicited advice to the imperial family, while radicals resented the respectful tone and the implication that reform was preferable to revolution. For his first letter to Alexander II (Doc. 5), Herzen took as his epigraph an i823 poem of encouragement to the five-year-old Alexander Nikolaevich, who would likely assume the throne one day. This was hardly an innocent gesture, since the poet, Kondraty Ryleev, had taken part in the Decembrist rebellion two years later and died as one of the five martyrs of i826. Despite this provocative beginning, the letter itself is conciliatory in tone.64
. . . there is one thing in common between your banner and mine— namely that love for the people about which we speak.
And in its name I am prepared to make a huge sacrifice. . . .
I am prepared to wait, to step back a bit, to speak about something else, as long as I have a real hope that you will do something for Russia.
Your majesty, grant freedom to the Russian word. . . .
Give land to the peasants. It already belongs to them. . . .
Hurry! Save the serf from future crimes, save him from the blood that he will have to spill. . . .
Your majesty, if these lines reach you, read them without malice, alone, and then think about them. You do not often get to hear the sincere voice of a free Russian man.
Ten years later, the letter of May 2, 1865 (Doc. 68), at first addressed the tsar with empathy on the death of the heir, Nikolay Alexandrovich; Herzen, after all, had ample experience of personal tragedy. After a few sentences, however, Herzen compares the tsar's loss to that of Polish families whose sons died in the 1863 rebellion. Alexander is praised for the emancipation, and then reminded of the sins he committed against his own and other peoples, for which he must atone.
Forgiveness is not needed for your innocent victims or the suffering martyrs. It is necessary for you. You cannot go forward in a humane way without an amnesty from them.
Sovereign, be worthy of it!
The following year saw a final letter to Alexander II (Doc. 84), prompted by the government's frenzied search for conspirators after Karakozov's attempt on the tsar's life.
. . . let them call me crazy and weak, but I am writing to you because it is so difficult for me to abandon the idea that you have been drawn by others to this . . . terrible injustice that is going on around you. . . .
In all likelihood this is my last letter to you, Sovereign. Read it. Only endless and agonizing grief about the destruction of youthful, fresh strength under the impure feet of profane old men . . . only this pain could make me stop you once more on the road and once more raise my voice.
The number of the "living" summoned by Herzen with The Bell fluctuated during the 1860s and the great bell went silent a few years before the writer's death, not, he explained, because of his enemies, but the result of being abandoned by his friends.65 In a civilization that responded to the bold gesture and the heroic deed (podvig), Herzen had reached across great distances to project his ideas back to Russia, and had "stylistically conquered fate."66 He wrote in Past and Thoughts that when he returned from administrative exile in 1839 "any action was impossible . . . but, to make up for this, great was the power of speech."67 In a 1938 letter, Isaiah Berlin speculated that "if anyone were alive now who talked as he must have done . . . one would never listen to anyone else."68 Herzen preferred discussions among a small circle of close associates and visitors at home and abroad, and spoke only infrequently in public. He was able, however, to bring not just his political analysis but his confident voice to the lead articles that made The Bell so controversial and so influential.
Despite the many decades it took before Herzen's works were easily and legally available in his homeland, interest in him never flagged for long, as each generation found new reasons to listen to his vigorous commentary on Russia. The greatest response to his 1861 call to the intelligentsia to "go to the people" (Doc. 39) came in 1873, three years after his death. Russians traveling to Europe took the opportunity to find his forbidden writings and immerse themselves in his thought before returning home to a still-authoritarian state. Once there had been a stream of visitors to his London residence; now the pilgrims went to his grave in Nice. Fyodor Rodi- chev (1854-1933), an aristocrat who became a liberal leader in the Duma, "discovered" Herzen in Berlin in 1872, and what he read inspired him for a lifetime.69 Characters in Russian novels were said to keep copies of The Bell at home in order to give themselves a progressive air; what could not be a subject of serious public debate could appear as a slightly risque object. The revolutionary year of 1905 and the four Dumas that followed brought his works before a more politicized public that was looking for immediate answers about Russia's future direction. In Tolstoy's opinion, the intelligentsia was so degraded that they were unfit to understand Herzen's writings.70 Trotsky gave Herzen his due for the emphasis on the peasants' "collectivist traditions," but any "cult" was out of the question, because all authority must be subject to "constant reexamination."71 Gorky was more enthusiastic, calling Herzen "an entire province, a country amazingly rich in ideas."72 The authors of the seminal Landmarks (Vekhi) anthology of 1909 found Herzen a frequent point of reference in charting the intelligentsia's political and spiritual evolution. The man who was deemed by many to be a guide for troubled times was excoriated by writer Vasily Rozanov as the villain who helped destroy a millennium-old civilization.
The events of 1917 elevated Herzen to even greater heights, as the new nation grew into a land dotted with "Herzen streets" and "Herzen institutes." In 1920, the fiftieth anniversary of his death received substantial attention, and during an evening dedicated to the iubilei, the Soviet commissar of enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, declared that Herzen had ceased being just a tourist attraction for Russians in Europe, and was now a living and healing spring for his homeland. Toward the end of his remarks, Lunacharsky made serious use of the sacred cadences so beloved of the militantly atheist regime, calling Herzen a life-giving prophet. "We summon you to help us, O great writer, great heart and great mind; we summon you to rise out of the grave and help us, to aid us in this time of mighty events."73 A book from that same year referred to Herzen as a new Moses, and demanded that his precious remains be returned to "red Moscow." The author did, however, object to the series of "ridiculous" letters Herzen had written to the imperial family, an unsurprising comment, seeing that the descendants of the addressees had recently been executed.74
The early Soviet era brought the first substantial edition in Russia of Herzen's writings, assembled and edited by M. K. Lemke. In the years that followed, dedicated scholars organized their archival discoveries into multiple issues of Literary Heritage (Literaturnoe nasledstvo), and published a second edition of his collected works as well as a five-volume chronology of his life. The scholarly work was often of high quality, despite the fact that its sanction came from Lenin's pre-revolutionary essay on the occasion of Herzen's centenary, one of numerous tributes made that year.75 For Lenin, Herzen was not the perfect revolutionary ancestor, but he was more useful and less troublesome than Bakunin and the anarchists.
In Russian circles abroad, those who fled Lenin and Stalin's Russia saw Herzen as "the first to look on emigration as a base from which one could try to influence intellectual and political developments at home" and the "father of political emigration."76 A Herzen Foundation in Amsterdam published oppositional political materials for transport back to the Soviet Union, and, during its early years, Radio Liberty featured broadcasts on the contributions of Herzen, Korolenko, and others to Russia's pre-1917 democratic heritage. In a reversal of circumstances, by the mid-1980s, a different set of emigres at Radio Liberty placed blame for the violence of Bolshevism squarely at the feet of Herzen and Chernyshevsky.77
Memoirs of the Soviet era, the best of which only became available after 1985, reveal an unofficial side to readership in the Soviet Union. Irina Pa- perno found that scores of Soviet memoirists, especially those who wrote "for the drawer," saw in Herzen's "story of intimate life embedded in catastrophic history" the inspiration for their own narratives.78 In August 1941, poet Vera Inber spoke by radio to inhabitants of a blockaded Leningrad; she rallied them with Herzen's tales of an 1812 Moscow under siege and of the Battle of Borodino, tales he heard repeatedly as a child, becoming his Iliad and Odyssey and the focus of the first chapter of his memoirs. Inber told listeners that Russia "was creating for future generations new Odysseys, new Iliads," and that they would be the heroes of these epics.79
Lidiya Chukovskaya's reminiscences preserve conversations with Anna Akhmatova about their mutual love of Herzen's style and their respect for his honesty. When Chukovskaya stopped by Akhmatova's apartment after work, the poet noticed a portfolio of Herzen materials and demanded that her friend open it at random and read aloud, so that Akhmatova could commit to memory the "sound" of his prose.80 Although they both loved Past and Thoughts (minus the maudlin passages about Herwegh), they also regretted the neglect by Soviet readers of the rest of his work. Granted access to Vyacheslav Molotov's abandoned library, Rachel Polonsky discovered the Lemke edition of Herzen, begun before the Revolution and completed afterward; the only reader's notations she found were in the index and a volume of the memoirs.81
Chukovskaya called The Bell "a collection of articles that were epics, articles that were poetry, epigrams, laments, funeral orations, prayers for the dead, prophetic songs, and formulas that were so concise that they read like proverbs," most of them as relevant to the Russia of i962 as they had been a century earlier.82 In a conversation about how people behaved during the i937 purges, Akhmatova recalled Herzen's i867 reproach to those who not only failed to find words of support for political prisoners but who could not even remain silent at such moments (dazhe ne nashli molchaniia).83 Herzen's call for conscience and decency was heard in the years after Stalin's death. In Zhivago's Children, a study of the post-Stalinist intelligentsia, Vladislav Zubok charts Herzen's influence during the Thaw. While politically aware young people read widely from the nineteenth-century canon, "their main inspiration came from Alexander Herzen and other Russian socialists," and they concluded that "the existing regime was a horrible deviation from revolutionary ideals."84 A monograph on the final year of Herzen's life written in Moscow by Raisa Orlova, the wife of Lev Kopelev and active in dissident circles, could only be published abroad.85
Herzen remained a rich source of inspiration for the dissident movement in the 1960s, with his example of a successful end run around censorship and border controls sending a quite different message than the regime could possibly have wished. In Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle, Inno- kenty Volodin's uncle asks the well-educated young man whether he has ever read Herzen "properly," restating the crucial question of conscience, whether there are limits to patriotism, and whether it extends to aiding the government in the destruction of its people.86 When a small group of Russians protested the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in i968, they were inspired by Herzen's slogan in support of the Poles: "To Your Freedom and Ours."87 Alexander Yanov credits his 1974 Young Communist article—with its repeated references to Herzen's political courage in countering pseudo- patriotism—with contributing to his own expulsion from the country.88
Herzen and Ogaryov composed a joint letter in 1863 to the impatient Ba- kunin, saying that they saw their role as holding firm to the banner until the dawn of a better day. Six years later, Herzen wrote to Ogaryov that he did not believe that they had always been effective. "Sometimes we were right on target, but at other times we were working for the 20th century."89 In the end, Herzen's confidence in the long-term impact of their publications appears to have been more than justified.
In February 1837, Herzen wrote to his beloved Natalya from exile in Vyatka: "I'm already 24 years old, and I still don't know what to do. . . . To write or to serve. The literary world is unsatisfying because it isn't real life, and government service—how much humiliation would there be before I reached a point where my service would be of use? These . . . are the questions I have been preoccupied with lately."90 His guiding principles involved greater honesty than was possible in government service, and more practical goals than could be presented effectively in fiction or literary criticism.91 Herzen obviously found a way to combine writing and service to the people; practically speaking, this was only possible in exile, on another shore, where he could openly serve the "second government" that Russian literature had become.
Unlike many Russian writers and critics of the mid-nineteenth century, Herzen rejected the lure of inserting politics between the lines, believing that under well-formed governments, writers seek not to mask their thoughts, but to express them clearly.92 When Herzen was still being taught at home, his tutor brought him forbidden verses by Pushkin and Ryleev. "I used to copy them in secret. . . . (and now I print them openly!)."93 In an 1844 diary entry, he mentions an article by Mikhail Bakunin that had arrived from abroad. "Here is the language of a free man, which seems quite strange to us. . . . We are used to allegory, to a bold word intra muros, and we are amazed by the daring speech of a Russian man, like a person sitting in a dark hovel is startled by the light."94 He also rejected de Custine's popular myth of Russia as a mysterious, undecipherable land; Herzen strove to make sense of it for both Europeans and for the Russians themselves. In remembering the "Remarkable Decade," Pavel Annenkov said that in Russia, where keeping a low profile was the wisest strategy, Herzen's values and criticisms were "undisguised."95 As his work abroad wound down in 1868, Herzen summed it up in a typically matter-of-fact way: "It wasn't a conspiracy, it was a printing press."96
With Past and Thoughts Alexander Herzen created one of literature's great memoirs. From the Other Shore, "The Russian People and Socialism," "On the Development of Revolutionary Thought in Russia," and other essays made a significant contribution to European thought between the French and Russian revolutions. Articles in The Polestar and editorials in The Bell are major documents in the history of nineteenth-century Russian political journalism, not part of a conspiracy, but one very eloquent Russian's service to his country, an interactive "encyclopedia of civic freedom."97 It is a pleasure to introduce these previously untranslated writings to a new audience, which, as Tolstoy said in 1905, Herzen so richly deserves.
Notes
The original Russian in the introduction's epigraph is "On uzhe ozhidaet svoikh chi- tatelei vperedi," Oct. 12, 1905, L. N. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestevnnaia literatura, 1960-65), 20:224, 506-7. On Oct. 18, 1905, Tolstoy wrote to Vladimir Stasov from Yasnaya Polyana, thanking him for the suggestion to reread Herzen. In this turbulent year, Stasov had felt that Herzen's writings allowed him to once again "see the sun and warm himself' (Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 18:368-70).
Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin: Recollections of an Historian of Ideas (London: Phoenix, 1992), 175.
A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: ANSSSR, 1954-66), 21:76.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 21:300-303, 314; 26:13. The young radical Alexander Serno-Solovyovich complained that, while turning down the pleas from destitute emigres, Herzen could discuss socialism as he dined on caviar and champagne. As cited in: Martin Miller, The Russian Revolutionary Emigres (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 141.
Let 1:522-31, 540-42 (this refers to the first of five volumes chronicling Herzen's life and work; see the entry under Letopis' zhizni i tvorchestva A. I. Gertsena in the bibliography).
Let 3:19.
Introduction to the four-volume edition ofAlexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968), i:xxvi, xxxvii.
Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 2:996-97, 3:1023-26.
Let 2:119-24.
Irena Zhelvakova, Gertsen (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2010), 386.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. 1, 265. The most recent account of the foundation of the Press can be found in Fran^oise Kunka, Alexander Herzen and the Free Russian Press in London 1852 to 1866 (Saarbrticken: LAP Lambert Academic Publishers, 2011).
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 2i:28.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. 2, 4i6.
Let 3:53.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. 2, 449.
Let 1:589; Let 2:20, 48. In a March 10 (Feb. 26) 1867 letter to Ogaryov from Italy, Herzen said that a visit from his friend would be welcome, but hardly possible, since he
had no set residence of his own (" 'u menia' net u menia"), Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 29:bk. i, 58.
E. Lampert, Studies in Rebellion (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, i957), i79-
Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 3:i44i, П453. This comment is reminiscent of his earlier criticism of the Petrashevtsy, a Petersburg progressive group arrested in 3:849 that included a young Dostoevsky: "They wanted to have harvests in return for the intention to sow" (My Past and Thoughts, 2:978).
Andrei Root, Gertsen i traditsii Vol'noi russkoi pressy (Kazan: Izdatel'stvo Kazan- skogo universiteta, 200i), 2П4.
