A Herzen Reader

This time the accused is not Panin or Zakrevsky—the accused is me.

This accusation, expressed on behalf of "a significant number of think­ing people in Russia," has great importance for me. Its final word is that all my activity, that is, my life's work, is bringing harm to Russia.

If I believed this, I would find the selflessness to hand over my work to others and disappear somewhere in the back of the beyond, lamenting how my entire life had been a mistake. But I am not the judge of my own case; there are too many maniacs who are sure that they are doing the right thing, and you cannot prove a case with ardent love, pure intentions, or your entire life. Therefore, I will turn over the accusation to the court of public opinion.

Until the time when the public speaks loudly on the side of the accuser, I will stubbornly follow the path along which I have been traveling.

Until the time when I receive dozens of ardent expressions of sympathy with the accusatory letter, I will persist.

While the number of readers continues to grow—as it is now growing— I will persist.

While Butenev in Constantinople, Kiselev in Rome, and I don't know who in Berlin, Vienna, and Dresden wear themselves out rushing about to viziers and pashas, to ministers' secretaries and cardinals' assistants, ask­ing and begging for the suppression of The Bell and The Polestar, and until the Allgemeine Zeitung and Gerlach's Kreuz-Zeitung stop bewailing the fatal influence of The Bell on the nerves ofPetersburg dignitaries, I will carry on.¹

I stand before you in my "hopelessly incorrigible state," as Golitsyn ju­nior characterized me in 1835, when I was being judged by a committee of inquiry.² Be as strict, cruel, and unjust as you wish, but I ask of you one thing: in the English manner, let us stick to business and leave personali­ties out of it.

I am prepared to print everything that is possible in terms of quality and quantity.

The "Accusatory Letter" which we have published today differs substan­tially from previous letters opposing The Bell. In those letters there was a friendly reproach and the kind of friendly indignation in which could be heard a familiar native sound.

There is nothing like that in this letter.

Those were written from our side, and in the very disagreement and re­proach there was sympathy. This letter was written from a completely op­posing point of view, that is, from the viewpoint of administrative progress and governmental inflexibility. We never accepted it and so there is no sur­prise in the fact that we did not follow that path. We never represented our­selves as government authorities or statesmen. We wanted to be Russia's protest, its cry of liberation and its cry of pain, we wanted to unmask villains who stand in the way of success and rob the people. We dragged them to the place of punishment and made them look ridiculous. We wanted to be not just Russia's revenge but its irony—and nothing more. What kind of Bludovs and Panins are we—we are the book publishers for "a significant number of suffering people in Russia."

And here I must add that we are not at all in the exclusive position that is often ascribed to us, and which is ascribed by the author of this letter, and against which I protest with all my strength. What kind of monopoly do we have on Russian publishing, as if we held the concession on Russian speech in foreign lands?

If we are, as the author of the letter says, "the strength and power in Rus­sia," then the reason is not that we are the only ones with an instrument.

Now that we have gotten the ball rolling, you can publish in Russian in Berlin, Leipzig, and in London itself.³

And if, in good conscience, we cannot recommend the Brussels periodi­cal Le Nord as an outlet for Russian articles, what is to prevent placing them in Russia Abroad?⁴

To us belong the honor of initiative and the honor of success, but not a monopoly.

Notes

Source: "Obvinitel'nyi akt," Kolokol, l. 29, December 1, 1858; 13:404-6, 597-600.

Herzen complained about the campaign to suppress The Bell in earlier essays, in­cluding "Lackeys and Germans Refuse Permission" and "Logophobia" (Docs. 15 and 17). Apollinary P. Butenev (1787-1866) was Russia's representative to Constantinople from 1856 to 1858; Nikolay D. Kiselev (1802-1869) was the Russian ambassador to the papal court in Rome from 1856 to 1864. The Kreuz-Zeitung, so called because of the cross on the title page, was also called the Neue Preussische Zeitung; it was founded in 1848 in Berlin by the far-right leader Eduard Ludwig Gerlach, who proposed new periodicals to polemicize with The Bell, not only abroad, but within Russia itself.