3
The Memoirs, called by Herzen himself My Past and Thoughts, are divided into five Parts. This translation, made six years ago from the Petersburg edition of 1913, contains Parts I and II. These were written in London in 1 852-3, and printed in London, at 36
Regent's Square, in the Russian journal called The Pole-Star.
Part I has not, I believe, been translated into English before. A translation of Part II was published in London during the Crimean war;4 but this was evidently taken from a German version by someone whose knowledge of German was inadequate. The German translation of the Memoirs by Dr Buek s seems to me very good; but it is defective : whole chapters of the original are omitted without warning.
To make the narrative easier to follow, I have divided it up into numbered sections, which Herzen himself did not use. I have added a few footnotes.
5 June 1923
J.D . D U FF
4·
Exile in Siberia, by Alexander Herzen (London, 1855; Hurst and
Herzen was not responsible for the misleading title, which caused him some annoyance.
5· Erinnerungen von Alexander Herzen, by Dr Otto Buek (Berlin, 1907).
INTR ODUCTION
ISAIAH BERLIN
1
AL EX A N D ER HERZEN is the most arresting Russian political writer in the nineteenth century. No good biographies of him exist, perhaps because his own autobiography is a great literary masterpiece. It is not widely known in English-speaking countries, and that for no good reason, for it has been translated into English, the first two Parts magnificently by J. D. Dufl',l and the whole adequately by Constance Garnett; unlike some works of political and literary genius, it is, even in translation, marvellously readable.
In some respects, it resembles Goethe's Dichtung und W ahrheit more than any other book. For it is not a collection of wholly personal memoirs and political reflections. It is an amalgam of personal detail, descriptions of political and social life in various countries, of opinions, personalities, outlooks, accounts of the author's youth and early manhood in Russia, historical essays, notes of journeys in,Europe, France, Switzerland, Italy, of Paris and Rome during the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 (these last are incomparable, and the best personal documents about these events that we possess), discussions of political leaders, and of the aims and purposes of various parties. All this is interspersed with a variety of comment, pungent observation, sharp and spontaneous, occasionally malicious, vignettes of individuals, of the character of peoples, analyses of economic and social facts, discussions and epigrams about the future and past of Europe and about the author's own hopes and fears for Russia ; and interwoven with this is a detailed and poignant account of Herzen's personal tragedy, perhaps the most extraordinary self-revelation on the part of a sensitive and fastidious man ever written down for tlle benefit of tlle general public.
1- The translation published in this volume as Childhood, Youth and Exile. The present essay originated as the last of the four Northcliffe lectures for 1954, delivered at University College, London, and is reprinted here, with minor changes, from the version published in Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London, 1978: Hogarth Press).
xiv
I S A I A H B E R L I N
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was born in Moscow in 1812, not long before the capture of the dty by Napoleon, the illegitinlate son of Ivan Yakovlev, a rich and well-born Russian gentleman, descended from a cadet branch of the Romanovs, a morose, difficult, possessive, distinguished and civilised man, who bullied hiS
son, loved hini deeply, embittered his life, and had an enormous influence upon him both by attraction and repulsion. His mother, luiza Haag, was a mild German lady from Stuttgart in Wiirttemberg, the daughter of a minor official. Ivan Yakovlev had met her while travelling abroad, but never married her. He took her to Moscow, established her as mistress of his household, and called his son Herzen in token, as it were, of the fact that he was the child of his heart, but not legitimately born and therefore not entitled to bear his name.
The fact that Herzen was not born in wedlock probably had a considerable effect on his character, and may have made him more rebellious than he might otherwise have been. He received the regular education of a rich young nobleman, went to the University of Moscow, and there early asserted his vivid, original, impulsive character. He was born (in later years he constantly came back to this) into the generation of what in Russia came to be called lishnie lyudi, 'superfluous men', with whom Turgenev's early novels are so largely concerned.
These young men have a place of their own in the history of European culture in the nineteenth century. They belonged to the class of those who are by birth aristocratic, but who themselves go over to some freer and more radical mode of thought and of action.
There is something singularly attractive about men who retained, throughout life, the manners, the texture of being, the habits and style of a civilised and refined milieu. Such men exercise a peculiar kind of personal freedom which combines spontaneity with distinction. Their minds see large and generous horizons, and, above all, reveal a unique intellectual gaiety of a kind that aristocratic education tends to produce. At the same tinle, tlley are intellectually on the side of everything that is new, progressive, rebellious, young, untried, of that which is about to come into being, of the open sea whether or not there is land that lies beyond. To this type belong those intermediate figures, like Mirabeau, Charles James Fox, Franklin Roosevelt, who live near the frontier that divides old from new, between the douceur de la vie which is about to
IN TR O D U C T I O N
XV
pass and the tantalising future, the dangerous new age that they themselves do much to bring into being.
2
Herzen belonged to this milieu. In his autobiography he has des·
cribed what it was like to be this kind of man in a suffocating society, where there was no opportunity of putting to use one's natural gifts, what it meant to be excited by novel ideas which carne drifting in from all kinds of sources, from classical texts and the old Utopias of the West, from French social preachers and German philosophers, from books, journals, casual conversations, only to remember that the milieu in which one lived made it absurd even to begin to dream of creating in one's own country those harmless and moderate institutions which had long become forms of life in the civilised West.
This normally led to one of two results: either the young enthusiast simply subsided, and came to terms with reality, and becarne a wistful, gently frustrated landowner, who lived on his estate, turned the pages of serious periodicals imported from Petersburg or abroad, and occasionally introduced new pieces of agricultural machinery or some other ingenious device which had caught his fancy in England or in France. Such enthusiasts would endlessly discuss the need for this or that change, but always with the melancholy implication that little or nothin'g could or would be done; or, alternatively, they would give in entirely and fall into a species of gloom or stupor or violent despair, becoming selfdevouring neurotics, destructive personalities slowly poisoning both themselves and the life round them.