A Herzen Reader

As the Reader begins, two years have elapsed since Herzen saw for him­self the turbulent Europe of 1848 and learned of the official reaction to these events in Nicholas I's Russia. Having left his homeland for an indefi­nite period in 1847, Herzen was from time to time ordered to return, and then forbidden from returning. The Third Section (political police) debated the merits of kidnapping him or having the Russian government request his extradition, and more than one European state made him feel unwel­come. Both Herzen and his mother, Louisa Haag, were denied income from their properties until intervention by the Paris branch of the Roths­child banking family forced the tsar to relent. For Herzen, wealth meant the freedom to accomplish his political goals, and he also saw no great virtue in real or assumed poverty, and he enjoyed good wine, expensive cigars, and French snuff. Generous toward his family and friends, he resisted the en­treaties of fellow Russians (and other political emigres), who requested—or demanded—loans, responding matter-of-factly that "money is one of my weapons, and it should not be squandered."³

The desire to please the Russian authorities and keep revolution at bay led Swiss officials to threaten the expulsion of Herzen's mother and his deaf six- year-old son Nikolay, who attended a special school in Switzerland. Herzen countered with a European-wide publicity campaign that shamed the officials into reversing their decision.⁴ In the turbulence of post-revolutionary Europe, even the cosmopolitan Herzen needed to be a citizen somewhere, and the Swiss canton of Freiburg finally obliged in March 1851, after substantial funds were deposited in a local bank.⁵ Rather than initiating a peaceful stage of his life, this turned out to be the beginning of a period of personal tragedy; in rapid succession, Herzen lost his mother and young son, and then his wife.

Isaiah Berlin claimed Past and Thoughts to be the "ark" in which Her- zen saved himself, but, for all that, it was still only the "accompaniment to Herzen's central activity: revolutionary journalism."⁶ After his August 1852 move to England, the forty-year-old Herzen spent several months in isola­tion while he decided what to do with the rest of his life, wishing to avoid the Russian pattern of beginning many projects and finishing none of them.⁷ For several years Herzen had worked to acquaint Europeans with progres­sive Russian literature (Doc. 1). Resolved to henceforth address Russia directly, he began writing his memoir in a more organized way, and estab­lished the Free Russian Press.⁸ In Berlin's terms, Herzen attempted, simul­taneously, to save himself and his country. His memoir Past and Thoughts provides a general background to the work of the press and the personality of its chief writer, although the richest source of Herzen's thoughts about the purpose of The Polestar (Poliarnaia zvezda) and The Bell (Kolokol) can be found in the periodicals themselves and in his private correspondence.

In the memoir, we meet the Polish exiles who welcomed Herzen to London and worked tirelessly on the printing and distributing of Russian publications. We experience the early London years, when there were few customers and virtually no response from what was still a very rigid Nicho- laevan Russia. The death of Nicholas I in 1855 led Herzen to launch the almanac Polestar, which was printed with Cyrillic type acquired from the same Parisian firm that supplied official Russian printers, leading Herzen to humorously call his enterprise "The Imperial and Revolutionary Press."⁹

It took two additional years and the stimulus of poet Nikolay Ogaryov's ar­rival in London before activity reached an even higher level.

Herzen credited Ogaryov (1813-1877) with the idea of a newspaper sup­plement to The Polestar, which soon assumed its independent existence as The Bell.¹⁰ Friends since childhood, they were linked by their early oath on the Moscow hills to avenge the Decembrists. Presenting a united front to the outside world, their personal correspondence reveals substantial dif­ferences in tactics, priorities, judgments of people, and work habits. This decades-long relationship was, strangely enough, not weakened by the widower Herzen's liason with Ogaryov's second wife, Natalya Tuchkova- Ogaryova, with whom he had three children. By the mid-i86os, both men had tired of her difficult personality, and preferred each other's company to hers. What Herzen wrote from jail in 1834 remained true for the rest of their lives: "The worst thing for me is to be parted from Ogaryov . . . without him I am but a single volume of an unfinished epic, a mere excerpt."¹¹