For example: Georgii Plekhanov, "Rech' na mogile A. I. Gertsena v Nitstse: 7 apre- lia 1912," in Sochinenii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia Izdatel'stvo, 1926), 23:453-56; and Lunacharskii, "Aleksandr Ivanovich Gertsen," 1:129-42.
S. V. Utechin, Russian Political Thought: A Concise History (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964), 117.
James Crichtlow, Radio Hole-in-the-Head: Radio Liberty, An Insider's Story of Cold War Broadcasting (Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1995), 19, 85, 171-72. Ludmilla Alekseyeva, U.S. Broadcasting to the Soviet Union (New York: Helsinki Watch Committee, 1986), 29-30.
Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 9-12.
Cited by Harrison Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 253. See Vera Inber, Pochti tri goda (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisa- tel', 1946), 7-8.
Lidiia Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi v trekh tomakh (Moscow: So- glasie, 1997), 2:544 (Nov. 4, 1962).
Rachel Polonsky, Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey Through Russian History (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 77-80. For a variety of bicentennial week assessments of Herzen, see: Literaturnaia gazeta, April 4, 2012.
Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, 2:577 (Dec. 29, 1962).
Chukovskaia, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, 2:264 (Sept. 14, 1957). The Herzen quote is from "Otvet I. S. Aksakovu," which appeared in Kolokol no. 240 (May 1, 1867), and was republished in Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 19:244-55. Other Herzen scholars of a liberal cast included Natan Eidelman and Lidiya Ginzburg.
Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 67. Zubok goes on to mention an underground group at the Leningrad Institute of Technology called the Bell, whose members were soon arrested by the KGB (156).
Orlova, Poslednii god zhizni Gertsena. In her Memoirs (New York: Random House, 1983), Orlova recalled an August 1968 discussion of the Soviet invasion, during which Solzhenitsyn said that what the Soviet Union needed at that moment was "a new Her- zen" to shame intellectuals into action (3i7).
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Harper, 2009), chap. 61, pp. 448-49.
Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990), 220.
Aleksandr Ianov, "Al'ternativa," Molodoi Kommunist 1974: 1 (70-77). See also Ya- nov's book The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History, trans. Stephen Dunn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 261-62.
Let 5:180; Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 30:33-34. In an essay from 1923, "On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters," Yevgeny Zamyatin commented on the usefulness of heresy that fights entropy and is right "150 years later." See A Soviet Heretic, ed. and trans. Mirra Ginsburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 109.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 21:142-43.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 21:154.
Let 1:263, 333. For an analysis of the "dangerous texts" paradigm, see Kathleen Parthe, Russia's Dangerous Texts: Politics Between the Lines (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004).
Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, 1:52.
Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:409. When addressing Europeans (Doc. 1), Her- zen acknowledged efforts by Russian writers, especially during the decade after the Decembrist revolt, to make veiled references to political subjects and to encourage readers to be attentive. However, by i860 he writes in The Bell that "we have no secrets, and we passionately want to show the sovereign all there is to know," while the tsar's closest aides "conceal everything except harmful gossip" (Doc. 25).
Cited by Isaiah Berlin in chap. 4 of Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York: Penguin, 1979), 200.
"U nas byl ne zagovor, a tipografiia." Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 20:420. This is from the 1868 essay "K nashim vragam."
Zhelvakova, Gertsen, 533.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
For bibliographical entries and for the citation of Russian words, a standard Library of Congress transliteration is employed. In other usages, modifications have been made for ease of pronunciation (e.g., Murav'ev/Muravyov, Arsen'ev/Arseniev, Nikolai/Nikolay, Elena/Yelena). For a small number of prominent figures, the most familiar form of their names has been chosen (e.g., Nicholas I, Alexander II). In the text of the primary documents, Herzen's frequent use of three closely spaced dots, indicating a pause for emphasis, or two dots plus a question mark or an exclamation point, as is common in Russian, has been preserved; any omissions made by the translator in Herzen's writing are indicated by three widely spaced dots in brackets.
All volume and page numbers for the originals of the Herzen documents translated in A Herzen Reader refer to Aleksandr I. Gertsen, Sobranie so- chinenii v tridtsati tomakh, 30 vols. (Moscow: ANSSSR, 1954-66) and are given in a source note following the text. Page numbers indicate first the document itself, then the notes at the back of each volume. For Poliarnaia zvezda, the year and book are indicated (kn.), and for Kolokol, the issue number (l.) and the date.
A Herzen Reader
On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia was written in 1850, at the dawn of a particularly turbulent period in Herzen's life, so it is fitting that one of the first places it is mentioned is in a letter to the German poet George Herwegh, soon to be revealed as a serious rival for Natalya Herzen's affections. Herzen tells Herwegh that he is writing a "brief note about the development of liberalism and opposition in Russian literature," but a few weeks later admits that it has turned out to be much more political than literary (Let 2:572-74). After three years abroad, Herzen felt completely cut off from everything Russian; at best, his letters were answered with expressions of passivity and despair, and at worst, they were returned to him (Zhelvakova, Gertsen, 337). Natan Eidelman saw this as the moment when Herzen summed up past Russian thought and sketched the "contours of a new 'program.' " Herzen had not yet seen some of the most important eighteenth-century Russian documents, but as they came to his attention, he published them in London (Eidel'man, Svobodnoe slovo, 450-51). The treatise on revolutionary ideas, comprising an introduction, six chapters, an epilogue, and a supplement, was published in German and French in 1851; the translation below is from the French. The appearance of the French edition led to Herzen being thrown out of Nice, which still belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia, in June of that year. By October 1851, it was on the list of foreign publications that were "absolutely" forbidden in Russia (Let 2:25, 51).
Herzen's analysis of Russia's historical development elicited strong reactions across the political spectrum. The first Russian readers were members of the ruling circles who were permitted to receive foreign publications otherwise banned by the censorship committee. Based on rumors emanating from those quarters, and in the wake of the 1849 Petrashevsky trial, Herzen's Moscow acquaintances feared that the pamphlet could provoke additional attacks on progressive circles. Timofey Granovsky, whose friendship Herzen treasured, wrote disapprovingly to the author—before he had read the essay—about the dangers to which Herzen was exposing liberals. In an apologetic letter two years later he admitted that at the time he had been influenced by gossip. Pavel Annenkov believed that Herzen's essay put Granovsky in real peril; the government saw revolution everywhere and was just waiting for the beloved professor to make a mistake (Annenkov, Extraordinary Decade, 250-51; Annenkov, Literaturnye vospomina- niia, 529-31).