The letter was dated Feb. 2i, i870, and is cited in Michael Confino, Daughter of a Revolutionary: Natalie Herzen and the Bakunin-Nechayev Circle, trans. Hilary Sternberg and Lydia Bott (LaSalle, 1ll.: Library, i973), i63-64.
Isaiah Berlin, "A Revolutionary Without Fanaticism," in The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 93.
Root, Gertsen i traditsii Vol'noi russkoi pressy, especially chapter 2, "Pervaia russkaia svobodnaia gazeta 'Kolokol' (i857-i867): Dvizhenie publitsisticheskoi mysli Gertsena," which carefully analyzes both the shorter editorials and the longer summary articles. Lampert compared Herzen, who "never said the same thing twice," to Bakunin, who constantly repeated himself (Lampert, Studies in Rebellion, i95).
Lampert, Studies in Rebellion, i87.
Let 3:255.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. i, 3i6-i8.
Let 3:595; Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vols. 4i-42:4i9-25.
Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 23.
Let 4:254.
Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov, 2i, 45, 84, ii8.
Ibid., П78-79.
Let 2:3i6-i8.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 29: 272.
32 . Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. 2, 449.
Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (London: George Allen and Unwin, i96i), i:384-85, 409, 426.
From an April 5, i870, letter to Strakhov, cited in Raisa Orlova, Poslednii god zhizni Gertsena (New York: Chalidze, i982), 2i-22. Irena Zhelvakova refers to a list of more than 300 literary references in The Bell, which was compiled for the facsimile edition of the newspaper. See Zhelvakova, Gertsen (Zhizn' zamechatel'nykh liudei) (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 20i0), 434.
Orlova, Poslednii god, 3; Let 5:259.
In an i857 letter to Alexander II about a book that defamed the Decembrists, Her- zen characterized modern authoritarian states with unreformed political institutions as "Chinghiz Khan plus the telegraph." See Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, i3:38.
Lampert, Studies in Rebellion, i90, i95. Lampert makes much of the resemblance to Voltaire, whom Herzen read in his father Ivan Yakovlev's library. He notes that, unlike Voltaire, Herzen was "saddened by what he knew" (i9i). For another characterization of Herzen's style, see Miller, The Russian Revolutionary Emigres, i80.
Ioann Novich, A. I. Gertsen: Stenogramma publichnoi lektsii, prochitannoi 4 aprelia 1947 goda v Dome Soiuzov v Moskve (Moscow, i947), 2i.
Lampert, Studies in Rebellion, 196. Turgenev judged Herzen's style as "monstrously incorrect," although lively and appropriate to the message (Lampert, 196). Her- zen, in turn, criticized the politics of Turgenev's novels, in private and in public.
Let 5:171. From a January 1869 letter to Marx.
Lampert, Studies in Rebellion, 174.
M. M. Bakhtin, "Rabelais in the History of Laughter," chapter 1 of Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 59, 92.
Iakov El'sberg, Gertsen: Zhizn' i tvorchestvo, 4th rev. ed. (Moscow: Khudozhestven- naia literatura, 1963), 537-38. Given El'sberg's sinister reputation, it is fairly certain that Herzen would have felt uncomfortable in his critical embrace.
Lampert, Studies in Rebellion, 190. For some key examples of irony, see Docs. 55, 78, and 86.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Essays, trans. Vern McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 135.
El'sberg, Gertsen, 539, 543.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 22:98.
From his preface to his 1858 publication of works by Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov and Alexander Radishchev that had been banned in Russia. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 13:272. His comments on "native irony" refer to Radishchev's Journey from Petersburg to Moscow.
Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 4:1698. See also 2:628, 808, 3:1065, and 1070. The theme came up often in Herzen's writing, in comments about Chicherin, Prou- dhon, and others, who seemed surer than he was of the most effective remedies for achieving political health. This well-known formula was a favorite of Yuri Trifonov. See the record of a 1980 conversation with critic Lev Anninsky: Iurii Trifonov, Kak nashe slovo otzovetsia (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1985).
Isaiah Berlin, Flourishing: Letters 1928-1946, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto and Windus, 2004), 68, 239, 258, 269.
Let 3:238, 449.
The first observation was cited by Michael Katz in the introduction to Who Is to Blame? A Novel in Two Parts, his translation of Herzen's 1846 novel (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 35. The second dates from 1869; see Let 5:195-96.
Let 2:384.
Let 3:382.
Let 3:286.
Let 2:450.
Novich, A. I. Gertsen, 21.
Vasily Rozanov, "Fallen Leaves," in The Apocalypse of Our Times and Other Writings, trans. Robert Payne and Nikita Romanoff (New York: Praeger, 1977), 205.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "Ne obychai degtem shchi belit', na to smetana," Literat- urnaia Gazeta, Nov. 4, 1965. Translated by Donald Fiene for Russian Literature Triquar- terly 11 (1975): 264-69.
Docs. 3, 7, 29, 35, 39, and 92, respectively.
Orlova, Poslednii god, 29. Martin Miller reminds us that in The Polestar for 1855, Herzen issued a warm invitation to his readers, saying that the doors were wide open and all arguments were summoned (The Russian Revolutionary Emigres, 179).
Let 4:390-96.
See Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's "Diary of a Writer" and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), as well as his introductions to the full and condensed versions of the Diary's translation: "Introductory Study: Dostoevsky's Great Experiment," in Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, 2 vols., trans. and annotated Kenneth Lantz, 1-117 (Evanston, 1ll.: Northwestern University Press, 1993); and "Editor's Introduction: The Process and Composition of a Writer's Diary," in Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer's Diary, one-volume abridged edition, trans. and annotated Kenneth Lantz, xix-lxiii (Evanston, 1ll.: Northwestern University Press, 2009).
In 1837, the heir to the throne visited Vyatka, to which Herzen had been exiled. Herzen was detailed to guide the tsarevich and his tutor, the poet Zhukovsky, through an exhibit of local products; soon afterward, Zhukovsky was able to bring about Herzen's transfer to Vladimir. See My Past and Thoughts, 1:278-82.
Let 5:172.
This was said of the rural writer Viktor Astaf'ev after his death; from an unsigned obituary in Kul'tura, December 2001.
Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 4:1763.
Berlin, Flourishing, 280.
Kermit McKenzie, "The Political Faith of Fedor Rodichev," in Essays on Russian Liberalism, ed. Charles E. Timberlake (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972), 49. The Russian-Jewish writer S. An-sky called an early journalistic effort The Bells of Vitebsk (Vitebsker gleklekh) in Herzen's honor. See Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 17-18.
This is part of the same passage quoted in the epigraph.
Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 64.
Maksim Gorkii, "Iz istorii russkoi literatury," in Izbrannye literaturno-kriticheskie stat'i (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1941), 70.
Anatolii Lunacharskii, "Aleksandr Ivanovich Gertsen," in Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1963), 1:142-51.
Iurii M. Steklov, A. I. Gertsen (Iskander) 1812-1870 g. (Moscow: Gosudarstven- naia Izdatel'stvo, 1920), 37, 43, 64. Nikolay Ogaryov's remains were repatriated in the mid-1960s.
For example: Georgii Plekhanov, "Rech' na mogile A. I. Gertsena v Nitstse: 7 apre- lia 1912," in Sochinenii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia Izdatel'stvo, 1926), 23:453-56; and Lunacharskii, "Aleksandr Ivanovich Gertsen," 1:129-42.
S. V. Utechin, Russian Political Thought: A Concise History (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964), 117.
James Crichtlow, Radio Hole-in-the-Head: Radio Liberty, An Insider's Story of Cold War Broadcasting (Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1995), 19, 85, 171-72. Ludmilla Alekseyeva, U.S. Broadcasting to the Soviet Union (New York: Helsinki Watch Committee, 1986), 29-30.
Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 9-12.
Cited by Harrison Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 253. See Vera Inber, Pochti tri goda (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisa- tel', 1946), 7-8.
Lidiia Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi v trekh tomakh (Moscow: So- glasie, 1997), 2:544 (Nov. 4, 1962).
Rachel Polonsky, Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey Through Russian History (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 77-80. For a variety of bicentennial week assessments of Herzen, see: Literaturnaia gazeta, April 4, 2012.
Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, 2:577 (Dec. 29, 1962).
Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, 2:264 (Sept. 14, 1957). The Herzen quote is from "Otvet I. S. Aksakovu," which appeared in Kolokol no. 240 (May 1, 1867), and was republished in Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 19:244-55. Other Herzen scholars of a liberal cast included Natan Eidelman and Lidiya Ginzburg.
Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 67. Zubok goes on to mention an underground group at the Leningrad Institute of Technology called the Bell, whose members were soon arrested by the KGB (156).
Orlova, Poslednii god zhizni Gertsena. In her Memoirs (New York: Random House, 1983), Orlova recalled an August 1968 discussion of the Soviet invasion, during which Solzhenitsyn said that what the Soviet Union needed at that moment was "a new Her- zen" to shame intellectuals into action (3i7).
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Harper, 2009), chap. 61, pp. 448-49.
Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 220.
Aleksandr Ianov, "Al'ternativa," Molodoi Kommunist 1974: 1 (70-77). See also Ya- nov's book The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History, trans. Stephen Dunn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 261-62.
Let 5:180; Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 30:33-34. In an essay from 1923, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters," Yevgeny Zamyatin commented on the usefulness of heresy that fights entropy and is right "150 years later." See A Soviet Heretic, ed. and trans. Mirra Ginsburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 109.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 21:142-43.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 21:154.
Let 1:263, 333. For an analysis of the "dangerous texts" paradigm, see Kathleen Parthe, Russia's Dangerous Texts: Politics Between the Lines (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004).
Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 1:52.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:409. When addressing Europeans (Doc. 1), Her- zen acknowledged efforts by Russian writers, especially during the decade after the Decembrist revolt, to make veiled references to political subjects and to encourage readers to be attentive. However, by i860 he writes in The Bell that "we have no secrets, and we passionately want to show the sovereign all there is to know," while the tsar's closest aides "conceal everything except harmful gossip" (Doc. 25).
Cited by Isaiah Berlin in chap. 4 of Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York: Penguin, 1979), 200.
"U nas byl ne zagovor, a tipografiia." Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 20:420. This is from the 1868 essay "K nashim vragam."
Zhelvakova, Gertsen, 533.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
For bibliographical entries and for the citation of Russian words, a standard Library of Congress transliteration is employed. In other usages, modifications have been made for ease of pronunciation (e.g., Murav'ev/Muravyov, Arsen'ev/Arseniev, Nikolai/Nikolay, Elena/Yelena). For a small number of prominent figures, the most familiar form of their names has been chosen (e.g., Nicholas I, Alexander II). In the text of the primary documents, Herzen's frequent use of three closely spaced dots, indicating a pause for emphasis, or two dots plus a question mark or an exclamation point, as is common in Russian, has been preserved; any omissions made by the translator in Herzen's writing are indicated by three widely spaced dots in brackets.
All volume and page numbers for the originals of the Herzen documents translated in A Herzen Reader refer to Aleksandr I. Gertsen, Sobranie so- chinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols. (Moscow: ANSSSR, 1954-66) and are given in a source note following the text. Page numbers indicate first the document itself, then the notes at the back of each volume. For Poliarnaia zvezda, the year and book are indicated (kn.), and for Kolokol, the issue number (l.) and the date.
A Herzen Reader
On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia was written in 1850, at the dawn of a particularly turbulent period in Herzen's life, so it is fitting that one of the first places it is mentioned is in a letter to the German poet George Herwegh, soon to be revealed as a serious rival for Natalya Herzen's affections. Herzen tells Herwegh that he is writing a "brief note about the development of liberalism and opposition in Russian literature," but a few weeks later admits that it has turned out to be much more political than literary (Let 2:572-74). After three years abroad, Herzen felt completely cut off from everything Russian; at best, his letters were answered with expressions of passivity and despair, and at worst, they were returned to him (Zhelvakova, Gertsen, 337). Natan Eidelman saw this as the moment when Herzen summed up past Russian thought and sketched the "contours of a new 'program.' " Herzen had not yet seen some of the most important eighteenth-century Russian documents, but as they came to his attention, he published them in London (Eidel'man, Svobodnoe slovo, 450-51). The treatise on revolutionary ideas, comprising an introduction, six chapters, an epilogue, and a supplement, was published in German and French in 1851; the translation below is from the French. The appearance of the French edition led to Herzen being thrown out of Nice, which still belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia, in June of that year. By October 1851, it was on the list of foreign publications that were "absolutely" forbidden in Russia (Let 2:25, 51).
Herzen's analysis of Russia's historical development elicited strong reactions across the political spectrum. The first Russian readers were members of the ruling circles who were permitted to receive foreign publications otherwise banned by the censorship committee. Based on rumors emanating from those quarters, and in the wake of the 1849 Petrashevsky trial, Herzen's Moscow acquaintances feared that the pamphlet could provoke additional attacks on progressive circles. Timofey Granovsky, whose friendship Herzen treasured, wrote disapprovingly to the author—before he had read the essay—about the dangers to which Herzen was exposing liberals. In an apologetic letter two years later he admitted that at the time he had been influenced by gossip. Pavel Annenkov believed that Herzen's essay put Granovsky in real peril; the government saw revolution everywhere and was just waiting for the beloved professor to make a mistake (Annenkov, Extraordinary Decade, 250-51; Annenkov, Literaturnye vospomina- niia, 529-31).
The actor Mikhail Shchepkin was delegated by Moscow acquaintances to ask Herzen in person to stop writing and move to America, at least until things had calmed down in Russia. Petr Chaadaev, on the other hand, sent thanks to Herzen for having mentioned his role in the struggle for freedom. It turns out that Chaadaev had also written to the political police, expressing his indignation at receiving the praise of such a scoundrel; he later explained to his puzzled nephew that he had to save himself (Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 15). Encouraged by Herzen's bold approach, students at Moscow University later illegally printed their own translation.
Nikolay Gogol was frightened by the essay's claim that in his earlier works he depicted noblemen and officials negatively, and Shchepkin said that when he and Tur- genev met Gogol at the end of October, the latter was torn between feeling offended and questioning his own wisdom in having published Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (Let 2:51). The critic Vladimir Botkin, a liberal frightened into conservatism by the 1848 revolutions, labeled Herzen's survey a "denunciation." When the minister of state properties, Kiselev, observed that it could not endanger anyone, since it only spoke of the dead, the Third Department's Count Orlov replied that "if we really wanted to, we could use the dead to reach the living"; another conservative journalist, Nikolay Grech, called Herzen a "swine" who led young people to drink the poison of "unbelief and disrespect for sacred things and state power" (Let 2:45).
