A Herzen Reader

Herzen: "There are many who reproach The Bell, among them the Prussian Kreuz- Zeitung, with a disrespectful tone and familiar air toward people who, although they stand in the way of any improvement and are major scoundrels, still belong to the high­est ranks. [. . .] In the ringing of our Bell there is a howl that arises from the jail cells, bar­racks, and stables, from the landowners' fields and the censor's slaughterhouse—The Bell definitely belongs to bad society, which is why it lacks the clerk's manners and the secretary's courtesy."

Grigory B. Blank (1811-1889), ^a Tambov landowner, strongly supported serfdom. Nikolay A. Bezobrazov (1816-1867), leader of the St. Petersburg gentry, wrote brochures about gentry rights.

Herzen refers to articles published in The Bell in 1857 and 1858, exposing crimes against serfs and others, and the absence of punishment for their tormenters.

♦ 19 ♦

The Bell, No. 27, November i, i858. While this public letter to the empress caused a stir, it was not without precedent. In i826, poet Vasily Zhukovsky wrote to Maria Alexan- drovna's mother-in-law, Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, whom he had earlier tutored in Russian. Zhukovsky believed that then eight-year-old Alexander Nikolaevich should receive more than just a military education, because Russia needed enlightenment and new laws (Wortman, Development of Russian Legal Consciousness, 138-39). In his mem­oirs, Herzen claimed that Maria Alexandrovna wept when she read this open letter about the education of her children. Anna Tyutcheva, lady-in-waiting to the empress (and fu­ture wife of the Slavophile journalist Ivan Aksakov) wrote in her diary that the scoundrel Herzen was right, and not for the first time; Tyutcheva firmly believed that the empress understood better than anyone else the weaknesses in the education arranged for her sons (Let 2:455-56). The letter was well received by many close to the court for the intelli­gent and polite tone it adopted (Let 2:458), although at least one historian of Russia later found the entire idea of writing to the empress on such a subject "ridiculous" (Ulam, Ideologies and Illusions, 23). At the end of this issue of The Bell, Herzen invited the tsar to send him any royal speeches—like the one made to the Moscow nobility—that could not be published in Russia.

In Scenarios of Power, Richard Wortman described Nikolay Alexandrovich's tutor, August Theodore Grimm (1805-1878), as a man "whose pedagogy created a scandal that quickly went beyond the bounds of the court and brought the heir's education into debates on Russia's destiny." Wortman went on to say that "Herzen's letter reached its mark. Within a month it was circulating in the court." In 1859, Count Sergey Stro- ganov was chosen to supervise the heir; since the universities were undesirable centers of anti-monarchist politics, he invited respected scholars to read lectures at the palace (Wortman, Scenarios of Power, 2:95-99). Nikolay Alexandrovich, fifteen years old when the letter below was written, grew into a well-educated and promising young man, but tragically died from meningitis in 1865, which prompted Herzen to write another letter to the emperor (Doc. 68). The next in line, Alexander Alexandrovich, to whose educa­tion little attention had been paid, assumed the role of heir, and in 1881 succeeded his father as tsar.

A Letter to the Empress Maria Alexandrovna [1858]

Your Highness,

We lack a present, and therefore it is not surprising that we are particu­larly concerned with the future of our country. The first dawns after a grim and prolonged winter have paled, having barely commenced. and we have grown poorer than we were before, without the hatred that we have lost and the indignation which has softened. We have given ourselves up to the spring breezes, and exposed our long-hardened hearts to feelings unknown since childhood. but we were not fated to see the fulfillment of these or other dreams. People and tsars in our transitional age are left with appeals and placards. To the next generation, perhaps, will belong action and drama.

We do not envy them. Our activity is coming to an end . soon we will pass away, exhausted—but not defeated—by our thirty-year struggle. Let the new generation that comes to replenish our ranks find a better use for their strength. And you, Highness, can be in the forefront of this.

Unfortunately, the fate of autocratic monarchies depends to a great extent on the personality of the tsar. It was not for nothing that Peter I sacrificed dynastic interests and the life of his own son to his reforms.¹ Alexander I, who said of himself "Je ne suis qu'un heureux hazard," has passed into history.² It is in this game of chance that you can increase the possibility of winning in the near future, for the good of Russia.