A Herzen Reader

Baron August Haxthausen (i792-i866), an economist, traveled through Russia in Й43-44 and wrote a three-volume study based on his travels, which was published between Й47 and i852.

i848.

Herzen lists the following works: Von anderen Ufer (i85o), Du development des idees revolutionaries en Russia (i85i), Le socialisme et le people russe, lettre a Jules Michelet (i85i), and articles in L'Homme, a periodical published in Jersey.

Г7. This phrase was used by Herzen in a number of earlier essays.

Sobakevich and Nozdrev are characters in Gogol's Dead Souls.

The introduction of the zemstvo in i864 transferred responsibility in areas such as taxation, medical care, education, and road repair to local councils. Widely believed— except by Russian revolutionaries—to have been one of the more successful reform measures, its powers were restricted between i890 and i905.

Herzen knew and admired Giuseppe Mazzini (i8o5-i872), a leading Italian nationalist, democrat, and active participant in European revolutionary circles, from Mazzini's several periods of exile in London.

Komissarov (i838-i892) is the peasant credited with saving Alexander II from the assassination attempt in i866 (Doc. 80).

Baron Fedor I. Firks (i8i2-i872), under the pseudonym Skedo-Ferroti, was the Brussels publisher of the newspaper L'Echo de la Presse Russe, which came out in Rus­sian, French, and German between i86i and Й67.

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The Bell, Nos. 233-234, February i, Й67. Herzen greeted the New Year in Nice, "lying in bed with Prince Dolgorukov's Notes" (Let 4:336). He added the final two paragraphs to the piece below to encourage the author, who had seen and disliked the first ver­sion. The review provoked a negative reaction from the Russian revolutionary Serno- Solovyovich, who despised Herzen's "liberal" tolerance of the Russian aristocracy. This article makes a similar point to de Custine's Letters from Russia in 1839, that the Russian aristocracy bears little resemblance to other European elites.

A New "Velvet Book" of Russian Noble Families [1867]

A new "velvet book" of Russian noble families has been published in Geneva under the modest title The Notes of Prince Peter Dolgorukov.¹ The first volume, like the Book of Genesis and the Acts of the Apostles of the highest levels of the gentry, appears at a very appropriate time. Genealogi­cal trees in Russia were always prepared like fir trees before Christmas. depending on how much you paid, that's how many golden apples you got. But recently, in light of the imminent and not entirely honest end of serf-owning, people have begun to invent not separate trees, but an en­tire forest, a kind of valiant noble history, honorable in the present, hon­orable in the past, patriotic, historical, etc. In the past we used to hear from gray-haired butlers and various hangers-on: "Now that was a genuine Russian gentleman,² a Russian gentleman in the full sense of the word". But in our day these expressions have been elevated from the servants' hall to the front hall of literature and therefore it is very interesting to find out what was a genuine Russian gentleman, and what full sense of this word our government and gentry scribes on aristocratic affairs are talking about.

The first volume of the Notes of Prince Dolgorukov, a representative of one of our most ancient princely families, is completely devoted to an enu­meration of the principal families who surrounded the imperial throne at the beginning of the 18th century and helped to rule Russia. It amounts to just facts, detailed facts, carefully gathered and almost without commen­tary, ending with the regency of Biron, thus it takes in the honeymoon of the new empire. Reading this horrendous, frenzied, criminal carmen hor- rendum³ sometimes you have to set the book aside to recover from the horror and loathing. Here you abandon the human world: these are other creatures, other reptiles devoid of anything human except their talent for denunciation, kowtowing, stealing, and harming their fellow creatures. It is not the number of innocent victims, the rivers of blood and tears, or the tor­ture and hard labor that depress the reader. all chronicles are full of blood and injustice, [. . .] but in the childhood and youth of the gentry there is a whiff of meanness, the absence of any conviction, shame, or honor, the cynicism of servility, and the consciousness of transgressions. A Dominican with strong faith burning a heretic,⁴ or an Asian slave with his religion of obe­dience, is a thousand times more a human being than this entire gang of aristocrats—scoundrels, who sold themselves as a group to get serfdom, and individually for power and money.