Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Nothing but a Europe-wide scandal came of it. The “generals” refused the invitation to be on the jury d’honneur, and the composer Richard Wagner, to whom Herzen also wrote about the affair, supported Herwegh. Karl Marx, who disliked Herzen politically and personally, gloated, “Herwegh not only made Herzen a cuckold, but he milked him for 80,000 francs.”

The unfortunate Natalie Herzen died in 1852 of tuberculosis, leaving her husband inconsolable to the end of his days. But Herzen, in his youth convinced of the “unlimited value of the personality” (particularly his own), immediately placed his personal catastrophe into the broader context of the crisis of contemporary European culture. “Everything has collapsed—public and private, European revolution and home and hearth, freedom of the world and personal happiness.” That big idea fueled Herzen’s innovative memoirs My Past and Thoughts, which he began right after his wife’s death as a confessional about his family’s tragedy. Over the course of fifteen years of work it became a “biography of humanity,” as he put it. “Jealousy … Fidelity … Betrayal … Purity … Dark forces, threatening words, which caused rivers of tears, rivers of blood—words that make us shudder, like memories of inquisition, torture, plague … and yet words beneath which, as if beneath the sword of Damocles, lived and lives the family.”

My Past and Thoughts makes for difficult, occasionally irritating, but ultimately rewarding reading: an odd mix of sharp observations colored by the author’s inimitable irony; vivid descriptions of historical events; subtle landscapes; and witty philosophical and political digressions. The author is in continual dialogue with the reader, who delights in Herzen’s speech—voluble, sarcastic, tragic.

Herzen inserted fragments from letters and diaries into the text, not in their original form but edited to suit the needs of the narrative. Herzen was just as free with historical facts; he admitted that his memoirs “are not historical monograph, but the reflection of history in a man who accidentally ended up in its path.”

Herzen used the word “accidentally” coquettishly: he expended superhuman efforts to put himself “into” history—not just political history, but artistic as well—and My Past and Thoughts provides a series of sharp vignettes: Nicholas I, loathed by Herzen, looks like a “shorn and slimy jellyfish with a mustache”; his son, the future Alexander II, is more kindly drawn—“His features expressed kindness and weakness … The few words he spoke to me were gentle … without the father’s habit of frightening the listener into a faint.”

In My Past and Thoughts, Herzen predicted that if democracy prevailed in America, “people there would not become happier, but they would be more sated. Their satisfaction will be flatter, poorer and drier than the one borne in the ideals of romantic Europe, but with it there will be no tsars, no centralization, and perhaps, no hunger.”

The emotional center of My Past and Thoughts is the passionate and frank description of the love drama of Herzen and Natalie (“The poor sufferer—how much I participated in her murder, loving her limitlessly!”), a drama presented as the result not just of mere personal rivalry but, more grandiosely, of the clash of reactionary and progressive forces: “And my hearth was extinguished by the crush of two wheels of world history … Life deceived me, history deceived me.”

.  .  .

Herzen died in Paris in 1870, politically marginalized, just two and a half months short of his fifty-eighth birthday. In his lifetime, the full text of My Past and Thoughts did not appear in print: Herzen considered the portrayal of his intimate life a tad too frank. Turgenev, who read the manuscript, given to him by Herzen’s daughter six years after the writer’s death, was disturbed: “It is written in fire, tears, and blood.”⁹ But “I am definitely against publication, even though as a reader, I regret it.”¹⁰ The complete text was not published until fifty years after Herzen’s death, in 1919–1920. In the postrevolutionary flames, Herzen’s lyrical outpouring had little impact. Many considered them old-fashioned.

Leo Tolstoy, a great admirer of Herzen, often expressed regret about the unfortunate fate of his prose in Russia. In his own works, Tolstoy always strived for topicality.

When Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina began serialization in 1875 in the conservative journal the Russian Herald (he had ended his collaboration with the liberal Contemporary), it met a squall of negative reviews. Turgenev was outraged: “With his talent, to wander into the high society swamp and lose his way there, treating all that piffle not with humor but seriously—what nonsense!”¹¹

The liberal Nekrasov nailed Anna Karenina with an epigram:

Tolstoy, you proved with patience, talent, and great delay