A Herzen Reader

The early Soviet era brought the first substantial edition in Russia of Herzen's writings, assembled and edited by M. K. Lemke. In the years that followed, dedicated scholars organized their archival discoveries into mul­tiple issues of Literary Heritage (Literaturnoe nasledstvo), and published a second edition of his collected works as well as a five-volume chronology of his life. The scholarly work was often of high quality, despite the fact that its sanction came from Lenin's pre-revolutionary essay on the occasion of Herzen's centenary, one of numerous tributes made that year.⁷⁵ For Lenin, Herzen was not the perfect revolutionary ancestor, but he was more useful and less troublesome than Bakunin and the anarchists.

In Russian circles abroad, those who fled Lenin and Stalin's Russia saw Herzen as "the first to look on emigration as a base from which one could try to influence intellectual and political developments at home" and the "father of political emigration."⁷⁶ A Herzen Foundation in Amsterdam published oppositional political materials for transport back to the Soviet Union, and, during its early years, Radio Liberty featured broadcasts on the contributions of Herzen, Korolenko, and others to Russia's pre-1917 demo­cratic heritage. In a reversal of circumstances, by the mid-1980s, a different set of emigres at Radio Liberty placed blame for the violence of Bolshevism squarely at the feet of Herzen and Chernyshevsky.⁷⁷

Memoirs of the Soviet era, the best of which only became available after 1985, reveal an unofficial side to readership in the Soviet Union. Irina Pa- perno found that scores of Soviet memoirists, especially those who wrote "for the drawer," saw in Herzen's "story of intimate life embedded in cata­strophic history" the inspiration for their own narratives.⁷⁸ In August 1941, poet Vera Inber spoke by radio to inhabitants of a blockaded Leningrad; she rallied them with Herzen's tales of an 1812 Moscow under siege and of the Battle of Borodino, tales he heard repeatedly as a child, becoming his Iliad and Odyssey and the focus of the first chapter of his memoirs. Inber told lis­teners that Russia "was creating for future generations new Odysseys, new Iliads," and that they would be the heroes of these epics.⁷⁹

Lidiya Chukovskaya's reminiscences preserve conversations with Anna Akhmatova about their mutual love of Herzen's style and their respect for his honesty. When Chukovskaya stopped by Akhmatova's apartment after work, the poet noticed a portfolio of Herzen materials and demanded that her friend open it at random and read aloud, so that Akhmatova could com­mit to memory the "sound" of his prose.⁸⁰ Although they both loved Past and Thoughts (minus the maudlin passages about Herwegh), they also re­gretted the neglect by Soviet readers of the rest of his work. Granted access to Vyacheslav Molotov's abandoned library, Rachel Polonsky discovered the Lemke edition of Herzen, begun before the Revolution and completed afterward; the only reader's notations she found were in the index and a volume of the memoirs.⁸¹

Chukovskaya called The Bell "a collection of articles that were epics, ar­ticles that were poetry, epigrams, laments, funeral orations, prayers for the dead, prophetic songs, and formulas that were so concise that they read like proverbs," most of them as relevant to the Russia of i962 as they had been a century earlier.⁸² In a conversation about how people behaved during the i937 purges, Akhmatova recalled Herzen's i867 reproach to those who not only failed to find words of support for political prisoners but who could not even remain silent at such moments (dazhe ne nashli molchaniia).⁸³ Herzen's call for conscience and decency was heard in the years after Sta­lin's death. In Zhivago's Children, a study of the post-Stalinist intelligentsia, Vladislav Zubok charts Herzen's influence during the Thaw. While politi­cally aware young people read widely from the nineteenth-century canon, "their main inspiration came from Alexander Herzen and other Russian socialists," and they concluded that "the existing regime was a horrible de­viation from revolutionary ideals."⁸⁴ A monograph on the final year of Her­zen's life written in Moscow by Raisa Orlova, the wife of Lev Kopelev and active in dissident circles, could only be published abroad.⁸⁵