Aleksandr Herzen
Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen, Herzen also
spelled Hertzen, or Gertsen (b. April 6
[March 25, Old Style], 1812, Moscow,
Russia—d. Jan. 21 [Jan. 9], 1870, Paris,
France), political thinker, activist,
and writer who originated the theory of
a unique Russian path to socialism known
as peasant populism. Herzen chronicled
his career in My Past and Thoughts
(1861–67), which is considered to be one
of the greatest works of Russian prose.
Early life.
Herzen was the illegitimate son of a
wealthy nobleman, Ivan Alekseyevich
Yakovlev, and a German woman of humble
origins. Reared in his father’s house,
he received an elite and far-ranging
education from French, German, and
Russian tutors. Still, the “taint” of
his birth, as he regarded it, made him
resentful of authority and, ultimately,
of the autocratic, serf-based Russian
social order. This resentment also bred
in him an ardent commitment to the cause
of the Decembrists, a revolutionary
group that staged an unsuccessful
uprising against the emperor Nicholas I
in 1825. Herzen and his friend Nikolay
Ogaryov, who, like Herzen, was
influenced by the heroic libertarianism
of the German playwright Friedrich
Schiller, took a solemn oath to devote
their lives to continuing the
Decembrists’ struggle for freedom in
Russia.
Attending the University of Moscow
between 1829 and 1833, Herzen evolved
from “romanticism for the heart to
idealism for the head” and became an
adept of the German philosopher
Friedrich Schelling’s Naturphilosophie.
Eventually Herzen and Ogaryov and their
circle fused the pantheistic idealism of
Schelling with the utopian socialism of
the French social philosopher Henri de
Saint-Simon to produce a philosophy of
history in which the “World Spirit”
evolved ineluctably toward the
realization of freedom and justice.
This metaphysical politics was
sufficient, however, to lead to the
arrest of the entire circle in 1834.
Herzen was sent into exile for six years
to work in the provincial bureaucracy in
Vyatka (now Kirov) and Vladimir; then,
for an indiscreet remark about the
police, he spent two more years in
Novgorod. The misery of this period was
relieved by an extravagantly romantic
courtship and an initially happy
marriage with his cousin, Natalya
Zakharina, in 1838.
Herzen’s eight-year experience with
injustice and the acquaintance it
afforded with the workings of Russian
government gave firmer contours to his
radicalism. He abandoned the nebulous
idealism of Schelling for the thought of
two other contemporary German
philosophers—first the “realistic logic”
of G.W.F. Hegel and then the materialism
of L.A. Feuerbach. Herzen thus became a
“Left-Hegelian,” holding that the
dialectic (development through the
reconciliation of conflicting ideas) was
the “algebra of revolution” and that the
disembodied truths of “science” (i.e.,
German idealism) must culminate in the
“philosophy of the deed,” or the
struggle for justice as proclaimed by
French socialism. In later life Herzen
explained that this metaphysical
approach to politics was inevitable for
his generation, since the despotism of
Nicholas I made action impossible and
thus left pure thought as the only free
realm of expression.
Armed with these philosophical weapons,
Herzen returned to Moscow in 1842 and
immediately joined the camp of the
Westernizers, who held that Russia must
progress by assimilating European
rationalism and civic freedom, in their
dispute with the Slavophiles, who argued
that Russian development must be founded
on the Orthodox religion and a fraternal
peasant commune. Herzen contributed to
this polemic two able and successful
popularizations of Left-Hegelianism,
Diletantizm v nauke (“Dilettantism in
Science”) and Pisma ob izuchenii prirody
(“Letters on the Study of Nature”), and
a novel of social criticism, Kto
vinovat? (“Who Is to Blame?”), in the
new “naturalistic” manner of Russian
fiction.
Soon, however, Herzen fell out with the
other Westernizers because the majority
of the group were reformist liberals,
whereas Herzen had by now embraced the
anarchist socialism of the French social
theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. At this
point, in 1846, Herzen’s father died,
leaving him a considerable fortune; and
the following year Herzen left Russia
for western Europe—as it turned out, for
good.
Life in exile.
Herzen went immediately to the capital
of European radicalism, Paris, hoping
for the imminent triumph of social
revolution. The revolutionary upheavals
of 1848 that he witnessed in Paris and
Italy soon disabused him: he became
convinced that the Western “matadors of
rhetoric” were too imbued with the
values of the past to level the existing
social order, that Europe’s role as a
progressive historical force was
finished, and that Western institutions
were in fact “dead.” He concluded
further that, contrary to the teachings
of the Hegelians, there was no
“rational” inevitability in history and
that society’s fate was decided instead
by chance and human will. He developed
these themes in two brilliant but rather
confused works, Pisma iz Frantsii i
Italii (“Letters from France and Italy”)
and S togo berega (From the Other
Shore). His disillusionment was vastly
increased by his wife’s infidelity with
the radical German poet Georg Herwegh
and by her death in 1852.
