MY PAST AND THOUGHTS
The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen
TRANSLATED BY Constance Garnett REVISED BY Humphrey Higgens
INTRODUCTION BY Isaiah Berlin
ABRIDGED, WITH A PREFACE AND NOTES
by Dwight Macdonald
MY PAST
AND
THOUGHTS
The Memoirs of
Alexander Herzen
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFONIA PRESS
Berkeley and Los Angeles and London
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Abridged version copyright © 1973 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Introduction copyright© 1968 by Isaiah Berlin.
Revised translation copyright © 1968 by Chatto and Windus Ltd.
All rights reserved under International
and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
University of California Press Edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
First California Printing 1982
ISBN 0-520-04210-7 paper
0-520-04191-7 cloth
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-15933
Printed in the United States of America
Who is entitled to write his reminiscences?
Everyone.
Because no one is obliged to read them.
In order to write one's reminiscences it is not at all necessary to be a great man, nor a notorious criminal, nor a celebrated artist, nor a statesman-it is quite enough to be simply a human being, to have something to tell, and not merely to desire to tell it but at least have some little ability to do so.
Every life is interesting; if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting, the life itself is interesting. Man likes to enter into another existence, he likes to touch the subtlest fibres of another's heart, and to listen to its beating
. . . he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks for himself confirmation, sympathy, justification . . . .
But may not memoirs be tedious, may not the life described be colourless and commonplace?
Then we shall not read it-there is no worse punishment for a book than that.
Moreover, the right to indite one's memoirs is no relief for the chagrin of this. Benvenuto Cellini's Diary is not interesting because he was an excellent worker in gold but because it is in itself as interesting as any novel.
The fact is that the very word 'entitled' to this or that form of composition does not belong to our epoch, but dates from an era of intellectual immaturity, from an era of poet-laureates, doctors'
caps, corporations of savants, certificated philosophers, diploma'ed metaphysicians and other Pharisees of the Christian world. Then the act of writing was regarded as something sacred, a man writing for the public used a high-flown, unnatural, choice language; he 'expounded' or 'sang'.
We simply talk; for us writing is the same sort of secular pursuit, the same sort of work or amusement as any other. In this connection it is difficult to dispute 'the right to work'.
Whether the work will find recognition and approval is quite a different matter.
A year ago I published in Russian part of my memoirs under the title of Prison and Exile. l published it in London at the beginning of the [Crimean] war. I did not reckon upon readers nor upon any attention outside Russia. The success of that book v
exceeded all expectations: the Revue des Deux Mondes, the most chaste and conceited of journals, published half the book in a French translation; the clever and learned Athenaeum printed extracts in English; the whole book has appeared in German and is being published in English.
That is why I have decided to print extracts from other parts.
In another place I speak of the immense importance my memoirs have for me personally, and the object with which I began writing them. I confine myself now to the general remark that the publication of contemporary memoirs is particularly useful for us Russians. Thanks to the censorship we are not accustomed to anything being made public, and the slightest publicity frightens, checks, and surprises us. In England any man who appears on any public stage, whether as a huckster of letters or a guardian of the press, is liable to the same critical examination, to the same hisses and applause as the actor in the lowest theatre in Islington or Paddington. Neither the Queen nor her husband are excluded. It is a mighty curb!
Let our imperial actors of the secret and open police, who have been so well protected from publicity by the censorship and paternal punishments, know that sooner or later their deeds will come into the light of day.
ALEXANDER HERZEN, The Pole Star, 1 855
CONTENTS
PREFACE by Dwight Macdonald
x1
INTRODUCTION by Isaiah Berlin
x1x
DEDICATION (to Nicholay Platonovich Ogarev) xlv
NURSERY AND UNIVERSITY
(1812-1834)
Childhood
3
Youth
19
Political Awakening
39
Nick and the Sparrow Hills
58
My Father
65
The University
79
After the University
107
Appendix: A. Polezhayev
117
PRISON AND EXILE
122
(1834-1838)
Ogarev's Arrest
125
My Arrest
132
Imprisonment
137
Krutitsky Barracks
145
Investigation and Sentence
152
Perm
166
Vyatka
170
Misgovernment in Siberia
185
Appendix: Alexander Lavrentevich Vitberg
199
The Tsarevich's Visit
210
The Beginning of My Life at Vladimir
219
MOSCO\V, PETERSBURG AND
NOVGOROD (1840-1847)
Return to Moscow and Intellectual Debate
229
Petersburg and the Second Banishment
253
Councillor at Novgorod
269
Our Friends
284
Our 'Opponents'
287
To Petersburg for a Passport
305
PARIS-ITALY -PARIS
(1847-1852)
The Journey
319
The Honeymoon of the Republic
324
Western European Arabesques, I
330
1. The Dream
330
2. The Reality
333
The Revolution of 1848 in France
340
In Geneva with the E.-riles of 1848
358
Western European Arabesques, II
384
1. A Lament
384
2. Postscript on Petit Bourgeois
391
Money and the Police
398
P.-1. Proudhon
414
Appendix: Second Thoughts on the Woman
Question
431
EKGLAND (1852-1858)
The Fogs of London
445
The Emigrants in l,ondon
448
John Stuart Mill and His Book on Liberty 458
German Emigrants
467
Robert Owen
485
THE FREE RUSSIAN PRESS
AND THE BELL (1858-1862)
Apogee and Perigee
529
The Younger Emigrants: The Common Fund
554
M. Bakunin and the Cause of Poland
565
THE LATER YEARS ( 1860-1868)
Fragments
591
Swiss Views
591
Beyond the Alps
594
Zu Deutsch
596
Living Flowers-The Last
of the Mohican Squaws
599
The Flowers of Minerva
606
Venezia la bella
609
Byzantium
613
France, Germany ... and America
615
The Superfluous and the Jaundiced (1860)
619
Bazarov Once More (1868)
628
Letter 1
628
Letter 2
639
A Relevant Chrestomathy from the Later Years
(Selected by the Abridger)
643
APPENDix: Marx v. Herzen
(the Soviet Academy's History,
with Notes by Dwight Macdonald
677
INDEX OF PERSONS
follows page 684
PREFA CE
by Dwight Macdonald
ALTHOUGH THE INDEFATIGABLE Constance Garnett translated Herzen's memoirs fifty years ago, they have never caught on with American readers. Most people to whom I mention Herzen have either never heard of him or confuse him with another nineteenth-century founding father, Herzl, or with the physicist Hertz, he of the waves. In Russia, My Past and Thoughts has always been standard reading, like War and Peace;1 nor is Herzen unfamiliar to Western European readers. But like certain wines, he doesn't "travel" well. So far, he hasn't crossed the Atlantic.
This is strange because My Past and Thoughts is, when it's not great political writing, a classic of autobiography that stands with Rousseau, Stendhal, Gibbon, Tolstoy, and Henry Adams; one might add Trotsky and Churchill, who, like Herzen, knew how to assimilate the personal to the historical. It is also strange because, unlike some classics, Herzen is extremely readable.2
Finally, our neglect is odd because Herzen-though a friend of 1 The opening section of My Past and Thoughts, "Nursery and University," reminds me of War and Peace in many ways: same period ; simple, classical prose; and large, varied cast of characters from every stratum of Russian society. The first ten pages, on the burning of Moscow, sound like an early draft of Tolstoy's novel, right from the first sentence : " 'Vera Artamonovna, come tell me once more how the French came to Moscow,'
I used to say, rolling myself up in the quilt and stretching in my crib, which was sewn round with canvas that I might not fall out."
2 For example-also an instance of personal/historical mixture-there is the paragraph in which he disposes of the great de Tocqueville.
(Herzen and a friend have just been arrested as suspicious foreigners during the "June Days" that drowned in blood the 1 848 revolution. ) We were taken away b y two soldiers with rifles i n front, two behind, and one on each side. The first man we met was a representant du peuple with a silly badge in his buttonhole; it was Tocqueville, who had written about America. I addressed myself to him and told him what had happened; it was not a joking matter; they kept people in prison without any sort of trial, threw them into the cellars of the Tuileries, and shot them. Tocqueville did not even ask who we were; he very politely bowed himself off, delivering himself of the following bar.ality: "The legislative authority has
PREFACE
Xll
Bakunin and an enemy of Marx-was the founding father of revolutionary socialism in Russia (Lenin revered him) and because, after 1917, our intelligentsia have often seemed more interested in Russian politics than in their O\Vll.
There \vere, of course, reasons why in the thirties we didn't respond to Herzen. In those innocent days, the outrages against rationality and human feeling that we read about in the daily papers were stimulating rather than depressing, since they revealed how absurd and hateful (therefore intolerable, therefore soon to be shattered by the revolutionary masses) was the capitalist status quo. (And we knew just the kind of society that should replace it and hO\v to go about the job.) Marx was our man then, the scholarly genius , .... hose titanic labors in the British Museum had discovered History's "laws of motion"-the prophet of the proletariat as savior and redeemer. (Marx did all right as John the Baptist, but his Jesus wasn't up to the part.) Now we are a world war and a few aborted revolutions the wiser and have come to be suspicious even of the Laws of History. We are, in fact, in much the same state of mind as Herzen after the failure of the 1848 revolution: despair and doubt ravage us, the Marxian dream has turned into the Russian nightmare (or the British doze), and so now we should be able to appreciate Herzen's unsystematic, skeptical, and free-thinking (also freefeeling) approach. His disenchantment, shot through with irony and rooted in his lifelong habit of judging abstract ideas by their concrete results-these qualities now seem to us (or rather, to me: an emendation Herzen \vould have approved; his political thinking was always personal) more attractive, and more useful, than Marx's optimistic, humorless, and somewhat inhuman doctrine of inevitable (a word Herzen would never have used) progress via historical/ materialistical/ dialectical necessity (another un-Herzenian word).
It may be objected that Herzen has no "message" for us today.
True enough, if a positive program is meant: Herzen was a critic, a reflective observer, and usually a "negativist." All we no right to interfere with the executive. " How could he have helped being a minister under Napoleon III!
Fair comment, except for the last sentence, which is a polemical quarter-truth. De Tocqueville was indeed, briefly (June-October, 1 849), Minister of Foreign Affairs, but Louis Napoleon was then merely the duly elected President of the Second Republic. He didn't become "Napoleon III" until three years later ( long after de Tocqueville had shifted to open and vigorous opposition), when a coup d'etat made him the plebiscitary "Emperor of the French. "
Preface
Xlll
can learn from him is what a certain historical event meant to his mind and heart, not what to do about it. But this objection shows why Herzen is our man today. In a period like this, when mankind seems to be in an impasse, such a thinker precisely because he is uncommitted to solutions is more useful to us than a thinker like Marx. Herzen's reactions to 1 848, for instance, are more to the point today than Marx's. The tragi-comedy of 1 848
was the turning point in the intellectual development of both revolutionaries. 1 848 stimulated Marx to a mighty effort at system building which now seems-"to me" understood-ethically repulsive, politically ambiguous, and, in its nineteenthcentury optimism of progress, intellectually absurd. (How much more creative, usable, and simpatico the pre-1848 young Marx now appears than the mature Marx of Das Kapital!) 1848 threw Herzen into a permanent state of disenchantment (his discovery of his wife's infidelity was also an important factor-typically) .
But now that we can see what the failure of the working class to make a revolution in 1 848 meant, both about the working class and Western society, Herzen's despair seems less self-indulgent and more realistic than Marx's optimistic faith. (This system have I shored up against my ruin.) Certainly it is more interesting and-that great cant word of our time-"relevant," because in it we can recognize ourselves and our historical situation as we can't in Marx. De te fabula narratur-mon semblable, mon frere!
The above paragraphs were written twenty-five years ago as a preface to some excerpts from My Past and Thoughts that I ran in the Winter 1 948 number of my then magazine, Politics. I reprint them here (with cuts and a dditions which don't change the general argument) because I'm a thrifty writer and can't see why I should go to the trouble of reformulating what I've already expressed well enough, especially since a quarter-century of American political experience hasn't (alas) "dated" my 1948
remarks. And the last eight years of Johnsonnixonesque Vietnamization of the republic (as Rosa Luxemburg observed, imperialism brutalizes the "mother," or rather "stepmother,"
country as damagingly as it does the colonies) have depressed me to a political mood which makes my old postwar state of mind look positively euphoric. I am "ravaged by doubt and despair" more virulently and am more skeptical about political programs, radical or bourgeois. My suspicions about Progress, Laws of History, and the Proletariat have long since vanished, to be replaced by bleak certainties. Had anybody predicted in 1948
PREFACE
that I would come to look back on the Roosevelt-Truman period
-those liblab fakers!-as a golden age relative to what we got later, I'd have been more amused than angry. But so has it come to pass. And even the Age of Ike now looks to me, if not golden, at least silver compared to the leaden catastrophes of our last two presidencies. "In short, if Marx was our man in the thirties, Herzen may be our man in the forties" is a sentence I deleted from my old text because it would have blown the gaff on the spoof. But it now works well enough if "forties" is changed to
"sixties." Or maybe it's not too early to make it "seventies"-the decade hasn't gotten off to an encouraging start.
