Kathleen é - A Herzen Reader

class="book">54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

A Second Warning and A Second Godunov [1866]

A Letter to Emperor Alexander II [1866] 285

From Petersburg [1866] 287

From the Sovereign to P. P. Gagarin [1866] 291

Katkov and the Sovereign [1866] 297

A Frenzy of Denunciations [1866] 299

A Quarrel Among Enemies [1866] 300

America and Russia [1866] 303

The Question of a Plot [1866] 305

Order Triumphs! [1866-1867] 306

A New "Velvet Book" of Russian Noble Families [1867] 322

Our System of Justice [1867] 325

Moscow—Our Mother and Stepmother [1867] 327

Rivals of the Big Bell and the Big Cannon [1867] 330

The Right to Congregate—New Restrictions [1867] 331

The Shot of June 6 [1867] 332

Venerable Travelers (Part Two) [1867] 334

1857-1867 [1867] 339

Critical Essay

Alexander Herzen: Writings on the Man and His Thought

Robert Harris 343

Bibliography 371

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A Herzen Reader owes its greatest debt to Russian scholars who worked on the thirty-volume edition of Herzen's collected works (Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh). Information about the translated documents not other­wise attributed comes from their notes to the original texts. The five-volume chronicle (Letopis' zhizni i tvorchestva A. I. Gertsena) of Herzen's life and works is another valuable source; references to it indicate the volume and page number (e.g., Let 2:37). For over a century, members of the Herzen family in Europe and the United States have been extraordinarily generous with materials in their possession, and the result has been a steady increase in the availability of important documents to the editors of the works men­tioned above and to the scholars who organized Herzen volumes for Liter- aturnoe nasledstvo (Literary Heritage). Their generosity also helped furnish the house-museum on Sitsev Vrazhek in Moscow, whose existence is due in no small measure to the efforts of scholar Irena Zhelvakova. Alexander Herzen was no great fan of jubilees, but he was eager to make his observa­tions about Russia available to readers in his homeland and abroad, and to stimulate further discussion, and it is with this goal that we offer A Herzen Reader to the public. We are grateful to the University of Rochester (Kath­leen Parthe) and New College, Oxford (Robert Harris), and to Northwestern University Press for helping us to complete this project.

INTRODUCTION

He awaits his readers in the future.

—Tolstoy's 1905 diary entry on Herzen

There was a time when Russian readers were divided into followers of Alex­ander Herzen—willing to take considerable risks to acquire and discuss his works—and his implacable enemies, who saw in him a traitor to the nation. There was a time when leading European liberals and radicals engaged him in a lively and prolonged debate, while Marx and Engels treated Herzen and his friend Mikhail Bakunin as unwelcome distractions in the lead-up to their revolution. During his life (1812-1870), Herzen survived the dogged pursuit of the tsarist secret police at home and abroad, and after his death, he overcame Lenin's embrace to reemerge in the post-Stalin era as a bea­con of individual conscience, free speech, and national self-determination. Despite Herzen's enduring reputation outside Russia as the author of Past and Thoughts and From the Other Shore, Isaiah Berlin was still moved to tell an interviewer that Herzen remained an unknown thinker "because he was not translated."¹ In his early twenties, Herzen wrote to Natalya Zakharina, his future wife, that he wished to see part of his soul present in every piece of writing: "let their sum total serve as my biography in hieroglyphics."² Two centuries after this illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman was born in the momentous year of 1812, Herzen's political writing and his personal correspondence remain largely unavailable in English. A Herzen Reader will add to the Herzen narrative, with a selection of one hundred essays and editorials written between 1850 and 1867.

As the Reader begins, two years have elapsed since Herzen saw for him­self the turbulent Europe of 1848 and learned of the official reaction to these events in Nicholas I's Russia. Having left his homeland for an indefi­nite period in 1847, Herzen was from time to time ordered to return, and then forbidden from returning. The Third Section (political police) debated the merits of kidnapping him or having the Russian government request his extradition, and more than one European state made him feel unwel­come. Both Herzen and his mother, Louisa Haag, were denied income from their properties until intervention by the Paris branch of the Roths­child banking family forced the tsar to relent. For Herzen, wealth meant the freedom to accomplish his political goals, and he also saw no great virtue in real or assumed poverty, and he enjoyed good wine, expensive cigars, and French snuff. Generous toward his family and friends, he resisted the en­treaties of fellow Russians (and other political emigres), who requested—or demanded—loans, responding matter-of-factly that "money is one of my weapons, and it should not be squandered."³

The desire to please the Russian authorities and keep revolution at bay led Swiss officials to threaten the expulsion of Herzen's mother and his deaf six- year-old son Nikolay, who attended a special school in Switzerland. Herzen countered with a European-wide publicity campaign that shamed the officials into reversing their decision.⁴ In the turbulence of post-revolutionary Europe, even the cosmopolitan Herzen needed to be a citizen somewhere, and the Swiss canton of Freiburg finally obliged in March 1851, after substantial funds were deposited in a local bank.⁵ Rather than initiating a peaceful stage of his life, this turned out to be the beginning of a period of personal tragedy; in rapid succession, Herzen lost his mother and young son, and then his wife.

Isaiah Berlin claimed Past and Thoughts to be the "ark" in which Her- zen saved himself, but, for all that, it was still only the "accompaniment to Herzen's central activity: revolutionary journalism."⁶ After his August 1852 move to England, the forty-year-old Herzen spent several months in isola­tion while he decided what to do with the rest of his life, wishing to avoid the Russian pattern of beginning many projects and finishing none of them.⁷ For several years Herzen had worked to acquaint Europeans with progres­sive Russian

--">