A Herzen Reader

It was only in the :950s that Herzen scholarship in the West began to come into its own, dovetailing with the interest of certain scholars in non-Marxist formations of Russian thought. This research offered an alternative rep­resentation of Russia and its ideology to that which had been crystallizing during the Cold War era and the McCarthy years. In 1951 Richard Gilbert Hare (1907-1966) (who had also worked in the Foreign Office) published Pioneers of Russian Social Thought, which offered fuller vignettes of several of the figures that Berlin had surveyed in his 1948 article. Hare accorded more space to Herzen than any other figure in the monograph, although he cites little secondary literature. In a similar vein, Eugene Lampert (1914­2004), a Russian cultural and intellectual historian, completed Studies in Rebellion (1956), a survey of Russian revolutionary thought, featuring es­says on three nineteenth-century non-Marxist Russian thinkers. Lampert devotes more space to Herzen than to any other subject in his book. In his analysis, Lampert concentrates on Herzen's ideology and moral theory, less so on Herzen as a concrete political figure.

Franco Venturi (1914-1994) opens his classic study, Roots of Revolution, which first appeared in Italian in 1952, with a chapter on Herzen, whom he dubs "the true founder of Populism."⁴⁹ Venturi regards Herzen's influ­ence on the movement as largely due to his force of personality—his per­sonal experiences, and comments which were conveyed in his memoirs, in which "autobiography constantly intrudes on politics"—rather than in the production of a unified doctrine. He further maintains that Herzen looked back with a degree of nostalgia to his parents' generation, late eighteenth- century gentry who strove, albeit somewhat unsuccessfully, after the values of enlightenment and an emerging notion of social responsibility. These values, embodied to some extent in the Decembrists, were fundamental in inspiring Herzen's worldview. Venturi notes the influence of Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Fourier, and tracks Herzen's absorption of their thought in a narrative outline which, in a brief chapter, takes the reader to 1848. After treating Bakunin, Venturi returns to Herzen, with an equally brief but help­ful chapter on The Bell. In doing so, Venturi produced one of the first stud­ies in the West to draw attention to The Bell and its significance in the rise of populism. However, the author's primary concern, as the book's original title, Il populismo russo, makes clear, is to trace the history of the populist movement as it coalesced with other streams of thought to produce the circumstances required for the Russian revolution. Herzen and his publica­tions are of interest to Venturi mainly in regard to their instrumentality in providing the basis for certain fundamental elements of the populist move­ment of the 1860s.

Marc Raeff, a fine scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Rus­sia, emerged out of the same scholarly zeitgeist of the postwar era. In 1950 he completed his dissertation, and similar to the research bent of Berlin, Venturi, Hare, Lampert, and Malia (see below), it was on a theme that high­lighted a softer, non-Marxist version of Russian socialism, stressing liberal rather than authoritarian or determinist elements.⁵⁰

By the end of the i950s the time was ripe for a full-length English-language monograph on Herzen, and the study of Martin Malia (i924-2004), pub­lished in i96i but over a decade in gestation, filled this gap admirably. To this day, Malia's monograph is often regarded as the first port of call, if not the standard reference on the subject. Though dated and subject to the inevitable errors, flaws, and biases that are uncovered with time and exposure to criticism, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism: 1812-1855 remains the best single intellectual biography written on Her­zen's first forty years, though it is just as much (if not more) a history of the development of Russian socialism during the reign of Nicholas I, with Herzen emblematic as the main protagonist.