A Herzen Reader

But that is really very little, that is still a negative distinction. It is insuf­ficient to not do evil while having so many resources to do good, which no other European monarchy possesses. But he does not know how to get started and what to do.

And there is no one to tell him. There it is—the result of enforced si­lence, that is what it means to rip out the people's tongue and place a lock on their lips. The Winter Palace is surrounded by a kingdom of the deaf, and within it only the Nicholaevan general adjutants speak. They, of course, will not be talking about the spirit of the times, and it is not from them that Alexander will hear the groans of the Russian people.

It order to hear this, in order to know about the evil and the means to eradicate it, it is not necessary now to pace, like Harun al Rashid, under the windows of his subjects.¹ One has only to lift the shameful chains of censor­ship, which soiled a word before it had been said. And the same Smirdin or Glazunov who supply books to mere mortals will bring to the tsar the voice of his people.²

But the servants of Nicholas, so steeped in slavery, do not want this.

They will ruin Alexander—and how one feels sorry for him! One feels sorry for his good heart, for the faith we had in him, for the tears that he shed on several occasions.

These people will drag him into the same routine, will lull him with lies, will frighten him with the impossibility, will drag him again into for­eign affairs to distract him from the internal ones. All of this is happening already. [. . .]

At home the deceived peasant once more drags himselfacross the master's field and sends his son to the manor house—this is terrible! The government knows that they cannot avoid the task of freeing the peasants with land. The conscience, the moral consciousness of Russia demands that it be resolved. What do they gain by dragging it out and putting it off until tomorrow?

When we say that this is cowardice in the face of necessity and that this spineless sluggishness will result in the peasants solving the question with an axe, and we implored the government to save the peasant from future crimes, good people raised a cry of horror and accused us of a love for bloody measures.³

This is a lie and a deliberate refusal to understand. When a doctor warns a patient of the terrible consequences of the disease, does this mean that he loves and summons these consequences? What a childish point of view!

No, we have seen too much and too close at hand the terror of bloody revolutions and their perverted results to call them forth with savage joy.

We simply pointed out where these gentlemen are headed and where they will lead others. Let them know that if neither the government nor the landowners do anything—it will be done by the axe. And let the sovereign know that it is up to him whether the Russian peasant will take the axe from behind his sash!

Something has to be done—they cannot put off the question and ignore its consequences.

October 25, 1856, Putney

Notes

Source: "Kreshchennaia sobstvennost'. Predislovie k vtoromu izdaniiu," 1857; 12:94­96, 5i6-i9.

Harun-al-Rashid (763-809), an Arabian caliph.

Alexander F. Smirdin (1795-1857), owner of a bookstore, library, and printing press in Petersburg. Ivan I. Glazunov (1826-1889), ^a bookseller and publisher, grandson of the founder of Russia's oldest book business.

This was the reaction to Herzen's article "St. George's Day! St. George's Day!"

^ 9 ♦

The Polestar, Bk. III, 1857. The first separate issue of The Bell in July 1857 included this announcement with additional comments. During the dramatic trial scenes in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky had the defense lawyer Fetyukovich pull out all the stops, with quotations from the gospels and references to the well-known Schiller epi­graph from The Bell: "As a man and a citizen I call out—vivos voco! [. . .] Not in vain is this tribune given us by a higher will—from here we can be heard by the whole of Russia."¹ Herzen did not have great faith in state-run trials either, but for fundamentally different reasons. Dostoevsky is more critical of the liberals and radicals who read The Bell than of its editor, who died a decade before the publication of The Brothers Karamazov.

The Bell A Supplement to The Polestar

[1857]

"Vivos voco!"

The Polestar comes out too rarely—we do not have the means to publish it more frequently. Aside from that, events in Russia are moving quickly, they must be caught on the fly and discussed right away. For this purpose we are undertaking a new periodical publication. Without fixing the exact times of its appearance, we will attempt to issue one sheet, sometimes two, every month under the title The Bell.