A Herzen Reader

The number of the "living" summoned by Herzen with The Bell fluctu­ated during the 1860s and the great bell went silent a few years before the writer's death, not, he explained, because of his enemies, but the re­sult of being abandoned by his friends.⁶⁵ In a civilization that responded to the bold gesture and the heroic deed (podvig), Herzen had reached across great distances to project his ideas back to Russia, and had "stylistically con­quered fate."⁶⁶ He wrote in Past and Thoughts that when he returned from administrative exile in 1839 "any action was impossible . . . but, to make up for this, great was the power of speech."⁶⁷ In a 1938 letter, Isaiah Berlin speculated that "if anyone were alive now who talked as he must have done . . . one would never listen to anyone else."⁶⁸ Herzen preferred discussions among a small circle of close associates and visitors at home and abroad, and spoke only infrequently in public. He was able, however, to bring not just his political analysis but his confident voice to the lead articles that made The Bell so controversial and so influential.

Despite the many decades it took before Herzen's works were easily and legally available in his homeland, interest in him never flagged for long, as each generation found new reasons to listen to his vigorous commen­tary on Russia. The greatest response to his 1861 call to the intelligentsia to "go to the people" (Doc. 39) came in 1873, three years after his death. Russians traveling to Europe took the opportunity to find his forbidden writings and immerse themselves in his thought before returning home to a still-authoritarian state. Once there had been a stream of visitors to his London residence; now the pilgrims went to his grave in Nice. Fyodor Rodi- chev (1854-1933), an aristocrat who became a liberal leader in the Duma, "discovered" Herzen in Berlin in 1872, and what he read inspired him for a lifetime.⁶⁹ Characters in Russian novels were said to keep copies of The Bell at home in order to give themselves a progressive air; what could not be a subject of serious public debate could appear as a slightly risque object. The revolutionary year of 1905 and the four Dumas that followed brought his works before a more politicized public that was looking for immediate answers about Russia's future direction. In Tolstoy's opinion, the intelli­gentsia was so degraded that they were unfit to understand Herzen's writ­ings.⁷⁰ Trotsky gave Herzen his due for the emphasis on the peasants' "collectivist traditions," but any "cult" was out of the question, because all authority must be subject to "constant reexamination."⁷¹ Gorky was more enthusiastic, calling Herzen "an entire province, a country amazingly rich in ideas."⁷² The authors of the seminal Landmarks (Vekhi) anthology of 1909 found Herzen a frequent point of reference in charting the intelligen­tsia's political and spiritual evolution. The man who was deemed by many to be a guide for troubled times was excoriated by writer Vasily Rozanov as the villain who helped destroy a millennium-old civilization.

The events of 1917 elevated Herzen to even greater heights, as the new nation grew into a land dotted with "Herzen streets" and "Herzen insti­tutes." In 1920, the fiftieth anniversary of his death received substantial attention, and during an evening dedicated to the iubilei, the Soviet com­missar of enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, declared that Herzen had ceased being just a tourist attraction for Russians in Europe, and was now a living and healing spring for his homeland. Toward the end of his remarks, Lunacharsky made serious use of the sacred cadences so beloved of the militantly atheist regime, calling Herzen a life-giving prophet. "We sum­mon you to help us, O great writer, great heart and great mind; we summon you to rise out of the grave and help us, to aid us in this time of mighty events."⁷³ A book from that same year referred to Herzen as a new Moses, and demanded that his precious remains be returned to "red Moscow." The author did, however, object to the series of "ridiculous" letters Herzen had written to the imperial family, an unsurprising comment, seeing that the descendants of the addressees had recently been executed.⁷⁴