My 1948 observations about Herzen's strange failure to catch on over here are also still (alas) relevant. Just this week-to cite the most recent findings of a one-man (me), one-question ("Who was Alexander Herzen?") poll I've been unsystematically conducting for years-I drew the normal blank from two friends I really thought might know: a sixtyish professor of English, freewheeling in his interests and an accomplished parodist, and the clever, knowledgeable (I thought) youngish editor of a sociocultural "little magazine" I admire. The professor was able to connect Herzen with politics but ran out of gas on when, where, and, indeed, who. The editor-just the sort of free-thinker Herzen would appeal to (I'm sure I've done for him what Meyer Schapiro did for me when he introduced me to the memoirs in 1943 )-was completely blank.3
In one way, My Past and Thoughts is a hard book to prune because it's alive all through, remarkably sustained in style and thought, very few longueurs. But, in another way, it's an easy book to cut because it's not really a book. Herzen was a temperamental anarchist-his adherence to Proudhon and Bakunin and his rejection of Marx had much deeper roots than politics.
Therefore, he planned his masterpiece according to the best anarchist principles; i .e., he didn't. Like Topsy, and unlike Das Kapital, it just growed. The architecture is in the most irregular Gothic style with all sorts of outbuildings-some elegant, some grotesque-proliferating around the central mass ( if there can
:1 At least neither mixed him up with Herzl or Hertz. (A little learning is a dangerous thing. ) Checking up about those waves, I ran across further evidence of Herzen's American invisibility. On my desk I have four "college-size" dictionaries: The American College (Random House, 1947-55 ), The Standard College ( Funk & Wagnalls, 1963), Webster's New World (World, 1953-70), and American Heritage (Houghton Miffiin, 1969) . All list Herzl, three Hertz, none Herzen.
Preface
XV
be a center to so amorphous an assemblage) , which itself is constantly pushing up spires, adding lady chapels, breaking out rose windows, and extruding semi-detached cloisters and refectories-always just where you least expect them. Like Sterne in Tristram Shandy, Herzen made digression a formal principle, backing into or out of the subject or, when pressed, escaping crabwise with a scuttle to the side. As he remarked in the fourth letter of Ends and Beginnings ( 1862), that extraordinary series of super-Gothic articles disguised as letters to Turgenev, his old friend and comrade in long midnight arguments a la Russe: Please don't be angry with me for so continually wandering from the point. Parentheses are my joy and my misfortune.
A French literary man of the days of the Restoration, a classic and a purist, more than once said to me, taking a pinch of snuff in that prolonged Academy way which will soon have passed away altogether: "Notre ami abuse de la parenthese avec intemperance!" It is for the sake of digressions and parentheses that I prefer writing in the form of letters to friends; one can then write without embarrassment whatever comes into one's head.
My Past and Thoughts began as a series of reminiscences of his childhood and youth which he ran in the Russian-language magazines-The Pole Star and, later, The Bell-he published and edited from London, where he was a political refugee for the last twenty years of his life.4 They were an immediate success, 4 The Bell (Kolokol) was perhaps the most effective muckraking magazine in radical history. Its influence reached its apogee, 1 857-62, after the liberal Alexander II had succeeded the despotic Nicholas I. Kolokol was widely distributed inside Russia, through underground channels, and was read in the highest offices of the state bureaucracy, including the study of the Tsar himself. "It seemed as if Herzen's Kolokol had as many contributors as readers," William Jackson Armstrong observed in Siberia and the Nihilists ( Pacific Press, Oakland, Cal., 1890 ) . "State secrets of which not ten persons in the empire dreamed were treated by him as things of common knowledge. . . . He kept track as accurately of the corruption and cruelties of the most insignificant police officer as he did of the transactions in the Senate and Council chamber. The dread of appearing in Kolokol soon paralyzed the hand of the boldest and most hardened officials in the service." Herzen explains why in the preface to the 1 855 English edition of My Ezile in Siberia: "There is no country in which memoirs can be more useful than in ours. We Russians, thanks to the censorship, are little accustomed to publicity; it frightens, astonishes and offends us. It is time the lmperi:�l artists of the police of St. Petersburg should know that sooner or later their actions, so well hidden by
PREFACE
XVl
and so to this nucleus he added from time to time the variegated products of his prolific journalism, finally giving the medley a title which covers anything and everything.
The four volumes of the recent Garnett-Higgens version (Knopf, 1 968), from which I have quarried the present abridgment, arc structurally an anthology which includes a variety of subjects in a variety of prose styles. THE NovEL: "Nursery and University," whose 150 pages begin Volume I (they are here given nearly complete ) , and in Volume II the 1 00 pages of "A Family Drama" plus two short stories, "The Engelsons" and
"N. I. Sazonov" (all regretfully omitted here ) . THE MEMOIR: his political life and hard times from his first arrest in 1 834 to his arrival in London as an exile for the rest of his life, in 1 852
(these occupy the rest of Volumes I and I I ) . THE "PRoFILE": mini and major, of the myriad characters of every class, nation and politics he met in his active and gregarious life-most are vignettes, some are full-length portraits (Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth, Owen, Bakunin, Proudhon, Vitberg, Belinsky, Ketscher), all are executed with verve, wit, psychological acuity and a novelist's flair for detail. REPORTAGE that would have made his fortune-not that he needed another one-had there been a nineteenth-century New Yorker: "The Tsarevich's Visit" in Volume I ; "Money and the Police" in Volume II, with the vivid, and admiring, sketch of Rothschild at work in his bank (Herzen was the least snobbish of radicals-like Gandhi, he treated the rich as social equals) ; the superb chapters in Volume III on the national idiosyncrasies of the post-1848 French, Italian, Polish, Russian and German refugees in London, with whom as the only comrade in town with ready cash (and a reputation as a soft touch not completely deserved-his brain was always working) he became widely acquainted ; and his story of Prince Golitsyn and his serf musicians (see pp. 539-49 ). a Gogolian comedy Herzen does full justice to. HisTORY: the chief examples are "The Emperor Alexander an(l Karazin" and "Princess Dashkov,"
which are magnificent but also 1 07 pages, and not even so fat an abridged edition as this could contain them ; they are in Volume prisons, handcuffs and gra\'!'S, will he revealed in the full glare of day."
Turgenev once told Herzcn that when the actors of the Imperial Theater in l\Ioscow had a row with the director and were getting nowhere, one of them finally exclaimed: "\Ye will write to Koloko/1" The director ca\'!•d in at once . . . . Tangentially but profoundly to the present point is nn anecdote from an Parlier period of tsarism. Peter the Great asked an old hi therto faithful mansenant why lw had conspired to kill him.
"Because the mind loves space." was the reply, "and you cramp me."
Preface
XVll
IV, along with letters to and from Herzen and a rich variety of political, social and cultural speculations from his last decadesome of his most important writings. Herzen didn't peter out.
Nor did he abandon his anarchist belief in creative disorder.
Structural coherence, which has begun to erode by the end of Volume I, has by IV yielded completely to Chaos and Old Night.
But a night with many stars in it.5
A note on the text: Constance Garnett made the first English translation of My Past and Thoughts. She worked from the most complete Russian text then available, Slovo's five-volume edition (Berlin, 1 921 ) . Her translation was published in six small (duodecimo) and attractive volumes between 1 922 and 1 927 by Chatto and Windus (London) and Alfred A. Knopf (New York) .
In 1 968 the same publishers put out a new edition, in four large (and attractive) volumes-a revision of the Garnett translation by Humphrey Higgens. Mr. Higgens also added additional material, lacking in Slovo (and hence in Garnett), from the Collected Works recently published by the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (Moscow, 30 vols., 1 954-64 ) . The present volume is based on Mr. Higgens's edition.
Footnotes: They come in five varieties. (Tr. ) indicates Miss Garnett's notes (A.S.) the Soviet Academy of Sciences', (R.) Mr. Higgens's, and (D.M.) mine. Herzen's own, or those condensed from Herzen's text, are unmarked.
Omissions: Cuts of a page or more are indicated by ornaments between paragraphs or, when one or more following chapters are omitted, by ornaments at the end of the preceding chapter.
Lesser cuts are not indicated-i.e., all dots ( . . . . ) were in the original. I've made very few lesser cuts because ( a ) I think they 5 The most discerning appreciation of Herzen as a writer I know is V. S.
Pritchett's in The New Statesman cf: Nation for June 12 and. 19, 1943.
Some excerpts: "His power of observation is extraordinary . . . . Herzen's memory particularizes and generalizes . . . . His most important quality is his sense of situation . . . . his gift for knowing not only what people are but how they are [historically l situated. How rare is the capacity to locate character in its time . . . . His memoirs are the autobiography of a European . . . . He tells a story with the economy of a great reporter .
. . . Herzen hardened into a man who could record his experience with an uncommon mixture of nostalgia and scorn. One tempers the other .
. . . He is interesting because he is, in many ways, writing our own history, but in that stringent and speculative manner which has disappeared since the decline of philosophic education. Somewhere in the pages of this hard, honest observer of what movements do to men, we shall find ourselves."
PREFACE
XVUJ
distort an author's style more than the big ones do, and (b) Herzen is too good a writer, his prose is too close-knit and texturally harmonious to need, or deserve, retail editing. That's for patzers, not for grand masters like Herzen, who is articulate but not verbose, explicit but never otiose.
Supplementary reading: There are two important books in English. For Herzen's political-intellectual development in the context of his period and for a critical psycho biography (the book's range is wider than its title suggests), read Martin Malia's Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855 (Harvard University Press, 1961 ) . For Herzen's personal life after he left Russia in 1 847 up to his death in 1 870, see E. H. Carr's The Romantic Exiles (London 1933; Penguin paperback, 1968) , a fascinating piece of scholarly detective work like A. J. A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo. Mr. Carr has tumed up new material from Herzen's daughter, Herwegh's son, and other primary sources that supplements, or corrects, factually at least, the more intimate sections of the memoirs such as "A Family Drama," Herzen's story of the liaison between his wife and the German revolutionary poetaster, Georg Herwegh. Carr's book is subtitled "A 1 9th-Century Portrait Gallery," which is accurate.
Mr. Carr throws new light on many other figures in the memoirs, notably N. P. Ogarev ("Poor Nick" ), Herzen's lifelong friend and collaborator, whose wife, Natalie, became in the London years Herzen's mistress without breaking up, or even straining, their friendship.
INTRODU CTION
by Isaiah Berlin
ALEXANDER HERZEN, like Diderot, was an amateur of genius whose opinions and activities changed the direction of �ocial thought in his country. Like Diderot, too, he was a brilliant and irrepressible talker: he talked equally well in Russian and in French to his intimate friends and in the Moscow salons-always in an overwhelming flow of ideas and images; the waste, from the point of view of posterity (just as with Diderot) is probably immense: he had no Boswell and no Eckermann to record his conversation, nor was he a man who would have suffered such a relationship. His prose is essentially a form of talk, with the vices and virtues of talk: eloquent, spontaneous, liable to the heightened tones and exaggerations of the born story-teller, unable to resist long digressions which themselves carry him into a network of intersecting tributaries of memory or speculation, but always returning to the main stream of the story or the argument; but above all, his prose has the vitality of spoken words-it appears to O\ve nothing to the carefully composed formal sentences of the French 'philosophes' whom he admired or to the terrible philosophical style of the Germans from whom he learnt; we hear his voice almost too much-in the essays, the pamphlets, the autobiography, as much as in the letters and scraps of notes to his friends.
Civilised, imaginative, self-critical, Herzen was a marvellously gifted social observer; the record of what he saw is unique even in the articulate nineteenth century. He had an acute, easily stirred and ironical mind, a fiery and poetical temperament, and a capacity for vivid, often l)Tical, writing--qualities that combined and reinforced each other in the succession of sharp vignettes of men, events, ideas, personal relationships, political situations and descriptions of entire forms of life in which his writings abound. He was a man of extreme refinement and sensibility, great intellectual energy and biting wit, easily irritated amour propre and a taste for polemical writing; he was addicted to analysis, investigation, exposure ; he saw himself as an expert 'unmasker' of appearances and conventions, and dramatised himself as a devastating discoverer of their social and moral core. Tolstoy, who had little sympathy with Herzen's opinions, and was not given to excessive praise of his contempo-xix
INTRODUCTION
XX
raries among men of letters, especially when they belonged to his own class and country, said towards the end of his life that he had never met anyone with 'so rare a combination of scintillating brilliance and depth.' These gifts make a good many of Herzen's essays, political articles, day-to-day journalism, casual notes and reviews, and especially letters written to intimates or to political correspondents, irresistibly readable even to-day, when the issues with which they were concerned are· for the most part dead and of interest mainly to historians.