Among the essay's better-known European readers, Friedrich Engels particularly objected to Herzen's elevation of the peasant commune and his association with such figures as Proudhon and Bakunin. In an 1853 letter to an associate about the possibility of revolution in Russia, Engels complained that Herzen had hedged his bets in a Hegelian manner by describing a republic that was simultaneously democratic, socialist, communist, and Proudhonian (Let 2:139-40). The historian Jules Michelet, with whom Herzen enjoyed long conversations, was very impressed with the article, which he called a "heroic" work by a Russian patriot, and he subsequently cited Herzen's ideas in his own analysis of Russia. Revised versions of Revolutionary Ideas were published in French and German in subsequent years, and arrangements were made with William Linton for a translation into English. The 1858 French version, published in London, was the basis of two different Russian translations later commissioned for twentieth-century editions of Herzen's works. An 1860 discussion of Herzen by Nikolay Sazonov for La gazette du Nord called Revolutionary Ideas a survey, however incomplete, of Russia's "moral and intellectual history . . . distinguished by a remarkable intelligence and a correct assessment of the foundations of Russian life" (Ivanova, A. I. Gertsen, 155).
In chapter 5 below, Herzen makes a strong argument for the significance of Russian literature in spreading new and liberating ideas, and provides an impressive "martyrol- ogy of Russian literature" (Zhelvakova, Gertsen, 341). Free of tsarist censorship, he was able to expand upon views held by the critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848) and other progressive figures, and to introduce them to Europeans, who, based on existing information, had a poor understanding of the country's problems, and who knew virtually nothing of Russia's potential for reform. The Marquis de Custine's travelogue Lettres de Russie en 1839 had come out to great acclaim in 1843, and La Russie et les Russes by the Decembrist emigre Nikolay Turgenev (1799-1871) made its appearance four years later. The former heard only the silence emanating from frightened Russians, while the latter, who was abroad in December 1825 and never returned to his homeland, took little notice of the common people. Herzen heard the voices of both remarkable individuals and the Russians as a whole, and was therefore more hopeful than others in 1850 about Russia's future prospects (Walicki, Legal Philosophies, 336-37).
On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia Chapter V. Literature and Public Opinion in Russia After December 14, 1825
[1851/1858]
The twenty-five years since the 14 (26) of December are harder to characterize than all the time that has elapsed since the age of Peter the Great. Two opposing tendencies—one on the surface, the other in depths where it can barely be seen—make observation difficult. Russia appears to remain immobile, even to have retreated a bit, but in essence, everything has taken on a new appearance; the questions are more complex and the answers less simple.
On the surface of official Russia, "the empire of facades," only the losses have been visible—the cruel reaction, the inhuman persecution, the strengthening of despotism. Surrounded by mediocrity, by soldiers on parade, Baltic Germans, and brutal conservatives, one sees Nicholas, suspicious, cold, stubborn, pitiless, absent any greatness of soul—as mediocre as his entourage. And, immediately below him, high society, which lost its barely acquired sense of honor and dignity when the first clap of thunder broke over its head after December 14. The Russian aristocracy did not recover during the reign of Nicholas, its bloom had faded, and all that was noble and good in it languished in the mines or in Siberia. The nobles who remained and kept the monarch's favor descended to a degree of vileness and servility known to us from de Custine's description.1
Then there were the guards officers; formerly brilliant and well-educated, they turned increasingly into dull soldiers. Before 1825, everyone wearing civilian clothes acknowledged the superiority of epaulets. To be comme il faut, one had to serve for a couple of years in the guards, or at least in the cavalry. Officers were the heart and soul of any gathering, the heroes of holiday celebrations and balls, and, to be truthful, there was a good reason for this. Officers were more independent and conducted themselves with more dignity than groveling bureaucrats. Circumstances changed, and the guards shared the fate of the aristocracy; the best of the officers were exiled, many others left the military, unable to bear the coarse and insolent tone adopted by Nicholas. Their places were quickly taken by diligent soldiers or pillars of the barracks and the stable. Officers lost the favorable opinion of society and civilian dress gained an advantage—the uniform prevailed only in small provincial towns and at court, the chief guardroom of the empire. Members of the imperial family, along with its head, showed the military a preference that was exaggerated and inappropriate in their position. The public's coldness toward men in uniform did not extend to admitting civilian government employees into society. Even in the provinces, they were treated with an unconquerable disdain, which did not prevent the growth of the bureaucracy's influence. After 1825, the whole administration, formerly aristocratic and ignorant, became petty and mean. Ministries turned into offices, and their heads and senior officials into businessmen or clerks. In their attitude toward the civil service they were exactly like the dull new members of the guards. Consummate experts on every sort of formality, cold and unquestioning in carrying out orders from above, their devotion to the government came from a love of extortion. Nicholas was in need of such officers and administrators.
The barracks and the chancellery were the chief supports of Nicholas's political system. Blind discipline devoid of common sense combined with the dead formalism of Austrian tax officials—those were the foundations of the celebrated mechanism of power in Russia. What a poor concept of governance, what prosaic autocracy and pitiful banality! This is the simplest and most brutal form of despotism.
Add to this Count Benkendorf, chief of the gendarmes—that armed inquisition, that political Masonic order, with members in all corners of the empire, from Riga to Nerchinsk, listening and eavesdropping—heading the Third Department of His Majesty's chancellery (such is the name of the main office for espionage), sitting in judgment over everything, altering court decisions, and interfering in everything but especially in matters concerning political criminals. From time to time in front of this office-tribunal there appeared civilization in the form of a writer or student who was exiled or locked up, his place soon to be taken by another.
In a word, looking at official Russia one could only despair; on the one hand there was Poland, divided and martyred with amazing regularity; on the other hand, the insanity of a war which continued throughout the reign, swallowing up armies without advancing by a single step our domination of the Caucasus; and, in the center, general degradation and governmental incompetence.
But to make up for it, within Russia great work was going on, work that was muffled and mute but active and continuous; everywhere discontent grew, revolutionary ideas gained more territory during those twenty-five years than during the entire previous century, and yet they did not penetrate through to the people.
The Russian people still kept itself far away from political life, having little reason to take part in the work going on at other levels of society. Long-term suffering forced upon them their own sense of dignity; the Russian people had suffered too much to agitate for a minor improvement in their position—better to remain a beggar in rags than to change into something patched together from scraps. But if it took no part in the movement of ideas occupying other classes, this does not at all mean that nothing was transpiring in its soul. The Russian people breathed more heavily than before, and its countenance was sadder; the injustice of serfdom and pilfering by civil servants became more and more unbearable. The government had disturbed the calm of the village commune with its compulsory organization of labor, and, with the introduction of rural police [stanovye pristavy] even the repose of the peasant in his own hut was restricted and supervised. There was a major increase in cases brought against arsonists, those who killed landowners, and participants in peasant uprisings. There was grumbling among the large number of religious dissenters; oppressed and exploited by the clergy and the police, they were far from making any major move, and yet one heard from time to time in these dead seas vague sounds heralding fierce storms. The Russian people's discontent of which we have been speaking is scarcely visible to a superficial glance. Russia always seems so tranquil that one would have difficulty believing that anything was going on. Few people know what is happening under the shroud in which the government wraps the dead—the bloodstains, the military ex- ecutions—when it is said, hypocritically and arrogantly, that there was no blood and no corpse under the shroud. What do we know of the Simbirsk arsonists, and the massacre of landowners simultaneously organized by a number of villages? What do we know of local uprisings, which broke out in connection with Kiselev's new administration?2 What do we know of the destruction in Kazan, Vyatka, and Tambov, where one had to resort to cannon?
The intellectual effort of which we spoke was not taking place at the highest levels of the state nor at its base, but in between the two, that is to say, between the lower and middle nobility. The facts we will introduce may not seem to have great importance, but it must not be forgotten that propaganda, like all education, is not flashy, especially when it does not dare to show itself in the light of day.
The influence ofliterature has noticeably increased, and penetrates much more deeply than before; it has not changed its mission and retains its liberal and educational character, to the extent possible under censorship.
A thirst for education is taking hold of the entire younger generation; civilian and military schools, gymnasia, lycees, and academies overflow with students; the children of the poorest parents strive to get into various institutes. The government, which as recently as 1804 enticed children into the schools with various privileges, now uses every effort to hold back the tide; difficulties are created at admission time and during exams; tuition payment is demanded; the education minister issues an order restricting the education of serfs. Nevertheless, Moscow University has become a cathedral of Russian civilization; the emperor detests it, sulks over it, and each year exiles a batch of its students. He never visits it when in Moscow, but the University flourishes and its influence grows; in bad repute, it expects nothing, continuing its work and becoming a genuine force. The elite among the youth in neighboring provinces come to the University, and each year an army of graduates spreads throughout the country as civil servants, doctors, and teachers.
In the depths of the provinces, and even more so in Moscow, there is a visibly growing class of independent people not pursuing public service, who occupy themselves with their properties, science, and literature; they demand nothing of the government except to be left alone. This is in contrast to Petersburg nobles, who cling to government service and the court, are consumed by servile ambition, expect everything from the government, and live only through it. To ask for nothing, to remain independent, not to seek a position—under a despotic regime this counts as being in opposition. The government looked suspiciously at these idlers and was not pleased. They constituted a core of educated people poorly disposed toward the Petersburg regime. Some spent entire years abroad, bringing back with them liberal ideas; others came to Moscow for a few months, spending the rest of the year on their estates, reading everything new and acquainting themselves with intellectual developments in Europe. Among provincial landowners, reading was in fashion. People bragged about their libraries, and at the very least ordered new French novels, the Journal des Debats and the Augsburg newspaper; to possess banned books was to be in style. I do not know of a single well-kept house where one could not find de Custine's book about Russia, which was specifically banned by Nicholas. Denied the possibility of action, constantly menaced by the secret police, young people plunged into their reading with great fervor. The mass of ideas in circulation grew and grew.
But what new ideas and tendencies arose after the 14th of December?3
The first years following 1825 were terrible. It took people a dozen years to realize how servile and persecuted was their lot. Profound despair and general low spirits took hold. High society, with a haste that was cowardly and mean, renounced all humane feelings and all civilized thoughts. There was virtually no aristocratic family without a relative among the exiles, and almost none of them dared to dress in mourning or express their sorrow. Turning away from this sad spectacle of servility, immersed in reflection in order to find some source of advice or hope, one came up against a terrible thought, which made the blood run cold.
Illusions were impossible: the people were indifferent spectators on the 14th of December. Every clear-thinking person saw the terrible result of the complete rupture between national Russia and Europeanized Russia. Every living link had been broken between these two parties and they had to be renewed, but how? That was the great question. Some thought that nothing would be achieved by allowing Russia to be pulled along by Europe; they placed their hopes not on the future, but on a return to the past. Others saw in the future only unhappiness and ruin. They cursed the mongrelized civilization and its apathetic people. A great sadness came over the hearts of all thinking people.
Only Pushkin's resonant and broad song echoed across a landscape of slavery and anguish; this song preserved the past epoch, filled the present with its manly sounds, and sent its voice far into the future. Pushkin's poetry was a pledge and a comfort. Amidst poets who live in times of despair and decadence you don't find these types of songs, which do not go well with burials.
Pushkin's inspiration did not deceive him. The blood that had rushed to a heart struck by terror could not stop there; it soon began to make itself known.
Already a journalist had courageously raised his voice to rally the timid.4 This man, who had spent all his youth in his Siberian homeland, took up trade, which quickly bored him; he then devoted himself to reading. Without any formal education, he learned French and German on his own, and went to live in Moscow. There, without colleagues, without acquaintances, and without a name in literature, he came up with the idea of editing a monthly journal. He soon astonished his readers with the encyclopedic variety of his articles. He wrote boldly of jurisprudence and music, of medicine and Sanskrit. Russian history was one of his specialties, which did not prevent him from writing stories, novels and, finally, reviews, in which he achieved great success.
In Polevoy's writing one would look in vain for great erudition, for philosophical depth, but with each question he was able to discern its humanitarian side; his sympathies were liberal. His journal The Moscow Telegraph enjoyed great influence, and we must acknowledge the service he rendered by publishing in such a dismal age. What could be written the day after the uprising, or on the eve of the executions? Polevoy's position was very difficult. He was saved from persecution by his very obscurity. One wrote very little in that epoch; half of the literary world was in exile, and the other half kept silent. A small number of renegades, like the siamese twins Grech and Bulgarin,5 allied themselves with the government, having smoothed over their part on the 14th December with denunciations against their friends and by suppressing the person who had set type for revolutionary proclamations on Grech's printing press. They alone dominated journalism in
Petersburg, but it was in their role as police agents, not as literary figures. Polevoy was able to hold out against all reactionary forces without betraying his cause until 1834; we must not forget this.
Polevoy began to democratize Russian literature, bringing it down from its aristocratic heights, making it more popular, or at least more bourgeois. His greatest enemies were literary authorities whom he attacked with pitiless irony. He was completely correct in thinking that any destruction of authority was a revolutionary act, and that a man who was able to free himself from the oppression of great names and pedants could not fully remain either a religious or civil slave. Before Polevoy, critics occasionally dared, amidst allusions and excuses, to make some slight observations about Der- zhavin, Karamzin, or Dmitriev,6 all the while acknowledging that their greatness was incontestable. From the very first day, Polevoy stood on an equal footing and began to take on these great masters, who were so serious and dogmatic. Old Dmitriev, poet and former Minister of Justice, spoke with sadness and horror at the literary anarchy introduced by Polevoy, with his lack of respect for people whose services were acknowledged by the entire nation.
Polevoy not only attacked literary authorities, but also scholars; he dared to challenge their research, he, the minor Siberian merchant who had never pursued formal studies. Scholars ex officio allied themselves with gray-haired literary eminences to begin a proper war against the insurgent journalist.
Polevoy, knowing the public's taste, destroyed his enemies with biting articles.
He replied in a joking manner to the scholars' observations, treating their tedious judgments with an impertinence that made people laugh out loud. It is hard to describe the curiosity with which the public followed the course of this polemic. They seemed to understand that in attacking literary authorities, Polevoy had in mind other authorities. He made use of every occasion to touch on delicate political questions, and did this with admirable skill. He said almost everything, without ever leaving himself open to attack. It must be said that censorship really helped the development of style and the art of mastering one's own speech. A man who is irritated by an obstacle he finds offensive wishes to vanquish it and almost always succeeds. Circumlocution carries in it traces of emotion, of battle; it is more impassioned than a simple utterance. An implied word is stronger under its veil, always transparent for one who wishes to understand. Constrained speech has a more concentrated meaning, it is sharp; to speak in a way that the thought is clear, but the words seem to come from the reader himself, that is the best way to be convincing. Implications increase the force of the expression, while nakedness constrains the imagination. The reader who knows the extent to which the writer must be careful will read attentively; a secret bond is established between him and the author: the one conceals what he writes, the other what he understands. The censorship is a spider web that catches small flies but is torn by the large ones. Characters and allusions may perish under red ink; energetic thoughts and genuine poetry pass with disdain through this cloakroom, having allowed themselves, at most, to be brushed a bit.7
With The Telegraph, journals began to dominate Russian literature. They absorbed all intellectual movement. Few books were bought, while the best poetry and stories saw the light of day in journals, and something had to be out of the ordinary—a poem by Pushkin or a novel by Gogol—to otherwise attract the attention of a public as scattered as were the readers of Russia. In no country other than England was the influence of journals so great. This was in fact the best means of spreading enlightenment over such a great expanse. The Telegraph, The Messenger of Moscow, The Telescope, The Library for Reading, Fatherland Notes, and their illegitimate son The Contemporary, in spite of different tendencies, have spread a great deal of information and many concepts and ideas over the past twenty-five years. They gave the inhabitants of the Omsk and Tobolsk provinces the possibility of reading novels by Dickens and George Sand two months after they had appeared in London or Paris. Even the fact that they appeared as installments was useful, stimulating lazy readers.
