A Herzen Reader

P.S. On the 12th the newspapers said that on the way to Versailles there were more cries of "Long live Poland!" as Alexander II and Napoleon rode by. Napoleon said: "They are incorrigible," and the sovereign answered: "That is proof that they must be stopped." Then he requested (and this does him great honor) that they release the people who had been arrested for shouting this slogan. In Russia and Siberia there are thousands of Poles, who never shouted but had merely thought "Long live Poland!" We propose that they be liberated as well, since the tsar's opinion cannot change as a result of latitude and longitude.

Notes

Source: "Avgusteishie puteshestvenniki (Stat'ia vtoraia)," Kolokol, l. 243, June 15, 1867; 19:280-85, 481-86.

Regarding the opening epigraph, see Doc. 92, Part II for information about Abbe Sieyes. Herzen is using the quote above to emphasize his unchanging position toward autocracy, and to point out Alexander II's inability to draw the appropriate lessons from French revolutionary history.

Shpekin played the postmaster in Gogol's play The Inspector General; in act 5, scene 8, he must decide whether to open a letter or not. Herzen plays on the similarity of the Russian roots of the words pechatat' (to print) and raspechatat' (to unseal).

Napoleon III's equerry Ramboud, son-in-law of the French ruler's late personal secretary Mocquard, noticed Berezovsky with a gun and rode up to shield the emperor; the shot hit his own horse.

In a June 8, 1867, letter to Turgenev, author of Notes of a Hunter, Herzen jokingly suggested a title for a history of Alexander II's reign, with two botched assassination attempts to date: Notes of Unsuccessful Hunters by Successful Ones (Zapiski durnykh okhot- nikov khoroshimi).

Hume was an English spiritualist who visited St. Petersburg in the mid-i860s.

Herzen was in exile in Vyatka from May 1835 through December 1837; the heir to the throne visited the town on May 18-20, 1837, during his get-acquainted trip around Russia. As a result of this visit and the efforts of the poet Zhukovsky, who accompanied Alexander as a tutor, Herzen was transferred to Vladimir. Herzen described this meet­ing in letters and in Past and Thoughts.

During his stay, from May 20 (June 1) until May 30 (June 11), Alexander was given the use of an apartment in the Elysee Palace on Avenue Marigny, where Herzen lived from April to October i847.

Installments of Herzen's Letters from the Avenue Marigny appeared in two different issues of The Contemporary for 1847. The journal was banned in May 1866.

Grafy, telegraphy.

The announced purpose for the tsar's trip to Paris was to attend the World Exposi­tion, but rumor said that there were to be talks about getting French help in pressing Turkey to quit the Slavic regions of Europe. As Herzen predicted, little was accom­plished in the diplomatic arena.

Herzen jokingly refers to the "principle of sufficient reason" credited to the Ger­man philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716).

This is a reference to the devout posture of Empress Maria Alexandrovna, who converted to Orthodoxy upon her arrival in Russia in i840. Herzen saw as hypocritical the combination of barbaric state policy and imperial piety.

On May 14, 1867, in Tsarskoe Selo, Alexander had received a delegation of Slavs who had come to Russia for the Moscow Ethnographic Exposition.

After the defeat of Napoleon and the surrender of the French, Alexander I made a triumphal entry into Paris on March 19/31, 1814.

The achievements of Russian horse breeding were displayed at the exhibition, and on June 3, 1867, Alexander II was awarded a gold medal for improvements in this field.

Herzen appears to be referring, ironically as always, to the theft of state salt stores and landslides in the salt-mining region of Nizhny Novgorod.

Prince Czartoryski (1828-1894) was the leader of the Polish aristocracy in emigration.

Get out of here!

Nicholas visited Vienna in 1833 and 1835. During the first visit, the emperor made the tsar head of a regiment of hussars. The episode related here took place during the second trip.

In 1848, Emperor Ferdinand I abdicated in favor of his nephew Franz Joseph. The latter began with a bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising, with the aid of Rus­sian forces led by Prince Paskevich. On August 13, 1849, nine Hungarian generals were executed on orders of Franz Joseph.

The ironic paraphrase of a line from Pushkin's ballad about a pale knight.

"Brother, my heart pledges to you a sister's true love." Herzen places a paraphrase of lines from Schiller's ballad "The Knight of Toggenburg" in the mouth of Nicholas I.