Although much has been written about Herzen-and not only in Russian-the task of his biographers has not been made easier by the fact that he left an incomparable memorial to himself in his own greatest work-translated by Constance Garnett as My Past and Thoughts-a literary masterpiece \"\"Orthy to be placed by the side of the novels of his contemporaries and countrymen, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky. Nor were they altogether unaware of this. Turgenev, an intimate and life-long friend (the fluctuations of their personal relationship were important in the life of both; this complex and interesting story has never been adequately told) admired him as a writer as well as a revolutionary journalist. The celebrated critic Vissarion Belinsky discovered, described and acclaimed his extraordinary literary gift when they were both young and relatively unknown. Even the angry and suspicious Dostoyevsky excepted him from the virulent hatred with which he regarded the pro-Western Russian revolutionaries, recognised the poetry of his writing, and remained well-disposed towards him until the end of his life. As for Tolstoy, he delighted both in his society and his writings: half a century after their first meeting in London he still remembered the scene vividly.1
It is strange that this remarkable writer, in his lifetime a celebrated European figure, the admired friend of Michelet, Mazzini, Garibaldi and Victor Hugo, long canonised in his own country not only as a revolutionary but as one of its greatest men I P. Sergeyenko, in his book on Tolstoy, says that Tolstoy told him in 1 908 that he had a very clear recollection of his visit to Herzen in his London house in March 1861. 'Lev Nikolaevich remembered him as a not very large, plump little man, who generated electric energy. "Lively, responsive, intelligent, interesting", Lev Nikolaevich explained (as usual illustrating every shade of meaning by appropriate movements of his hands), "Herzen at once began talking to me as if we had known each other for a long time. I found his personality enchanting. I have never met a more attractive man. He stood head and shoulders above all the politicians of his own and of our time. " ' (P. Sergeyenko, Tolstoi i ego sovremenniki, Moscow, 1 9 1 1 , pp. 13-14.)
Introduction
XXI
of letters, is, even to-day, not much more than a name in the West. The enjoyment to be obtained from reading his prose-for the most part still untranslated-makes this a strange and gratuitous loss.
Alexander Herzen was born in Moscow on the 6th April, 1812, some months before the great fire that destroyed the city during Napoleon's uccupation after the battle of Borodino. His father, Ivan Alexandrovich Yakovlev, came of an ancient family distantly related to the Romanov dynasty. Like other rich and wellborn members of the Russian gentry, he had spent some years abroad, and, during one of his journeys, met, and took back to Moscow with him, the daughter of a minor Wiirttemberg official, Luiza Haag, a gentle, submissive, somewhat colourless girl, a good deal younger than himself. For some reason, perhaps owing to the disparity in their social positions, he never married her according to the rites of the Church. Yakovlev was a member of the Orthodox Church; she remained a Lutheran.2 He was a proud, independent, disdainful man, and had grown increasingly morose and misanthropic. He retired before the war of 1 81 2, and at the time of the French invasion was living in bitter and resentful idleness in his house in Moscow. During the occupation he was recognised by Marshal Mortier, whom he had known in Paris, and agreed-in return for a safe conduct enabling him to take his family out of the devastated city-to carry a message from Napoleon to the Emperor Alexander. For this indiscretion he was sent back to his estates and only allowed to return to Moscow somewhat later. In his large and gloomy house on the Arhat he brought up his son, Alexander, to whom he had given the surname Herzen, as if to stress the fact that he was the child of an irregular liaison, an affair uf the heart. Luiza Haag was never accorded the full status of a wife, but the boy had every attention lavished upon him. He received the normal education of a young Russian nobleman of his time, that is to say, he was looked after by a host of nurses and serfs, and taught by private tutors, German and French, carefully chosen by his neurotic, irritable, devoted, suspicious father. Every care was taken to develop his gifts. He was a lively and imaginative child and absorbed knowledge easily and eagerly. His father loved him after his fashion: more, certainly, than his other son, also illegitimate, born ten years earlier, whom he had christened Yegor (George) . But he was, by the eighteen-twenties, a defeated and 2 There is evidence, although it is n'lt conclusive, that she was married to him according to the Lutheran rite. not recognised by the Orthodox Church.
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gloomy man, unable to communicate with his family or indeed anyone else. Shrewd, honourable, and neither unfeeling nor unjust, a 'difficult' character like old Prince Bolkonsky in Tolstoy's War and Peace, Ivan Yakovlev emerges from his son's recollections a self-lacerating, grim, shut-in, half-frozen human being, who terrorised his household with his whims and his sarcasm.
He kept all doors and windows locked, the blinds permanently drawn, and, apart from a few old friends and his own brothers, saw virtually nobody. In later years his son described him as the product of 'the encounter of two such incompatible things as the eighteenth century and Russian life'-a collision of cultures that had destroyed a good many among the more sensitive members of the Russian gentry in the reigns of Catherine II and her successors. The boy escaped with relief from his father's oppressive and frightening company to the rooms occupied by his mother and the servants; she was kind and unassuming, crushed by her husband, frightened by her foreign surroundings, and seemed to accept her almost Oriental status in the household with uncomplaining resignation. As for the servants, they were serfs from the Yakovlev estates, trained to behave obsequiously to the son and probable heir of their master. Herzen himself, in later years, attributed the deepest of all his social feelings (which his friend, the critic Belinsky, diagnosed so accurately) , concern for the freedom and dignity o f human individualsl to the barbarous condi tions that surrounded him in childhood. He was a favourite child, and much spoiled; but the facts of his irregular birth and of his mother's status were brought home to him by listening to the servants' gossip and, on at least one occasion, by overhearing a conversation about himself between his father and one of his old army comrades. The shock was, according to his own testimony, profound : it was probably one of the determinin� factors of his life.
He was taught Russian literature and history by a young university student, an enthusiastic follower of the new Romantic movement, which, particularly in its German form, had then begun to dominate Russian intellectual life. He learned French (which his father \\TOt!.' more easily than Russian) and German (which he spoke with his mother) and European, rather than Russian, history-his tutor was a French refugee who had emigrated to Russiil aftPr the Fn'nch Revolution. The Frenchman did not reveal his political opinions, so Herzen tells us, uutil mit' day, wlwn his pupil ilsked him why Louis XVI had been cx('cuted ; to this he replied in iln altf.'red voice, 'Because he
\ViiS il trili tor· to his country', ilrHl finding the boy responsive,
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threw off his reserve and spoke to him openly about the liberty and equality of men. Herzen was a lonely child, at once pampered and cramped, lively and bored; he read voraciously i n his father's large library, especially French books o f the Enlightenment. He was fourteen when the leaders of the Decembrist conspiracy were hanged by the Emperor Nicholas I. He later declared that this event was the critical turning point of his life; whether this was so or not, the memory of these aristocratic martyrs in the cause of Russian constitutional liberty later became a sacred symbol to him, as to many others of his class and generation, and affected him for the rest of his days. He tells us that a few years after this, he and his intimate friend Nick Ogarev, standing on the Sparrow Hills above Moscow, took a solemn 'Hannibalic' oath to avenge these fighters for the rights of man, and to dedicate their own lives to the cause for which they had died.
In due course he became a student in the University of Moscow, read Schiller and Goethe, and somewhat later the French utopian socialists, Saint-Simon, Fourier and other social prophets smuggled into Russia in defiance of the censorship, and became a convinced and passionate radical. He and Ogarev belonged to a group of students who read forbidden books and discussed dangerous ideas ; for this he was, together with most other 'unreliable' students, duly arrested and, probably because he declined to repudiate the views imputed to him, condemned to imprisonment. His father used all his influence to get the sentence mitigated, but could not save his son from being exiled to the provincial city of Vyatka, near the borders of Asia, where he was not indeed kept in prison, but put to work in the local administration. To his astonishment, he enjoyed this new test of his powers; he displayed administrative gifts and became a far more competent and perhaps even enthusiastic official than he was later prepared to admit, and helped to expose the corrupt and brutal governor, whom he detested and despised. In Vyatka he became involved in a passionate love affair with a married woman, behaved badly, and suffered agonies of contrition. He read Dante, went through a religious phase, and began a long and passionate correspondence with his first cousin Natalie, who, like himself, was illegitimate, and lived as a companion in the house of a rich and despotic aunt. As a result of his father's ceaseless efforts, he was transferred to the city of Vladimir, and with the help of his young Moscow friends, arranged the elopement of Natalie. They were married in Vladimir against their relations' wishes. He was in due course allowed to return to
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Moscow and was appointed to a government post in Petersburg.
Whatever his ambitions at the time, he remained indomitably independent and committed to the radical cause. As a result of an indiscreet letter, opened by the censors, in which he had criticised the behaviour of the police, he was again sentenced to a period of exile, this time in Novgorod. Two years later, in 1 842, he was once more permitted to return to Moscow. He was by then regarded as an established member of the new radical intelligentsia, and, indeed, as an honoured martyr in it� cause, and began to write in the progressive periodicals of the time. He always dealt with the same central theme: the oppression of the individual ; the humiliation and degradation of men by political and personal tyranny; the yoke of social custom, the dark ignorance, and savage, arbitrary misgovernment which maimed and destroyed human beings in the brutal and odious Russian Empire.
Like the other members of his circle, the young poet and novelist Turgenev, the critic Belinsky, the future political agitators Bakunin and Katkov ( thf> first in the cause of revolution, the second of reaction), the literary essayist Annenkov, his own intimate friend Ogarev, Herzen plunged into the study of German metaphysics and French sociological theory and historythe ,,·orks of Kant, Schelling, and above all, Hegel; also Saint
Simon, Augustin Thierry, Leroux, Mignet and Guizot. He composed arresting historical and philosophical essays, and stories dealing with social issucs: they were published. ,,·idely read and discussed, and created a considerable reputation for their author. He adopted an uncompromising position. A leading representative of the dissident Russian gentry, his socialist beliefs were caused less by a reaction against the cruelty and chaos of the laissc::.-fairc economy of the bourgeois \Vest-for Russia, then in its early industrial beginnings, was still a semi-feudal, socially and ec'anomically primitive society-than as a direct responsc to the agonising social problems in his native land: the poverty of the masscs, serfdom and lack of individual freedom at all levels. and a lawless and brutal autocracy.3 In addition, there was. thc wounded national pride of a po,�·erful and semibarbarous socicty. whose leaders were aware of its backwardness, 3 The historical aiHI sociolop;ical t•xplanation of the orip;ins of Russian socialism and of lferzpn's part in it cannot bP attempted her!'. It has been treated in a number of ( unlranslatPd) Russian monop;raphs. both preand post-revolutionary. ThP most dPtailPd a nd original study of this topic to rlatp is Alt·randrr 1/rr::.rn and thr Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855 ( 1961 ) by Profpssor Martin Malia.
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and suffered from mingled admiration, envy and resentment of the civilised West. The radicals believed in reform along democratic, secular, Western lines; the Slavophils retreated into mystical nationalism, and preached the need for return to native
'organic' forms of life and faith that, according to them, had been all but ruined by Peter I's reforms, which had merely encouraged a sedulous and humilia ting aping of the soulless, and, in any case, hopelessly decadent West. Herzen was an extreme ''Westerner', but he preserved his links with the Slavophil adversaries-he regarded the best among them as romantic reactionaries, misguided nationalists, but honourable allies against the Tsarist bureaucracy-and later tended systematically to minimise his differences with them, perhaps from a desire to see all Russians who were not dead to human feeling ranged in a single vast protest against the evil regime.
In 1847 Ivan Yakovlev died. He left the greater part of his fortune to Luiza Haag and her son, Alexander Herzen. With immense faith in his own powers, and burning with a desire (in Fichte's words that expressed the a ttitude of a generation) 'to be and do something in the world,' Herzen decided to emigrate.
Whether he wished or expected to remain abroad during the rest of his life is uncertain, but so it turned out to be. He left in the same year, and travelled in considerable state, accompanied by his wife, his mother, two friends, as well as servants, and, crossing Germany, towards the end of 1 847 reached the coveted city of Paris, the capital of the civilised world. He plunged at once into the life of the exiled radicals and socialists of many nationalities who played a central role in the fermenting intellectual and artistic activity of that city. By 1848, when a series of revolutions broke out in country after country in Europe, he found himself with Bakunin and Proudhon on the extreme left wing of revolutionary socialism. When rumours of his activities reached the Russian government, he was ordered to return immediately. He refused. His fortune in Russia and tha't of his mother were declared confiscated. Aided by the efforts of the banker James Rothschild who had conceived a liking for the young Russian 'baron' and was in a position to bring pressure on the Russian government, Herzen recovered the major portion of his resources, and thereafter experienced no financial want. This gave him a degree of independPnce not then enjoyed by many exiles, as well as the financial means for supporting other refugees and radical causes.
