PREFA CE
by Dwight Macdonald
ALTHOUGH THE INDEFATIGABLE Constance Garnett translated Herzen's memoirs fifty years ago, they have never caught on with American readers. Most people to whom I mention Herzen have either never heard of him or confuse him with another nineteenth-century founding father, Herzl, or with the physicist Hertz, he of the waves. In Russia, My Past and Thoughts has always been standard reading, like War and Peace;1 nor is Herzen unfamiliar to Western European readers. But like certain wines, he doesn't "travel" well. So far, he hasn't crossed the Atlantic.
This is strange because My Past and Thoughts is, when it's not great political writing, a classic of autobiography that stands with Rousseau, Stendhal, Gibbon, Tolstoy, and Henry Adams; one might add Trotsky and Churchill, who, like Herzen, knew how to assimilate the personal to the historical. It is also strange because, unlike some classics, Herzen is extremely readable.2
Finally, our neglect is odd because Herzen-though a friend of 1 The opening section of My Past and Thoughts, "Nursery and University," reminds me of War and Peace in many ways: same period ; simple, classical prose; and large, varied cast of characters from every stratum of Russian society. The first ten pages, on the burning of Moscow, sound like an early draft of Tolstoy's novel, right from the first sentence : " 'Vera Artamonovna, come tell me once more how the French came to Moscow,'
I used to say, rolling myself up in the quilt and stretching in my crib, which was sewn round with canvas that I might not fall out."
2 For example-also an instance of personal/historical mixture-there is the paragraph in which he disposes of the great de Tocqueville.
(Herzen and a friend have just been arrested as suspicious foreigners during the "June Days" that drowned in blood the 1 848 revolution. ) We were taken away b y two soldiers with rifles i n front, two behind, and one on each side. The first man we met was a representant du peuple with a silly badge in his buttonhole; it was Tocqueville, who had written about America. I addressed myself to him and told him what had happened; it was not a joking matter; they kept people in prison without any sort of trial, threw them into the cellars of the Tuileries, and shot them. Tocqueville did not even ask who we were; he very politely bowed himself off, delivering himself of the following bar.ality: "The legislative authority has
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Bakunin and an enemy of Marx-was the founding father of revolutionary socialism in Russia (Lenin revered him) and because, after 1917, our intelligentsia have often seemed more interested in Russian politics than in their O\Vll.
There \vere, of course, reasons why in the thirties we didn't respond to Herzen. In those innocent days, the outrages against rationality and human feeling that we read about in the daily papers were stimulating rather than depressing, since they revealed how absurd and hateful (therefore intolerable, therefore soon to be shattered by the revolutionary masses) was the capitalist status quo. (And we knew just the kind of society that should replace it and hO\v to go about the job.) Marx was our man then, the scholarly genius , .... hose titanic labors in the British Museum had discovered History's "laws of motion"-the prophet of the proletariat as savior and redeemer. (Marx did all right as John the Baptist, but his Jesus wasn't up to the part.) Now we are a world war and a few aborted revolutions the wiser and have come to be suspicious even of the Laws of History. We are, in fact, in much the same state of mind as Herzen after the failure of the 1848 revolution: despair and doubt ravage us, the Marxian dream has turned into the Russian nightmare (or the British doze), and so now we should be able to appreciate Herzen's unsystematic, skeptical, and free-thinking (also freefeeling) approach. His disenchantment, shot through with irony and rooted in his lifelong habit of judging abstract ideas by their concrete results-these qualities now seem to us (or rather, to me: an emendation Herzen \vould have approved; his political thinking was always personal) more attractive, and more useful, than Marx's optimistic, humorless, and somewhat inhuman doctrine of inevitable (a word Herzen would never have used) progress via historical/ materialistical/ dialectical necessity (another un-Herzenian word).
It may be objected that Herzen has no "message" for us today.
True enough, if a positive program is meant: Herzen was a critic, a reflective observer, and usually a "negativist." All we no right to interfere with the executive. " How could he have helped being a minister under Napoleon III!
Fair comment, except for the last sentence, which is a polemical quarter-truth. De Tocqueville was indeed, briefly (June-October, 1 849), Minister of Foreign Affairs, but Louis Napoleon was then merely the duly elected President of the Second Republic. He didn't become "Napoleon III" until three years later ( long after de Tocqueville had shifted to open and vigorous opposition), when a coup d'etat made him the plebiscitary "Emperor of the French. "
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can learn from him is what a certain historical event meant to his mind and heart, not what to do about it. But this objection shows why Herzen is our man today. In a period like this, when mankind seems to be in an impasse, such a thinker precisely because he is uncommitted to solutions is more useful to us than a thinker like Marx. Herzen's reactions to 1 848, for instance, are more to the point today than Marx's. The tragi-comedy of 1 848
was the turning point in the intellectual development of both revolutionaries. 1 848 stimulated Marx to a mighty effort at system building which now seems-"to me" understood-ethically repulsive, politically ambiguous, and, in its nineteenthcentury optimism of progress, intellectually absurd. (How much more creative, usable, and simpatico the pre-1848 young Marx now appears than the mature Marx of Das Kapital!) 1848 threw Herzen into a permanent state of disenchantment (his discovery of his wife's infidelity was also an important factor-typically) .
But now that we can see what the failure of the working class to make a revolution in 1 848 meant, both about the working class and Western society, Herzen's despair seems less self-indulgent and more realistic than Marx's optimistic faith. (This system have I shored up against my ruin.) Certainly it is more interesting and-that great cant word of our time-"relevant," because in it we can recognize ourselves and our historical situation as we can't in Marx. De te fabula narratur-mon semblable, mon frere!
The above paragraphs were written twenty-five years ago as a preface to some excerpts from My Past and Thoughts that I ran in the Winter 1 948 number of my then magazine, Politics. I reprint them here (with cuts and a dditions which don't change the general argument) because I'm a thrifty writer and can't see why I should go to the trouble of reformulating what I've already expressed well enough, especially since a quarter-century of American political experience hasn't (alas) "dated" my 1948
remarks. And the last eight years of Johnsonnixonesque Vietnamization of the republic (as Rosa Luxemburg observed, imperialism brutalizes the "mother," or rather "stepmother,"