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first place, perhaps, for his own personal salvation, built out of material provided by his own predicament-out of exile, solitude, despair-survives intact. Written abroad, concemed largely with European issues and figures, these reminiscences are a great permanent monument to the civilised, sensitive, morally preoccupied and gifted Russian society to which Herzen belonged; their vitality and fascina tion have not declined in the hundred years that have passed since the first chapters saw the light.
D E D I C A T I O N
(to Nicholay Platonovich Ogarev 1)
This book speaks chiefly of two persons. One of them is no more:2 you are still left, and therefore it is to you, my friend, that it rightly belongs.
/SKANDER3
1 st July, 1860
Eagle's Nest, Bournemouth
MANY OF MY FRIENDS have advised me to begin a complete edition of My Past and Thoughts, and there is no difficulty about this, at least so far as Parts I and II are concerned. But they say that the fragments which appeared in The Pole Star are rhapsodical and lacking in unity, are broken off at haphazard, sometimes anticipate, sometimes lag behind. I feel that this is true, but I cannot put it right. To make additions, to arrange the chapters in chronological order, would not be a difficult matter; but to recast entirely, d'un jet-that I will not undertake.
My Past and Thoughts was not written consecutively: between some chapters there lie whole years. Therefore the whole of it retains the colour of its own time and of varying moods-I should not care to rub this off.
These are not so much notes as a confession, round which, d propos of which, have been assembled memories snatched from here and there in the Past, and ideas from my Thoughts, which here and there have remained behind. Moreover, in these annexes, superstructures, extensions, there is a unity: at least I think so.
These notes are not a first experiment. I was twenty-five when I first began to write something in the way of reminiscences.
This is how it happened: I had been transferred from Vyatka to Vladimir, and I was horribly bored. I found the stop before Moscow tantalizing, outrageous. I was in the situation of a man who is kept at the last coach-stage for want of horses.
1 For Nikolay Platonovich Ogarev see E. H. Carr: The Romantic Eziles (Gollancz, 1 933 ) , Chapters VII, XVI. (R.) 2 Natalya Alexandrovna, Herzen's first cousin and wife. (R.) 3 "lskander," the Turkish form of "Aitoxander," was sometimes used by Herzen as a pen name. (D.M.)
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D E DIC A T I O N
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In reality this was very nearly the most 'pure, most earnest period of a youth which had begun to come to an end.' And my boredom was lucid and contented, as with children on the day before a holiday or a birthday. Every day letters arrived, written in a fine hand ;� I was proud of them and happy, and they helped me to grow. None the less separation was a torment, and I did not know how to set about pushing aside that eternity-some four months ! 5 I listPn<'d to the advice that was given me and began at leisure to makes notes of my memories of Krutitsky and Vyatka. Three note-books were filh•d . . . and then the past was flooded by the light of the present.
Belinsky read thf'm in 1 840 and liked them, and he printed two of the note-books in Otechestuenniye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) , the first and third ; the other must be still lying about somewhere in our house in Moscow, if it has not been used to light the fire.
Fifteen years went by; 'I \<vas living a lonely life in London, near Primrose Hill, cut off from the whole world by distance, by thf' fog and by my O\vn desire.
' I had not a single close friend in London. Th�re were people for whom I had a regard, and who had the same for me, but no one who \Vas my intimate. All of them, as they came and went and met each other, were interested only in general matters, in the business of the whole of humanity, or at least of a whole people ; their acquaintance, one might say, was impersonal.
Months would pass and there \vould not be a single word of what I want<'d to talk about.
' . . . Meanwhile I was hardly beginning at that time to come to myself, to recover from a series of fearful events, misfortunes, mistakes.6 The history of the recent years of my life presented itself to me \vith greater and greater clarity, and I perceived
� The letters were from his cousin, Natalya Alexandrovna Zakharin, whom he shortly married. (A.S.)
" From 2nd January (when Herzen arrived at Vladimir) to 9th May (when he married N. A. Zakharin ) , 1838. (A.S.) G Herzen is speaking of his experiences after the defeat of the revolution of 1 848, and also of the misfortunes which befell his family: the loss of his mother and son in a shipwreck in 1 85 1 , and the death of his wife on 2nd May. 1 852. (A.S. ) The infidelity of his wife with the German revolutionary poetaster, Herwegh, may be presumed to have also weighed on Herzen's mind, judging by his devoting over a hundred pages of Volume II to "A Family Drama"-pages of novelistic poignancy I was sorry lo omit from this one-volume selection. For a cool British view of the Herzen-Herwegh affair, ironic and amusing, see E. H. Carr's The Romantic Exiles. (D.M.)
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with dismay that no one but myself was aware of it, and that the truth would die with me.
'I determined to write: but one memory summoned up hundreds of others; all the old, the half-forgotten, rose again: boyhood's dreams, the hopes of youth, a young man's intrepidity, prison and exile-those early misfortunes that had left no bitterness in my heart but had passed like thunderstorms in Spring, refreshing and strengthening my young l ife with their impact.'
Now I was not writing to gain time: there was nowhere I was in a hurry to go to.
When I began this new work I absolutely forgot the existence of Notes of a Young Man,1 and carne upon them by chance in the British Museum when I was going through some Russian magazines. I had copies made and read them through. The feeling they aroused was a strange one: I perceived so palpably how much older I had grown in those fifteen years that at first I was amazed. At that time I had still been playing with life, and with my very happiness, as though there was to be no end to it. The tints of Notes of a Young Man were so rosy that I could take nothing from it: it belonged to the time of my youth, and it must be left as it was. Its morning's light was not suited to my evening's labour. There was much truth in it, but also much that was mischievous; more than that, there remained upon it the mark, quite evident to me, of Heine, whom I had read with admiration at Vyatka . In My Past and Thoughts the marks of life are visible, and no others are to be seen.
My work progressed slowly . . . . Much time is needed for any event to settle into a perspicuous thought-not a comforting one: melancholy, perhaps, but one that can be reconciled with one's intelligence. Without this there may be sincerity, but truth there cannot be!
Several attempts were unsuccessful and I threw them away.