Aleksandr Herzen

Russian writer and social reformer

• Born: April 6, 1812
• Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
• Died: January 21, 1870
• Place of death: Paris, France

As one of the “fathers” of the Russian intelligentsia, Herzen urged an increased pace of Westernization for Russia, yet harbored a Slavophile attraction for the village commune. From his offices in London, he edited an influential émigré newspaper and helped to shape the direction of Russian radical opinion.

Early Life

Aleksandr Herzen (HEHR-tsen) was the illegitimate son of Ivan Alekseyevich Yakovlev, of a distinguished aristocratic family, and of Louise Ivanovich Haag, a German daughter of a minor official from Württemberg. The name “Herzen” was given him by his father to indicate that he was the product of matters of the “heart,” as was his elder and also illegitimate brother, Yegor Herzen.

In the family home on Arbat Street in Moscow, young Herzen was isolated from many children, but he developed a close friendship with Nikolay Ogaryov, with whom he developed a lifelong partnership. Attracted to the Romanticism of Friedrich Schiller, the two boys took an oath to avenge the five Decembrist rebels executed by Czar Nicholas I after the abortive uprising of 1825. Both entered the University of Moscow in 1829, and Herzen joined the department of natural sciences. At the university, he also acquired a deep interest in history, philosophy, and politics. His circle of friends included Ogaryov, Nikolai Satin, Vadim Passek, Nikolai Kh. Ketscher, and Anton Savich. These friends reflected a popular mystical bent for politics, and they avidly read the works of Friedrich Schelling and Saint-Simon, espousing the radical democracy of brotherly love, idealism, and even socialism. In 1834, following a critical remark about the czar that was reported to the police, Herzen was arrested, jailed for nearly a year, and exiled to Perm and Viatka.

Life’s Work

In 1838, after three years in exile, he married Natalya Alexandrovna Zakharina in Vladimir, and the next year they had a son, Aleksandr, Herzen’s only surviving male heir. The czar pardoned Herzen in 1839, and he entered state service in Novgorod, partly to qualify for noble status and partly to acquire the rights of inheritance. His work caused him to travel often to St. Petersburg, where he quarreled with Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky over the ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Ironically, Belinsky abandoned Hegelian thought shortly before Herzen’s own conversion to that system. Herzen won the admiration of Belinsky, however, when he published two installments of his early memoirs, Zapiski odnogo molodogo cheloveka (1840-1841; notebooks of a certain young man).

In 1840, Herzen again ran afoul of the authorities and was arrested, only to be released owing to his wife’s illness. It was about this time that he rejected his wife’s religious inspiration for Hegel’s more radical thought, blaming police harassment for his wife’s new illness and the subsequent death of their second child. He abandoned the Idealism of Schelling for the realism of Hegel and a materialist worldview; hence, he was regarded as a Left-Hegelian. He wrote Diletantizm v nauke (1843; dilettantism and science), an essay reflecting his new radicalism. His newfound hostility toward religion and all officialdom caused difficulties with his wife.

From 1842 to 1846, Herzen formed a new circle of friends in Moscow, including Ketscher, Satin, Vasily Petrovich Botkin, E. F. Korsh, Timofei Granovski, Mikhail Shchepkin, and Konstantin Kavelin. Belinsky and his St. Petersburg friends were sometimes in attendance. Although an avowed admirer of Western socialist thought, Herzen was increasingly attracted to the Russian peasant and the commune, central to the thought of the Slavophile community. The Slavophile attraction to religion and disdain for the West kept Herzen from entering their circles. In 1845-1846, Herzen published Pisma ob izuchenii prirody (letters on the study of nature), which combined his interest in science and philosophy.

In 1846, Herzen inherited a substantial fortune from his father, including a Moscow house and 500,000 rubles. During that same year, he left Russia, never to return. His wife, his three children, his valet, and two of his friends escorted him to the West. The year of his departure, he published a novel, Kto vinovat? (1845-1846; Who Is to Blame? , 1978), in which he paid his homage to George Sand and the women’s movement. In Europe, Herzen read deeply the socialist literature of Louis Blanc, Charles Fourier, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. There followed Pisma iz Frantsii i Italii (1854; letters from France and Italy), Vom andern Ufer (1850; From the Other Shore , 1956), “Lettre à M. Jules Michelet” (1851), and “Lettre d’un Russe à Mazzini” (1849). These works reflected his pessimistic reactions to the revolutions in Europe two years earlier; he concluded that western institutions were fatally ill.

Herzen’s commitments to socialism and atheism made life difficult for his wife, Natalya, whose own affair with the German poet Georg Herwegh led to a crisis in the marriage. Shortly after the couple’s reconciliation in 1851, their deaf-mute son, Nicholas, and Herzen’s own mother died in a boating accident in the Mediterranean Sea. On May 2, 1852, his wife died after giving birth to a stillborn child.

In 1852, Herzen left for England, where he lived for the next eleven years. There he worked on his Byloe i Dumy (1861-1867; My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen , 1924-1927). In London, Herzen also founded a journal, Poliarnaia zvezda (the polar star), which was founded in the year that Nicholas died and on the exact anniversary of the rebellion of the five Decembrists, whose pictures were in the first issue. He wrote a public letter to the new czar, Alexander II, giving him advice on the need for freedom for his people.

During these years, Herzen’s home in London was a haven for Russian revolutionaries. There, Herzen carried on a vigorous dispute with his boyhood friend Mikhail Bakunin . With the visiting Ogaryov, he launched his newspaper Kolokol (the bell). It was Ogaryov who suggested the title, reminiscent of the assembly bell of the Novgorodian republic that Grand Prince Ivan III removed, an action symbolically destroying the freedom of that community in the fifteenth century. The paper was extremely popular for eight years in Russia, where it was distributed bimonthly, despite the interference of the security police. Throughout this period, Herzen campaigned for the emancipation of the serfs, relief from government censorship, elimination of corporal punishment, and establishment of legal due process.

