A Herzen Reader

.A few months ago I talked for a long time with an old man.⁸ He has spent half of his more than sixty years in prison; his entire life he has been persecuted, and he is being persecuted now, not just by his enemies but by his own people. This man, forgotten in prison, emerged in i848 from the graves of Mont Saint-Michel like an apparition amidst the jubilation of the February revolution, and when they expected him to offer a joyful greeting, a shout, and delight, he said loudly: "We are drowning," and the crowd which had let him out of jail moved away, as if from a villain, a holy fool, or someone infected with the plague. "And it is you who are drowning us, not our enemies," he continued. He was imprisoned once again, and, taking advantage of his incarceration, he made slanderous remarks about it, and the republic drowned, and they were the ones who drowned it.

For another fifteen years he watched from inside the prison walls at the destruction of all the initiatives and all the hopes; gray as the moon, he emerged again from prison; the old man was met by the former hatred, the former spite, and physically broken, in terrible poverty, completely alone, he disappeared into the mountains, away from his native land.

This old man is Auguste Blanqui.

[. . .] He depressed me, and something dark arose in my soul. A book lay on the table;⁹ I took it up, sure that I would find lies, filth, and slander, and I could not put it down: once more a series of martyrs, tireless activists, and young and old fighters rose before me. This official Vilna literature had erected a remarkable monument to the Polish emigration. . . . From 1831 to 1866 they labor on, and their work is destroyed; they begin anew, and it is once more destroyed; again they begin [. . .] from every place they return to their homeland, bearing in their chest an unquenchable faith in the libera­tion to come and a readiness to fall in battle for it.

Why do we have so little faith, why is our faith so weak? Why have so many of us hung our heads and lost heart at the first sign of failure, at the first unfortunate attempts, not even realizing that they may have been carried out mistakenly?

Is it possible that to believe with great faith a desperate situation or a mystical lunacy is required?

[. . .] Our battle is just beginning, and its lines are just being drawn.

The reactionary period has been ongoing for less than five years. [. . .]

Everything that has happened is sad, and half of it was not even needed from their point of view. But could one really have expected that this govern­ment, the last fruit cultivated in the hothouses of the Winter Palace, would act sensibly and dispassionately, that it would act wisely and humanely? Could one really have expected that a society consisting of people who were raised in the depravity of manor house life, having become accustomed from their childhood years to arbitrariness and slavery, to the spectacle of suffering and torture, that a society raised on bribes and slander, in gov­ernment offices and Shemyakin courts, consisting of characters out of Os- trovsky, from the menagerie of the "dark kingdom," would act wisely and humanely?¹⁰ That, like Saul, it would be blinded as a scoundrel and recover his sight as an apostle?

One should not have expected that Alexander Nikolaevich, having fallen asleep while reading What Is to Be Done? or The Bell, would wake up with a zealous desire to return land to the people and set up workshops for women and men in the Winter Palace.¹¹

Then there would be no need for a struggle, as a miracle would be sufficient. [. . .]

In Russian government life one new element has developed recently, and we value it highly—it is the tsar's tongue, which is constantly chatter­ing, the police, who go about satisfying their needs with a rattle in their hands, the literary dikasteria,¹² who uphold on an hourly basis tsarist gran­deur and Orthodox sanctity, freelance journalism on a temporary contract, which defends the throne and the fatherland.

It is a step in the mud—a huge step forward.

The mud will dry up and remain, but it is impossible to keep silent. The coarse and ignorant destruction of honest organs is a shame, but it would be twice the shame if these disgraceful organs were abolished.