A Herzen Reader

Herzen remained a rich source of inspiration for the dissident move­ment in the 1960s, with his example of a successful end run around censor­ship and border controls sending a quite different message than the regime could possibly have wished. In Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle, Inno- kenty Volodin's uncle asks the well-educated young man whether he has ever read Herzen "properly," restating the crucial question of conscience, whether there are limits to patriotism, and whether it extends to aiding the government in the destruction of its people.⁸⁶ When a small group of Rus­sians protested the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in i968, they were inspired by Herzen's slogan in support of the Poles: "To Your Freedom and Ours."⁸⁷ Alexander Yanov credits his 1974 Young Communist article—with its repeated references to Herzen's political courage in countering pseudo- patriotism—with contributing to his own expulsion from the country.⁸⁸

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