Despite his disappointment with the terms of the emancipation edict in 1861, Herzen’s revolutionary radicalism was muted, because he began to doubt the efficacy of violence. Younger radicals were drifting to the more uncompromising positions of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, depicted often as the leader of the “sons” among the intelligentsia. Fearing loss of influence among the young radicals, Herzen was persuaded by Bakunin to support the Polish rebels in 1863, thereby risking the loss of many moderate liberals in Russia. By then Herzen seemed to have resolved his ambivalence toward revolution and to have approved the new radical party, Land and Freedom. When the expected peasant uprisings failed to occur, Herzen was left without his former supporters.

Meanwhile, complications arose in his personal life. Ogaryov’s wife, Natalya, arrived in London in 1856, and she and Herzen began an affair that resulted in a daughter, born in 1858, and in twin boys two years later. Strangely enough, he and Ogaryov remained close friends. Four years later, the twins died of diphtheria in Paris. In 1865, Herzen moved his paper and journal to Geneva, but publication ceased two years later. When the radicals of Sergey Gennadiyevich Nechayev attempted to enlist Herzen’s support in new conspiracies, he was wise enough to resist. Ogaryov, however, used his portion of the fund from Kolokol to aid the new movement in 1869. During that same year, Herzen first began to mention to Ogaryov his desire to return home, and he wrote to Bakunin expressing new reservations about violent revolt. On January 21, 1870, however, after a short illness, Herzen died in Paris. His remains were later removed to Nice.

Significance

Through Kolokol Aleksandr Herzen gave advice to czar and radical alike. Influenced by German philosophy and French socialism, he belonged to those educated Russians who looked upon their own nation as backward. As Herzen grew older, however, he strengthened his belief in the values of the Russian peasant and his unique village commune. He viewed the Russian peasant not as a backward and embarrassing example of Russian culture but as an exemplar of moral purity. Observing the seamier side of Western industrialism and capitalism, Herzen, like the Slavophiles, saw an opportunity to build socialism in Russia with the peasantry. By avoiding industrial capitalism, Russia could catch up with and even surpass Western Europe. The village commune offered a romantic alternative to, and an escape route from, the urban degradation that marked so many European cities of his day.

Unlike his younger colleagues, Herzen saw hope in political reform. He once addressed the czar as a true populist and a benevolent father. When the emancipation came for the serfs, he was disappointed by the terms of the edict but nevertheless recognized that the government had moved in a liberal direction and that further reforms were to be expected. He reproached those who refused to see anything positive in the state reform. To Herzen, they were more interested in revolution as an end in itself than they were in bettering society. To the younger radicals, however, Herzen was a haughty nobleman offering advice to his servants.

If Herzen typified the fathers, Chernyshevsky typified the sons. This split among the intelligentsia of the 1860’s was best described by the writer Ivan Turgenev in his novel Ottsy i deti (1862; Fathers and Sons, 1867). How understandable that Leo Tolstoy, the famed pacifist novelist, deplored the decline of Herzen’s influence because his influence was the last opportunity for radicalism to avoid terror and bloodshed. However, his ambivalent attitude toward revolution enabled liberal, radicals, and Marxists to claim his support. What was not ambivalent was his constant defense of the dignity and freedom of the individual.

Bibliography

Acton, Edward. Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Stresses the era of 1847-1863, when Herzen struggled with the concept of revolution. The author’s biographical approach shows the interaction between Herzen’s personal life and his career.

Gershenzon, M. O. A History of Young Russia. Translated by James P. Scanlon. Irvine, Calif.: Charles Schlacks, Jr., 1986. Although not a single chapter is devoted to Herzen, this book remains a brilliant mine of ideas and information about him. The chapters on Ogaryov and others reveal different sides of Herzen.

Herzen, Aleksandr. Letters from France and Italy, 1847-1851. Edited and translated by Judith Zimmerman. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. Collection of Herzen’s letters written during his exile from Russia, including descriptions of the 1848 revolution in Paris and revolutionary activities in the Italian peninsula.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. Still the best source not only for Herzen but also for all members of his circle. Beautifully translated and rendered enjoyable to read in a single volume.

Kelly, Aileen M. Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. Analyzes the writings of three Russians, describing the shared humanism and the emphasis on the role of chance and contingency in the works of Herzen, Anton Chekhov, and M. M. Bakhtin. Describes how the three men helped develop European thought.

Malia, Martin. Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961. The principal study of Herzen, treating his career up to the death of Nicholas. Malia seeks to explain why the basis for Russian socialism was laid in an era without an industrial working class.

Pomper, Philip. The Russian Revolutionary Intelligentsia. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970. This short survey focuses on the principle that ideologies are as much traced to individual personalities as they are to ideas.

Ulam, Adam B. In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia. New York: Viking Press, 1977. A fascinating account of nineteenth century radicals. Ulam sees the turning point in the conspiratorial caste of mind that was fashioned during the early 1860’s.

Walicki, Andrzej. “Alexander Herzen’s Russian Socialism.” In The Slavophile Controversy: History of the Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth Century Russian Thought. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1975. Walicki describes how Herzen merged the utopias of the Slavophiles and the Western liberals. He shows Herzen’s faith in the future of Russia despite his frequent bouts with disillusionment.

Zimmerman, Judith E. Midpassage: Alexander Herzen and European Revolution, 1847-1852. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989. Recounts Herzen’s experiences during exile from Russia. Although he lost his family and his optimism, he became a tougher and more effective political figure during these years.