A Herzen Reader

"To the analytical antinomies he addressed, Berlin affixed the dyad of East and West as he sought in the exertions of 19th century Russian writers a counterweight to the exaggerated pursuit of perfection emblematic of the Enlightenment. . . . Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Herzen, Berlin believed, were expositors of an alternative, corrective, vi­sion, sources for redress and repair for what ails the West's record of ideas. Herzen was his favorite. Berlin appreciated Herzen because he declined to pursue a singular coherent doctrine, and for his open temperament." Ira Katznelson, "Isaiah Berlin's Mo­dernity," Social Research 66, no. 4 (1999): 1087-88.

In the mid-1950s, having witnessed the fruits of Stalinism, Nazism, and the esca­lating Cold War, Berlin writes: "On the whole, it is Herzen's totalitarian opponents both of the Right and of the Left that have won." Isaiah Berlin, introduction to Herzen, From the Other Shore, trans. Budberg, xx.

" ' Lampert sees Herzen as Lampert writ large,' I remember Berlin telling me, when I was embarking on a doctorate on Herzen. Carr's retort, when I recounted this to him, was that 'Berlin sees Berlin as Herzen writ large.' " Edward Acton, "Eugene Lampert: Distinguished Scholar of Russian History" (obituary), Guardian, September 10, 2004, p. 29. In a letter of August 1938, Berlin writes: "Oh dear, Herzen. There is no writer, indeed no man I shd like to be like, to write like, more" [sic]. Flourishing: Letters, 1928-1946, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 2005), 279.

Offord comments that Berlin "established a hagiographic tradition" and that this, in part, accounts for the lack of critical examination of Herzen by later scholars. Derek Offord, "Alexander Herzen and James de Rothschild," Toronto Slavic Quarterly 19 (Win­ter 2007): 1.

Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (1952; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, i960).

See Marc Raeff, "The Peasant Commune in the Political Thinking of Russian Publicists: Laissez-Faire Liberalism in the Reign of Alexander II" (Ph.D. thesis, Har­vard University, 1950). Also in this vein, in 1951 V. Pirozhkova completed a dissertation that considered the "collapse" of Herzen's utopian vision. Her dissertation was later published as Vera Piroschkow [Vera Aleksandrovna Pirozhkova], Alexander Herzen: Der Zusammenbruch einer Utopie (Munich: A. Pustet, 1961).

Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism: 1812-1855 (Cam­bridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1961), 393.

Malia conceives of Herzen as a figure influenced to a great degree by the ideational and aesthetic constructs he formed in Russia. "The liberal institutions of England . . . so utterly failed to impress him." Martin E. Malia, "Schiller and the Early Russian Left," in Russian Thought and Politics, vol. 4, ed. H. McLean, M. Malia, and G. Fischer (Cam­bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 197.

This omission was noted in Hare's review: "A study of Herzen's contribution to Russian socialism should surely take into account the most mature and influential pe­riod of his life, when after the death of Nicholas I (1855), he fascinated the new Emperor and a large Russian reading public through the pages of his London-published journal The Bell." Richard Hare, review of Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855, by Martin Malia, Russian Review 21, no. 2 (April 1962): 191-92.

Aileen M. Kelly, "Herzen and Proudhon: Two Radical Ironists," in Views from the Other Shore (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 84.

Monica Partridge, Alexander Herzen: 1812-1870 (Paris: Unesco, 1984), 83.

See Monica Partridge, "Alexander Herzen and the English Press," Slavonic and East European Review 36, no. 87 (June i958): 453; and Monica Partridge, "Alexander Herzen and England," in Alexander Herzen: Collected Studies, 2nd ed. (Nottingham: Astra, i993), ii5.

Edward Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary (Cam­bridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, i979), ix.

Acton argues that Herzen's "private ordeal" "did more than predispose him emo­tionally" in his thought and attitude. The "personal catastrophe" "touched him at the deepest level" and impacted "his basic approach to historical development." Acton, Al­exander Herzen, i05-8.

Judith E. Zimmerman, Midpassage: Alexander Herzen and European Revolution, 1847-1852 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, ^89), xv.

Ibid., xii-xiii.