Herzen and Ogaryov composed a joint letter in 1863 to the impatient Ba- kunin, saying that they saw their role as holding firm to the banner until the dawn of a better day. Six years later, Herzen wrote to Ogaryov that he did not believe that they had always been effective. "Sometimes we were right on target, but at other times we were working for the 20th century."89 In the end, Herzen's confidence in the long-term impact of their publications appears to have been more than justified.
In February 1837, Herzen wrote to his beloved Natalya from exile in Vyatka: "I'm already 24 years old, and I still don't know what to do. . . . To write or to serve. The literary world is unsatisfying because it isn't real life, and government service—how much humiliation would there be before I reached a point where my service would be of use? These . . . are the questions I have been preoccupied with lately."90 His guiding principles involved greater honesty than was possible in government service, and more practical goals than could be presented effectively in fiction or literary criticism.91 Herzen obviously found a way to combine writing and service to the people; practically speaking, this was only possible in exile, on another shore, where he could openly serve the "second government" that Russian literature had become.
Unlike many Russian writers and critics of the mid-nineteenth century, Herzen rejected the lure of inserting politics between the lines, believing that under well-formed governments, writers seek not to mask their thoughts, but to express them clearly.92 When Herzen was still being taught at home, his tutor brought him forbidden verses by Pushkin and Ryleev. "I used to copy them in secret. . . . (and now I print them openly!)."93 In an 1844 diary entry, he mentions an article by Mikhail Bakunin that had arrived from abroad. "Here is the language of a free man, which seems quite strange to us. . . . We are used to allegory, to a bold word intra muros, and we are amazed by the daring speech of a Russian man, like a person sitting in a dark hovel is startled by the light."94 He also rejected de Custine's popular myth of Russia as a mysterious, undecipherable land; Herzen strove to make sense of it for both Europeans and for the Russians themselves. In remembering the "Remarkable Decade," Pavel Annenkov said that in Russia, where keeping a low profile was the wisest strategy, Herzen's values and criticisms were "undisguised."95 As his work abroad wound down in 1868, Herzen summed it up in a typically matter-of-fact way: "It wasn't a conspiracy, it was a printing press."96
With Past and Thoughts Alexander Herzen created one of literature's great memoirs. From the Other Shore, "The Russian People and Socialism," "On the Development of Revolutionary Thought in Russia," and other essays made a significant contribution to European thought between the French and Russian revolutions. Articles in The Polestar and editorials in The Bell are major documents in the history of nineteenth-century Russian political journalism, not part of a conspiracy, but one very eloquent Russian's service to his country, an interactive "encyclopedia of civic freedom."97 It is a pleasure to introduce these previously untranslated writings to a new audience, which, as Tolstoy said in 1905, Herzen so richly deserves.
Notes
The original Russian in the introduction's epigraph is "On uzhe ozhidaet svoikh chi- tatelei vperedi," Oct. 12, 1905, L. N. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestevnnaia literatura, 1960-65), 20:224, 506-7. On Oct. 18, 1905, Tolstoy wrote to Vladimir Stasov from Yasnaya Polyana, thanking him for the suggestion to reread Herzen. In this turbulent year, Stasov had felt that Herzen's writings allowed him to once again "see the sun and warm himself' (Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, 18:368-70).
Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin: Recollections of an Historian of Ideas (London: Phoenix, 1992), 175.
A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: ANSSSR, 1954-66), 21:76.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 21:300-303, 314; 26:13. The young radical Alexander Serno-Solovyovich complained that, while turning down the pleas from destitute emigres, Herzen could discuss socialism as he dined on caviar and champagne. As cited in: Martin Miller, The Russian Revolutionary Emigres (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 141.
Let 1:522-31, 540-42 (this refers to the first of five volumes chronicling Herzen's life and work; see the entry under Letopis' zhizni i tvorchestva A. I. Gertsena in the bibliography).
Let 3:19.
Introduction to the four-volume edition ofAlexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968), i:xxvi, xxxvii.
Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 2:996-97, 3:1023-26.
Let 2:119-24.
Irena Zhelvakova, Gertsen (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2010), 386.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. 1, 265. The most recent account of the foundation of the Press can be found in Fran^oise Kunka, Alexander Herzen and the Free Russian Press in London 1852 to 1866 (Saarbrticken: LAP Lambert Academic Publishers, 2011).
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 2i:28.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. 2, 4i6.
Let 3:53.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. 2, 449.
Let 1:589; Let 2:20, 48. In a March 10 (Feb. 26) 1867 letter to Ogaryov from Italy, Herzen said that a visit from his friend would be welcome, but hardly possible, since he
had no set residence of his own (" 'u menia' net u menia"), Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 29:bk. i, 58.
E. Lampert, Studies in Rebellion (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, i957), i79-
Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 3:i44i, П453. This comment is reminiscent of his earlier criticism of the Petrashevtsy, a Petersburg progressive group arrested in 3:849 that included a young Dostoevsky: "They wanted to have harvests in return for the intention to sow" (My Past and Thoughts, 2:978).
Andrei Root, Gertsen i traditsii Vol'noi russkoi pressy (Kazan: Izdatel'stvo Kazan- skogo universiteta, 200i), 2П4.
The letter was dated Feb. 2i, i870, and is cited in Michael Confino, Daughter of a Revolutionary: Natalie Herzen and the Bakunin-Nechayev Circle, trans. Hilary Sternberg and Lydia Bott (LaSalle, 1ll.: Library, i973), i63-64.
Isaiah Berlin, "A Revolutionary Without Fanaticism," in The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 93.
Root, Gertsen i traditsii Vol'noi russkoi pressy, especially chapter 2, "Pervaia russkaia svobodnaia gazeta 'Kolokol' (i857-i867): Dvizhenie publitsisticheskoi mysli Gertsena," which carefully analyzes both the shorter editorials and the longer summary articles. Lampert compared Herzen, who "never said the same thing twice," to Bakunin, who constantly repeated himself (Lampert, Studies in Rebellion, i95).
Lampert, Studies in Rebellion, i87.
Let 3:255.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 27:bk. i, 3i6-i8.
Let 3:595; Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vols. 4i-42:4i9-25.