of interested posterity. Nekrasov w.as a very gifted poet, but before
everything he was a preacher and a propagandist of genius; consequently it was not he but Belinsky who first saw the central issue and saw it more clearly and directly and simply than anyone would ever
see it again. Nor did the thought ever seem to arise in his mind that
it might be possible not to face it with all its implications, to practise
caution, to be more circumspect in one's choice of a moral and
political position, or perhaps even to retire to a neutral and disinterested
attitude above the din of the battle. 'He knew no fear, because he was
strong and sincere; his conscience was clear.' It is because he committed himself so violently and irrevocably to a very specific vision of the truth, and to a very specific set of moral principles to govern both
thought and action, at a price which grew greater continually to
himself and those who chose to follow him, that his life and his outlook
alternately appalled and inspired the generation which came after him.
No final verdict had been declared upon him in his own lifetime. Not
even official canonisation in his native country has finally laid the
ghost of his doubts and torments or stilled his indignant voice. The
issues on which he spent his life are today more alive-and, in consequence of revolutionary forces which he himself did so much to set in motion, more pressing and more threatening-than ever before .
..
IV
A L E X A N D E R H E R Z E N
A L E XA N D E R H E R Z E N is the most arresting Russian political writer
in the nineteenth century. No good biographies of him exist, perhaps
because his own autobiography is a great literary masterpiece. It is
not widely known in English-speaking countries, and that for no good
reason, for it has been translated into English, the first part magnificently by J. D. Duff, and the whole adequately by Constance Garnett; unlike some works of political and literary genius, it is, even
in translation, marvellously readable.
In some respects, it resembles Goethe"s Dichtung und Wahrheit
more than any other book. For it is not a collection of wholly personal
memoirs and political reRections. It is an amalgam of personal detail,
descriptions of political and social life in various countries, of opinions,
personalities, outlooks, accounts of the author's youth and early manhood in Russia, historical essays, notes of journeys in Europe, France, Switzerland, Italy, of Paris and Rome during the revolutions of I 848
and I 849 (these last are incomparable, and the best personal documents
about these events that we possess), discussions of political leaders, and
of the aims and purposes of various parties. All this is interspersed
with a variety of comment, pungent observation, sharp and spontaneous,
occasionally malicious, vignettes of individuals, of the character of
peoples, analyses of economic and social facts, discussions and epigrams
about the future and past of Europe and about the author's own
hopes and fears for Russia; and interwoven with this is a detailed and
poignant account of Herzen's personal tragedy, perhaps the most
extraordinary self-revelation on the part of a sensitive and fastidious
man ever written down for the benefit of the general public.
Alexander I vanovich Herzen was born in Moscow in I 8 I 2, not
long before the capture of the city by Napoleon, the illegitimate son
of I van Yakovlev, a rich and well-born Russian gentleman, descended
from a cadet branch of the Romanovs, a morose, difficult, possessive,
distinguished and civilised man, who bullied his son, loved him deeply,
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A L E X AN D E R H E RZEN
embittered his life, and had an enormous influence upon him both by
attraction and repulsion. His mother, Luiz� Haag, was a mild
German lady from Stuttgart in Wurttemberg, the daughter of a minor
official. I van Y akovlev had met her while travelling abroad, but
never married her. He took her to Moscow, established her as mistress
of his household, and called his son Herzen in token, as it were, of
the fact that he was the child of his heart, but not legitimately born
and therefore not entitled to bear his name.
The fact that Herzen was not born in wedlock probably had a
considerable effect on his character, and may have made him more
rebellious than he might otherwise have been. He received the regular
education of a rich young nobleman, went to the University of
Moscow, and there early asserted his vivid, original, impulsive
character. He was born (in later years he constantly came back to this)
into the generation of what in Russia came to be called /ishnie lyudi,
'superfluous men', with whom Turgenev's early novels are so largely
concerned.
These young men have a place of their own in the history of
European culture in the nineteenth century. They belonged to the
class of those who are by birth aristocratic, but who themselves go
over to some freer and more radical mode of thought and of action.
There is something singularly attractive about men who retained,
throughout life, the manners, the texture of being, the habits and
style of a civilised and refined milieu. Such men exercise a peculiar
kind of personal freedom which combines spontaneity with distinction.
Their minds see large and generous horizons, and, above all, reveal a
unique intellectual gaiety of a kind that aristocratic ed:.�cation tends
to produce. At the same time, they are intellectually on the side of
everything that is new, progressive, rebellious, young, untried, of that
which is about to come into being, of the open sea whether or not
there is land that lies beyond. To this type belong those intermediate
figures, like Mirabeau, Charles James Fox, Franklin Roosevelt,
who live near the frontier that divides old from new, between the
douceur de Ia vie which is about to pass and the tantalising future,
the dangerous new age that they themselves do much to bring into
being.
Herzen belonged to this milieu. In his autobiography he has described
what it was like to be this kind of man in a suffocating society, where
there was no opportunity of putting to use one's natural gifts, what it
meant to be excited by novel ideas which came drifting in from all
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RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S
kinds o f sources, from classical texts an d the old Utopias o f the west,
from French social preachers and German philosophers, from books,
journals, casual conversations, only to remember that the milieu in
which one lived made it absurd even to begin to dream of creating in
one's own country those harmless and moderate institutions which
had long become forms of life in the civilised west.
This normally led to one of two results: either the young enthusiast
simply subsided, and came to terms with reality, and became a wistful,
gently frustrated landowner, who lived on his estate, turned the pages
of serious periodicals imported from Petersburg or abroad, and
occasionally introduced new pieces of agricultural machinery or some