Shortly after his arrival in Paris, before the revolution, he contributed a series of impassioned articles to a Moscow periodi-
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cal controlled by his friends, in which he gave an eloquent and violently critical account of the conditions of life and culture in Paris, and, in particular, a devastating analysis of the degradation of the French bourgeoisie, an indictment not surpassed even in the works of his contemporaries Marx and Heine. His Moscow friends for the most part received this with disfavour: they regarded his analyses as characteristic flights of a highly rhetorical fancy, irresponsible extremism, ill suited to the needs of a misgoverned and backward country compared to which the progress of the middle classes in the West, whatever its shortcomings, was a notable step forward towards universal enlightenment.
These early works-The Letters from Avenue Marigny and the Italian sketches that followed-possess qualities which became characteristic of all his writings: a rapid torrent of descriptive sentences, fresh, lucid, direct, interspersed with vivid and never irrelevant digressions, variations on the same theme in many keys, puns, neologisms, quotations real and imaginary, verbal inventions, gallicisms which irritated his nationalistic Russian friends, mordant personal observations and cascades of vivid images and incomparable epigrams, which, so far from either tiring or distracting the reader by their virtuosity, add to the force and swiftness of the narrative. The effect is one of spontaneous improvisation: exhilarating conversation by an intellectually gay and exceptionally clever and honest man endowed with singular powers of observation and expression. The mood is one of ardent political radicalism imbued with a typically aristocratic ( and even more typically Muscovite) contempt for everything narrow, calculating, self-satisfied, commercial, anything cautious, petty or tending towards compromise and the
;uste milieu, of which Louis Philippe and Guizot are held up to view as particularly repulsive incarnations. Herzen's outlook in these essays is a combination of optimistic idealism-a vision of a socially, intellectually and morally free society, the beginnings of which, like Proudhon, Marx, and Louis Blanc, he saw in the French working class; faith in the radical revolution which alone could create the conditions for their liberation; but with this, a deep distrust ( something that most of his allies did not share) of all general formulae as such, of the programmes and battle cries of all the political parties, of the great, official historical goals-progress, liberty, equality, national unity, historic rights, human solidarity-principles and slogans in the name of which men had been, and doubtless would soon again be, violated and slaughtered, and their forms of life condemned and destroyed. Like the more extreme of the left wing disciples of
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Hegel, in particular like the anarchist Max Stirner, Herzen saw danger in the great magnificent abstractions the mere sound of which precipitated men into violent and meaningless slaughternew idols, it seemed to him, on whose altars human blood was to be shed tomorrow as irrationally and uselessly as the blood of the victims of yesterday or the day before, sacrificed in honour of older divinities-church or monarchy or the feudal order or the sacred customs of the tribe, that were now discredited as obstacles to the progress of mankind. Together with this scepticism about the meaning and value of abstract ideals as such, in contrast with the concrete, short-term, immediate goals of identifiable living individuals-specific freedoms, reward for the day's work-Herzen spoke of something even more disquieting-a haunting sense of the ever widening and unbridgeable gulf between the humane values of the relatively free and civilised elites ( to which he knew himself to belong) and the actual needs, desires and tastes of the vast voiceless masses of mankind, barbarous enough in the West, wilder still in Russia or the plains of Asia beyond. The old world was crumbling visibly, and it deserved to fall. It would be destroyed by its victims-the slaves who cared nothing for the art and the science of their masters; and indeed, Herzen asks, why should they care? Was it not erected on their suffering and degradation? Young and vigorous, filled with a just hatred of the old world built on their fathers' bones, the new barbarians will raze to the ground the edifices of their oppressors, and with them all that is most sublime and beautiful in Western civilisation; such a cataclysm might be not only inevitable but justified, since this civilisation, noble and valuable in the eyes of its beneficiaries, has offered nothing but suffering, a life without meaning, to the vast majority of mankind. Yet he does not pretend that this makes the prospect, to those who, like him, have tasted the riper fruits of civilisation, any less dreadful.
It has often been asserted by both Russian and Western critics that Herzen arrived in Paris a passionate, even utopian idealist, and that it was the failure of the Revolution of 1 848 which brought about his disillusionment and a new, more pessimistic realism. This is not sufficiently borne out by the evidence.� Even in 1 847, the sceptical note, in particular pessimism about the degree to which human beings can be transformed, and the still deeper scepticism about whether such changes, even if they were 4 The clearest formulation of this well-worn and almost universal thesis is to be found in Mr E. H. Carr's livelv and well documented treatment of Herzen in his The Romantic Exiles- and elsewhere. Mr Malia's book avoids this error.
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achieved by fearless and intelligent revolutionaries or reformPrs, ideal images of whom floated before the eyes of his Westernising friends in Russia, would in fact lead to a juster and freer order, or on the contrary to the rule of ne\v masters over new slavesthat ominous note is sounded before the great debacle. Yet, despite this, he remained a convinced, ultimately optimistic revolutionary. The spectacle of the workers' revolt and its brutal suppression in Italy and in France, haunted Herzen all his life.
His first-hand description of the events of 1 848-9, in particular of the drowning in blood of the July revolt in Paris, is a masterp iece of 'committPd' historical and sociological \\Titing. So, too, are his sketches of the personalities involved in these u pheavals, and his reflections upon them. Most of these essays and letters remain untranslated.
Herzen could not and would not return to Russia. He became a Swiss citizen, and to the disasters of the revolution was added a personal tragedy-the seduction of his adored wife by the most intimate of his new friends, the radical German poet Georg HPrwegh, a friend of Marx and Wagner, the 'iron lark' of the German Revolution, as Heine half ironically called him.
Herzen's progressive, somewhat Shelleyan, views on love, friendship, equality of the sexes, and the irrationality of bourgeois morality, were tested by this crisis and broken by it. He went almost mad with grief and jealousy: his love, his vanity, his deeper assumptions about the basis of all human relationships, suffered a traumatic shock from which he was never fully to recover. He did what few others have ever done: described every detail of his own agony, every step of his altering relationship
\vith his wife, with Herwegh and Herwegh's wife, as they seemed to him in retrospect; he noted every communication that occurred between them, every moment of anger, despair, affection, love, hope, hatred, contempt and agonised, suicidal selfcontempt. Every tone and nuance in his own moral and psychological condition are raised to high relief against the background of his public life in the world of exiles and conspirators, French, Italian, German, Russian, Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, who move on and off the stage on which he himself is always the central, self-absorbed, tragic hero. The account is not unbalanced
-there is no obvious distortion-but it is wholly £>gocentric. All his life H£>rzen perc£>ived the external world clearly, and in proportion, but through the medium of his own self-romanticising personality, with his own impressionable, ill-organised self at the CPntre of his universe. No matter how violent his torment, he retains full artistic control of the tragedy which he is living
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through, but also wntmg. It is, perhaps, this artistic egotism, which all his work exhibits, that was in part responsible both for Natalie's suffocation and for the lack of reticence in his description of what took place: Herzen takes wholly for granted the reader's understanding, and still more, his undivided interest in every detail of his own, the writer's, mental and emotional life.
Natalie's letters and desperate flight to Herwegh show the measure of the increasingly destructive effect of Herzen's selfabsorbed blindness upon her frail and exalte temperament. We know comparatively little of Natalie's relationship with Herwegh: she may well have been physically in love with him, and he with her: the inflated literary language of the letters conceals more than it reveals; what is clear is that she felt unhappy, trapped and irresistibly attracted to her lover. If Herzen sensed this, he perceived it very dimly. He appropriated the feelings of those nearest him as he did the ideas of Hegel or George Sand: that is, he took what he needed, and poured it into the vehement torrent of his own experience. He gave generously, if fitfully, to others; he put his own life into them, but for all his deep and life-long belief in individual liberty and the absolute value of personal life and personal relationships, scarcely understood or tolerated wholly independent lives by the side of his own: his description of .his agony is scrupulously and bitterly detailed and accurate, never self-sparing, eloquent but not sentimental, and remorselessly self-absorbed. It is a harrowing document. He did not publish the story in full during his lifetime, but now it forms part of his Memoirs.
Self-expression-the need to say his ovvn word-and perhaps the craving for recognition by others, by Russia, by Europe, were primary needs of Herzen's nature. Consequently, even during this, the darkest period of his life, he continued to pour out a stream of letters and articles in various languages on political and social topics; he helped to hep Proudhon going, kept up a correspondence with Swiss radicals and Russian emigres, read widely, made notes, conceived ideas, argued, worked unremittingly both as a publicist and as an active supporter of left wing and revolutionary causes. After a short while Natalie returned to him in Nice, only to die in his arms. Shortly before her death, a ship on \vhich his mother and one of his children, a deaf-mute, were travelling from :Marseilles, sank in a storm. Their bodies were not found. Herzen's life had reached its lowest ebb. He left Nice and the circle of Italian, French and Polish revolutionaries to many of whom he was bound by ties of warm friendship, and with his three surviving children went to England. America was
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too far away and, besides, seemed to him too dull. England was no less remote from the scene of his defeats, political and personal, and yet still a part of Europe. It was then the country most hospitable to political refugees, civilised, tolerant of eccentricities or indifferent to them, proud of its civil liberties and its sympathy with the victims of foreign oppression. He arrived in London in 1851.
He and his children \vandered from home to home in London and its suburbs, and there, after the death of Nicholas I had made it possible for him to leave Russia, his most intimate friend, Kicholay Ogarev, joined them. Together they set up a printing press, and began to publish a periodical in Russian called The Pole Star-the first organ wholly dedicated to uncompromising agitation against the Imperial Russian regime.
The earliest chapters of Mr Past and Thoughts appeared in its pages. The memory of the terrible years 1 848-51 obsessed Herzen's thoughts and poisoned his blood stream: it became an inescapable psychological necessity for him to seek relief by setting down this bitter history. This was the first section of his Memoirs to be written. It was an opiate against the appalling loneliness of a life lived among uninterested strangers5 while political reaction seemed to envelop the entire world, leaving no room for hope. Insensibly he was drawn into the past. He moved further and further into it and found it a source of liberty and strength. This is how the book which he conceived on the analogy of David Copperfield came to be composed.6 He began to 5 Herzen had no close English friends, although he had associates, allies, and admirers. One of these. the radical journalist '"'· J. Linton, to whose English Republic Herzen had contributed articles, described him as
'short of stature, stoutly built, in his last days inclined to corpulence, with a grand hPad, long chestnut hair and beard, small ltJminous eyes, and rather ruddy complexion. Sua\·e in his manner, courteous, but with an intense power of irony, witty, . . . clear, concise and impressiYe, he was a subtle and profound thinker, with all the passionate nature of the
"barbarian, " yet generous and humane.' (Jlfcmories, London, 1 895, pp.
1 46-7.) And in his European Republicans, published two years earlier, he spoke of him as 'hospitable and taking pleasure in society, . . . a good com·ersationalist, with a frank and pleasing manner,' and said that the Spanish radical Castelar declared that Herzen, with his fair hair and beard, looked like a Goth. but possessed the warmth. YiYacity, 'verve and inimitable grace' and 'marn�llous variP!y' of a Southerner. Turgenev and Herzen were the first Russians to mon• freely in European society.
The impression that they made did a good deal, though perhaps not enough, to dispel the myth of the dark 'Sla,· soul,' which took a long time to die; perhaps it is not altogether dead yet.
ll 'Copperfield is Dickens's Past and Thoughts,' he said in one of his letters in the early sixties ; humility was not among his virtues.
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write it in the last months of 1 852. He wrote by fits and starts.
The first two parts were probably finished by the end of 1 853. In 1 854 a selection which he called Prison and Exile-a title perhaps inspired by Silvio Pellico's celebrated Le Mie Prigioni, was published in English. I t was an immediate success; encouraged by this, he continued. By the spring of 1 855, the first five parts of the work were completed ; they were all published by 1857. He revised part IV, added new chapters to it and composed part V; he completed the bulk of part VI by 1858. · The sections dealing with his intimate life-his love and the early years of his marriage-were composed in 1 857: he could not bring himself to touch upon them until then. This was followed by an interval of seven years. Independent essays such as those on Robert Owen, the actor Shchepkin, the painter Ivanov, Garibaldi (Camicia Rossa), were published in London between 1 860
and 1 864; but these, although usually included in the Memoirs, were not intended for them. The first complete edition of the first four parts appeared in 1 861 . The final section-part VIII and almost the whole of part VII-were \Vritten, in that order, in 1 865-7. Herzen deliberately left some sections unpublished: the most intimate details of his personal tragedy appeared posthumously-only a part of the chapter entitled Oceano Nox was printed in his lifetime. He omitted also the story of his affairs with Medvedeva in Vyatka and with the serf girl Katerina in Moscow-his confession of them to Natalie cast the first shadow over their relationship, a shadow that never lifted; he could not bear to see it in print while he lived. He suppressed, too, a chapter on 'The German Emigrants' which contains his unflattering comments on Marx and his followers, and some characteristically entertaining and ironical sketch('s of some of his old friends among the Russian radicals. He genuinely detested the practice of washing the revolutionaries' dirty linen in public, and made it clear that he did not intend to make fun of allies for the entertainment of the common enemy. The first authoritative edition of the Memoirs was compiled by Mikhail Lemke in the first complete edition of Herzen's works, which was begun before, and completed some years after, the Russian Revolution of 1 9 1 7. It has since been revised in successive Soviet editions. The fullest version is that published in the new exhaustive edition of Herzen's works, a handsome monument of Soviet scholarshipwhich at the time of writing is still incomplete.