Polevoy managed to keep The Telegraph going until 1834. However, the persecution of ideas was redoubled after the rebellion in Poland. Victorious absolutism lost all false modesty, all shame. Schoolboy pranks were punished like armed uprisings, and children of 15-16 were exiled or sent away as soldiers for life. A student of Moscow University, Polezhaev,8 already known for his verse, composed several liberal poems. Without having him tried, Nicholas sent for the young man, ordered him to read the verses aloud, kissed him, and sent him away as a simple soldier; the idea of such an absurd punishment could only arise in the mind of a government that had lost its senses, and that saw the Russian army as a reformatory or a prison. Eight years later, the soldier Polezhaev died in a military hospital. A year after that, the Kritsky brothers, also Moscow students, were sent to prison because—if I am not mistaken—they broke a bust of the emperor. Since that time, no one has heard anything about them. In 1832, on the pretext that it was a secret society, a dozen students were arrested and immediately sent to the Orenburg garrison, soon to be joined by a Lutheran pastor's son, Jules Kolreif, who was not a Russian citizen, had only occupied his time with music, but who dared to say that he did not consider it his duty to denounce his friends. In 1834 my friends and I were thrown into prison and, after eight months, sent away as clerks in the chancelleries of distant provinces. We were accused of intending to form a secret society and wishing to spread Saint-Simon's ideas; as a bad joke, we were read a death sentence, and then were told that the emperor, with the unpardonable benevolence so typical of him, had only sentenced us to a corrective term in exile. That punishment lasted more than five years.
The Telegraph was suspended that same year of 1834. Polevoy, having lost his journal, was quite at sea. His literary essays no longer enjoyed success; embittered and disappointed he quit Moscow to live in St. Petersburg. A sad astonishment greeted the first issues of his new journal (Son of the Fatherland). He became submissive and fawning. It was sad to see this bold fighter, this tireless worker, who was able to get through the most difficult times without deserting his post, come to terms with his enemies as soon as his journal was shut down. It was sad to hear the name of Polevoy coupled with those of Grech and Bulgarin, sad also to be present at the productions of his plays, which were applauded by secret agents and official lackeys.
Polevoy was aware of his own decline, he suffered because of it and was depressed. He wanted to escape his false position, to justify himself, but he lacked the strength and he merely compromised himself with the government, without gaining anything vis-a-vis the public. His nature was more noble than his conduct and could not sustain this struggle for very long. He died soon afterward, leaving his affairs in complete disarray. All his concessions had brought him nothing.
There were two men who continued Polevoy's work—Senkovsky and Belinsky.9
Senkovsky, a Russified Pole, an orientalist and academic, was a witty writer, a hard worker without any opinions of his own, unless one calls a profound disdain for people and things, convictions and theories, an opinion. Senkovsky was a true representative of the direction which the mentality of the public had taken since 1825, with a luster that was brilliant but cold, a disdainful smile which often hid remorse, a thirst for pleasure stimulated by the uncertainty which hovered over everyone's fate, a materialism that was mocking and therefore melancholy, the constrained jesting of a man in prison.
The antithesis of Senkovsky, Belinsky was a type of studious Moscow youth, a martyr to his doubts and thoughts, an enthusiast, a poet of dialectics, vexed by everything that surrounded him, consumed by torment. This man trembled with indignation and shook with rage at the eternal spectacle of Russian absolutism.
Senkovsky established his magazine as one establishes a commercial enterprise. All the same, we do not share the opinion of those who see a governmental tendency in it. It was read eagerly throughout Russia, which never happened with a journal or book written in the interests of power. The Northern Bee, enjoying the protection of the police, only seemed to be an exception to this rule: it was the sole unofficial political newspaper allowed, which explains its success; but as soon as the official newspapers had a tolerable staff, The Northern Bee was abandoned by its readers. There is no fame, no reputation that can withstand the deadly and degrading government connection. Everyone who reads in Russia detests power; all who love it do not read or only read French trifles. Russia's greatest celebrity— Pushkin—was at one point abandoned because of the congratulations he sent Nicholas after the cholera epidemic and for two political poems. Gogol, the idol of Russian readers, fell instantly into the most profound disgrace because of a servile pamphlet. Polevoy was eclipsed the day he made an alliance with the government. In Russia one does not forgive a turncoat.
Senkovsky spoke with disdain of liberalism and science, but then he had no respect for anything else. He imagined himself eminently practical because he preached a theoretical materialism but, like all theoreticians, he was surpassed by other theoreticians who were much more abstract but had intense convictions, which is infinitely more practical and closer to action than practology.
Ridiculing everything which men hold most sacred, Senkovsky, without wishing it, demolished monarchism in people's minds. Preaching comfort and sensual pleasures, he led people to the simple thought that it is impossible to enjoy oneself while constantly thinking about the secret police, denunciations, and Siberia, that fear is not comfortable, and that no man can dine well if he does not know where he will spend the night.
Senkovsky was wholly a man of his time; in sweeping near the entrance to a new era, he mixed together valuable objects with dust, but he cleared the ground for another age which he did not understand. He felt this himself, and as soon as something new and lively broke through in literature, Senkovsky furled his sails and soon completely faded away.
Senkovsky was surrounded by a circle of young men of letters whom he ruined by corrupting their taste. They introduced a style which seemed at first brilliant, but which was, at a second glance, dubious. In the poetry from Petersburg, or rather from Vassilevsky Island,10 there is nothing living or real in hysterical images that conjure up Kukolniks, Benediktovs, Timofeevs,11 and others. Such flowers can only bloom at the foot of the imperial throne and in the shadow of the Peter Paul Fortress.
In Moscow, the journal that replaced the suppressed Telegraph was The Telescope; this did not last as long as its predecessor, but its death was most glorious. This was the one that published the celebrated letter by Chaa- daev.12 The journal was immediately suppressed, the censor pensioned off, and the editor-in-chief exiled to Ust-Sysolsk. The publication of this letter was a momentous event. It was a challenge, a sign of an awakening; it broke the ice after the 14th of December. At last a man appeared whose soul overflowed with bitterness. He found a terrible language with which to express—with funereal eloquence, with an overwhelming serenity— everything acrimonious that had accumulated in the heart of civilized Russia during those ten years. This letter was the testament of a man who gave up his rights not out of love for his descendants, but from disgust; severe and cold, the author demanded an accounting from Russia for all the pain with which it drenched a man who dared to emerge from the savage state. He wanted to know what we had bought at that price, what we had done to merit this situation; he analyzed it with an inexorable, hopeless depth, and, having finished his vivisection, he turned away in horror, cursing the country in its past, in its present, and in its future. Yes, the somber voice sounded only to tell Russia that it had never existed in a normal human way, that it represented "only a gap in human intelligence, only an instructive example for Europe." He told Russia that its past was useless, its present superfluous, and that it had no future.
Without agreeing with Chaadaev, we understand perfectly what led him to this dark and despairing point of view, all the more so since up to the present the facts speak for him and not against him. We believe; for him it was enough to point a finger. We hope; for him it was enough to open the page of a journal to prove that he was right. The conclusion at which Chaadaev arrived could not hold up against any criticism, and that is hardly where one would find the importance of this publication; it is through the lyricism of its austere indignation, which shakes the soul and for a long time leaves it under a painful impression, that it maintains its significance. The author was reproached for his harshness, but it is that which is his greatest achievement. One must not humor us; we forget too quickly our position, we are too accustomed to be distracted within prison walls.
A cry of anguish and astonishment greeted this article, it frightened people, it wounded even those who shared these feelings, and all the same it merely stated what was vaguely agitating each of our souls. Who among us has not had such moments of anger, in which he hated this country that responds to all generous human aspirations with torment, which hastens to wake us up in order to torture us. Who among us has not wished to break away forever from this prison which occupies a quarter of the earthly sphere, from this monstrous empire where every police superintendent is a sovereign and the sovereign is a crowned superintendent of police? Who among us has not indulged in all the temptations to forget this frozen hell, to achieve a few moments of drunkenness and distraction? We see things now in a different way, we envisage Russian history in a different manner, but there is no reason to recant or repent of those moments of despair; we paid too dearly for them to yield them up; they are our right, our protest, they saved us.
Chaadaev went silent but he did not leave us in peace. The Petersburg aristocrats—those Benkendorfs and Kleinmikhels13—were offended for Russia. A sober-minded German, Vigel, the chief—evidently Protestant— of the department for religious congregations, protested on behalf of Russian Orthodoxy. The emperor had it announced that Chaadaev suffered a mental breakdown. This tasteless joke brought even his enemies to Chaa- daev's side, and his influence in Moscow increased. Even the aristocracy bowed their heads before this thinker and surrounded him with respect and attention, thus giving lie to the imperial joke.
Chaadaev's letter was a sounding trumpet; the signal had been given and from all sides new voices were heard; young fighters entered the arena, giving evidence of the silent work that had taken place during these ten years.
The 14 (26) December had too deeply cut off the past for the literature that preceded it to be able to continue in the same way. Right after this great day, a young man full of the fantasies and ideas of 1825, Veneviti- nov,14 could appear. Despair, like the ache after a wound, did not come immediately. But hardly had he pronounced a few noble words when he disappeared like the flowers of a more gentle sky, which expire from the icy breath of the Baltic.
Venevitinov was not viable in the new Russian atmosphere. In order to tolerate the air of that sinister epoch a different constitution was required, and it was necessary from childhood to get used to that ever-present harsh north wind, to become acclimated to insoluble doubts, to the bitterest truths, to one's own weakness, to daily insults; the habit must be ingrained from earliest childhood to conceal everything that disturbs the soul but not to lose any of what has been buried there; on the contrary, to ripen in quiet anger all that has deposited itself in the heart. It was necessary to know how to hate out of love, to despise for humanity's sake, to have unlimited pride in order to raise one's head high while shackled hand and foot.
Every chapter of Onegin, which appeared after 1825, was more and more profound. The poet's original plan was light and serene, he had sketched it out in a different time; he was surrounded then by a world which enjoyed this ironic, friendly, and playful laughter. The first chapters of Onegin remind us a lot of the sharp but robust comedy of Griboedov.15 Tears and laughter—everything changed.
The two poets we have in mind who convey the new era in Russian poetry are Lermontov and Koltsov.16 These two strong voices come from opposite sides. Nothing can demonstrate with greater clarity the change brought about in people's minds since 1825 than a comparison between Pushkin and Lermontov. Pushkin, often dissatisfied and sad, offended and full of indignation, was, however, ready to make his peace. He desired it, and did not despair of it; a chord of remembrance from the times of the emperor Alexander did not cease to resonate in his heart. Lermontov was so used to despair, to antagonism, that not only did he not look for a way out, he could not conceive of the possibility of either a battle or an accommodation. Lermontov never learned to hope, he never sacrificed himself because there was nothing to call forth such a sacrifice. He did not hold his head with pride in the noose, like Pestel and Ryleev,17 because he could not see the usefulness of sacrifice; he flung himself to the side and died for nothing.
The pistol shot that killed Pushkin aroused Lermontov's soul. He wrote an energetic ode in which, branding the vile intrigues which preceded the duel, intrigues carried out by literary ministers and spying journalists, he cried out with the indignation of a young man: "Vengeance, emperor, vengeance!" The poet paid for this single act of defiance with exile to the Caucasus. This took place in 1837; in 1841, Lermontov's body was placed in a grave at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains.
And what you said before your death, None among those present understood...
...your final words Their profound and bitter meaning Is lost.18
Fortunately, we have not lost what Lermontov wrote during the last four years of his life. He belonged entirely to our generation. All of us were too young to take part on the 14th of December. Awakened by that great day, we saw only executions and banishments. Reduced to a forced silence, suppressing our tears, we learned to retire within ourselves, to prepare our thoughts in secret, and what were those thoughts? These were no longer ideas of a civilizing liberalism, ideas of progress; they were doubts, negations, and thoughts full of fury. Used to such sentiments, Lermontov could not save himself in lyricism the way Pushkin had done. He dragged a ball and chain of skepticism through all his fantasies and all his pleasures. A manly and melancholy thought never left his face and broke through to all his poetry. It was not an abstract thought that sought to adorn itself with poetic flowers; no, Lermontov's meditation is his poetry, his torment, his strength. He had deep feelings for Byron, which Pushkin did not share. To the misfortune of too much insight, he added another, the boldness of saying a great many things without varnish or discretion. Weak creatures, bruised by this, never forgive such sincerity. One spoke of Lermontov as a spoiled child from an aristocratic house, like one of those idle creatures who perish in boredom and excess. One did not wish to see how much this man had struggled, how much he had suffered before daring to express his thoughts. People accept with greater indulgence insults and ill-will than a certain maturity of thought and an alienation which desires to share neither hopes nor fears and which dares to speak openly of this rupture. When Ler- montov left Petersburg for a second period of exile in the Caucasus he was quite weary and he told his friends that he would attempt to die as quickly as possible. He kept his word.
What, in the end, is this monster that calls itself Russia, which needs so many victims and which permits its children only the sad alternative of either losing themselves morally in a setting hostile to all that is human, or of dying at the dawn of their life? It is a bottomless abyss, where the best oarsmen will perish, where the greatest efforts, the greatest talents, the greatest minds will be swallowed up before having succeeded at anything.
And yet, can one doubt of the existence of embryonic forces, when one sees from the depths of the nation a voice rise up like that of Koltsov?
For a century, even a century and a half, the people had only sung the old songs, or some made-up monstrosities from the middle of Catherine II's reign. There were a few fairly successful imitations from the beginning of our century, but these artificial pieces lack truthfulness; they were capricious efforts. It was from these same depths of village Russia that new songs came. A herdsman driving his animals across the steppe was inspired to compose them. Koltsov was a genuine son of the people. Born in Voronezh, he studied in a parish school until he was ten, learning only to read and to write without spelling rules. His father, a cattle dealer, made him take up the trade. Koltsov took herds of cattle over hundreds of versts, and became used to a nomadic life, which is reflected in the majority of his lyrics. The young cattle dealer loved to read, and he continually reread one or another poet whom he took as his model, and his attempts at imitation warped his poetic instinct. His true talent finally broke through and he wrote popular songs, which, though few in number, were masterpieces. These were genuine songs of the Russian people. One found in them a melancholy that was their characteristic trait, a heartrending sadness, and an overflowing of life. Koltsov had shown how much poetry was hidden in the soul of the Russian people, and, that after a long and deep sleep, there was something stirring in its chest. We have other poets, statesmen, and artists who have come from the people, but they have emerged in the literal sense of the word, breaking all ties with them. Lomonosov was the son of a White Sea fisherman. He fled the paternal home to study, entered a church school, and then went to Germany, where he ceased to be a man of the people. He had nothing in common with agricultural Russia, except for that which unites all people of the same race. Koltsov remained in the midst of the herds and the business of a father who detested him, and who, along with other relatives, made his life so hard that he died in 1842. Koltsov and Lermontov made their debut and died in the midst of the same era. After them, Russian poetry went silent.