Loss of faith in the West, however,
provoked a spiritual return to Russia:
though “old” Europe, “fettered by the
richness of her past,” had proved
incapable of realizing the ideal of
socialism, “young” Russia, precisely
because its past offered nothing worth
conserving, now seemed to Herzen to
possess the resources for a radical new
departure. And Herzen (borrowing an idea
from his old foes, the Slavophiles)
found these resources above all in a
collectivist peasant commune, which he
viewed as the basis for a future
socialist order. This new faith in
Russia’s revolutionary potential was
expressed in Letters to the French
historian Jules Michelet and the Italian
revolutionist Giuseppe Mazzini in 1850
and 1851.
In 1852 Herzen moved to London, and the
following year, with the aid of Polish
exiles, he founded the “Free Russian
Press in London,” the first uncensored
printing enterprise in Russian history.
In 1855 Nicholas I died, and soon
thereafter Alexander II proclaimed his
intention of emancipating the serfs.
Responding to this unprecedented “thaw,”
Herzen rapidly launched a series of
periodicals that were designed to be
smuggled back to Russia: “The Polar
Star” in 1855, “Voices from Russia” in
1856, and a newspaper, Kolokol (The
Bell), created in 1857 with the aid of
his old friend Ogaryov, now also an
émigré. Herzen’s aim was to influence
both the government and the public
toward emancipation of the peasants,
with generous allotments of land and the
liberalization of Russian society. To
this end, he moderated his political
pronouncements, speaking less of
socialist revolution and more of the
concrete issues involved in Alexander’s
reforms. For a time he even believed in
enlightened autocracy, hailing Alexander
II in 1856 (in words that echoed the
famous dying tribute of Julian the
Apostate to Christ) with: “you have
conquered, oh Galilean!” Kolokol soon
became a major force in public life,
read by the tsar’s ministers and the
radical opposition.
Soon, however, the ambiguity of Herzen’s
position between reform and revolution
began to cost him support. After 1858
moderate liberals, such as the writer
Ivan Turgenev, attacked Herzen for his
utopian recklessness; and after 1859 he
quarreled with the political writer N.G.
Chernyshevsky and the younger generation
of radicals, whose intransigent manner
appeared to him as “very dangerous” to
reform. He also lost faith in the
government; when the Emancipation Act
was finally enacted in 1861, he
denounced it as a betrayal of the
peasants.
He therefore veered again to the left
and called on the student youth to “go
to the people” directly with the message
of Russian socialism. Furthermore, on
the urging of the anarchist Mikhail
Bakunin, he threw the support of Kolokol
behind the unsuccessful Polish revolt of
1863. He immediately regretted this
rashness, for it cost him the support of
all moderate elements in Russia without
restoring his credit among the
revolutionaries. Kolokol’s influence
declined sharply. In 1865 Herzen moved
his headquarters to Geneva to be near
the young generation of Russian exiles,
but in 1867 public indifference forced
Kolokol to cease publication.
Amidst these political reverses, Herzen
turned his energies increasingly to his
memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, which
were designed to enshrine both his own
legend and that of Russian radicalism. A
loosely constructed personal narrative,
interspersed with sharp vignettes of
both Russian and Western political
figures and with philosophical and
historical digressions, it provides a
masterful fresco of contemporary
European radicalism. At times witty,
irreverent, and playful in style, and at
other times lyrical, passionate, and
rhapsodical, it is one of the most
original and powerful examples of
Russian prose. My Past and Thoughts was
published principally between 1861 and
1867, and its scope and quality have
placed it alongside the great Russian
novels of the 19th century in artistic
stature.
In 1869 Herzen wrote letters K staromu
tovarishchy (“To an Old Comrade”;
Bakunin), in which he expressed new
reservations about the cost of
revolution. Still, he was unable to
accept liberal reformism completely, and
he expressed interest in the new force
of the First International, Karl Marx’s
federation of working-class
organizations. This wavering position
between socialism and liberalism, which
characterized so much of his career,
proved to be his political testament.
The ambiguities of his position have
made it possible ever since for both
Russian liberals and socialists to claim
his legacy with equal plausibility.
Martin E. Malia