The Memoirs formed a vivid and broken background accompaniment to Herzen's central activity: revolutionary journalism, to which he dedicated his life. The bulk of it is contained in the
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most celebrated of all Russian periodicals published abroad
Kolokol-The Bell-edited by Herzen and Ogarev in London and then in Geneva from 1 857 until 1 867, with the motto (taken from Schiller) Vivos voco. The Bell had an immense success. It was the first systematic instrument of revolutionary propaganda directed against the Russian autocracy, written with knowledge, sincerity and mordant eloquence; it gathered round itself all that was uncowed not only in Russia and the Russian colonies abroad, but also among Poles and other oppressed nationalities.
It began to penetrate into Russia by secret routes and was regularly read by high officials of State, including, it was rumoured, the Emperor himself. Herzen used the copious information that reached him in clandestine letters and personal messages, describing various misdeeds of the Russian bureaucracy to expose specific scandals-cases of bribery, miscarriage of justice, tyranny and dishonesty bv officials and influential persons. The Bell named names, offered documentary evidence, asked awkward questions and exposed hideous aspects of Russian life.
Russian travellers visited London in order to meet the mysterious leader of the mounting opposition to the Tsar. Generals, high officials and other loyal subjects of the Empire were among the many visitors who thronged to see him, some out of curiosity, others to shake his hnnd, to express sympathy or admiration. He reached the peak of his fame, both political and literary, after the defeat of Russia in the Crimean \Var and the death of Nicholas I. The opPn nppeal by HerzPn to the new Emperor to free the serfs and initinte hold and radical reforms 'from above,'
and, after the first concrete steps towards this had been taken in 1 8'i9, his paean of praise to AlPxander II under the title of 'Thou hast ConquerPd, 0 Galilean,' created the i llusion on both sides of the Russian frontier that a new liberal era was at last dawning, in which a degree of understanding-perhaps of actual coopPration--could be achievPd between Tsardom and its opponents. This state of mind did not last long. But Herzen's credit stood very high-high<'r than that of any other Russian in the
\Vest: in the late fifties and early sixties, he \Vas the acknowledged leader of all that \Vas generous, enlightened, civilised, human!' in Russia. :\lore than Bnkunin and Pven Turgenev, whose nov<>ls for·med n central source of knovvledge about Russia in the "·est, l l!'rz!'n courlt!'ract<'d tlw l<'g<'nd, ingrained in the minds of progn·ssive Europ£>ans (of whom l\lichelet \vas perhaps the most repr<'sentntiw· ) , that Russia consisted of nothing save only tlw government jack-boot on the one hand, and the dark,
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silent, sullen mass of brutalised peasants on the other-an image that was the by-product of the widespread sympathy for the principal victim of Russian despotism, the martyred nation, Poland. Some among the Polish exiles spontaneously conceded this service to the truth on Herzen's part, if only because he was one of the rare Russians who genuinely liked and admired individual Poles, worked in close sympathy with them, and identified the cause of Russian liberation with that of all her oppressed subject nationalities. It was, indeed, this unswerving avoidance of chauvinism that was among the principal causes of the ultimate collapse of The Bell and of Herzen's O\VTI political undoing.
After Russia, Herzen's deepest love was for Italy and the Italians. The closest ties bound him to the Italian exiles, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Saffi and Orsini. Although he supported every liberal beginning in France, his attitude towards her was more ambiguous. For this there were many reasons. Like Tocqueville (whom he personally disliked) , he had a distaste for all that was centralised, bureaucratic, hierarchical, subject to rigid forms or rules; France was to him the incarnation of order, discipline, the worship of the state, of unity, and of despotic, abstract formulae that flattened all things to the same rule and pattern-something that had a family resemblance to the great slave states-Prussia, Austria, Russia ; with this he constantly contrasts the decentralised, uncrushed, untidy, 'tru�y democratic' Italians, whom he believed to possess a deep affinity 'vith the free Russian spirit embodied in the peasant commune with its sense of natural justice and human worth. To this ideal even England seemed to him to be far less hostil<' than legalistic, calculating France: in such moods he comes close to his romantic Slavophil opponents.
Moreover, he could not forget the betrayal of the revolution in Paris by the bourgeois parties in 1 848, the execution of the workers, the suppression of the Roman Revolution by the troops of the French Republic, the vanity, weakness and rhetoric of the French radical politicians-Lamartine, Marrast, Ledru-Rollin, Felix Pyat. His sketches of the lives and behaviour of leading French exiles in England are masterpieces of amused, halfsympathetic, half-contemptuous description of the grotesque and futile aspects of every political emigration condemned to sterility, intrigue and a constant flow of self-justifying eloquence before a foreign audience too remote or bored to listen. Yet he thought well of individual members of it: he had for a time been a close ally of Proudhon, and despite their differences, he continued to respect him ; he regarded Louis Blanc as an honest and
I N T R O D U C T I O N
XXXIV
fearless democrat, he was on good terms with Victor Hugo, he liked and admired Michelet. In later years he visited at least one Paris political salon-admittedly, it was that of a Pole--with evident enjoyment: the Goncourts met him there and left a vivid description in their journal of his appearance and his conversation.7 Although he was half German himself, or perhaps because of it, he felt, like his friend Bakunin, a strong aversion. from what he regarded as the incurable philistinism of the Germans, and what seemed to him a peculiarly unattractive combination of craving for blind authority with a tendency to squalid internecine recriminations in public, more pronounced than among other emigres. Perhaps his hatred of Herwegh, whom he knew to be a friend both of Marx and of Wagner, as well as Marx's onslaughts on Karl Vogt, the Swiss naturalist to whom Herzen was devotf•d, played some part in this. At least three of his most intimate friends were pure Germans. Goethe and Schiller meant more to him than any Russian writers. Yet there is something genuinely venomous in his account of the German exiles, quite different from the high-spirited sense of comedy with which he describes the idiosyncrasie>s of the other foreign colonies gathered in London in the fifties and sixties-a city, if we are to believe Herzen, equally unconcerned with their absurdities and 7 See entry in the Journal under 8th February 1 865-'Dinner at Charles Edmond's ( Chojecki) . . . A Socratic mask with the warm and transparent flesh of a Rubens portrait. a red mark between the eyebrows as from a branding- iron, greying beard and hair. As he talks there is a constant ironical chuckle which rises and falls in his throat. His voice is soft and slow, without any of the coarseness one might have expected from the huge neck; the ideas are fine, delicate, pungent, at times subtle, always definite, il luminated by words that take time to arrive, but which always possess the felicitous quality of French as it is spoken by a civilised and witty foreig-ner.
'He speaks of Bakunin, of his eleven months in prison, chained to a wall, of his escape from Siberia by the Amur River, of his return by way of Cal ifornia, of his arrival in London. where. after a stormy, moist embrace, his first words to Herzen were "Can one get oysters here?".'
Herze;. delig-hted the Goncourts with stories about the Emperor 1\:icholas walking in the night in his empty palace, after the fall of Eupatoria during- the Crimean 'Var, with the heavy, unearthly steps of the stone statui' of the Commander in 'Don Jwm.' This was followed by anecdotes about Eng-lish habits and manners-'a country which he loves as the land of libcrty'-to illustrate its absurd, class conscious, unyielding traditionalism, particularly noticeable in the relations of masters and servants.
The Goncourts quote a characteristic epig-ram made by Herzen to illustrate the difference between the French and English characters. They fai thfully rC>port the story of how James Rothschild managed to save Herzen's property in Russia.
Introduction
XXXV
their martyrdoms. As for his hosts, the English, they seldom appear in his pages. Herzen had met Mill, Carlyle and Owen.
His first night in England was spent with English hosts. He was on reasonably good terms with one or two editors of radical papers (some of whom, like Linton and Cov.,·en, helped him to propagate his views, and to preserve contact with revolutionaries on the continent as well with clandestine traffic of propaganda to Russia) , and several radically inclined Members of Parliament, including minor ministers . . In general, however, he seems to have had even less contact with Englishmen than his contemporary and fellow exile, Karl Marx. He admired England. He admired her constitution; the wild and tangled wood of her unwritten la\vs and customs brought the full resources of his romantic imagination into play. The entertaining passages of Mr Past and Thoughts in which he compared the French and the English, or the English and the Germans, display acute and amused insight into the national characteristics of the English.
But he could not altogether like them: they remained for him too insular, too indifferent, too unimaginative, too remote from the moral, social and aesthetic issues which l ay closest to his O\vn heart, too materialistic and self-satisfied. His judgments about them, always intelligent and sometimes penetrating, are distant and tend to be conventional. A description of the trial in London of a French radical who had killed a political opponent in a duel in Windsor Great Park is wonderfully executed, but remains a piece of genre painting, a gay and brilliant caricature. The French, the Swiss, the Italians, even the Germans, certainly the Poles, are closer to him. He cannot establish any genuine personal relationship with the English. \Vhen he thinks of mankind he does not think of them.
Apart from his central preoccupations, he devoted himself to the education of his children, which he entrusted in part to an idealistic German lady, Malwida von Meysenbug, afterwards a friend of Nietzsche and Romain Rolland. His personal life was intertwined with that of his intimate friend Ogarev, and of Ogarev's wife who became his mistress; in spite of this the mutual devotion of the two friends remained unaltered-the Memoirs reveal little of the curious emotional consequences of this relationship.s
8 See chapters 8 and 12 of E. H. Carr's The Romantic Eziles for what the Memoirs don't reveal, which is a lot. Carr's account draws largely on Natalie Ogarev's unpublished diaries. Similarly, Carr uses papers
I N T R O D U C T I O N
xxxvi
For the rest, he lived the life of an affiuent, well born man of letters, a member of the Russian, and more specifically, Moscow gentry, uprooted from his native soil, unable to achieve a settled existence or even the semblance of inward or outward peace, a life filled with oc<:asional moments of hope and even exultation, followed by long periods of misery, corrosive self-criticism, and most of all overwhelming, omnivorous, bitter nostalgia. It may be this, as much as objective reasons, that caused him to idealise the Russian peasant, and to dream that the answer to the central
'social' question of his time-that of growing inequality, exploitation, dehumanisation of both the oppressor and the oppressedlay in the preservation of the Russian peasant commune. He perceived in it the seeds of the development of a non-industrial, semi-anarchist socialism. Only such a solution, plainly influenced by the views of Fourier, Proudhon and George Sand, seemed to him free from the crushing, barrack-room discipline demanded by Western communists from Cabet to Marx; and from the equally suffocating, and, it seemed to him, far more vulgar and philistine ideals contained in moderate, half-socialist doctrines, with their faith in the progressive role of developing industrialism preached by the forerunners of social democracy in Germany and France and of the Fabians in England. At times he modified his view: towards the end of his life he began to recognise the historical significance of the organised urban workers.
But all in all, he remained faithful to his belief in the Russian peasant commune as an embryonic form of a life in which the quest for individual freedom was reconciled with the need for collective activity and responsibility. He retained to the end a romantic vision of the inevitable coming of a new, just, all-transforming social order.
Herzen is neither consistent nor systematic. His style during his middle years has lost the confident touch of his youth, and conveys the consuming nostalgia that never leaves him. He is obsessed by a sense of blind accident, although his faith in the values of life remains unshaken. Almost all traces of Hegelian influence are gone. 'The absurdity of facts offends us . . . it is as made available to him by Herwegh's son-his fascinating little book is in the Herzen style: as much novel as history-"to correct the serious omission and inaccuracies of the Herzen version " of the liaison between the German radical poet and Herzen's wife. For the Herzen version, see pp. 840-920 and 932-50 of the complete Gamett-Higgens edition ( Knopf, 1 968) , which unhappily had to be omitted in this politically oriented abridgment. I think, myself, that the Herzen version is closer to the truth, and f
Introduction
XXX VB
though someone had promised that everything in the world will be exquisitely beautiful, just and harmonious. We have marvelled enough at the deep abstract wisdom of nature and history; it is time to realise that nature and history are full of the accidental and senseless, of muddle and bungling.' This is highly characteristic of his mood in the sixties; and it is no accident that his exposition is not ordered, but is a succession of fragments, episodes, isolated vignettes, a mingling of Dichtung and Wahrheit, facts and poetic licence. His moods alternate sharply.
