A Herzen Reader

Herzen notes that he is citing The St. Petersburg Gazette.

Vladimir D. Skaryatin was an arch-conservative nobleman, one of whose family members had participated in the assassination of Paul I.

Ivan M. Martynov was a Russian emigrant and Jesuit whose letter published in the March 4, i864, issue of The Day was an answer to an article criticizing the Jesuits. The answer by the prominent Slavophile writer Yury Samarin, as abstract as Martynov's, was spread over four issues and also published separately. Herzen's own published political criticisms of material in The Day remained unanswered.

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The Bell, No. 2i2, January i5, i866. Herzen's interest in the Decembrists dates back to i825; the uprising was without doubt one of the most decisive influences in his life. He used the Free Russian Press to publish materials by and about the Decembrists, and the title Polestar was a tribute to the five martyrs. For all these reasons, to speak with a survivor was an exciting and deeply moving experience. After being released from exile in i856, the Decembrist Sergey Volkonsky traveled abroad for his health, meeting with Herzen in Paris in late June-early July i86i. The two got along very well and met on several occasions, allowing Herzen to learn a great deal more about the Decembrists. He found Volkonsky an admirable and fascinating figure, an example of righteousness and resilience in a progressive cause; one witness to their meetings said that Herzen's affection for Volkonsky was that of a son (Let 3:224-26). Friends and family members of the last prince were not entirely happy with the tribute below, which they claimed was a "distorted view" of the old prince, who was highly unlikely to have revealed so much information in the presence of strangers. The Decembrist legacy was problematic for the prince's son, M. S. Volkonsky, a rising figure in government service in the 1860s, and for grandson S. M. Volkonsky, who in spring 1917 was horrified by the thought that Decembrist memoirs might wind up in a museum of the revolution (Eidel'man, Svobodnoe slovo, 390-91).

In Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, Orlando Figes adds substantially (72-146) to the biographical details presented in the document below. Volkonsky's ancestors include the fourteenth-century prince Mikhail Chernigorsky, whose service to Muscovy against the Mongols led to his canonization. By Alexander I's reign, this ancient family was closer than any other to the tsar, with more than a few Volkonskys serving at court, including the young Sergey Grigorevich, who was awarded the right to enter the emperor's private apartments unannounced. He even spent time with the much younger Nikolay Pavlovich—the future Nicholas I—playing with toy soldiers. Af­ter more than fifty real-life battles, including Borodino, and the triumphal march to Paris and Vienna, Sergey Volkonsky returned to Russia convinced of two things: Russia could not realize its potential without civil rights, and the serfs had shown beyond any doubt the depth of their patriotism. As a member of the Union of Welfare, Volkonsky was asked to recruit Pushkin, a close friend of his wife's family, but refrained from doing so. Once he was convicted, his mother's influence at court spared him a death sentence, but he lost his title, rank, and battlefield medals, and was sent to hard labor and exile by the tsar he had entertained, and by chief of police Benkendorf, an old friend from school and service.

During three decades in Siberia, Volkonsky rejected aristocratic ways and embraced peasant life, including the commune, although it is said that he retained his impressive conversational skills in French. Released by Alexander II, Volkonsky found in European Russia servility, hypocrisy, and a lack of dignity, which he deplored in his memoirs. The tsar finally returned the general's war medals in 1864, and in 1903 his portrait found its place again among the Hermitage's heroes of 1812 at the request of his nephew, who was at that time the gallery's director. In Volkonsky, Herzen found a perfect hero.

Prince Sergey Grigorevich Volkonsky [1866]

The great martyrs of the Nicholaevan era, our fathers in spirit and in free­dom, the heroes of Russia's first awakening, participants in the great war of 1812 and the great protest of 1825, are going to their graves. It is becoming empty...and petty without them.

Prince Sergey Grigorevich Volkonsky died the 28th of November (the 10th of December).

With pride and tender emotion we remember our meeting with the ven­erable old man in 1861. Speaking about it in The Bell (No. 186, 1864), we were afraid to name him.¹