But in prose, activity accelerated and took a different direction.
Gogol, without being by origin a man of the people like Koltsov, was one by his tastes and his turn of mind. Gogol is completely independent of any foreign influence. He did not become familiar with any literature until he had already made his name. He was more in sympathy with the life of the people than with that of the court, which is natural on the part of a Little Russian.
The Little Russian, even when ennobled, does not break so thoroughly with the people as does a Russian. He loves his country, his dialect, the Cossack traditions and the hetmen. The independence of Ukraine, savage and warlike, but republican and democratic, was maintained through the centuries until Peter I. The Little Russians, pestered by the Poles, the Turks, and the Muscovites, and involved in an eternal war against the Crimean Tartars, had never succumbed. Little Russia, in a voluntary union with Great Russia, negotiated significant rights for itself. Tsar Alexey cursed the need to observe them. Peter I, using as a reason Mazeppa's betrayal, kept only a mere shadow of these privileges;19 Elizabeth and Catherine introduced serfdom. The poor country protested, but could it oppose this fatal avalanche that came down from the North to the Black Sea, and covered all that bore the Russian name with the same shroud of uniform and icy slavery? Ukraine suffered the fate of Novgorod and Pskov, but much later, and a single century of servitude has not been able to efface all that was independent and poetic in this brave people. There is more individual development and more local color than with us; among us, the same miserable garment covers all folk life. People are born to bow down before an unjust fate and die without a trace, leaving their children to begin the same desperate life. Our people do not know their own history, while every village in Little Russia has its own legend. The Russian people know only Pugachev and 1812.
The stories with which Gogol made his debut formed a series of genuinely beautiful tableaux of the customs and landscapes of Little Russia, full of gaiety, grace, liveliness, and love. Stories like this are impossible in Great Russia for lack of a plot and a character. With us, popular scenes take on a somber and tragic appearance, which oppresses the reader; I say tragic, only in the meaning of Laocoon. It is the tragic of a fate to which man succumbs without a fight. Suffering changes into rage and grief, laughter into bitter and spiteful irony. Who can read without shaking in indignation and shame the magnificent novel Anton Goremyka,20 and Turgenev's masterpiece Notes of a Hunter?
As Gogol left Little Russia and approached central Russia, the naive and gracious images disappeared. There is no further half-wild hero of the type in Taras Bulba, no debonair and patriarchal old man like the one he portrayed in Old-World Landowners. Under the Moscow sky, everything in him turned gloomy, somber, and hostile. He still laughed, he laughed more than he had done before, but it was a different laughter, and only people who were very hard-hearted or very simple could allow themselves to be taken in by this laughter. Passing from Little Russians and Cossacks to Russians, he left the side of his people and gave himself over to his two most implacable enemies: the official and the nobleman. Before him no one had ever given such a complete course of lectures on the anatomy and pathology of the Russian bureaucrat. With laughter on his lips, he penetrated indiscreetly into the deepest recesses of this impure and malicious soul. Gogol's comedy The Inspector General and his novel Dead Souls are a terrible confession of contemporary Russia, on the scale of Koshikhin's revelations in the 17th century.21
The emperor Nicholas split his sides with laughter when he attended a production of The Inspector General!!!
The poet, in despair from having produced only this majestic hilarity and the conceited laughter of bureaucrats who exactly resembled those he had depicted, though they were better protected by the censorship, felt obliged to explain in an introduction that his comedy was not only very funny, but also very sad, and that "there are warm tears under its smile."
After The Inspector General, Gogol turned to the provincial gentry and brought into the light this unknown population which had remained behind the scenes, far from roads and large cities, buried deep in the countryside, this Russia of petty squires, who in quietly taking care of their lands bred a corruption deeper than that of the West. Thanks to Gogol, we finally saw them leave their manor houses, their lordly homes, and parade before us without mask or makeup, forever drunk and greedy, slaves of power with no dignity, and tyrants without compassion toward their serfs, draining the life and blood of the people with the lack of constraint and the naivete of a child who nurses at his mother's breast.
Dead Souls roused all Russia.
Such an accusation was necessary for contemporary Russia. It is the story of an illness, written by the hand of a master. Gogol's poetry is a cry of terror and shame, uttered by a man degraded by the vulgarity of life, who suddenly sees in the mirror his own brutalized features. But for such a cry to break loose from a chest there must be healthy parts and the strength for recovery. A person who frankly confesses his weaknesses and faults senses that they do not form the main part of his being, that they do not absorb him entirely, and that there is in him something that escapes and resists the fall; that he can redeem the past, not simply to raise his head again, but to be transformed, as in Byron's tragedy, from Sardanapal the womanish to Sardanapal the hero.
Here we come face to face once more with this great question: where is the evidence that the Russian people can rise up again, and what is the evidence to the contrary? This question, as we have seen, had preoccupied all thinking men without any of them finding an answer.
Polevoy, who encouraged others, believed in nothing; would he have otherwise allowed himself to become discouraged so quickly, and gone over to the enemy at the first setback? The Library for Reading leaped right over this problem, circumventing the question without having made an effort to answer it. The solution offered by Chaadaev was no solution at all.
Poetry, prose, art, and history demonstrate for us the formation and development of this absurd milieu, these harmful ways, this monstrous power, but no one points to a way out. Must one become acclimated, as Gogol did later on, or rush toward one's doom like Lermontov? It is impossible to become acclimated; and yet we are loath to perish; something tells us from the bottom of our heart that it is too early to die, it seems there are still some living souls behind the dead souls.
The questions have reappeared with greater intensity, and all that is still hopeful demands a solution at any cost.
After 1840, two opinions absorbed the public's attention. From a scholastic controversy they soon passed into literature, and from there into society.
We are speaking of Muscovite pan-Slavism and Russian Europeanism.
The battle between these two opinions was ended by the revolution of 1848.
This was the last spirited polemic that occupied the public, and for that very reason it had real importance. We therefore dedicate the following chapter to it. [. . .]
Epilogue
[. . .] Behind the visible state in Russia there exists no invisible state which could presumably serve as the apotheosis and transformation of the present order of things; there is no unattainable ideal that never coincides with reality, although forever promising to do so. There is nothing behind the stockades where superior force holds us captive. The question of revolution in Russia comes down to a question of material force. That is why, without considering causes other than the ones we have mentioned, this country is the best possible place for a social regeneration.
We have said that after 1830, with the appearance of Saint-Simonism, socialism made a strong impression on minds in Moscow. Accustomed as we were to communes, land partition, and workers' cooperatives, we saw in this doctrine an expression of sentiments that were closer to us than what was found in political doctrines. Having witnessed the most terrible abuses, we were less bothered by socialism than the Western bourgeoisie.
Little by little, literary works were imbued with socialist tendencies and inspirations. Novels, stories, and even Slavophile manuscripts protested against contemporary society from more than simply a political point of view. It is sufficient to mention Dostoevsky's Poor Folk.
In Moscow, socialism marched alongside Hegelian philosophy. The alliance of modern philosophy and socialism is not difficult to imagine, but it is only recently that the Germans acknowledged the close ties between science and revolution, not because they had not formerly understood this, but because socialism, like all things practical, simply didn't interest them. Germans can be profoundly radical in science while remaining conservative in their actions—poets on paper and bourgeois in life. Such a dualism is unacceptable to us. Socialism seems to us to be the most natural syllogism, the application of logic to government.
We must note that in Petersburg socialism assumed a different character. Revolutionary ideas were always more practical there than in Moscow; theirs is the cold fanaticism of mathematicians. In Petersburg, they love order, discipline, and practical applications. Whereas in Moscow they argue, in Petersburg they form groups. In the latter city you will find the most passionate adherents of the Masonic movement and mysticism, and The Messenger of Zion, the organ of the Bible Society, was published there. The conspiracy of December 14th ripened in Petersburg; in Moscow it never developed sufficiently to go out onto the public square. In Moscow it is difficult to come to any understanding; individuals there are too capricious and too expansive. In Moscow there are more poetic elements, more erudition and, along with that, more nonchalance, greater carelessness, more useless words and a greater divergence of opinions. Saint-Simonism—vague, religious, and at the same time analytic—goes remarkably well with Muscovites. Having studied it, they passed naturally on to Proudhon, just as they went from Hegel to Feuerbach.
Fourierism suited the students of Petersburg more than Saint-Simonism. Fourierism values an immediate realization and seeks a practical application, but it also dreams, basing its dreams on mathematical calculations, concealing its poetry under the name of production, and its love of freedom under the union of workers in brigades—Fourierism was likely to find a response in Petersburg. The phalanstery is nothing more than a Russian commune and a workers' barracks, a military colony on a civilian basis, and an industrial regiment. It has been observed that an opposition openly battling with a government always has something of its character, but in an inverse sense. And I am sure that there is a basis for the fear of communism experienced by the Russian government: communism is Russian autocracy turned inside out.
Petersburg is outstripping Moscow, thanks to these sharp—perhaps limited—but active and practical views. The honor of taking the initiative belongs to it and Warsaw, but if tsarism falls, the center of freedom will be in the heart of the nation, in Moscow.
The complete failure of the revolution in France, the unfortunate outcome of the revolution in Vienna, and the comic finale of the revolution in Berlin served as a basis for a renewed reaction in Russia. Once again, everything was paralyzed; the plan to free the serfs was abandoned and replaced by a decision to close all universities. Censorship was doubled and more difficulties were put in the way of issuing foreign passports. Newspapers, books, words, clothing, women, and children were all persecuted.
In 1848 a new phalanx of heroic young people were sent to prison, and from there to hard labor in Siberia.22 An oppressive wave of terror cut down all the new shoots and forced everyone to yield; intellectual life once again hid itself, and, if it revealed itself, then only fearfully, only in mute despair, and, since then, every bit of news coming out of Russia has filled the soul with sorrow and deep sadness. [. . .]
No matter what people say, the methods employed by the Russian government—cruel methods—are not, however, sufficient to choke all the new shoots of progress. They cause many to perish in terrible moral suffering, but we must be prepared for this, and there are doubtless more people aroused than disarmed by these measures.
In order to actually choke off the revolutionary principle in Russia—the consciousness of our position and the desire to get out of it—Europe itself must assimilate more deeply the Petersburg government's principles and paths so that its return to absolutism is complete. One must wipe the word Republique from France's facade—that terrible word, even if it is only a lie and a taunt. In Germany the right to free expression—imprudently given— must be taken away. The day after a Prussian gendarme, with the aid of a Croat, has broken up the last printing presses which were dragged in the mud by des Freres Ignorantins23 against the pedestal of Gutenberg's statue, or when an executioner in Paris, with the pope's blessing, has burned the works of French philosophers on la place de la Revolution—on the following day the all-powerful tsar will have reached his apogee.
Could this be possible?
Who can say these days what is and isn't possible? The battle is not over, the struggle continues.
The future of Russia has never been more closely linked to the future of Europe than it is at present. Our hopes are well known to all, but our reluctance in answering does not come from childlike vanity, or from a fear of the future catching us in a lie, but because of the impossibility of seeing any aspect of this issue whose resolution does not depend completely on internal conditions.
On the one hand, the Russian government is not Russian, just generally despotic and retrograde. As the Slavophiles say, it is more German than Russian, and that explains the good disposition and love toward it shown by other states. Petersburg is a new Rome, the Rome of universal enslavement, and the capital of absolutism; that is why the Russian emperor fraternizes with the emperor of Austria and helps him to oppress Slavs. The principle of power is not national, and absolutism is more cosmopolitan than the revolution.
On the other hand, the hopes and aspirations of revolutionary Russia coincide with the hopes and aspirations of revolutionary Europe and anticipate their alliance in the future. The national element that Russia adds is the freshness of youth and a natural tendency toward socialist institutions.
The European states have clearly reached an impasse. They must make a decisive surge forward or they will fall even further back than now. The contradictions are too irreconcilable and the issues are too acute and have ripened too much through suffering and hatred to be able to stop at half- solutions and peaceful negotiations between power and freedom. But if there is no salvation for states in their current form of existence, the manner of their death can differ greatly. Death can come by means of rebirth or decay, through revolution or reaction. Conservatism, having no goal other than the preservation of an outdated status quo, is just as destructive as revolution. It annihilates the old order, not with the hot flame of rage, but with the slow flame of senility.
If conservatism gets the upper hand in Europe, imperial power in Russia will not only crush civilization, but will annihilate an entire class of civilized people, and then...
And then—here we find ourselves standing before an entirely new question and a mysterious future. Autocracy, having triumphed over civilization, finds itself face to face with a peasant insurrection, with an enormous revolt in the manner of Pugachev. Half of the strength of the Petersburg government is based on civilization and on the deep divide it has engendered between the civilized classes and the peasants. The government continually leans on the former, and it is primarily in the noble sphere that it finds the means, the people, and counsel. On breaking with his own hands such an essential instrument, the emperor has once again become the tsar, but it is not enough for him to let his beard grow and wear a zipoun2 The house of Holstein-Gottorp25 is too German, too pedantic, and too sophisticated to throw itself unreservedly into the arms of a half-savage nationalism in order to remain at the head of a popular movement which has wanted from the very beginning to settle accounts with the nobility and to spread the customs of the rural commune to all estates, cities, and the entire nation.
We have seen a monarchy surrounded by republican institutions, but our imagination cannot conceive of an emperor of Russia surrounded by communist institutions.
Before this distant future can be realized, a number of things must occur, and the influence of imperial Russia will be no less pernicious for reactionary Europe than the latter's influence will be for Russia. It is this barracks-room Russia that desires, by means of bayonets, to put an end to the questions that are agitating the world. It is this Russia that is roaring and moaning like the sea at the doors of the civilized world, always ready to overflow its banks, always trembling with a desire for conquest, as if it had nothing to do at home, as if pangs of conscience and bouts of madness disturb the minds of its rulers.
Only reaction can open these doors, with the Hapsburgs and Hohen- zollerns requesting fraternal assistance from the Russian army and leading it into the heart of Europe.
Then the great party of order will see what a strong government and respect for power are like. We advise the German princelings to acquaint themselves now with the fate of the grand dukes of Georgia, who were given a little money in Petersburg, the title of highness, and the right to have a royal crown on their carriage. But revolutionary Europe cannot be defeated by imperial Russia. It will save Russia from a terrible crisis, and will itself be saved from Russia.
