A Herzen Reader

Prince Sergey Grigorevich Volkonsky [1866] From Petersburg [1866] 1789 [1866]

Irkutsk and Petersburg [1866]

Gentry Benefactors [1866]

The News from Russia [1866]

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A Second Warning and A Second Godunov [1866]

A Letter to Emperor Alexander II [1866] 285

From Petersburg [1866] 287

From the Sovereign to P. P. Gagarin [1866] 291

Katkov and the Sovereign [1866] 297

A Frenzy of Denunciations [1866] 299

A Quarrel Among Enemies [1866] 300

America and Russia [1866] 303

The Question of a Plot [1866] 305

Order Triumphs! [1866-1867] 306

A New "Velvet Book" of Russian Noble Families [1867] 322

Our System of Justice [1867] 325

Moscow—Our Mother and Stepmother [1867] 327

Rivals of the Big Bell and the Big Cannon [1867] 330

The Right to Congregate—New Restrictions [1867] 331

The Shot of June 6 [1867] 332

Venerable Travelers (Part Two) [1867] 334

1857-1867 [1867] 339

Critical Essay

Alexander Herzen: Writings on the Man and His Thought

Robert Harris 343

Bibliography 371

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A Herzen Reader owes its greatest debt to Russian scholars who worked on the thirty-volume edition of Herzen's collected works (Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh). Information about the translated documents not other­wise attributed comes from their notes to the original texts. The five-volume chronicle (Letopis' zhizni i tvorchestva A. I. Gertsena) of Herzen's life and works is another valuable source; references to it indicate the volume and page number (e.g., Let 2:37). For over a century, members of the Herzen family in Europe and the United States have been extraordinarily generous with materials in their possession, and the result has been a steady increase in the availability of important documents to the editors of the works men­tioned above and to the scholars who organized Herzen volumes for Liter- aturnoe nasledstvo (Literary Heritage). Their generosity also helped furnish the house-museum on Sitsev Vrazhek in Moscow, whose existence is due in no small measure to the efforts of scholar Irena Zhelvakova. Alexander Herzen was no great fan of jubilees, but he was eager to make his observa­tions about Russia available to readers in his homeland and abroad, and to stimulate further discussion, and it is with this goal that we offer A Herzen Reader to the public. We are grateful to the University of Rochester (Kath­leen Parthe) and New College, Oxford (Robert Harris), and to Northwestern University Press for helping us to complete this project.

INTRODUCTION

He awaits his readers in the future.

—Tolstoy's 1905 diary entry on Herzen

There was a time when Russian readers were divided into followers of Alex­ander Herzen—willing to take considerable risks to acquire and discuss his works—and his implacable enemies, who saw in him a traitor to the nation. There was a time when leading European liberals and radicals engaged him in a lively and prolonged debate, while Marx and Engels treated Herzen and his friend Mikhail Bakunin as unwelcome distractions in the lead-up to their revolution. During his life (1812-1870), Herzen survived the dogged pursuit of the tsarist secret police at home and abroad, and after his death, he overcame Lenin's embrace to reemerge in the post-Stalin era as a bea­con of individual conscience, free speech, and national self-determination. Despite Herzen's enduring reputation outside Russia as the author of Past and Thoughts and From the Other Shore, Isaiah Berlin was still moved to tell an interviewer that Herzen remained an unknown thinker "because he was not translated."¹ In his early twenties, Herzen wrote to Natalya Zakharina, his future wife, that he wished to see part of his soul present in every piece of writing: "let their sum total serve as my biography in hieroglyphics."² Two centuries after this illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman was born in the momentous year of 1812, Herzen's political writing and his personal correspondence remain largely unavailable in English. A Herzen Reader will add to the Herzen narrative, with a selection of one hundred essays and editorials written between 1850 and 1867.