A Herzen Reader [Kathleen é] (fb2) читать постранично, страница - 3

people, and work habits. This decades-long relationship was, strangely enough, not weakened by the widower Herzen's liason with Ogaryov's second wife, Natalya Tuchkova- Ogaryova, with whom he had three children. By the mid-i86os, both men had tired of her difficult personality, and preferred each other's company to hers. What Herzen wrote from jail in 1834 remained true for the rest of their lives: "The worst thing for me is to be parted from Ogaryov . . . without him I am but a single volume of an unfinished epic, a mere excerpt."¹¹

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).

Herzen was, of course, one of Russia's first and most successful inves­tigative journalists, and most of The Bell's 245 issues are "accusatory doc­uments," which give an impression of "unrelieved political, cultural and moral darkness, with shocking revelations of systematic injustice, cruelty, oppression, and continuous abuses and misgovernment, some of which were actually remedied as a result of these revelations."²² He was obliged to depend on others for on-site reports, but he turned this raw material into brilliantly constructed attacks on public officials and their private support­ers. Using publicity as a kind of "anti-police" force, he called to account those who punished the Russian people and who threatened him person­ally.²³ It is hardly surprising that the Russian authorities and other oppo­nents of meaningful reform were incensed by what appeared in the Free Russian Press, but Herzen was also criticized in print and in person by Bo­ris Chicherin, a liberal professor, and by Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, the progressive voices of The Contemporary (Sovremennik), the most impor­tant thick journal of the reform years. Faced with conservatives who found him despicable, liberals who thought him immoderate, and the radical intelligentsia who called him naive, Herzen did not waver from positions which accorded with his openly stated values; he was happy to be corrected on facts, but never altered his principles.

Herzen defended the many exposes of government misconduct in The Bell, with some of his most explicit arguments presented in 1858-59 (Docs. 20-22). When Chernyshevsky was arrested in 1862, Herzen, himself a for­mer political prisoner, dropped their quarrel and focused on the shame that Russia brought on itself through its treatment of a man who only wished the best for the Russian people (Doc. 64). He was appalled that Russia's liberals failed to offer the fallen man their support. In their private corre­spondence, Herzen and Ogaryov frequently debated the function of their paper; for Herzen, its role was "uncompromising propaganda," a profound sermon which "could be transformed into political agitation, but was not itself agitation."²⁴

During the second half of the 1850s, while the reforms were under dis­cussion, Herzen's essays offered a nuanced picture of Alexander II. At the beginning of the new tsar's reign in 1855, Herzen had made it clear that it should not matter whence liberation came; Herzen was principled, but not rigid or dogmatic. His letters to the tsar were respectful and positive, under­standing that change from above was the preferred nonviolent alternative. Still, there was ample evidence by 1858 that conservative figures surround­ing Alexander II continued to influence the censorship, the universities, and other institutions. When Herzen's elaborately planned London celebra­tion of the March 1861 emancipation announcement was ruined by news of bloody repression in Poland, it was rightly seen as a poor omen. The gov­ernment's subsequent response to fires in St. Petersburg, upheaval among students and peasants, and the Polish uprising of 1863 bore no signs of a progressive spirit. For the 1867 essay "Our System of Justice" (Doc. 94) one of The Bell's correspondents provided evidence that even when the criminal chamber recommended moderate sentences, the State Senate substantially increased them, while military tribunals routinely handed out corporal pun­ishment and even death sentences. The exalted tone often used by memoir­ists and historians to describe the Russian judicial reforms of the 1860s is absent from Herzen's account, especially when the inauguration of a modern court system coincided with the closed proceedings and vindictive atmosphere surrounding the case of Dmitry Karakozov.

A dozen of the hundred essays in this volume are reflections on this first assassination attempt against Alexander II on April 4, 1866. Herzen's initial reaction (Doc. 80) was disapproval