Sometimes he believes in the need for a great, cleansing, revolutionary storm, even were it to take the form of a barbarian invasion likely to destroy all the values that he himself holds dear. At other times he reproaches his old friend Bakunin, who joined him in London after escaping from his Russian prisons, for wanting to make the revolution too soon; for not understanding that dwellings for free men cannot be constructed out of the stones of a prison ; that the average European of the nineteenth century is too deeply marked by the slavery of the old order to be capable of conceiving true freedom, that it is not the liberated slaves who will build the ne\v order, but new men brought up in liberty. History has her own tempo. Patience and gradualismnot the haste and violence of a Peter the Great-can alone bring about a permanent transformation. At such moments he wonders whether the future belongs to the free, anarchic peasant, or to the bold and ruthless planner; perhaps it is the industrial worker who is to be the heir to the new, unavoidable, collectivist economic order.9 Then again he returns to his early moods of disillusionment and wonders whether men in general really desire freedom: perhaps only a few do so in each generation, while most human beings only want good government, no matter at whose hands; and he echoes de Maistre's bitter epigram about Rousseau: 'Monsieur Rousseau has asked why it is that men who are born free are nevertheless everywhere in chains; it is as if one were to ask why sheep, who are born carnivorous, nevertheless everywhere nibble grass.' Herzen develops this theme. Men desire freedom no more than fish desire to fly. The fact that a few flying fish exist does not demonstrate that fish in general were created to fly, or are not fundamentally quite content to stay below the surface of the water, for ever away from the sun and the light. Then he returns to his earlier optimism and the thought that somewhere-in Russia-there lives the unbroken 9 This is the thesis in which orthodox Soviet scholars claim to discern a belated approach to those of Marx.
I N TRODUCT ION
XXXVlll
human being, the peasant with his faculties intact, untainted by the corruption and sophistication of the West. But this Rousseauinspir£>d faith, as he grows older, grows less secure. His sense of reality is too strong. For all his efforts, and the efforts of his socialist friends, he cannot deceive hims£>lf entirely. He oscillates between pessimism and optimism, scepticism a�d suspicion of his own sc£>pticism, and is kept morally alive only by his hatred of all injustice, all arbitrariness, all mediocrity as such-in particular by his inability to compromise in any degree with either the brutality of reactionaries or the hypocrisy of bourgeois liberals. He is preserved by this, buoyed up by his belief that such evils will destroy themselves, and by his love for his children and his devoted friends, and by his unquenchable delight in the variety of life and the comedy of human character.
On th£> whole, he grew more pessimistic. He began with an ideal vision of human life, largely ignored the chasm which divided it from the pres£>nt-whether the Russia of Nicholas, or the corrupt constitutionalism in the \Vest. In his youth he glorified Jacobin radicalism and condemned its opponents in Russiablind conservatism, Slavophil nostalgia, the cautious gradualism of his friends Granovsky and Turgenev, as well as Hegelian appeals to patience and rational conformity to the inescapable rhythms of history, which se£>med to him designed to ensure the triumph of the new bourg£>ois class. His attitude, before he went abroad, was boldly optimistic. There followed, not indeed a change of view. but a cooling-off, a tendency to a more sober and critical outlook. All genuine change, he began to think in 1 847, is necessarily slov.,·; the power of tradition (which he at once mocks at and admirPs in England ) is very great; men are less mall£>able than was believed in the eight£>enth century, nor do they truly seek liberty, only security and contentment; communism is but Tsarism stood on its head, the replacement of one yoke by anothf'r; the id£>als and watchwords of politics turn out, on examination, to be empty formulae to which devout fanatics happily slaughter h€'catombs of their fellows. He no longer feels Cf:'rtain that the gap b£>tween the enlightened elite and the masses can ever, in principle, be bridged (this becomes an obsessive r<>frain in lat<>r Russian thought) , sine£> the awak£>ned people may, for unalterabl<> psychological or sociological reasons, despis£> and rej<>ct the gifts of a civilisation which will never mean enough to them. But if all this is even in small part true, is radical transformation either practicable or desirable? From this follows Herzen's growing sense of obstacles that may be insurmountable, limits that may be impassable, his empiricism, seep-
Introduction
XXXIX
ticism, the latent pessimism and despair of the middle sixties.
This is the attitude which some Soviet scholars interpret as the beginning of an approach on his part towards a quasi-Marxist recognition of the inexorable laws of social development-in particular the inevitability of industrialism, above all of the central role to be played by the proletariat. This is not how Herzen's Russian left wing critics interpreted his views in his lifetime, or for the half century that followed. To them, rightly or wrongly, these doctrines seemed symptomatic of conservatism and betrayal. For in the fifties and sixties, a new generation of radicals grew up in Russia, then a backward country in the painful process of the earliest, most rudimentary beginnings of slow, sporadic, inefficient industrialisation. These were men of mixed social origins, filled with contempt for the feeble liberal compromises of 1 848, with no illusions about the prospects of freedom in the West, determined on more ruthless methods; accepting as true only what the sciences can prove, prepared to be hard, and if need be, unscrupulous and cruel, in order to break the power of their equally ruthless oppressors; bitterly hostile to the aestheticism, the devotion to civilised values, of the
'soft' generation of the forties. Herzen realised that the criticism and abuse showered upon him as an obsolete aristocratic dilettante by these 'nihilists' (as they came to be called after Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons, in which this conflict is vividly presented for the first time) was not altogether different from the disdain that he had himself felt in his own youth for the elegant and ineffective reformers of Alexander I's reign; but this did not make his position easier to bear. What was illreceived by the tough-minded revolutionaries pleased Tolstoy, who said more than once that the censorship of Herzen's works in Russia was a characteristic blunder on the part of the government; the government. in its anxiety to stop young men from marching towards the revolutionary morass, seized them and swept them off to Siberia or prison long before they were even in sight of it, while they were still on the broad highway; Herzen had trodden this very path, he had seen the chasm, and warned against it, particularly in his 'Letters to an Old Comrade.'
Nothing, Tolstoy argued, would have proved a better antidote to the 'revolutionary nihilism' which Tolstoy condemned, than Herzen's brilliant analyses. 'Our young generation would not have been the same if Herzen had been read by them during the last t\venty years.' Suppression of his books, Tolstoy went on, was both a criminal, and from the point of vie\v of those who did not desire a violent revolution, an idiotic policy. At other times,
INTR O DU C T I O N
xl
Tolstoy was less generous. In 1 860, six months before they met, he had been reading Herzen's writings with mingled admiration and i rritation: 'Herzen is a man of scattered intellect, and morbid amour-propre,' he wrote in a letter, 'but his breadth, ability, goodness, elegance of mind arc Russian.' From time to time various correspondents record the fact that Tolstoy read Herzen, at times aloud to his fami ly, with the greatest admiration. In 1 896, during one of his angriest, most anti-rationalist moods, he said, '\Vhat has Herzen said that is of the sl ightest use?'-as for the argument that the generation of the forties could not say what it wanted to say because of the rigid Russian censorship, Herzen wrote in perfect freedom in Paris and yet managPd to say 'nothing useful.' \Vhat i rrita tPd Tolstoy most was Herzen's social ism. In 1 908 hP complained that Herzen was
'a narrow socialist,' evPn if he was 'head and shoulders above the other pol iticians of his age and ours.' The fact that he believed in politics as n wea pon was suffic ient to condemn him in Tolstoy's eyPs. From 1 862 onwards, Tolstoy had declared his hostili ty to fn ith in l ibernl ,·dorm nnd improvement of human life by legnl or institutional changP. Herzen fell under this general ban.
l\1oreovPr, Tolstoy s!'ems to have f0lt n certain lnck of personal sympathy for Herzen and his public position-even a k ind of jealousy. "'h0n, in momPnts of a cute discourngement and irritation, Tolstoy spoke (perhaps not wry seriously) of leaving Russia forever, lw would say tha t whatev!'r he d id, hP would not join HPrzen or march und<'r h is bannPr: 'he go0s his way, I shnl l go mine.' HP sPriously unclPrrnted HPrzpn's rPvolutionnry tempPra
IJIPllt and instincts. I lo\VPVPr sceptical Herzen may have been of spPcific n•volutionnry doctrinPs or plans in Russia-nnd no-one wns morP so-he beliewd to the c•nd of his l i fe in the moral and socinl nPed and the inPvitahility, sooner or la ter, of a revolution in Russia-- a violPn t transformation follo\wd h:· a j ust, that is a socialist, onlPr. HP did not, it is true, closp his eyes to the possibil ity, pn•n tlw pmbahility, that tlw great rebellion would Pxtinguish values to which h<' \va s himsplf dedicnted-in particular. the frPPCloms without which he and others l ike him could not hrPnthc. 1\'"cvPrthf'lPss, he rf'rogniscd not only the im·vitnbility but thP historic j usticP of the coming catncl:·sm. H i s mora l tast<•s. h is respPct for human va lues, h i s pntir<' style of !iff', d i v i Introduction xli end. I t is this in him that both the Russian populists and the Russian Marxists-Mikhaylovsky and Lenin-recognised and saluted. It was not prudence or moderation that led him to his unwavering support of Poland in her insurrection against Russia in 1 863. The wave of passionate Russian nationalism which accompanied its suppression, robbed him of sympathy even among Russian liberals. The Bell declined in circulation.10 The new, 'hard' revolutionaries needed his money, but made it plain that they looked upon him as a liberal dinosaur, the preacher of antiquated humanistic views, useless in the violent social struggle to come. He left London in the late sixties and attempted to produce a French edition of The Bell in Geneva. When that too failed, he visited his friends in Florence, returning to Paris early in 1 870, before the outbreak of the Franco Prussian War. There he died of pleurisy, broken both morally and physically, but not disillusioned ; still writing with concentrated intelligence and force. His body was taken to Nice, where he is buried beside his wife. A life-size statue still marks his grave. Herzen's ideas have long since entered into the general texture of Russian political thought-liberals and radicals, populists and anarchists, socialists and communists, have all claimed him as an ancestor. But what survives to-day of all that unceasing and feverish activity, even in his native country, is not a system or a doctrine but a handful of essays, some remarkable letters, and the extraordinary amalgam of �emory, observation, moral passion, psychological analysis and political description, wedded to a major literary talent, which has immortalised his name. What remains is, above all, a passionate and inextinguishable temperament and a sense of the movement of nature and of its unpredictable possibilities, which he felt with an intensity which not even his uniquely rich and flexible prose could fully express. He believed that the ultimate goal of life was life itself; 10 Herzen's lifelong enemy, the reactionary Pan-Slavic journalist, M. N. Katkov, came out strongly for "national unity " against the Polish rebels -and against Herzen. Russian opinion was overwhelmingly on his side. A publ ic subscription was raised for Katkov. "He has rendered us great service!" exclaimed a Moscow nobleman. "He has crushed the serpent's head! He has broken Herzen's authority! " \Vhen a rash of incendiary fires broke out (d. Dostoevsky's The Possessed) , Katkov charged they were the work of a vast conspiracy organized by the Polish rebels, "Herzen and his scoundrels," and vari{'us persons in Paris. London, and Geneva including the Due d'Harcourt . . . . By the end of that year Kolokol's circulation had dropped from 2500 to 500. (D.M.) I N T R O D U C T I O N xlii that the day and the hour were ends in themselves, not a means to another day or another experience. He believed that remote ends were a dream, that faith in them was a fatal illusion ; that to sacrifice the present, or the immediate and foreseeable future to these distant ends must always lead to cruel and futile forms of human sacrifice. He believed that values were not found in an impersonal, objective realm, but were created by human beings, changed with the generations of men, but were nonetheless binding upon those who lived in their light; that suffering was inescapable, and infallible knovvledge neither attainable nor needed. He believed in reason, scientific methods, individual action, empirically discovered truths; but he tended to suspect that faith in general formulae, laws, prescription in human affairs was an attempt, sometimes catastrophic, always irrational, to escape from the uncertainty and unpredictable variety of life to the false security of our own symmetrical fantasies. He was fully conscious of what he believed. He had obtained this knowledge at the cost of painful, and, at times, unintended, selfanalysis, and he described what he saw in language of exceptional vitality, precision and poetry. His purely personal credo remained unaltered from his earliest days: 'Art, and the summer lightning of individual happiness: these are the only real goods we have,' he declared in a self-revealing passage of the kind that so deeply shocked the stern young Russian revolutionaries in the sixties. Yet even thev and their descendants did not and do not reject his artistic and. intellectual achievement. Herzen was not, and had no desire to be, an impartial observer. No less than the poets and the novelists of his nation, he created a style, an outlook, and, in the words of Gorky's tribute to him, 'an entire province, a country astonishingly rich in ideas,11 where everything is immediately recognisable as being his and his alone, a country into which he transplants all that he touches, in which things, sensations, feelings, persons, ideas, private and public events, institutions, entire cultures, are given shape and life by his pO\verful and coherent historical imagination, and have stood up against the forces of decay in the solid world which his memory, his intelligence and his artistic genius recovered and reconstructed. 111y Past and Thoughts is the Noah's ark in which he savPd himself, and not himself alone, from the destructive flood in which many idealistic radicals of the forties were drowned. Genuine art survives and transcends its immediate purpose. The structure that Herzen built in the 11 I storira Russkor Literaturr, p. Z06 (Moscow, 1 939) . Introduction xliii first place, perhaps, for his own personal salvation, built out of material provided by his own predicament-out of exile, solitude, despair-survives intact. Written abroad, concemed largely with European issues and figures, these reminiscences are a great permanent monument to the civilised, sensitive, morally preoccupied and gifted Russian society to which Herzen belonged; their vitality and fascina tion have not declined in the hundred years that have passed since the first chapters saw the light.