The Russian government, after laboring for twenty years, has managed to link Russia by unbreakable ties with revolutionary Europe.
There are no borders between Russia and Poland.
Of course Europe knows about Poland, this nation that the entire world has abandoned to an unequal struggle, having shed since that time rivers of blood on all the fields of battle where there was any question of winning a people's freedom. Everyone knows this nation, which, having succumbed to numerical superiority, traveled across Europe, more like a conqueror than a victim, and has been dispersed among other peoples in order to teach them—alas, unsuccessfully—the art of bearing defeat without yielding, degrading themselves, or losing faith. One can destroy Poland, but not conquer it, one can carry out the threat made by Nicholas to leave only a sign and a pile of stones where Warsaw once stood, but it is impossible to turn them into slaves like the Baltic provinces.
Having united Poland with Russia, the government has erected an enormous bridge for the solemn passage of revolutionary ideas, a bridge that begins at the Vistula River and ends at the Black Sea.
Poland is thought to be dead, but every time the roll is called it answers "Present," as the speaker of a Polish deputation did in 1848. They should not take a step without assuring themselves of their western neighbors, because they have had enough of Napoleon's sympathy and the celebrated words of Louis-Philippe: "The Polish nationality will not perish."
We have no doubts about Poland or Russia. But we do have doubts about Europe. If we had some confidence in the peoples of Europe, we would enthusiastically tell the Poles:
"Brothers, your fate is worse than ours and you have suffered much, but be patient a little longer; there is a great future at the end of your misfortunes. You will extract a sublime revenge and will bring about the liberation of the people whose hands forged your chains. In your enemies—the tsar and autocracy—you will recognize your brothers in the name of independence and freedom."
Notes
Source: Du developpement des idees revolutionnaires en Russie. V. "La litterature et l'opinion publique apres le 14 decembre 1825," 1851; 7:79-100, 412-33; translation into Russian, 209-30.
The account by Astolphe, Marquis de Custine (1790-1857), remains one of the most powerful books written about Russia by a foreigner. Banned in Russia, it was read widely, including in the Winter Palace.
Count Pavel D. Kiselev (1788-1872), minister of government property, carried out a reform in the management of state peasants.
Herzen comments: "It is not without a degree of fear that I embark on this section of my survey. The reader will understand that I cannot say everything, or name all the people in many cases; to speak of a Russian one must be certain that he is buried or in Siberia. Only after serious reflection did I decide on this publication; silence sustains despotism, things one dare not express only half-exist."
Nikolay A. Polevoy (1796-1846), historian, writer, and editor of the progressive Moscow Telegraph, later became much more conservative in his views.
Nikolay I. Grech (1787-1867) and Faddey V. Bulgarin (1789-1859) were conservative journalists; the latter was, in addition, an agent of the Third Department.
Gavrila R. Derzhavin (1743-1816) was a renowned pre-romantic poet and a government official. Nikolay M. Karamzin (1766-1826) wrote poetry, stories, and travel memoirs, all of which strongly influenced the evolution of Russian prose style, but is best known as the author of the officially praised History of the Russian State. Ivan I. Dmitriev (1760-1837) was a poet in the sentimentalist style who held a number of high government posts.
Herzen: "After the revolution of 1848, censorship became an obsession of Nicholas. Not content with the regular censorship and the two offices set up outside the country in Jassy and Bucharest, where Russian is not being written, he created a second censorship office in Petersburg; we are inclined to hope that this double censorship will be more useful than simple censorship. One will wind up printing books outside of Russia, which is already being done, and one will find out who is more the ingenious, free expression or the emperor Nicholas."
Herzen: "This episode is discussed at greater length in Past and Thoughts."
Osip I. Senkovsky (1800-1858) was a founding editor of The Library for Reading and also published under the name "Baron Brambeus." Vissarion G. Belinsky (1819-1848) was the most influential Russian critic of his age, intensely engaged with the political and social issues of the day.
Herzen: "A sort of Latin Quarter, mostly inhabited by literary and artistic people who are unknown in other parts of the city."
Nestor V. Kukolnik (1809-1868) was a dramatist and novelist on patriotic themes. Vladimir G. Benediktov (1807-1873) and Alexey V. Timofeev (1812-1883) were poets, the former popular for his highly ornamented verse, which was disparaged by Belinsky.
Petr Ya. Chaadaev (1794-1856) was an officer in the 1812 war, a friend and correspondent of Pushkin, and author of The Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman. Herzen speaks eloquently of Chaadaev in Past and Thoughts.
Count Alexander Khr. Benkendorf (1783-1844), from a Baltic German family, a hero of the 1812 war, warned Alexander I in 1821 about the growing danger from the secret societies; under Nicholas I he founded the political police and directed them from 1826 to 1844. Count Petr A. Kleinmikhel (1793-1869), another high tsarist official of German descent, was dismissed as minister of communications (which included the inadequate road system) by Alexander II at the beginning of the reform era.
Dmitry V. Venevitinov (1805-1827) was a romantic poet and philosopher and founder of the group "Lovers of Wisdom" (liubomudry).
Alexander S. Griboedov (1795-1829), diplomat and writer, is best known for his satiric play Woe from Wit, phrases from which became a staple of the language of the intelligentsia.
Mikhail Yu. Lermontov (1814-1841) wrote romantic poetry, sometimes with political implications, and a novel (A Hero of Our Time) as well as serving as a career officer in the Russian army; he is considered one of Russia's greatest nineteenth-century poetic talents. Alexey V. Koltsov (1809-1842) was a poet whose work received critical support from Pushkin, Belinsky, and others, as well as popular acclaim.
Pavel I. Pestel (1793-1826) and Kondraty F. Ryleev (1795-1826) were two of five executed Decembrists; Ryleev was a romantic poet who preferred historical themes and heroes. His almanac The Polestar inspired Herzen's publication of the same name.
Herzen: "Verses that Lermontov addressed to the memory ofPrince Odoevsky, who died as a soldier in the Caucasus, one of those sentenced after the 14 th of December."
Ivan Mazeppa (1639-1709) was a well-educated Ukrainian Cossack hetman who went over to the Swedish side during the Battle of Poltava, and was forever after seen as a traitor to the Russians and a hero of Ukraine.
Written by Dmitry V. Grigorovich (1822-1899) and published in The Contemporary in 1847, which, along with his earlier work The Village, gained recognition for their sympathetic description of the serfs.
Herzen: "A Russian diplomat at the time of Alexey, father of Peter I, who emigrated to Sweden, fearing persecution by the tsar, and was beheaded in Stockholm for murder."
Herzen: "We have in mind the Petrashevsky society. Young people gathered at his place to debate social questions. This club had existed for several years, when, at the beginning of the Hungarian campaign, the government decided to declare it a major conspiracy and increase the number of arrests. Where they sought a criminal plot, they found only opinions, but this did not keep them from condemning all the accused to death in order to give themselves a merciful air. The tsar replaced execution with hard labor, exile, or conscription. Among the condemned are Speshnev, Grigoriev, Dosto- evsky, Kashkin, Golovinsky, Mombelli, and others."
A religious order founded in the late seventeenth century. It refused admission to priests with theological training, while offering a free education to the children of the poor.
A homespun coat.
Through dynastic alliances, the Romanov dynasty became highly Germanicized during the eighteenth century. Peter III (reigned 1761-1762) was the son of Peter the Great's daughter Anna and Duke Karl Friedrich Holstein-Gottorp.
^ 2 +
The announcement below was published as a separate lithographed sheet by the printing house that Herzen established in London in order to challenge the heavily censored press at home. It was also published in a Polish newspaper in May 1853 (where the Russian government took note of it) and in an abridged form in the French newspaper La Nation on June 19 of that year. Both a declaration of intent and a call for participation, it stimulated little response until after Nicholas I died in 1855. Eagerly awaiting a response, and yet aware of the fear experienced in Russia even by liberals, Herzen asked a friend to tell him which of their acquaintances had burned the sheet to avoid compromising themselves (Let 2:139). In an 1863 publication celebrating the first decade of the Free Press, Herzen refers to the year 1853 as the beginning of uncensored Russian- language publications abroad. This is an excellent example of the author's disciplined writing and barely suppressed emotion. A phrase that he borrowed from the 1830 Polish rebellion—"For our freedom and yours"—appeared on banners displayed in Red Square by Soviet dissidents in August 1968 in support of Czechoslovakia after it was invaded by Warsaw Pact troops.
The Free Russian Press in London
[1853]
To Our Brothers in Russia
Why are we silent?
Do we really have nothing to say?
Or are we really silent because we dare not speak?
At home there is no place for free Russian speech, but it can ring out elsewhere if only its time has come.
I know how hard it is for you to keep silent, what it costs you to conceal every feeling, every thought, every impulse.
Open and free speech is a great thing; without free speech a man cannot be free. Not for nothing do people give their lives, leave their homeland and abandon their property. Only that which is weak, fearful, and immature hides itself. "Silence is a sign of consent" and it clearly speaks of renunciation, hopelessness, a bowing of the head, an acknowledged desperation.
Openness of expression is a solemn declaration, a transition to action.
It seems to us that the time has come to publish in Russian outside of Russia. You will show us whether we are right or wrong.
I will be the first to remove the fetters of a foreign language and once again take up my native tongue.
The desire to speak with foreigners has passed. We told them as best we could about Rus and the Slavic world; what could be done was done.
For whom are we printing in Russian from abroad, and how can forbidden works be sold in Russia?
If we are going to sit with our arms folded and be content with futile grumbling and noble indignation, if we wisely back down in the face of any sort of danger, and, having come up against an obstacle, stop without trying to either step over it or go around it, then it will be a long time before Russia sees any radiant days.
Nothing happens all by itself, without effort and will, without sacrifice and work. The human will, the will of a single steadfast person, is incredibly great.
Ask what is being done by our Polish brothers, who are more oppressed than us. Haven't they sent everything they wanted to Poland for the past twenty-five years, avoiding the lines of police and the nets of informers?
And now, true to their great banner on which is written: "For our freedom and yours," they extend a hand to us; they relieve us of three-quarters of the task, and the rest you can do yourselves.
The Polish democratic brotherhood in London, in a sign of its brotherly union with free Russian people, is offering you the means to get books in Russia and send manuscripts to us from there.
It is your job to come up with material and get involved.
Send what you wish, and everything written in a spirit of freedom will be printed, from scientific and fact-based articles on statistics and history to novels, stories, and verse.
We are even ready to print these materials for free.
If you have nothing ready of your own, send forbidden verses by Pushkin, Ryleev, Lermontov, Polezhaev, Pecherin,1 et al., which are making the rounds.
Our invitation applies just as much to the pan-Slavists as to all free- thinking Russians. We have even more of a right to expect something from them, because they are exclusively involved with Rus and the Slavic peoples.
Our door is open. Whether you want to make use of it or not will be on your conscience.
If we receive nothing from Russia it will not be our fault. If tranquility is dearer to you than free speech—keep silent.
But I don't believe that—up till now no one has printed anything in Russian abroad, because there was no free printing press. From the first of May 1853 the press will be up and running. In the meantime, while waiting in the hope of receiving something from you, I will publish my own manuscripts.
In 1849 I was already thinking of publishing Russian books in Paris; but, driven from country to country, haunted by a series of terrible calamities, I could not carry out this undertaking. And in addition I was distracted; I sacrificed a lot of time, emotion, life, and means to Western developments. Now I feel superfluous in that sphere.
To be your outlet, your free, uncensored speech is my single goal.
I don't want so much to tell you my new ideas as to use my position to give publicity to your unspoken thoughts and your hidden aspirations, to convey them to your brothers and friends, who are lost in the mute distances of the Russian kingdom.
Together we will find the means and the solutions so that the terrible events that are coming in the West do not catch us unawares or sleeping.
At one time you loved my writing. What I will tell you now is not as youthful nor so warmed by that radiant and joyous flame and that clear faith in the near future which broke through the censor's bars. An entire life has been buried between those times and the present; but after so much loss one's thought has become more mature, and though little faith remains, what is there is firm.
Meet me, as youthful friends meet a warrior returning from his service, aged, wounded, but who has honorably preserved his standard in captivity and abroad—and with the former boundless affection extends his hand to you in honor of our erstwhile alliance in the name of Russian and Polish
London, 21 February, 1853
Note
Source: "Vol'noe russkoe knigopechatanie v Londone. Brat'iam na Rusi," 1853; 12:6264, 511-12.
1. Vladimir S. Pecherin (1807-1885) was a poet and professor of Greek philosophy at Moscow University in the 1830s, after which he emigrated, eventually entering a monastery.
♦ 3 +
Written in June 1853, this is the first proclamation issued by the Russian Free Press. It was sent directly to senior government officials in St. Petersburg, who informed the tsar; plans were quickly formulated to prevent its distribution, and to henceforth pay the strictest attention to books and other printed materials brought into Russia. Tsarist authorities in Poland received an anonymous letter from a Polish acquaintance of Herzen in London offering to serve as an informant. Nicholas I forwarded a copy of "St. George's Day!" to Count Orlov at the Third Department with a sarcastic note about what "nice" reading it made (Let 2:152-54, 163). Herzen received a letter from actor Mikhail Shchepkin—who was staying in Paris—lamenting that Herzen had summoned the ruling class to a sacred deed that they would prove unable and unwilling to perform. Her- zen believed that it was Shchepkin's past life as a serf that made him uncomfortable in the presence of free speech and prone to exaggerate its dangers (Let 2:167).
In Muscovite Russia, St. George's Day (November 26) was the only day of the year when dependent peasants had the right to move from one overlord to another, a right that was gradually restricted until it completely disappeared during the seventeenth century. This proclamation apparently marks the first time Herzen used the word topor
Together we will find the means and the solutions so that the terrible events that are coming in the West do not catch us unawares or sleeping.
At one time you loved my writing. What I will tell you now is not as youthful nor so warmed by that radiant and joyous flame and that clear faith in the near future which broke through the censor's bars. An entire life has been buried between those times and the present; but after so much loss one's thought has become more mature, and though little faith remains, what is there is firm.
Meet me, as youthful friends meet a warrior returning from his service, aged, wounded, but who has honorably preserved his standard in captivity and abroad—and with the former boundless affection extends his hand to you in honor of our erstwhile alliance in the name of Russian and Polish
London, 21 February, 1853
Note
Source: "Vol'noe russkoe knigopechatanie v Londone. Brat'iam na Rusi," 1853; 12:6264, 511-12.
1. Vladimir S. Pecherin (1807-1885) was a poet and professor of Greek philosophy at Moscow University in the 1830s, after which he emigrated, eventually entering a monastery.
