A Herzen Reader

In May 1856 the second issue of The Polestar appeared and it sold out, taking with it all the rest. The entire mass of books moved out. At the begin­ning of 1857 there were no more books in the printing house and Trubner undertook at his own expense second printings of everything we had issued.¹⁴

There was so much work that our little press could not satisfy the de­mand, and in 1858 one of our fellow exiles, Zeno Swentoslowski, opened a Russian section in his own printing house and began printing Trubner's editions.

By the second half of 1857 the printing house's expenses began to be covered, and toward the end of 1858 there was a small profit, and about the same time two or three Russian presses opened in Germany.

Our press felt like a grandfather.

The time of trial and testing for our press was over, and the time of weak, fruitless efforts, and apathy on the Russian side had passed.

At the beginning of 1857 Ogaryov suggested publishing The Bell.

Its first issue appeared on July 1, 1857.

With the publication of The Bell began the period of growth of our print­ing press.

We will not speak about it here. The articles that came out in Czarnecki's Anthology relate to the first years of Russian publishing in London. The leaflets gathered there had been forgotten and scattered, becoming almost bibliographic rarities, and their republication seems very useful to us.

For us, these leaflets have the special character of an accounting, verifi­cation, and cleansing of the past. Much in them is immature, there is the imprint of another age, and the stern shadow of Nicholas casts a shadow on every page, obscuring every bright thought, irritating to the point of hatred every feeling, showing the dark lining of every hope. The major part of what has now become an incontestable event, was then only a premonition. As a result of these premonitions being fulfilled, we more and more have the right to conclude that we were not mistaken about the other ones.

Russia will have freedom,

The peasants will have land.

And Poland will have independence!

Notes

Source: "1853-1863," Desiatiletie Vol'noi Russkoi Tipografii v Londone, 1863; 17:74-81, 380-84.

The announcement, written by Herzen on February 21, 1853, was lithographed by members of the Polish democratic movement and smuggled into Russia (see Doc. 2).

The first pamphlet after the announcement of the press was "St. George's Day! St. George's Day!" (Doc. 3).

"I summon the living," the phrase from Schiller that Herzen used as his motto for The Bell from the beginning.

At the request of mutual friends, the actor Mikhail Shchepkin visited Herzen dur­ing a trip to Europe in September 1853 (see Doc. 60).

Count Stanislav Worcell (1799-1857) took part in the Polish uprising of 1830-31 and was a leader of the Polish exiles.

Ludvik Czarnecki (1828-1872) was a Polish emigre who ran the Free Russian Press in London.

Sales of Free Russian Press publications were handled by the publisher and book­seller Trtibner and Company, whose firm was located on Paternoster Row; Herzen plays on the street name's meaning of "Our Father."

The Russian phrase is toloch' vodu, "to beat water" in a mortar.

Vladimir A. Engelson (1821-1857) was a Russian journalist and revolutionary activ­ist living abroad.

In 1863, Dmitry A. Milyutin was war minister and Nikolay A. Milyutin was the former minister of the interior; Petr A. Valuev was the latter's successor in the ministry and head of the special committee on the reform of local government.

In 1785, the French queen ordered a pearl necklace and then refused to pay for it, causing a scandal.

Sentry post (in Italian).

Herzen refers to the fact that Minister of the Enlightenment Golovin was very short.

Herzen: "N. Trtibner in general was of great benefit to Russian propaganda, and his name ought not to be forgotten in the Almanac of the Russian Printing House. Aside from second editions of The Polestar and all our books, he undertook an entire series of editions in Russian: the poems of Ogaryov, the notes of Catherine II, the notes of Prin­cess Dashkova, Lopukhina, Pr. Shcherbatov and Radishchev et al."