D E D I C A T I O N (to Nicholay Platonovich Ogarev 1) This book speaks chiefly of two persons. One of them is no more:2 you are still left, and therefore it is to you, my friend, that it rightly belongs. /SKANDER3 1 st July, 1860 Eagle's Nest, Bournemouth MANY OF MY FRIENDS have advised me to begin a complete edition of My Past and Thoughts, and there is no difficulty about this, at least so far as Parts I and II are concerned. But they say that the fragments which appeared in The Pole Star are rhapsodical and lacking in unity, are broken off at haphazard, sometimes anticipate, sometimes lag behind. I feel that this is true, but I cannot put it right. To make additions, to arrange the chapters in chronological order, would not be a difficult matter; but to recast entirely, d'un jet-that I will not undertake. My Past and Thoughts was not written consecutively: between some chapters there lie whole years. Therefore the whole of it retains the colour of its own time and of varying moods-I should not care to rub this off. These are not so much notes as a confession, round which, d propos of which, have been assembled memories snatched from here and there in the Past, and ideas from my Thoughts, which here and there have remained behind. Moreover, in these annexes, superstructures, extensions, there is a unity: at least I think so. These notes are not a first experiment. I was twenty-five when I first began to write something in the way of reminiscences. This is how it happened: I had been transferred from Vyatka to Vladimir, and I was horribly bored. I found the stop before Moscow tantalizing, outrageous. I was in the situation of a man who is kept at the last coach-stage for want of horses. 1 For Nikolay Platonovich Ogarev see E. H. Carr: The Romantic Eziles (Gollancz, 1 933 ) , Chapters VII, XVI. (R.) 2 Natalya Alexandrovna, Herzen's first cousin and wife. (R.) 3 "lskander," the Turkish form of "Aitoxander," was sometimes used by Herzen as a pen name. (D.M.) xlv D E DIC A T I O N xlvi In reality this was very nearly the most 'pure, most earnest period of a youth which had begun to come to an end.' And my boredom was lucid and contented, as with children on the day before a holiday or a birthday. Every day letters arrived, written in a fine hand ;� I was proud of them and happy, and they helped me to grow. None the less separation was a torment, and I did not know how to set about pushing aside that eternity-some four months ! 5 I listPn<'d to the advice that was given me and began at leisure to makes notes of my memories of Krutitsky and Vyatka. Three note-books were filh•d . . . and then the past was flooded by the light of the present. Belinsky read thf'm in 1 840 and liked them, and he printed two of the note-books in Otechestuenniye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) , the first and third ; the other must be still lying about somewhere in our house in Moscow, if it has not been used to light the fire. Fifteen years went by; 'I \ ' I had not a single close friend in London. Th�re were people for whom I had a regard, and who had the same for me, but no one who \Vas my intimate. All of them, as they came and went and met each other, were interested only in general matters, in the business of the whole of humanity, or at least of a whole people ; their acquaintance, one might say, was impersonal. Months would pass and there \vould not be a single word of what I want<'d to talk about. ' . . . Meanwhile I was hardly beginning at that time to come to myself, to recover from a series of fearful events, misfortunes, mistakes.6 The history of the recent years of my life presented itself to me \vith greater and greater clarity, and I perceived � The letters were from his cousin, Natalya Alexandrovna Zakharin, whom he shortly married. (A.S.) " From 2nd January (when Herzen arrived at Vladimir) to 9th May (when he married N. A. Zakharin ) , 1838. (A.S.) G Herzen is speaking of his experiences after the defeat of the revolution of 1 848, and also of the misfortunes which befell his family: the loss of his mother and son in a shipwreck in 1 85 1 , and the death of his wife on 2nd May. 1 852. (A.S. ) The infidelity of his wife with the German revolutionary poetaster, Herwegh, may be presumed to have also weighed on Herzen's mind, judging by his devoting over a hundred pages of Volume II to "A Family Drama"-pages of novelistic poignancy I was sorry lo omit from this one-volume selection. For a cool British view of the Herzen-Herwegh affair, ironic and amusing, see E. H. Carr's The Romantic Exiles. (D.M.) Dedication xlvii with dismay that no one but myself was aware of it, and that the truth would die with me. 'I determined to write: but one memory summoned up hundreds of others; all the old, the half-forgotten, rose again: boyhood's dreams, the hopes of youth, a young man's intrepidity, prison and exile-those early misfortunes that had left no bitterness in my heart but had passed like thunderstorms in Spring, refreshing and strengthening my young l ife with their impact.' Now I was not writing to gain time: there was nowhere I was in a hurry to go to. When I began this new work I absolutely forgot the existence of Notes of a Young Man,1 and carne upon them by chance in the British Museum when I was going through some Russian magazines. I had copies made and read them through. The feeling they aroused was a strange one: I perceived so palpably how much older I had grown in those fifteen years that at first I was amazed. At that time I had still been playing with life, and with my very happiness, as though there was to be no end to it. The tints of Notes of a Young Man were so rosy that I could take nothing from it: it belonged to the time of my youth, and it must be left as it was. Its morning's light was not suited to my evening's labour. There was much truth in it, but also much that was mischievous; more than that, there remained upon it the mark, quite evident to me, of Heine, whom I had read with admiration at Vyatka . In My Past and Thoughts the marks of life are visible, and no others are to be seen. My work progressed slowly . . . . Much time is needed for any event to settle into a perspicuous thought-not a comforting one: melancholy, perhaps, but one that can be reconciled with one's intelligence. Without this there may be sincerity, but truth there cannot be! Several attempts were unsuccessful and I threw them away. Finally, when this year I was reading my latest note-books to a friend of my youth, I myself recognized the familiar features, and I stopped. My labour was over. It is very possible that I have greatly overestimated it, that in 7 First translated into English by Humphrey Higgens, this early work occupies pp. 1 799-1857 of Volume IV of Mr Higgens's edi tion. I have had to omit it for space but readers curious about Herzen's literary development, which was remarkable--and sustained-should look it up. His 1 84{) reconstruction of his childhood is lively and detailed but rather a jumble that quite lacks the Proustian depth of focus, the ordering and enriching of experience in unhurried restrospection that characterizes his treatment, fifteen years later, of the same memories. ( D.M. ) D E D I C A T I O N xlviii these rough sketches there is much that is hidden away, but only for me ; perhaps I read into it much more than was written; what I have said inspires me \'\'ith dreams and works like hieroglyphs to which I hold the key. Perhaps I alone hear spirits knocking beneath these lines . . . perhaps: but the book is no less dear to me for that. For a long time it had taken the place for me both of people and of what I had lost. The time had come to part with the book, too. All that is personal soon crumbles away, and to this destitution one has to submit. This is not despair, not senility, not coldness and not indifference: it is grey-haired youth, one of the forms of convalescence or, better, that process itself. Only by this means is it humanly possible to survive certain wounds. In a monk, of whatever age he may be, one is continually meeting both an old man and a young man. By burying everything personal he has returned to his youth. He has begun to live easily, on a grand scale-sometimes too grand . . . . In reality a man now and again has a feeling of futility and loneliness among impersonal generalities, the elements of history, and the shapes of the future which pass across their surface like the shadows of clouds. But what follows from this? People would like to preserve e\·erything, both the roses and the snow; they would likE> the clusters of ripe grapes to be lapped round with May flowers. The monks used to escape from the temptation to murmur by means of prayer. We have no prayers: we have work. Work is our prayer. It is possible that the fruit of both will be the same, but for the moment that is not what I am talking about. Yes, in life there is a predilection for a recurring rhythm, for the repetition of a motif. Who does not know how close old age is to childhood ? Look closely, and vou will see that on both sides of the full climax of life, \�ith its. crowns of flowers and thorns, with i ts cradles and its graves, epochs often repeat themselves which are similar in their chief features. What youth has not had is already lost; what youth has dreamt of, without an actual sight of it, comes out brighter and more composed, likewise without being actually seen, from behind the clouds and the red glow in the sky . . . . When I think how we two, now when we are nearly fifty, are standing at the first machine for the manufacture of free speech in Russia, 8 it seems that our childish Griitli9 on the 8 H.'s printing press in London, with a fount of Russian type. (R.) 9 According to tradition representatives of the Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden cantons took an oath in 1 307, in Grutli Meadow in Uri canton, Dedication Sparrow Hills were not thirty-three years ago. Even three seems a lot! Life . . . lives, peoples, revolutions, beloved faces have appeared, changed and vanished between the Sparrow Hills and Primrose H ill; already their traces have almost been swept away by the pitiless whirhvind of events. Everything round me is changed: the Thames flo,vs instead of the Moscow River, and I am surrounded by a strange people . . . and there is no more a way for us back to our country . . . only the dream of two boys, one of thirteen, the other of eleven, has remained intact! May My Past and Thoughts settle my account with my personal life and be its summary. My remaining thoughts belong to my work: my remaining powers, to the struggle! Thus have we kept, we two, our [ lofty] league: We two again will tread the cheerless track, Tell of the truth, unconscious of fatigue, On fancies and on persons turn our back. to to fight for the liberation of their country. The alliance of the three cantons laid the foundation of the actual independence of the Swiss State. Herzen is comparing this legendary oath with the oath taken by himself and N. P. Ogarev on the Sparrow Hills at Moscow. ( A.S. ) IO The final lines of Ogarev's poem, To lskander: the word 'lofty' is omitted from the first line. (A.S. )
N U R S E R Y A N D U N I V E R S I T Y ( 1 8 1 2 - 1 8 3 4 ) When memories of the past return And the old road again we tread, Slowly the feelings of old days Come back to life within the soul; Old griefs and joys are here unchanged, Again the once familiar thrill Stirs echoes in the troubled heart; And for remembered woes we sigh. N. P. OGARE:v, Humorous Verse Clzildhood 'VERA ARTAMONOVNA, come tell me once more how the French came to Moscow,' I used to say, rolling myself up in the quilt and stretching in my crib, which was sewn round with canvas that I might not fall out. 'Oh! what's the use of telling you ? You've heard it so many times; besides it's time to go to sleep. You had better get up a little earlier to-morrow,' the old woman would usually answer, although she was as eager to repeat her favourite story as I was to hear it. 'But do tell me a little bit. How did you find out? How did it begin?' 'This was how it began. You know what your papa1 is-he is always putting things off; he was getting ready and getting ready, and all of a sudden he was ready! Ev<"ryone was saying "It's time to set off; what is there to wait for? There's almost no one left in the town." But no: Pavel Ivanovich2 and he kept talking of how they would go together, and first one wasn't ready and then the other. At last we were packed and the carriage was ready; the family sat down to lunch, when all at once our head cook ran into the dining-room as pale as a sheet, and announced: "The enemy has marched in at the Dragomilovsky Gate." How all hearts did sink! "The power of the Cross be vvith us!" we cried. What a panic there was! vVhile we were bustling about, sighing and groaning, we looked and down the street came galloping dragoons in those helmets with horses' tails streaming behind. The gates had all been shut, and here was your papa left behind, and a fine party there was going to be, and you with him; your wet nurse Darya still had you at the breast, you were so weak and delicate.' 1 Herzen's father, Ivan Alexeyevich Yakovlev ( 1 i67- 1 846) , was a very wealthy nobleman belonging to one of the most aristocratic families of Russia. In 1 8 1 1 . at the age of forty-two, he married nt S tuttgart a girl of sixteen, Luiza Haag-though in Russia she was always called Luiza Ivanovna as easil'r to pronounce. r she was the daught<'r of a minor Wurtt!'mberg official. (D.l\1. ) ] As he nf'@:lected to repeat the marriage ceremony in Russia, their son was there illegitimate. Y akovlcv is said to have given him 1he surname Herzen because he was the 'child of his heart.' ( Tr.) 2 Golokhvastov, the husband of my father's younger sister, Yelizaveta. 3 M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S 4 And I smiled with pride, pleased that I had taken part in the war. 'At the beginning we got along somehow, for the first few days, that is; it was only that t\vo or three soldiers would come in and ask by signs whether there wasn't anything to drink ; we would take them a glass each, of course, and they would go away, and touch their caps to us, too. But then, you see, when fires began and k('pt getting worse and \Vorse, there was such disord('r, plundering and all sorts of horrors. At that time we were living in thP lodge at the princess's3 and the house caught fire ; th('n Pavel Ivanovich said, "Let's go to my house: it is built of stone ; it stands far back in the courtyard and the outer walls are properly built." 