♦ 3 +
Written in June 1853, this is the first proclamation issued by the Russian Free Press. It was sent directly to senior government officials in St. Petersburg, who informed the tsar; plans were quickly formulated to prevent its distribution, and to henceforth pay the strictest attention to books and other printed materials brought into Russia. Tsarist authorities in Poland received an anonymous letter from a Polish acquaintance of Herzen in London offering to serve as an informant. Nicholas I forwarded a copy of "St. George's Day!" to Count Orlov at the Third Department with a sarcastic note about what "nice" reading it made (Let 2:152-54, 163). Herzen received a letter from actor Mikhail Shchepkin—who was staying in Paris—lamenting that Herzen had summoned the ruling class to a sacred deed that they would prove unable and unwilling to perform. Her- zen believed that it was Shchepkin's past life as a serf that made him uncomfortable in the presence of free speech and prone to exaggerate its dangers (Let 2:167).
In Muscovite Russia, St. George's Day (November 26) was the only day of the year when dependent peasants had the right to move from one overlord to another, a right that was gradually restricted until it completely disappeared during the seventeenth century. This proclamation apparently marks the first time Herzen used the word topor
It is impossible to be a free person and have servants bought like a product and sold like a herd.
It is impossible to be a free person and have the right to flog peasants and send servants to jail.
It is impossible to even speak of human rights as the owner of human souls.
Might not the tsar say to you: "You want to be free, but whatever for? Take the quit-rent from your peasants, take their labor, take their children, assess their land, sell them, resettle them, flog them—and, if you tire of that, send them to me in the police station and I will be willing to flog them for you. Isn't that enough for you? Understand what's appropriate! Our ancestors ceded to you a portion of our autocracy; by placing free people in bondage to you they tore off the edge of their royal mantle and flung it over the poverty of your forefathers; you did not reject it, but covered yourself with it and lived under it—what kind of conversation can we have about freedom? Remain bound to your tsar while your orthodox peasants are bound to you. On what grounds would landowners be free people?"
And the tsar would be correct.
Many among you wanted the emancipation of the serfs; Pestel and his friends placed this freedom as their first item of business. They argued at first whether emancipation should be given with or without land. Then they all saw the absurdity of emancipation into hunger and vagrancy, and the question became only the amount of land and the possibility of compensation for it.
In the provinces with the most estates—Penza, Tambov, Yaroslavl and Vladimir, Nizhny, and, finally, in Moscow, the question of emancipation found sympathy and never met that frenzy with which American landowners defended their rights over blacks.
The Tula nobility presented a plan, and in a dozen other provinces people deliberated and made proposals.
And then, suddenly, the nobility and the government had a falling out and all those wonderful initiatives fell from their trembling hands.
But there was nothing to fear; the flood of 1848 was too shallow to inundate our steppe.
Since that time everything has fallen asleep.
Where is that minority who made so much noise in Petersburg and Moscow drawing rooms about the emancipation of the serfs?...
What came of all those committees, meetings, projects, plans, and proposals?.
Our sleepy inactivity, our sluggish lack of staying power, and our passive compliance inspire sadness and despair. With this dissoluteness we have reached the point where the government doesn't persecute us but just gives us a scare, and if it weren't for the youthful story—full of valor and recklessness—of Petrashevsky and his friends, one might think that you had come to an understanding with Nicholas Pavlovich and lived with him in harmony.
Meanwhile things are getting awkward in the villages. The peasants are looking gloomy. House serfs are less obedient. All kinds of stories are making the rounds. A landowner and his family burned, another killed with chains and pitchforks, a steward strangled by women in a field, a Kammer- herr2 flogged with a birch rod and forced to keep silent about it.
The peasants have clearly had enough of serfdom, only they do not know how to work together to accomplish something. For your part, you know that there can be no step forward without the emancipation of the serfs. Fortunately, it depends mostly on you.
Today it depends on you. We don't know what will happen tomorrow.
What are you really waiting for?
The government's permission? It gave you a sort of sly and ambiguous hint in 1842. You didn't make use of it.
What kind of permission is needed here? It is impossible to force someone to possess others; that would be a completely new form of tyranny, a reverse confiscation.
Think carefully about our words, and understand them.
At this moment you have more than a right;3 the fact of possession equals power. In either event, the key to the shackles is in your hands. It seems wiser and more practical to yield than to wait for an explosion. It's smarter to throw part of the cargo overboard than to allow the entire ship to sink.
We do not propose to you what Christ said to Nicodemus, to selflessly distribute your property; we have no paradise for you in exchange for such a sacrifice. We hate fine phrases and do not believe at all in mass generosity or in the unselfishness of entire social classes. On August 4, 1792, the French nobility acted in a way that was ten times wiser than it was selfless.4
Think carefully what is better for you—the emancipation of the serfs with land and with your assistance, or a struggle against emancipation with the assistance of the government? Starting with yourself, think carefully what is better—to begin a new, free Rus and amicably resolve a weighty issue with the peasants, or to begin a crusade against them with a weapon in one hand and a birch rod in the other? If Russia and the Slavic world are to have a future the peasants must be free...
Or there will be no Russia at all, and traces ofher, marked by unnecessary blood and terrible victories, will little by little disappear, like the traces of the Tatars, like a second unsuccessful northern population after the Finns. A state unable to separate itself from such a great sin, so deeply embedded in its inner structure, has no right to either formation or development, or to a part in the business of history.
But neither you nor I believe in such a terrible future.
You and I know that the emancipation of the serfs is essential, incontrovertible, and inevitable.
If you are unable to do anything they will still be free by grace of the tsar and by grace of Pugachevism.5
In both instances you are lost, and with you is lost that education that you completed despite difficulties, humiliations, and great injustices.
It will be painful if emancipation comes from the Winter Palace; tsarist power will justify itself to the people, and, having crushed you, will strengthen its despotism more than ever before.
Pugachevism is also frightening, but let us be frank—if the emancipation of the serfs cannot be bought at any other price, then that will not be too dearly bought. Dreadful transgressions bring in their wake dreadful consequences.
It will be one of those terrible historical calamities which can be foreseen and avoided in time, but from which it will be difficult or impossible to save oneself at the moment of defeat.
You have read the story of the Pugachev uprising, and you have heard stories about old Russian rebellions.
Our heart bleeds at the thought of innocent victims, we weep for them in advance, but, bowing our head, we say: let this terrible destiny, which people were not able or willing to avert, come to pass.
If we thought that this cup could not be refused, we would not have appealed to you, because our words would then have been empty or would have seemed a mockery that was nasty and inappropriate.
Quite the contrary, we are certain that there is no fatal necessity demanding that every step forward for the people must be celebrated with piles of corpses. A baptism by blood is a great thing, but we do not share the savage belief that every act of liberation and every triumph must pass through this.
Must the terrible lessons of the past always remain unspoken? [. . .]
Study them while there is still time.
We still believe in you; you gave a pledge and our heart has not forgotten it, that is why we do not directly address our unfortunate brothers in order to tell them how strong they are, something they do not realize, show them remedies that they have not figured out, and explain to them your weakness, which they do not suspect, in order to say to them:
"Well, chaps, it's time for the axe. We won't be shut up in a fortress forever, or spend more time doing unpaid labor or as house serfs. Stand up for your sacred freedom; for too long the masters have had their fun with us, have defiled our daughters and broken sticks over the ribs of the old men... Well children, let's bring straw, straw to the master's house, and let the gents warm themselves for the last time!"
Instead of that speech we are telling you: prevent a great calamity while it is still in your power.
Save yourselves from serfdom and the serfs from the blood they will have to spill.
Have pity on your children and on the conscience of the poor Russian people.
But hurry—it is harvest time and there is not an hour to lose.
The feverish breath of a sick, weakened Europe is blowing revolution toward Rus. The tsar has fenced you off, but there are chinks in that government fence and the draft is stronger than the wind.
The coming upheaval is not so foreign to the Russian heart as it once was. Our people are still unfamiliar with the word socialism but its meaning is close to the soul of a Russian who has lived out his days in a rural commune or a workers' co-op.
In socialism Rus will meet up with the revolution.
Such an oceanic stream of water cannot be stopped by customs regulation and birch rods. If you do not want to be drowned, get out of the way or swim with the current.
.Maybe those of you who do not want the emancipation think that the tsar will help in case of a crushing defeat. They are accustomed to fierce military pacification, they are accustomed to the role of executioner, which the government so willingly takes on itself at the behest of the gentry. They are accustomed to the gentry's criminal deafness to the peasants' complaints and shameful pandering to illegal sales, extraordinary tax assessments, and the forcible settlement of peasants outside the village.
Maybe the tsar will help with such means as his blessed predecessor used to help introduce the military colonies, flogging to death every tenth or twentieth person. Maybe.
But if you make use of the tsar's protection, be sure to behave yourselves; forget about any kind of human dignity, about any sort of free speech, and about the dream of personal independence, for at that point you will be loyal subjects and only loyal subjects. [. . .]
Notes
Source: "Iur'ev den'! Iur'ev den'!", 1853; 12:80-86, 514-15.
Herzen lists four of the five Decembrists executed in 1826.
At first a court official in sixth place on the Table of Ranks, by 1850 it designated those in ranks three and four.
Herzen: "Every noble class in the West can refer to some sort of weak, transparent rights to own peasants; we don't even have that. The Russian nobility didn't acquire slaves by spilling its own blood, but through a series of police actions, base pandering by the tsars, tricks by the civil servants, and the shameless greed of their ancestors."
4- Herzen misstated the date; he meant August 4, 1789, when noble members of the Constituent Assembly renounced their feudal rights.
5. The Pugachev rebellion of 1773-75 was led by a Cossack adventurer, Emilyan Pugachev, who claimed to be Tsar Peter III, the latest in a series of pretenders to the Russian throne. His large band of followers, including escaped serfs, deserting soldiers, branded convicts, Old Believers, and Cossacks, achieved early success in the Volga and Ural regions and marched on Moscow until the rebellion was finally halted and Pugachev was executed. Alexander Pushkin wrote both a historical account based on archival research and a novel, The Captain's Daughter, concerning this historical episode. It was seen as a warning about the underlying violence in a repressed society.
♦ 4 *
Initially published as a separate sheet, the announcement of The Polestar was reprinted in its first issue, as well in the French newspaper L'Homme, where agents of the Foreign Ministry noticed it and sent it on to St. Petersburg (Let 2:238-41). Originally planned as a journal, the lack of fresh material from Russia in the early years led to its continuation as a series of eight almanacs (1855-59, 1861-62, and 1869), some consisting of several installments. Its contents included Past and Thoughts, banned poetry by Pushkin, Lermontov, Ryleev, and Ogaryov, and Decembrist memoirs. It was named in honor of the publication edited by Ryleev and A. Bestuzhev from 1823 to 1825, which was closed down by Nicholas; the cover of the revived Polestar bore an engraving by Charles Linton of the five executed Decembrists in profile. Herzen planned for the first issue to come out on the anniversary of their deaths, July 13 (O.S.), but it was delayed until the beginning of August 1855.
Herzen believed that readers would be moved by this title; a letter the exiled Decembrist I. Yakushkin wrote from Siberia (which Herzen evidently never received) said that The Polestar was read with joy and deep emotion; its appearance was a major event for the youth of the mid-i85os. Nikolay Dobrolyubov wrote in his diary for January 13, 1857: "At 10 I began reading the second volume of The Polestar and I didn't stop until five in the morning [. . .] And having closed the book I couldn't sleep for a while [. . .] A lot of heavy, melancholy, but proud thoughts coursed through my head" (Dobroliubov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 6:451).
An Announcement About The Polestar
[1855]
The Polar Star hid behind the clouds of the reign of Tsar Nicholas.
Nicholas has passed on, and The Polestar has appeared once more, on our Good Friday, the day when five gallows were erected for our five crucifixions.
A Russian periodic publication that appears without censorship and is exclusively dedicated to the question of Russian emancipation and spreading liberated thought throughout Russia, is taking this name to demonstrate the continuation of the legend and the work, the internal bond and the blood ties.
Russia has been severely shaken by recent events. No matter what, it cannot return to stagnation; thought will be more active, new questions will arise—must they really fade away and go silent? We do not think so. Official Russia has a voice and will find defenders even in London. And Young Russia, the Russia of the future and of hope, does not possess a single organ.
We offer it one.
Beginning on February 18 (March 2) Russia enters a new phase of its development. The death of Nicholas is more than the death of a person— it is the death of principles which were carried out with great strictness and which had reached their limit. While he was alive they could somehow stand firm, established by habit and resting on an iron will.
After his death it is impossible to continue his reign.
We do not fight the dead. From the moment that Dr. Mandt whispered to the heir: "The carotid artery beats no longer," the passion of our struggle changed to a cold analysis of the past reign.
Two principal thoughts, lacking any unity and interfering with each other, determine the character of Nicholaevan rule.
Continuing Peter's legend in external affairs.
Counteracting the Petrine line of internal development.
Expanding borders and influence in Europe and Asia, while constricting any kind of civil society in Russia.
Everything for the state, i.e., for the throne, and nothing for the people.
To return to the patriarchal-barbaric power of the Muscovite tsars, without losing any of the grandeur of the Petersburg emperor—that was the task Nicholas set himself.
The Muscovite tsar, that Byzantine despot, surrounded by priests and monks, dressed in some sort of gilded robe, restricted by exaggerated oriental ceremony and a bad government structure—is less than a soldier. The Petersburg emperor, as soon as he rejects the formative principles of Peter, is only a soldier.
From the first day of his accession, Nicholas declared war on every sort of education and every free aspiration. He roused a sluggish Orthodoxy, persecuted the Uniates, destroyed tolerance, forbade Russians to go abroad, imposed an outrageous tax on the right to travel, tormented Poland for its political development, displayed relics which Peter had forbidden, and boldly placed on his flag, as if to mock the great words on the banner of the French Revolution: autocracy, orthodoxy, nationality!
Autocracy as a goal. This is the naive philosophy of history of the Russian autocrat.
Everything went his way. Not because he had exceptional strength, but because the baseness of the world around him was exceptional.
The height of his grandeur was the moment when he read Paskevich's dispatch:1 "Hungary lies at the feet of your highness!" [. . .]
Nicholas triumphed. But near the Winter Palace, i.e., near the Peter Paul Fortress, the Petrashevsky2 society was founded. It seems that despite all efforts, revolutionary thought was not dead but was fermenting in minds and making hearts beat faster. The appearance of these noble, self-sacrificing, fine young men before the investigating commission was an ominous memento mori for Nicholas. It was not by chance that the ghost of the 14th of December appeared twenty-five years later, flourishing and youthful. What had been achieved by terrible oppression at home and universal baseness?
In addition, after the triumph there was a terrible emptiness. The futility of an autocracy with no goal but itself was fully apparent the day after the victory.
Not a single fruitful thought, not a single improvement, everything turned gray along with Nicholas, growing older and stiffer. There was one thing he could accomplish—to free the serfs, and he wanted to do it, but it is hard, terribly hard for an absolute monarch to give anyone freedom.
[. . .] Nicholaevan rule was lowered into the grave with him. Do not worry, it will not rise again; things may get worse, but they will not be the same.
