A Herzen Reader

At the beginning of the reform era, Russians started sending Herzen fresh material and showing up at his door, as the newspaper grew in popu­larity and influence. Yakov Rostovtsev, who presided over the main Eman­cipation Committee, suggested that members read The Bell for its useful ideas. "While cursing us," Herzen wrote to his eldest son, the government "implements half of what we have been advocating."¹² Officials from vari­ous government agencies read the paper in order to "know the enemy"; one way or another, keeping up with its contents was a necessity, and it was printed on lightweight paper to make easier its safe and prompt transport to readers.¹³ What Herzen calls the paper's "apogee" was not long-lived; the authorities saw how Russia was increasingly unsettled by the talk of eman­cipation, and they began to persecute Herzen's visitors, correspondents, and even his readers. This repression took a far more serious turn after the Polish uprising of 1863 and the first attempt on the tsar's life in 1866.

Even as the weakness of the reform program became clear by 1862, Her- zen refused to alter his moderately socialist principles and embrace the violent agenda of the newest group of Russian radicals. He subsequently refused to abandon the Poles in 1863 to satisfy his own generation of Rus­sian liberals, proud to furnish "living proof" of protest against the "exter­mination of an entire people."¹⁴ Toward the end of Past and Thoughts, while wandering from one picturesque European "purgatory" to the next with no place to call his own, Herzen stoically embraced homelessness, serving out the Russian government's 1850 sentence of "perpetual exile."¹⁵ A vet­eran of decades of political struggle, he contemplated, with his "essential aloofness,"¹⁶

fellow exiles, including the latest Russian revolutionaries, who "throw themselves into the stream with a handbook on swimming."¹⁷ Pub­lication of The Polestar, The Bell, and Past and Thoughts, all of which began on such a high note, came to an indeterminate and somewhat melancholy end two years before Herzen's death. At times, Herzen had considered go­ing back to Russia, prompting Ogaryov to ask whether he would really take such a terrible risk "for a view of the fields and Staraya Konyushennaya street?"

¹⁸ It was just a thought, and Herzen never acted on it. He had de­cided early on that his only return home would be through the Free Russian Press (Doc. 52). Scarcely a month after Herzen's death, Bakunin wrote to Herzen's oldest daughter Tata and Natalya Tuchkova-Ogaryova that the de­ceased was the last Russian "to act in isolation," and that the time had come for "clear thinking and collective action."¹⁹

One of Bakunin's chosen partners in this "clear thinking and collective action" was Sergey Nechaev, whom Herzen had never trusted and who turned out to be a fake revolutionary but a real murderer.

During his twenty-three years abroad, the prolific Herzen "poured out a mass of articles, letters, essays, proclamations, the best of which are origi­nal masterpieces of both journalism and art."²⁰ The essays translated for this volume are less personal than his memoirs, and less abstractly philo­sophical than the longer analyses, but they are no less reflective ofHerzen's experiences and values, and carry a greater sense of urgency about abuses that needed to be publicized and corrected. Most of the translations from The Bell are editorials, a genre that Herzen virtually introduced to Russian journalism. As lead articles, they set the tone for the issue, and constituted its primary response to news from Russia. Because they are specific reac­tions to specific events, no two of these editorials are alike; they draw the reader in with their unique set of facts and their spirited, but logical, argu­mentation.²¹ Herzen also wrote lead articles that summarized the events of the year that had just ended (Docs. 25, 67) or that examined a longer period, from five to thirty years, in the life of the Free Russian Press or of Russia itself (Docs. 28, 52, 54, i00).