'So we went, mast('rS and sen·ants all together-there was no difference made; we went out into the Tverskoy Boulevard and th(' trees \vere beginning to burn-we made our way at last to the Golokhvastovs' house and it 'vas simply blazing, flames from every \vindow. Pav('l I vanovich was dumbfounded, he couldn't believe his eyes. B('hind thP house thPre is a big garden, you know; \\"!' "·('nt into it thinking we would be safe there. \Ve sat there on the seats grieving, when, all at once, a mob of drunken soldiers were upon us: one set about trying to pull off Pavel Ivanovich's shePpskin travelling coat; the old man would not give it up, and the soldi('r pulled out his sword and struck him smack in the face with it so that he kept the scar to the end of his days : the others S('t upon us: on(' soldier tore you from your nurse, openPd your baby-clothes to see if ther(' were any moneynot('S or diamonds hidden among thPm, saw there was nothing there, and so in a rage he deliberately tore your clothes to pieces and flung thPm down. As soon as they had gone away, we were in troublP again. Do you rem('mber our Platon who was sent for a soldier) He was dreadfully fond of drink and that day he was very full of courage ; he tied on a sabre and \valked about like that. The day b('fOrP thP enemy ent('red, Count Rostopchin4 had distributed all sorts of weapons at the arsenal ; so that was how he had got hold of a sabre. Towards the evening he sa\v a dragoon ride into tlw yard : there \vas a horse standing near the stable, the dragoon wanted to take it, but Platon rushed head-3 Anna Borisovna Meshchersky. ( A .S.) 4 Rostopchin. Fedor Yasilevich. Count ( 1 763-1826) . Governor of Moscow in 1 8 1 2. Believ<:>d to have set lire to the city when · the French entered. ( Tr.) Nursery and University 5 long at him and, catching hold of the bridle, said: "The horse is ours, I won't give it to you." The dragoon threatened him with a pistol, but seemingly it was not loaded ; the master himself saw what was happening and shouted to Platon: "Let the horse alone, it's not your business." But not a bit of it! Platon pulled out his sabre and struck him again and again. "Well," thought we, "now the hour of our death is come; when his comrades see him, it will be the end of us." But when the dragoon fell off Platon seized him by the feet and dragged him to a pit full of lime and threw him in, poor fellow, and he was still alive; his horse stood there and did not stir from the place, but stamped its foot on the ground as though it understood; our servants shut it in the stable; it must have been burnt there. We all hurried out of the courtyard, the fire was more and more dreadful; worn out and with nothing to eat, we got into a house that was still untouched, and set about getting some rest; in less than an hour, our people were shouting from the street: "Come out, come out ! Fire! Fire ! " Then I took a piece o f green baize from the billiard table and wrapped you in it to keep you from the night air; and so we made our way as far as the Tverskoy Square. There the French were trying to put the fire out, because some great man of theirs was living in the governor's house; we simply sat in the street ; sentries were walking everywhere, others were riding by on horseback. And you were screaming, straining yourself with crying, your nurse had no more milk, no one had a bit of bread. Natalya Konstantinovna was with us then, a bold wench, you know; she saw that some soldiers were eating something in a corner, took you and went straight to them, showed you and said "manger for the little one" ; at first they looked at her so sternly and said "allez, allez," but she fell to scolding them. "Ah, you cursed brutes," she said, "You this and that"; the soldiers did not understand a word, but they burst out laughing and gave her some bread soaked in water for you and a crust for herself. Early in the morning an officer came up and gathered together all the men and your papa with them, leaving only the women and Pavel lvanovich who was wounded, and took them to put out the fire in the houses nearby, so we remained alone till evening; we sat and cried and that was all. When it was dusk, the master came back and with him some sort of officer. . . .' Allow me to take the old woman's place and continue her narrative. When my father had finished his duties as a firebrigade man, he met by the Strastny monastery a squadron of Italian cavalry; he went up to �heir officer and told him in Italian the situation his family was in. When the Italian heard M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S 6 la sua dolce favella he promised to speak to the Duke of Treviso,5 and as a preliminary measure to put a sentry to guard us and prevent barbarous scenes such as had taken place in the Golokhvastovs' garden. He sent an officer to accompany my father with these instructions. Hearing that the \vhole party had eaten nothing for two days, the officer led us all to a shop that had been broken into; the choicest tea, with the buds in it, and Levant coffee had been thrown about on the floor, together with a great number of dates, figs, and almonds; our servants stuffed their pockets full: there was no lack of dessert. The sentry turned out to be of the greatest use to us: a dozen times gangs of soldiers began molesting the luckless group of women and servants encamped in the corner of Tverskoy Square, but they moved off immediately at his command. Mortier remembered that he had known my father in Paris and informed Napoleon ; Napoleon ordered him to be presented next morning. In a shabby, dark blue, short coat with bronze buttons, intended for sporting wear, without his wig, in high boots that had not been cleaned for several days, with dirty linen and unshaven chin, my father-who worshipped decorum and strict etiquette-made his appearance in the throne room of the Kremlin Palace at the summons of the Emperor of the French. Their conversation which I have heard many times is fairly correctly given in Baron Fain's6 History and in that of Mikhaylovsky-Danilevsky. After the usual phrases, abrupt words and laconic remarks, to which a deep meaning was ascribed for thirty-five years, till men realised that their meaning was often quite trivial, Napoleon blamed Rostopchin for the fire, said that it was vandalism, declared as usual his invincible love of peace, maintained that his war was against England and not against Russia, boasted that he had set a guard on the Foundling Hospital and the Uspensky Cathedral, complained of Alexander, and said that he was surrounded by bad advisers and that his (Napoleon's) peaceful inclinations were not known to the Emperor. My father observed that it was rather for the victor to make offers of peace. 5 Mortier, Edouanl Adolphe ( 1 768- 1 835) , Duke of Treviso. general under the Revolution and Napoleon, Marshal of France. Killed, 1 835, by the infernal machine of Fieschi. ( Tr. ) 6 Fain, Francois, Baron ( 1 778-1837), French historian and secretary of Napoleon. ( Tr. ) Nursery and University 7 'I have done what I could; I have sent to Kutuzov:7 he will not enter into negotiations and does not bring my proposals to the cognisance of the Tsar. If they want war, it is not my faultthey shall have war.' After all this comedy my father asked him for a pass to leave Moscow. 'I have ordered no passes to be given to any one ; why are you going? What are you afraid of? I have ordered the markets to be opened.' The Emperor of the French apparently forgot at that moment that, in addition to open markets, it is as well to have a house with a roof, and that life in the Tverskoy Square in the midst of enemy soldiers was anything but agreeable. My father pointed this out to him; Napoleon thought a moment and suddenly asked: 'Will you undertake to convey a letter from me to the Emperor? On that condition I will command them to give you a permit to leave the town with all your household.' 'I would accept your Majesty's offer,' my father observed, 'but it is difficult for me to guarantee that it will reach him.' 'Will you give me your word of honour that you will make every effort to deliver the letter in person? ' 'Je m'engage sur mon honneur, Sire.' 'That is enough. I will send for you. Are you in need of anything?' 'Of a roof for my family whil e I am here. Nothing else.' 'The Due de Trevise will do what he can.' Mortier did, in fact, give us a room in the Governor-General's house, and gave orders that we should be furnished with provisions; his maitre d'hotel even sent us wine. A few days passed in this way, after which Mortier sent an adjutant, at four o'clock one morning, to summon my father to the Kremlin. The fire had attained terrific dimensions during those days; the scorched air, opaque with smoke, was becoming insufferably hot. Napoleon was dressed and was walking about the room, looking careworn and out of temper; he was beginning to feel that his singed laurels would before long be frozen, and there would be no getting out of it here with a jest, as in Egypt. The plan of the campaign was absurd; except Napoleon, everybody knew it: Ney, Narbonne, Berthier, and officers of lower rank; to 7 Kutuzov, Mikhail Illarionovich ( 1 745-1 8 1 3 ) , Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army in 1 8 1 2. (Tr.) M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S 8 all objections he had replied with the cabbalistic word 'Moscow' ; in Moscow even he guessed the truth. When my father went in, Napoleon took a sealed letter that was lying on the table, handed it to him and said, bowing him out: 'I rely on your word of honour.' On the envelope was written: 'A mon frere l'Empereur Alexandre.' The permit given to my father has survived; it is signed by the Duke of Treviso and countersigned by the oberpolitsmeyster of Moscow, Lesseps. A few outsiders, hearing of our permit, joined us, begging my father to take them in the guise of servants or relations. An open wagonette was given us for the wounded old man, my mother and my nurse; the others walked. A few Uhlans escorted us on horseback as far as the Russian rearguard, at the sight of which they wished us a good journey and galloped back. A minute later the Cossacks surrounded the strange refugees and led them to the headquarters of the rearguard. There Wintsengerode and Ilovaysky the Fourth were in command. Wintsengerode, hearing of the letter, told my father that he would send him on immediately, with two dragoons, to the Tsar in Petersburg. 'What's to be done with your people?' asked the Cossack general, Ilovaysky. 'It is impossible for them to stay here. They are not out of musket-shot, and a real action may be expected any day.' My father begged that we should, if possible, be taken to his Yaroslavl estate, but incidentally observed that he had not a kopeck with him. 'We will settle up afterwards,' said Ilovaysky, 'and do not worry yourself: I give you my word to send them.' My father was taken by the military courier system along a road made of fascines in the style of those days. For us Ilovaysky procured some sort of an old conveyance and sent us to the nearest town with a party of French prisoners and an escort of Cossacks; he provided us with money for our expenses until we reached Yaroslavl, and altogether did everything he possibly could in the bustle and apprehension of wartime. My father was taken straight to Count Arakcheyev8 and detained in his house. The Count asked for the letter, but my father told him he had given his word of honour to deliver it in B Arakcheyev, Aleksey Andreyevich, Count ( 1 769-1 834) , Minister of VVar and the most powerful and influential man of the reign of Alexander I, whose intimate friend he was, hated and dreaded for his cruelty. (Tr.) Nursery and University 9 person; Arakcheyev promised to ask the Tsar, and, next day, informed him by letter that the Tsar had charged him to take the letter and to deliver it immediately. He gave a receipt for the letter: that, too, has survived. For a month my father remained under arrest in Arakcheyev's house; no one was allowed to see him except S. S. Shishkov, who came at the Tsar's command to question him concerning the details of the fire, of the enemy's entry into Moscow, and his interview with Napoleon ; he was the first eye-witness to arrive in Petersburg. At last Arakcheyev informed my father that the Tsar had ordered his release, and did not hold him to blame for accepting a permit from the enemy in consideration of the extremity in which he was placed. On setting him free Arakcheyev commanded him to leave Petersburg immediately without seeing anybody except his elder brother, to whom he was allowed to say good-bye. On reaching at nightfall the little Yaroslavl village, my father found us in a peasant's hut (he had no house on that estate) . I was asleep on a bench under the window; the window did not close properly, and the snow, drifting through the crack, covered part of the bench and lay, not thawing, on the window-sill. Everyone was in a state of great perturbation, especially mother. A few days before my father's arrival, the village elder and some of the house-serfs had run hastily in the morning into the hut where she was living, trying to explain something by gestures and insisting on her following them. At that time my mother did not speak a word of Russian ; all she could make out was that the matter concerned Pavel lvanovich; she did not know what to think ; the idea occurred to her that they had killed him, or that they meant to kill him and afterwards her. She took me in her arms, and trembling all over, more dead than alive, followed the elder. Golokhvastov was in another hut and they went into it; the old man really was lying dead beside the table at which he had been about to shave; a sudden stroke of paralysis had cut short his life instantaneously. My mother's position may well be imagined ( she was then seventeen), in the midst of these half-savage bearded men, dressetl in bare sheepskins, talking in a completely unkno,.vn language, in a little smoke-blackened hut; and all this in November of the terrible winter of 1812. Her one support had been Golokhvastov; she wept day and night after his death. But these savages pitied her from the bottom of their hearts, in all their kindness and simplicity; and the village elder sent his son several times to the town to get ra!sins, cakes, apples, and breadrings for her. M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S 1 0 Fifteen years later the elder was still living and used sometimes, grey with age and somewhat bald, to come to Moscow. My mother used customarily to regale him with tea and to talk to him about the winter of 1812, saying how she had been so afraid of him and how, without understanding each other, they had made the arrangements for the funeral of Pavel Ivanovich. The old man used still to call my mother-as he had then-Yuliza Ivanovna, instead of Luiza, and used to tell how I was not at all afraid of his beard and would readily let him take me into his arms. From the province of Yaroslavl we moved to that of Tver, and at last, a year later, made our way back to Moscow. By that time my father's brother,9 who had been ambassador to Westphalia and had afterwards gone on some commission to Bernadotte, had returned from Sweden ; he settled in the same house with us. I still remember, as in a dream, the traces of the fire, which remained until early in the 'twenties: great burnt-out houses without window frames or roofs, tumble-do\\'11 walls, empty spaces fenced in. with remains of stoves with chimneys on them.
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