We know almost nothing about his heir. But his wishes notwithstanding, the circumstances of his accession to the throne determine to some degree his situation.
What a difference!
In a shaky manner, Nicholas ascended the throne instead of his older brother. He was greeted by a rebellion that he defeated with grapeshot, but behind the fallen ranks of soldiers a colossal conspiracy came to light. All Russia was involved: the peasant was there as a soldier, the house of Ru- rik represented by princes, generals covered in glory, people covered with honor, literary figures, officers, civil servants in Petersburg, Moscow, and everywhere—all took part in the conspiracy. He was afraid to find out that his friend Adlerberg and Suvorov,3 the grandson of the Italian prince, were implicated, and freed them from prosecution; the emperor Alexander was almost part of the conspiracy—Speransky and Karamzin wrote charters on his order.4
Two roads lay ahead of Nicholas—to become the head of the movement, get control of it, and move forward, or to go against the current, while he still had the strength. He chose the latter and until the present war had kept up his role. But the movement which dragged him into war is the best proof that he had neither stopped it nor gained control, and the man who began by disarming everything—mind and hand—finished by calling all Russia, even the serfs, to arms.
What is there in the 18th of February that resembles the 14th of December? The new emperor could not answer the bravery at Sevastopol with grapeshot; he could not forbid every kind of speech, when some people were coming to him to say that they would give their blood and others their money for the defense of Russia. Russia did not want this war, is ravaged by it, and obviously did not need it. But the subject here is not what used to be or what one desires, but the salvation and the integrity of the state; the people set off to correct the tsar's mistake with their blood—will the new tsar answer them with Siberia and new oppression? Enough!
In 1825 all Europe stood behind Nicholas, and in 1855 all Europe stands against Alexander. It is easy to disregard the people's groaning when there is no external enemy, but it is difficult to send people to their death with insults and abuse in parting. They have woken up to the extent that it has become a people's war. Once again the people have something in common with the tsar—that is why the tsar will depend on them.
The fourteenth of December was also born in a moment of animation, when the people for the first time after Pozharsky5 walked hand in hand with the government. The thought of Russian liberation appeared on the earth that day, when a Russian soldier, tired after battles and long marches, rushed to finally rest in the Elysian Fields.
Can it be that after forty years a gigantic battle in the Tauride will take place with no effect?
Will the Sevastopol soldier, wounded and hard like granite, having tested his strength, present his back to the rod as before? Isn't an armed serf as apt to return peacefully to unpaid labor as a nomadic horseman from the Caspian shores—now guarding the Baltic border—is apt to go missing on his own steppe? Did Petersburg see the English fleet in vain? That is impossible. Everything is in motion, everything is shaken and strained. what would have to happen for a country that was so abruptly awoken to once again fall dead asleep?
It would be better that Russia perish!
But this will not happen. From far away another life is audible to us here, and a spring breeze wafts from Russia. We did not doubt the Russian people before, and everything written and said by us since 1849 testifies to that. The establishment of a printing-house is even more evidence. The question was about the best time, and it has been resolved in our favor.
Only let us not be mistaken about one matter; circumstances count for a great deal but they are not everything. Without personal participation, without willpower and without labor, nothing gets completed. This is what comprises the grandeur of man's action in history. He creates it, and the fulfillment of historical destiny depends on his supreme will. The more favorable the circumstances the more terrible the responsibility he bears to himself and to his descendants.
We summon you to work. It is not a lot, but it is physiologically important; we have made the first step, we have opened the gate—to walk through it is your job!
The first volume of The Polestar will appear on the twenty-seventh of July (August 7), and the second toward the New Year.
We don't want to start subscriptions before December; for subscriptions we need to know whether we will receive articles, and whether there will be support from Russia. Only then will we be able to determine whether we can publish three or four volumes a year.
Our plan is exceptionally simple. In each issue we would like to have one general article (philosophy of revolution, socialism), one historical or statistical article about Russia or the Slavic world, an analysis of some remarkable artistic work and one original literary article; after that, a mixture of letters, a chronicle, and so on.
The Polestar must be—and this is one of our most ardent desires—the refuge for all manuscripts drowning in the imperial censorship, all that have been mutilated by it. For the third time we are making a request to all literate people in Russia to obtain for us manuscript copies of Pushkin, Ler- montov et al., which are being passed around and are well-known ("An Ode to Freedom," "The Dagger," "The Village," omitted parts of Onegin and "Demon," "The Gavriliad," "The Triumph of Death," "Polikrat Samossky"...).
The manuscripts will eventually perish—they must be preserved in print.
Our first volume is rich. A writer of unusual talent and a sharp dialectic as soon as he heard a rumor about The Polestar sent us a superb article under the title "What is a state?" We have read it ten times, amazed at the boldness and depth of the author's revolutionary logic.
Another anonymous writer sent us "The Correspondence Between Be- linsky and Gogol." We knew about this correspondence before from Belin- sky himself; it made some noise in 1847. In any case, there is no indelicacy in printing it since it has passed through so many hands, even those of the police, and we are printing something that is already well known. Belinsky and Gogol are no longer alive, Belinsky and Gogol belong to Russian history, and the polemic between them is too important a document to not publish out of faint-hearted delicacy.
We have already secured these two articles for our first volume. Besides these we will print excerpts from Past and Thoughts, an analysis of Miche- let's La Renaissance, and tutti frutti—all and sundry.
Richmond (Surrey) March 25 (April 6), 1855
Notes
Source: "Ob"iavlenie o 'Poliarnoi zvezde' 1855," 1855; 12:265-71, 536-38.
Prince Ivan F. Paskevich-Yerevansky (1782-1856), a general and field marshal who commanded the Russian army in campaign against Hungarian revolutionaries in 1848.
The Petrashevsky circle, organized by Mikhail V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky (18211866), read and discussed progressive literature, especially the French utopian socialists, and evidently included a secret inner core of proto-revolutionaries. Its members were arrested in 1849, in the wake of the European revolutionary activities, and a number of them, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, received sentences of prison and exile in Siberia.
Vladimir F. Adlerberg (1791-1859) was a general and minister at court, enjoying the special confidence of Nicholas I and Alexander II; Alexander A. Suvorov (1804-1882) was a grandson of the great general and close to Decembrist circles, as a result of which he was sent to the Caucasus, later serving as governor-general in the Baltic provinces.
Herzen has in mind work carried out for Alexander I by Mikhail Speransky. The relevant political essays by N. M. Karamzin were written on his own initiative.
Minin, a commoner, and Pozharsky, an aristocrat, are credited with leading the forces that liberated Russia in 1612.
♦ 5 *
The Polestar, Bk. I, 1855. Exiled to the Russian interior, Herzen met Alexander Niko- laevich Romanov when the heir to the throne traveled throughout the empire to get to know more about his future subjects. A few years later, still under the spell of this meeting, Herzen admitted that his idee fixe was to serve in the grand duke's suite, even if it were as a lowly librarian, preferring that to a much higher-ranking ministerial position (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 22:85). This is the first of Herzen's open letters to the new tsar. The verses come from Ryleev's poem "The Vision: An Ode on the Name-Day of His Imperial Highness Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich, August 30, 1823." Herzen refers to the fact that when Ryleev wrote this poem, it was believed that the next tsar would likely be Konstantin Pavlovich and not his younger brother Nicholas. As heir, Alexander II's tutor was the poet Vasily Zhukovsky. Herzen was mistaken about the easing of the conditions of the Decembrists' exile, which took place three years later, in 1837.
The liberals Kavelin and Chicherin found this letter more reasonable than many of Herzen's statements, and others went so far as to call it a noble deed (podvig), but the act of writing to the tsar was controversial across the political spectrum. Always willing to entertain other opinions, Herzen later published the objections he received to this document (Ulam, Ideologies and Illusions, 37). A member of the State Senate, K. N. Lebedev, wrote in his diary that the letter brought to mind the early stages of the French Revolution, when the National Assembly received impertinent letters from those who suddenly felt themselves equal in dignity to the government. Lebedev wondered whether the socialist Herzen knew what he really wanted, and whether he had active partners to help realize his agenda (Let 2:237, 268-73). Adam Ulam noted the "fantastic" quality of Russian politics in the late 1850s and early 1860s, when "the most radical people were never very far from petitioning or eulogizing the Tsar for this or that reform" (Ideologies and Illusions, 36).
Shortly after Herzen's death in 1870, an anonymous pamphlet ("A Few Words from a Russian to Other Russians"), possibly by V. A. Zaitsev, appeared abroad. Its author stressed the restraint and tact employed by Herzen in addressing those in whose hands lay the fate of the Russian people. "He did not disdain writing to the inhabitants of the Winter Palace, and there was a time when he was read even there—if only because it was the 'fashion'—and his words did not go to waste." But, the author laments, it was not yet an age when people like Herzen, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov could exercise a sustained influence. "In our North these are bright meteors, and the Polestar, which hid behind the clouds during the reign of Nicholas, reappeared only briefly, and with Herzen's death has vanished again for a long time" (Ivanova, A. I. Gertsen, 181).
A Letter to Emperor Alexander the Second
[1855]
Perhaps, my lad, the crown Was designated for you by the creator. Love the people, respect the rule of law, Learn ahead of time to be a tsar, Love the voice of freedom's truth, Love this for your own good, And destroy the ignoble spirit of Slavery and injustice...
—K. Ryleev, "Ode to the Grand Duke Alexander
Nikolaevich," August 30, 1823
Sovereign!
Your reign is commencing under a very lucky star. There are no bloodstains on you, and you feel no pangs of conscience.
The news of your father's death was not brought to you by his assassins. You did not have to cross a square bathed in Russian blood to reach the throne; you did not have to proclaim to the people your accession by means of executions.
The chronicles of your dynasty hardly offer a single example of such an unsullied beginning.
And that is not all.
People expect from you mildness and a human heart.—You are exceptionally lucky!
Fate and chance have surrounded you with something that speaks in your favor. You alone of all your family were born in Moscow, and born at the time when it was awakening to a new life after the purifying fire. The cannons of Borodino and Tarutino1 had scarcely returned from abroad and were still covered with Parisian dust when your birth was proclaimed from the Kremlin heights. I remember hearing it as a five-year-old boy.
Ryleev greeted you with advice—can you really withhold your respect for this powerful freedom fighter, this martyr to his convictions? Why was it that your cradle inspired in him this mild and peaceful verse? What prophetic voice told him that in time the crown would fall on your youthful head?
You were taught by a poet who loved Russia.2
On the day you came of age the fate of our martyrs was made easier.— Yes, you are very fortunate!
Then there was your journey around Russia. I witnessed it, and, what is more, I remember it very well; as a result of your appearance my fate underwent a geographical improvement and I was transferred from Vyatka to Vladimir; I have not forgotten that.
Exiled to a distant town beyond the Volga, I watched how the poor folk met you with a simple love, and I thought: "How will he repay that love?"
Here it is—payment time, and how easy you will find it! Give in to your heart. You truly love Russia and you can do so, so much for the Russian people.
I also love the Russian people, I have forsaken them out of love; I could not remain a witness—silent and with folded arms—to those terrible things that the landowners and bureaucrats were doing to them.
Being at a distance has not changed my feelings; in the midst of strangers, in the midst of passions called forth by the war, I have not rolled up my flag. Just the other day I publicly greeted the English people on behalf of the Russian people.3
Of course, my banner is not yours—I am an incorrigible socialist and you're an autocratic emperor; but there is one thing in common between your banner and mine—namely that love for the people about which we speak.
And in its name I am prepared to make a huge sacrifice. What could not be accomplished by long years of persecution, prison, exile, or tedious wandering from country to country—I am prepared to do out of love for the people.
I am prepared to wait, to step back a bit, to speak about something else, as long as I have a real hope that you will do something for Russia.
Your majesty, grant freedom to the Russian word. Our mind is constricted, our thought is poisoning our chest from a lack of space; it is groaning in the confinement of censorship. Give us free speech. We have something to say to the world and to our own people.
Give land to the peasants. It already belongs to them; wipe away from Russia the shameful stain of serfdom, heal the bruises on the backs of our brothers—those dreadful marks of disdain for human beings.
As he was dying, your father—do not be afraid, I know that I am speaking with his son—confessed that he was unable to do everything that he wished for all his subjects. Serfdom was gnawing at his conscience in the last moments.
He was unable during the course of thirty years to free the serfs!
Hurry! Save the serf from future crimes, save him from the blood that he will have to spill.
.I am ashamed at how little we are prepared to be satisfied with; we want things of whose justice you—and everyone else—have little doubt.
As a first step that will be sufficient for us.
It may be that on the height on which you stand, surrounded by a fog of flattery, you are amazed by my impertinence; maybe you even laugh at this lost grain of sand out of seventy million grains of sand that make up your granite pedestal.
But it is better not to laugh. I am saying only what is kept silent at home. For that purpose I have set up on free soil the first Russian printing press; like an electrometer, it will register the activity and pressure of suppressed force.
A few drops of water that cannot find a way out are sufficient to destroy a granite cliff.
Your majesty, if these lines reach you, read them without malice, alone, and then think about them. You do not often get to hear the sincere voice of a free Russian man.
10 March 1855
Notes
Source: "Pis'mo k Imperatoru Aleksandru Vtoromu," Poliarnaia zvezda, kn. 1, 1855; 12:272-74 538-39.
In September 1812, Napoleon failed to defeat the Russians at Borodino; his forces were defeated the following month at Tarutino, south of Moscow, with an unusually large number of French guns falling into enemy hands.
Vasily Zhukovsky.
Herzen refers to "A Popular Assembly in Memory of the February Revolution," a speech that he gave in French at a London meeting on February 27, 1855, commemorating the events of 1848. The speech was published in English, French, and Russian.
♦ 6 *
The Polestar, Bk. I, 1855. Herzen published the infamous 1847 correspondence between Gogol and Belinsky, which was still banned in Russia, along with Gogol's reaction to Be- linsky's article in The Contemporary. In A Remarkable Decade, Pavel Annenkov described Herzen's arrival at the hotel in Paris where a seriously ill Belinsky read his own letter in Herzen's presence. Although Herzen heard the letter in its original form in 1847, the copy he used for publication is faulty. His word for publicity—glasnost'—was widely employed during the first decade of Alexander II's reign, and, along with the word for restructuring—perestroika—was revived 130 years later by Mikhail Gorbachev.
A Note on "The Correspondence Between N. Gogol and Belinsky" in The Polestar
[1855]
The circumstances which gave rise to this correspondence are well-known to our readers. In 1847, N. Gogol, who was living abroad, published his Correspondence with Friends in Russia. The book was a surprise to everyone. Its spirit completely contradicted his previous creations, which had so deeply shaken all Russian readers. Was it an internal, psychic reshaping, one of those painful stages of development by which a person reaches eventual maturity? Was it the result of a physical ailment, indignation, a long period spent abroad or simply dizziness? In any case, the publication of such a book by such a major talent had to stimulate a powerful polemic.
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