"nigger Jew boy" Lassalle (to telescope the racial epithets he
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showered, privately, on his pan-flashy rival in the German Social Democratic movement) . Marx was quite a different type from Herzen, and their "misunderstandings" were not really misunderstandings. (D.M. ) ]
However, by the end of the 1 860s, a s Lenin has shown, Herzen had come to recognize the power of the First International. In 1 868, rebuking 'our enemies'-the reactionaries headed by Katkov who proclaimed that 'socialism is now a dead cause'
Herzen pointed to the Brussels congress of the First International, the 'movement' of the German working class, and other signs of revolutionary enthusiasm.
[The First International was founded in London in 1 864
and Marx soon became its ideological leader. But from the beginning his dominance was challenged strongly by French, Swiss, Spanish, and Italian affiliates whose membership followed the anarchistic ideas of Proudhon and, especially, Bakunin. Maybe Herzen's "other signs of revolutionary enthusiasm" referred to such followers of his old friends
-1 haven't looked it up. Or maybe not. But it is a fact that at the Hague congress in 1872, two years after Herzen's death, the anarchists were so strong, and so on the rise (after the 1 870 Paris Commune, which was a Proudhon
Bakunin, not a Marxist, show) that Marx used his last voting muscle to transfer the headquarters of the First International to New York City, where it died, as he expected, of pernicious anemia in a few years, after which he planned and structured the Second International along more sensible, power-practical lines. (D.M. ) ]
And in a letter to Ogarev (September 29, 1 869) he writes: 'All the enmity between myself and the Marxids is over Bakunin.'
Note also that Herzen did not publish his chapter on 'The German Emigrants' during his lifetime.
[I don't know why in his last year Herzen came to think his enmity with the "Marxids" was only due to Bakunin.
Maybe he was irritated with Bakunin, as he often was, and relieved his feelings to the ever-sympathetic Ogarev with no idea of their being engraved by the muse of History, or the Soviet Academy, as the final sununary of his relations to Bakunin and Marx. As for Herzen's not publishing his chapter on "The German Emigrants" during
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his lifetime: Isaiah Berlin's Introduction (page xxxi) explains this not as due to a rapprochement with Marx but to Herzen's distaste (which Marx didn't share) for "washing the revolutionaries' dirty linen in public." (D.M.) On Marx's attitude to Herzen in the sixties, cf. his letter of February 1 3, 1 863, on the Polish risings: ' . . . now Herzen & Co. have a chance to prove their revolutionary honour.' And Herzen, as is known, did prove it. When he carne out for the Polish insurgents, Lenin writes, 'Herzen saved the honor of Russian democracy.' (V. I. Lenin: Works, V. 18, p. 13.) In the second edition of Das Kapital ( 1 873) Marx deleted a sharp, ironical remark aimed at Herzen which had appeared in the first edition ( 1 866) . However, it is hard to judge to what extent this represents a change in Marx's estimation of Herzen-see his 1 877 'Letter to the Editor of Notes of the Fatherland.'
[I haven't seen it but the implication is that Marx was still denigrating Herzen in 1877. Nor do I know why Marx deleted that "sharp, ironical" remark about Herzen in the second edition (maybe space ? ) , but I do notice that Marx, after challenging "llerzen & Co." ( the "Co." by that time was reduced to Ogarev-and Bakunin) to "prove their revolutionary honor" when the Polish revolt began, wasn't generous enough to concede that Herzen had proved it (unless the Soviet scholars, incredibly, overlooked some such expression, private or public, in their laborious search for every straw of "rapprochement") . That tribute Marx left for Lenin to pay-posthumously. (D.M. ) ]
Finally, the interest Marx took in Herzen's writings may be gathered from the fact that in studying the Russian language he made use of My Past and Thoughts.
[On this gracious dying fall, the Academy of Sciences ends its apologetic chronicle. Gracious, but even an amateur detects a certain desperation. ( "Well, anyway, he was good to his mother.") For Herzen's memoirs were, even in his, let alone Marx's, lifetime, recognized as a literary classic, and Marx dug classics, old or new. He admired Balzac's novels despite their retrograde politics and is said to have reread Aeschylus, in Greek, every year. So, of course he would dig Herzen stylistically as a language text. But there is no evidence he ever dug him politically. Quite the contrary, as the Soviet scholars and I have between us demonstrated. (D.M. ) ]
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PosTSCRIPT: In Martin Malia's Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism there is an explanation (footnote 5, pp. 429-30) of the grandeurs and miseries of Her:::en as a subject for Soviet scholarship which may be illuminating to readers puzzled by the above learned egg-dance. Or by the even more bewildering fact from which it proceeds: that so un
Marxist and unsovietsimpatico a political writer has lately had his complete works collected, annotated, and published by the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (Moscow, 1954-65, 30 volumes ) . True, Volume 1 appeared just after Stalin's death-though they must have been preparingbut still . . .
It's all due, according to Professor Malia, to Lenin's having dashed off three casual appreciations of Herzen as the founder of Russian socialism. "Short journalistic efforts of no great value as historical analysis unlike some of Lenin's longer and more pondered works" is his description.
But one of them was decisive in establishing Herzen's place in Soviet iconography as a precursive "voice crying in the wilderness." Namely "Parmiati Gertsena" ("To the Memory of Herzen" ) in the April 25, 1912, issue of the newspaper Sotsial-Demokrat.
"This article," Professor Malia writes, "was written to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Herzen's birth.
It is no more than an attempt to annex Her:::en to the tradition of Lenin's own party against the claims of the Socialist Revolutionaries, which in reality were more substantial. Yet this chance article has been the basis for Herzen's great fortune in Soviet historiography. Without it, Herzen might well have been spurned as an aristocrat, an anarchist, and Marx's foe-which was the fate of Bakunin. But Lenin's blessing has not been an unmixed one, for the same 'remarkable' article (as it is inevitably described) has also been the strait-jacket into which all Soviet scholarship on Her:::en has had to fit since the 1930s, and it is a narrow one indeed."
An item in The New York Times, March 16, 1947, is relevant here: "At the Lenin Library, where !Hoscow University students represent a formidable section of readers, Alexander Herzen was mentioned as among the most widely read authors. His works are required reading in courses on the literature and history of the revolutionary movement in Russia." One wonders what (silent) conclusions some of the Lenin Library readers may have drawn, for Her:::erz's notion
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