A Herzen Reader

Then there was your journey around Russia. I witnessed it, and, what is more, I remember it very well; as a result of your appearance my fate un­derwent a geographical improvement and I was transferred from Vyatka to Vladimir; I have not forgotten that.

Exiled to a distant town beyond the Volga, I watched how the poor folk met you with a simple love, and I thought: "How will he repay that love?"

Here it is—payment time, and how easy you will find it! Give in to your heart. You truly love Russia and you can do so, so much for the Russian people.

I also love the Russian people, I have forsaken them out of love; I could not remain a witness—silent and with folded arms—to those terrible things that the landowners and bureaucrats were doing to them.

Being at a distance has not changed my feelings; in the midst of strang­ers, in the midst of passions called forth by the war, I have not rolled up my flag. Just the other day I publicly greeted the English people on behalf of the Russian people.³

Of course, my banner is not yours—I am an incorrigible socialist and you're an autocratic emperor; but there is one thing in common between your banner and mine—namely that love for the people about which we speak.

And in its name I am prepared to make a huge sacrifice. What could not be accomplished by long years of persecution, prison, exile, or tedious wander­ing from country to country—I am prepared to do out of love for the people.

I am prepared to wait, to step back a bit, to speak about something else, as long as I have a real hope that you will do something for Russia.

Your majesty, grant freedom to the Russian word. Our mind is con­stricted, our thought is poisoning our chest from a lack of space; it is groaning in the confinement of censorship. Give us free speech. We have something to say to the world and to our own people.

Give land to the peasants. It already belongs to them; wipe away from Russia the shameful stain of serfdom, heal the bruises on the backs of our brothers—those dreadful marks of disdain for human beings.

As he was dying, your father—do not be afraid, I know that I am speak­ing with his son—confessed that he was unable to do everything that he wished for all his subjects. Serfdom was gnawing at his conscience in the last moments.

He was unable during the course of thirty years to free the serfs!

Hurry! Save the serf from future crimes, save him from the blood that he will have to spill.

.I am ashamed at how little we are prepared to be satisfied with; we want things of whose justice you—and everyone else—have little doubt.

As a first step that will be sufficient for us.

It may be that on the height on which you stand, surrounded by a fog of flattery, you are amazed by my impertinence; maybe you even laugh at this lost grain of sand out of seventy million grains of sand that make up your granite pedestal.

But it is better not to laugh. I am saying only what is kept silent at home. For that purpose I have set up on free soil the first Russian printing press; like an electrometer, it will register the activity and pressure of suppressed force.

A few drops of water that cannot find a way out are sufficient to destroy a granite cliff.

Your majesty, if these lines reach you, read them without malice, alone, and then think about them. You do not often get to hear the sincere voice of a free Russian man.

10 March 1855

Notes

Source: "Pis'mo k Imperatoru Aleksandru Vtoromu," Poliarnaia zvezda, kn. 1, 1855; ^12:27^2-74 53^8-39.

In September 1812, Napoleon failed to defeat the Russians at Borodino; his forces were defeated the following month at Tarutino, south of Moscow, with an unusually large number of French guns falling into enemy hands.

Vasily Zhukovsky.

Herzen refers to "A Popular Assembly in Memory of the February Revolution," a speech that he gave in French at a London meeting on February 27, 1855, commemo­rating the events of 1848. The speech was published in English, French, and Russian.

♦ 6 *

The Polestar, Bk. I, 1855. Herzen published the infamous 1847 correspondence between Gogol and Belinsky, which was still banned in Russia, along with Gogol's reaction to Be- linsky's article in The Contemporary. In A Remarkable Decade, Pavel Annenkov described Herzen's arrival at the hotel in Paris where a seriously ill Belinsky read his own letter in Herzen's presence. Although Herzen heard the letter in its original form in 1847, the copy he used for publication is faulty. His word for publicity—glasnost'—was widely employed during the first decade of Alexander II's reign, and, along with the word for restructuring—perestroika—was revived 130 years later by Mikhail Gorbachev.

A Note on "The Correspondence Between N. Gogol and Belinsky" in The Polestar

[1855]