A Herzen Reader

But this will not happen. From far away another life is audible to us here, and a spring breeze wafts from Russia. We did not doubt the Russian people before, and everything written and said by us since 1849 testifies to that. The establishment of a printing-house is even more evidence. The question was about the best time, and it has been resolved in our favor.

Only let us not be mistaken about one matter; circumstances count for a great deal but they are not everything. Without personal participation, without willpower and without labor, nothing gets completed. This is what comprises the grandeur of man's action in history. He creates it, and the fulfillment of historical destiny depends on his supreme will. The more favorable the circumstances the more terrible the responsibility he bears to himself and to his descendants.

We summon you to work. It is not a lot, but it is physiologically impor­tant; we have made the first step, we have opened the gate—to walk through it is your job!

The first volume of The Polestar will appear on the twenty-seventh of July (August 7), and the second toward the New Year.

We don't want to start subscriptions before December; for subscriptions we need to know whether we will receive articles, and whether there will be support from Russia. Only then will we be able to determine whether we can publish three or four volumes a year.

Our plan is exceptionally simple. In each issue we would like to have one general article (philosophy of revolution, socialism), one historical or statistical article about Russia or the Slavic world, an analysis of some re­markable artistic work and one original literary article; after that, a mixture of letters, a chronicle, and so on.

The Polestar must be—and this is one of our most ardent desires—the refuge for all manuscripts drowning in the imperial censorship, all that have been mutilated by it. For the third time we are making a request to all literate people in Russia to obtain for us manuscript copies of Pushkin, Ler- montov et al., which are being passed around and are well-known ("An Ode to Freedom," "The Dagger," "The Village," omitted parts of Onegin and "De­mon," "The Gavriliad," "The Triumph of Death," "Polikrat Samossky"...).

The manuscripts will eventually perish—they must be preserved in print.

Our first volume is rich. A writer of unusual talent and a sharp dialectic as soon as he heard a rumor about The Polestar sent us a superb article under the title "What is a state?" We have read it ten times, amazed at the boldness and depth of the author's revolutionary logic.

Another anonymous writer sent us "The Correspondence Between Be- linsky and Gogol." We knew about this correspondence before from Belin- sky himself; it made some noise in 1847. In any case, there is no indelicacy in printing it since it has passed through so many hands, even those of the police, and we are printing something that is already well known. Belinsky and Gogol are no longer alive, Belinsky and Gogol belong to Russian his­tory, and the polemic between them is too important a document to not publish out of faint-hearted delicacy.

We have already secured these two articles for our first volume. Besides these we will print excerpts from Past and Thoughts, an analysis of Miche- let's La Renaissance, and tutti frutti—all and sundry.

Richmond (Surrey) March 25 (April 6), 1855

Notes

Source: "Ob"iavlenie o 'Poliarnoi zvezde' 1855," 1855; 12:265-71, 536-38.

Prince Ivan F. Paskevich-Yerevansky (1782-1856), a general and field marshal who commanded the Russian army in campaign against Hungarian revolutionaries in 1848.

The Petrashevsky circle, organized by Mikhail V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky (1821­1866), read and discussed progressive literature, especially the French utopian social­ists, and evidently included a secret inner core of proto-revolutionaries. Its members were arrested in 1849, in the wake of the European revolutionary activities, and a number of them, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, received sentences of prison and exile in Siberia.

Vladimir F. Adlerberg (1791-1859) was a general and minister at court, enjoying the special confidence of Nicholas I and Alexander II; Alexander A. Suvorov (1804-1882) was a grandson of the great general and close to Decembrist circles, as a result of which he was sent to the Caucasus, later serving as governor-general in the Baltic provinces.

Herzen has in mind work carried out for Alexander I by Mikhail Speransky. The relevant political essays by N. M. Karamzin were written on his own initiative.

Minin, a commoner, and Pozharsky, an aristocrat, are credited with leading the forces that liberated Russia in 1612.

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