I N TRODUCT ION
XXXVlll
human being, the peasant with his faculties intact, untainted by the corruption and sophistication of the West. But this Rousseauinspir£>d faith, as he grows older, grows less secure. His sense of reality is too strong. For all his efforts, and the efforts of his socialist friends, he cannot deceive hims£>lf entirely. He oscillates between pessimism and optimism, scepticism a�d suspicion of his own sc£>pticism, and is kept morally alive only by his hatred of all injustice, all arbitrariness, all mediocrity as such-in particular by his inability to compromise in any degree with either the brutality of reactionaries or the hypocrisy of bourgeois liberals. He is preserved by this, buoyed up by his belief that such evils will destroy themselves, and by his love for his children and his devoted friends, and by his unquenchable delight in the variety of life and the comedy of human character.
On th£> whole, he grew more pessimistic. He began with an ideal vision of human life, largely ignored the chasm which divided it from the pres£>nt-whether the Russia of Nicholas, or the corrupt constitutionalism in the \Vest. In his youth he glorified Jacobin radicalism and condemned its opponents in Russiablind conservatism, Slavophil nostalgia, the cautious gradualism of his friends Granovsky and Turgenev, as well as Hegelian appeals to patience and rational conformity to the inescapable rhythms of history, which se£>med to him designed to ensure the triumph of the new bourg£>ois class. His attitude, before he went abroad, was boldly optimistic. There followed, not indeed a change of view. but a cooling-off, a tendency to a more sober and critical outlook. All genuine change, he began to think in 1 847, is necessarily slov.,·; the power of tradition (which he at once mocks at and admirPs in England ) is very great; men are less mall£>able than was believed in the eight£>enth century, nor do they truly seek liberty, only security and contentment; communism is but Tsarism stood on its head, the replacement of one yoke by anothf'r; the id£>als and watchwords of politics turn out, on examination, to be empty formulae to which devout fanatics happily slaughter h€'catombs of their fellows. He no longer feels Cf:'rtain that the gap b£>tween the enlightened elite and the masses can ever, in principle, be bridged (this becomes an obsessive r<>frain in lat<>r Russian thought) , sine£> the awak£>ned people may, for unalterabl<> psychological or sociological reasons, despis£> and rej<>ct the gifts of a civilisation which will never mean enough to them. But if all this is even in small part true, is radical transformation either practicable or desirable? From this follows Herzen's growing sense of obstacles that may be insurmountable, limits that may be impassable, his empiricism, seep-
Introduction
XXXIX
ticism, the latent pessimism and despair of the middle sixties.
This is the attitude which some Soviet scholars interpret as the beginning of an approach on his part towards a quasi-Marxist recognition of the inexorable laws of social development-in particular the inevitability of industrialism, above all of the central role to be played by the proletariat. This is not how Herzen's Russian left wing critics interpreted his views in his lifetime, or for the half century that followed. To them, rightly or wrongly, these doctrines seemed symptomatic of conservatism and betrayal. For in the fifties and sixties, a new generation of radicals grew up in Russia, then a backward country in the painful process of the earliest, most rudimentary beginnings of slow, sporadic, inefficient industrialisation. These were men of mixed social origins, filled with contempt for the feeble liberal compromises of 1 848, with no illusions about the prospects of freedom in the West, determined on more ruthless methods; accepting as true only what the sciences can prove, prepared to be hard, and if need be, unscrupulous and cruel, in order to break the power of their equally ruthless oppressors; bitterly hostile to the aestheticism, the devotion to civilised values, of the
'soft' generation of the forties. Herzen realised that the criticism and abuse showered upon him as an obsolete aristocratic dilettante by these 'nihilists' (as they came to be called after Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons, in which this conflict is vividly presented for the first time) was not altogether different from the disdain that he had himself felt in his own youth for the elegant and ineffective reformers of Alexander I's reign; but this did not make his position easier to bear. What was illreceived by the tough-minded revolutionaries pleased Tolstoy, who said more than once that the censorship of Herzen's works in Russia was a characteristic blunder on the part of the government; the government. in its anxiety to stop young men from marching towards the revolutionary morass, seized them and swept them off to Siberia or prison long before they were even in sight of it, while they were still on the broad highway; Herzen had trodden this very path, he had seen the chasm, and warned against it, particularly in his 'Letters to an Old Comrade.'
Nothing, Tolstoy argued, would have proved a better antidote to the 'revolutionary nihilism' which Tolstoy condemned, than Herzen's brilliant analyses. 'Our young generation would not have been the same if Herzen had been read by them during the last t\venty years.' Suppression of his books, Tolstoy went on, was both a criminal, and from the point of vie\v of those who did not desire a violent revolution, an idiotic policy. At other times,
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Tolstoy was less generous. In 1 860, six months before they met, he had been reading Herzen's writings with mingled admiration and i rritation: 'Herzen is a man of scattered intellect, and morbid amour-propre,' he wrote in a letter, 'but his breadth, ability, goodness, elegance of mind arc Russian.' From time to time various correspondents record the fact that Tolstoy read Herzen, at times aloud to his fami ly, with the greatest admiration. In 1 896, during one of his angriest, most anti-rationalist moods, he said, '\Vhat has Herzen said that is of the sl ightest use?'-as for the argument that the generation of the forties could not say what it wanted to say because of the rigid Russian censorship, Herzen wrote in perfect freedom in Paris and yet managPd to say 'nothing useful.' \Vhat i rrita tPd Tolstoy most was Herzen's social ism. In 1 908 hP complained that Herzen was
'a narrow socialist,' evPn if he was 'head and shoulders above the other pol iticians of his age and ours.' The fact that he believed in politics as n wea pon was suffic ient to condemn him in Tolstoy's eyPs. From 1 862 onwards, Tolstoy had declared his hostili ty to fn ith in l ibernl ,·dorm nnd improvement of human life by legnl or institutional changP. Herzen fell under this general ban.