It is from this, Monsieur, that we get the irony, the fury which exasperates us, which preys upon us, which drives us forward, \vhich sometimes brings us to Siberia, torture, banishment, premature death. vVe sacrifice ourselves with TID hope, from distaste, from tedium. . . . There is indeed something irrational in our life, but there is nothing vulgar, nothing stagnant, nothing bourgeois.
Do not accuse us of immorality because we do not respect what you respect. Since when has it been possible to reproach foundlings for not venerating their parents? We are independent because \Ve are beginning from our own efforts. We have no tradition but our structure, our national character; they are inherent in our being, they are our blood, our instinct, but by no means a binding authority. We are independent because we possess nothing. ·we have hardly anything to love. All our memories are fill£'d with bitterness and resentment. Civilisation and learning were held out to us at the end of a knout.
\Vhat have \Ve to do with your traditional duties, we younger brothers robbed of our heritage? And how could we honestly accept your faded morality, unchristian and inhuman, existing only in rhetorical exercises and indictments of the prosecution?
What respect can be inspired in us by your Roman-barbaric system of law, those heavy, crushing vaults, without light or air, repaired in the Middle Ages and whitewashed by the newly enfranchised Third Estate? I admit that the tricks of the Russian lawcourts are even worse, but who could prove to us that your system is just?
We see clearly that the distinction between your lav\"S and our ukazr lies principally in the formula with which they begin.
Ukazy begin with a crushing truth: 'The Tsar commands' ; your laws are headed with the insulting lie of the threefold republican motto and the ironical invocation of the name of the French people. The code of Nicholas is directed exclusively against men and in favour of authority. The Code Napoleon docs not seem to us to have any other quality. "\\'e are dragging about too many chains that violence has fastened on us to increase the weight of them with others of our choice. In this respect we stand precisely on a level with our peasants. We submit to brute force. We are
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slaves because we have no means of freeing ourselves; from the enemy camp, none the less, ""e accept nothing.
Russia will never be Protestant. Russia will never be justemilieu.
Russia will not make a revolution with the sole object of getting rid of the Tsar Nicholas and gaining, as the prize of victory, other Tsars: parliamentary representatives, judges, police officials and laws. We are asking for too much, perhaps, and shall achieve nothing. That may be so, but yet we do not despair; before the year 1 848 Russia could not, and should not, have entered the phase of revolution ; she had only her education to get, and she is getting it at this moment. The Tsar himself perceives it, so he bludgeons the universities, ideas, the sciences; he is striving to isolate Russia from Europe, to kill culture. He is practising his vocation.
Will he succeed? As I have said else,vhere, we must not have blind faith in the future; every foetus has its claim to development, but for all that not every foetus does develop. The future of Russia does not depend on her alone but is bound up with the future of the whole of Europe. Who can foretell what the fate of the Slav world will be when reaction and absolutism shall have vanquished the revolution in Europe?
Perhaps it will perish: who knows?
But in that case Europe too will perish.
And history will continue in America. Is
-from The Russian People and Socialism ( 1851 ) I V
THERE WAS A TIME when you defended the ideas of Western Europe, and you did well; the only pity is that it was entirely 16 This famous "letter" to Michelet is seYerely critical of the French historian's judgments about Russia but is also infused with a deep respect for Michelet's work and thought in general, a respect which wa5
reciprocated. In his Democratic Legends of the North, Michelet. the target of Herzen's polemic, pays an extra,·agant tribute to his adversary:
"The author [of The Russian People and Socialism] writes our language with heroic vigor. [Herzen seems to haw addressed Michele! in French, a language he was as much at home in, like many nineteenth-century aristocrats, as in his own.] Methought I saw one of the ancient heroes of the north tracing with a merciless rod of iron the sentence on this miserable world . . . . Alas! It is not the condemnation of Russia only; it is that of France and Europe also. "Ne flee from Russia,' he says,
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unnecessaryY The ideas of Western Europe, that is, scientific ideas, have long been recognised by all as the entailed estate of humanity. Science is entirely free of meridian and equator; it is like Goethe's Diwan-westostlich.
Now you want to maintain that the actual forms of Western European life are also the heritage of mankind, and you believe that the manner of life of the European upper classes, as evolved in the historic past, is alone in harmony with the aesthetic needs of human development, that i t alone furnishes the conditions essential for intellectual and artistic life; that in Western Europe art was born and grew up, and to Western Europe it belongs; and finally, that there is no other art at all. Let us pause first at this point.
Pray do not think that I shall from the point of view of civic austerity and ascetic demagogy object to the place which you give to art in life. I am in agreement with you on that point.
Art-c'est autant de prix; together with the summer lightning of personal happiness, it is our one undoubted blessing. In everything else we are either toiling or drawing water in a sieve for humanity, for our country, for fame, for our children, for money, and at the same time for trying to solve an endless problem. In art we find enjoyment, in it the goal is attained; it, too, is an
'End' in itself.
And so, giving to Diana of Ephesus what is due to Diana, I shall ask you of what exactly you are speaking, of the present or the past? Of the fact that art has developed in Western Europe, that Dante and Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Rembrandt, Mozart and Goethe, were by birth and opinion 'VVesterners'? But no one disputes this. Or do you mean that a long historical life has prepared both a better stage for art and a finer framework for it, that museums are more sumptuous in Europe than anywhere else, galleries and schools richer, students more numerous, teachers more gifted, theatres better appointed and so on? And that, too, is true ; or nearly so, for ever since the great opera has returned to its primitive state of performers strolling from town to town, only grand opera is iiberall und nirgends. In the whole
'but Russia is everywhere-Europe is one great prison.' So long, however, as Europe ;assesses such men as the author, everything may be hoped." (D.M. )
17 "You" is the novelist Turgenev, an old friend of Herzen's (D.M.) Turgenev carne to England in May 1 862, and the discussions which took place between the two friends were continued by Herzen in Ends and Beginnings. (A.S.)