A Herzen Reader

Alexander F. Golitsyn (1796-1864) participated in a number of investigative com­missions, including the one in 1834 that looked into the activities of Herzen, Ogaryov, and others. Herzen refers to him as "junior" to distinguish him from Prince Sergey M. Golitsyn (1774-1859), another commission member.

Herzen: "Besides our press, as the reader probably knows, there is another press in London run by Z. Swietoslawski."

The Russian government used Le Nord to try to influence public opinion in Europe. Russkii zagranichnyi sbornik was a liberal journal, edited in Paris and printed in Leipzig.

The Bell, No. 44, June 1, 1859. The title of the article below was written in capital letters and in English. This is the first detailed polemic against attempts made between 1857 and 1859 in The Contemporary and other Russian journals to discredit—in coded lan­guage—the journalism of exposure and denunciation, and to reevaluate the historical and socio-literary significance of the Nicholaevan era's "superfluous people," signaling that the time had come for action (Walicki, Slavophile Controversy, 452, 460). Herzen believed that the attacks on his journalism "served the interest of the most reactionary part of the tsarist bureaucracy, and that the young radicals might live to be decorated by the government" (Ulam, Ideologies and Illusions, 25). Natan Eidelman devoted many pages of analysis to this "family" quarrel, which pitched a more radical message inserted between the lines against a more moderate, but openly expressed, stance (Eidel'man, Svobodnoe slovo, 258-59, 271, 295, 308-15).

In several issues of The Contemporary, both before and after the appearance of "VERY DANGEROUS!!!" Dobrolyubov attacked pustozvonstvo ("idle talk," literally "empty ring­ing," a reference to The Bell), and claimed that unmasking particular abuses without criticizing the entire structure simply deflected attention from the main battle; he inti­mated that only the younger generation could effectively serve humanity (Gertsen, So- branie sochinenii, 4:48-112). In answer to this article, "Last Year's Literary Trifles," and to criticism from conservative literary figures in The Library for Reading (where Herzen had read Pisemsky's A Thousand Souls) and Fatherland Notes (where he read Goncharov's Oblomov), Herzen boldly reaffirmed the power of his targeted laughter.

After Nekrasov heard in his St. Petersburg club of the attacks contained in "VERY DANGEROUS!!!" and its inference that The Contemporary had been "bought," he and Dobrolyubov considered traveling to London to demand that Herzen retract his remarks, and, in Nekrasov's case, to possibly challenge him to a duel (Let 3:48). In the end it was Chernyshevsky who made the trip, meeting with Herzen in late June-early July 1859. He commented afterward that while the trip was not made in vain, it would have been tedious to prolong the debate (Let 3:55). Letters and reminiscences from that period indi­cate that there was great curiosity about what the two men said to each other (Let 3:58). According to a prison memoir by S. G. Stakhevich, in 1869 Chernyshevsky claimed that his message to Herzen was that the accusations in The Bell helped the government better exercise control over local officials, while leaving the state structure intact. "But the es­sence of the matter is in the state structure, and not in the agents" (Evgen'ev-Maksimov, Sovremennik, 388-91; Woehrlin, Chernyshevskii, 254). In his i860 article "The Superflu­ous and the Jaundiced" (included in the four-volume version of My Past and Thoughts), Herzen to some extent agreed with this criticism of expository journalism.

VERY DANGEROUS!!!

[1859]

Recently a pernicious current has begun to waft through our journalism, some kind of corrupted thinking which we do not accept as an expression of public opinion but as something inspired by the censorship's ruling and edifying triumvirate.¹