Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen

Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen (born April 6 [March 25, Old Style], 1812, Moscow, Russia—died Jan. 21 [Jan. 9], 1870, Paris, France) was a 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.

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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.