But here, unfortunately, it turns out that the people had very little meat on their bones, to the point that to all reforms, revolutions, and declaration of rights it answered:
We are hungry, wanderer, very hungry!
We are cold, dear one, very cold!6
And the lawgivers did not just break things, they also built them up, they not only unmasked, but also lectured, and more important than lecturing, they made people study, and maybe, the saddest thing of all in most cases, they were right.
Behind their own noise and their own speeches, the good neighborhood policemen of human rights and the Peter the Firsts of freedom, equality, and brotherhood for a long time did not hear what the sovereign people were saying; then they became angry over its rampant materialism. However, here as well they did not ask what was going on.
They were convinced that it was better to lecture the people than to learn from them, that it was better to build things up than to break them down, that it was better to work in the study on an account in the absence of the proprietor than to ask him about it. Sieyes and Speransky7 weren't the only ones who wrote all sorts of pale constitutions, but the Germans, what did they write and elevate to a science!? And the abyss between them and the people not only did not shrink, but expanded, and this is the consequence of tragic, inevitable necessity. Every success, every step forward carries away the radiant shore; it moves more and more quickly and becomes more and more distant from the gloomy shore and the ignorant people.8 With what can one fill the abyss, what doctrinaire scholasticism can be used to help, what dogmatic regulation and what kind of academic exercise can bridge it? An experiment was tried, it did not succeed, again because the socialists gave lectures before they knew what they were talking about, and organized phalansteries9 without having found anywhere the type of person who would want to live in workers' hotels.
And from this very abyss there will emerge, there will come to the surface guillotines, red hats on pikes, Napoleons, armies, more armies, legitimists, Orleanists, a second republic, and, finally, June days10—days that created nothing, established nothing, days in which the best and unluckiest of peoples, driven by need and despair, went out into the street without a sound, without a plan, without a goal, out of despair and said to their guardians, lawmakers, and teachers: "We do not know you! We were hungry, and you gave us parliamentary chatter; we were naked, and you sent us across the border to kill other cold and naked people; we asked for advice, we asked you to teach us how to get out of our situation, and you taught us rhetoric. We are returning to the darkness of our damp cellars, a portion of us will fall in an unequal battle, but, before doing this, we are telling you, scribes of the revolution, loudly and clearly:
The people are not with you!"
Notes
Source: "Miaso osvobozhdeniia," Kolokol, l. i2i, February i, i862; i6:25-29, 356-58.
Herzen then alludes to remarks made in such newspapers as the Allgemeine Zei- tung, Kolnische Zeitung, and Siecle.
Herzen: "We are mostly speaking about journals whose inclination is pseudo- republican, administratively democratic, or Germanically Russophobic. In serious periodicals there are remarkable articles about Russia. As recently as the January 2 issue of Revue des Deux Mondes there was a very interesting article by Charles de Mazade, 'La Russie sous le regne d'Alexandre II.' [. . .]"
A quote from Pushkin's "Demon," which Herzen has altered.
Herzen: "Alas, that time has passed. It will, perhaps, return, and while we wait."
Herzen: "The meat (or flesh) of social well-being."
From Nikolay Nekrasov's "Songs of the Poor Wanderer."
Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes (1748-1836) was an eloquent social and political theorist from the beginning of the French Revolution until Napoleon's coup d'etat: his best-known pamphlet is What Is the Third Estate? (1789).
For both words, Herzen employs the adjective temnyi (lit. "dark") in different, but related, senses.
According to utopian socialist theories of Charles Fourier (1771-1837).
These references are all to France from the Revolution of 1789 to that of 1848. In June 23-25, 1848 (the June Days), there was an uprising caused by the closure of workshops set up by the Second Republic.
^ 43 +
The Bell, No. 121, February 1, 1862. Herzen was dissatisfied with the September 1862 millennium ceremony staged in Novgorod, the city to which he had been exiled in 1841. He had requested Odessa, "the newest city in Russia, and they transferred me to Novgorod, the oldest city" (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 22:96). In an ill-tempered letter to friends, he had described "this city of worn inscriptions, reconstructed monasteries, Hanseatic memories, and Russian Orthodox liberalism" (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 22:97). Other than the ninth-century Varangian leader Rurik and the current governor, no one would go there willingly "since, like all provincial capitals, it is uninhabitable" (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 22:102).
Herzen particularly disliked the monument commissioned from the artist Mikeshin. That in the age of great reforms so much money and energy were wasted on jubilees was unfortunate, but what most offended Herzen were the heroes chosen for the very large and mute Novgorod bell, after he found out about the details for the design in a supplement to the official spiritual-cultural calendar (mesiatseslov) for 1862. Well aware of the mercurial nature of official favor in Russia, he suggested, tongue in cheek, that removable plaques should be made to celebrate "temporarily important people," and be changed every five years.
Jubilee [1862]
. The jubilee of Knyazhevich, the jubilee of Vyazemsky, the jubilee of Adlerberg, the jubilee of Sukhozanet,1 and, finally, Russia's jubilee! How ridiculous in itself to mark the exact moment of the conception of a state, especially when it took place in such a remote location that people are still arguing about the identity of the father,2 but we will not attack this, as it is an innocent affair. One could object that any sort of excess expense is now out of place, but, taking into consideration that the jubilee of any kind of useless, utterly insignificant person, whose total services consisted in, a la Maniloff,3 a tender friendship with Nicholas, costs more than ten monuments, we are prepared to reconcile ourselves even to this expense. What offends us is the continuation of lies in the past, and we are offended by sculptural deceptions. There is something faint-hearted and obtuse in a deliberate distortion of history on the highest authority. Did Nicholas hide the participation of Ermolov and Tol4 in the Battle of Borodino by omitting their names from a monument, did he hide from posterity the fact that Warsaw was captured by Tol and not Paskevich? Why have Rtishchev, Betskoy, Po- temkin, Kochubey, Vorontsov, Paskevich, Lazarev, Kornikov, Nakhimov,5 et al., et al. been elevated as temporarily important people?
We are not even talking about the crowd of every kind of high clergymen, these official enlighteners, whose carved faces appear in the list of historic celebrities. Among them are people of whom no one has heard, like Gury and Varsonofy, and there are those of whom we are accustomed to hearing about the negative side, like the schemer Feofan Prokopovich.6
If the deed is done and the carved likenesses have been commissioned, then we propose bas-reliefs for temporarily important people on removable plaques, so that they can be replaced as required by necessity and by the departure of new celebrities to join their forefathers.