country as damagingly as it does the colonies) have depressed me to a political mood which makes my old postwar state of mind look positively euphoric. I am "ravaged by doubt and despair" more virulently and am more skeptical about political programs, radical or bourgeois. My suspicions about Progress, Laws of History, and the Proletariat have long since vanished, to be replaced by bleak certainties. Had anybody predicted in 1948
PREFACE
that I would come to look back on the Roosevelt-Truman period
-those liblab fakers!-as a golden age relative to what we got later, I'd have been more amused than angry. But so has it come to pass. And even the Age of Ike now looks to me, if not golden, at least silver compared to the leaden catastrophes of our last two presidencies. "In short, if Marx was our man in the thirties, Herzen may be our man in the forties" is a sentence I deleted from my old text because it would have blown the gaff on the spoof. But it now works well enough if "forties" is changed to
"sixties." Or maybe it's not too early to make it "seventies"-the decade hasn't gotten off to an encouraging start.
My 1948 observations about Herzen's strange failure to catch on over here are also still (alas) relevant. Just this week-to cite the most recent findings of a one-man (me), one-question ("Who was Alexander Herzen?") poll I've been unsystematically conducting for years-I drew the normal blank from two friends I really thought might know: a sixtyish professor of English, freewheeling in his interests and an accomplished parodist, and the clever, knowledgeable (I thought) youngish editor of a sociocultural "little magazine" I admire. The professor was able to connect Herzen with politics but ran out of gas on when, where, and, indeed, who. The editor-just the sort of free-thinker Herzen would appeal to (I'm sure I've done for him what Meyer Schapiro did for me when he introduced me to the memoirs in 1943 )-was completely blank.3
In one way, My Past and Thoughts is a hard book to prune because it's alive all through, remarkably sustained in style and thought, very few longueurs. But, in another way, it's an easy book to cut because it's not really a book. Herzen was a temperamental anarchist-his adherence to Proudhon and Bakunin and his rejection of Marx had much deeper roots than politics.
Therefore, he planned his masterpiece according to the best anarchist principles; i .e., he didn't. Like Topsy, and unlike Das Kapital, it just growed. The architecture is in the most irregular Gothic style with all sorts of outbuildings-some elegant, some grotesque-proliferating around the central mass ( if there can
:1 At least neither mixed him up with Herzl or Hertz. (A little learning is a dangerous thing. ) Checking up about those waves, I ran across further evidence of Herzen's American invisibility. On my desk I have four "college-size" dictionaries: The American College (Random House, 1947-55 ), The Standard College ( Funk & Wagnalls, 1963), Webster's New World (World, 1953-70), and American Heritage (Houghton Miffiin, 1969) . All list Herzl, three Hertz, none Herzen.
Preface
XV
be a center to so amorphous an assemblage) , which itself is constantly pushing up spires, adding lady chapels, breaking out rose windows, and extruding semi-detached cloisters and refectories-always just where you least expect them. Like Sterne in Tristram Shandy, Herzen made digression a formal principle, backing into or out of the subject or, when pressed, escaping crabwise with a scuttle to the side. As he remarked in the fourth letter of Ends and Beginnings ( 1862), that extraordinary series of super-Gothic articles disguised as letters to Turgenev, his old friend and comrade in long midnight arguments a la Russe: Please don't be angry with me for so continually wandering from the point. Parentheses are my joy and my misfortune.
A French literary man of the days of the Restoration, a classic and a purist, more than once said to me, taking a pinch of snuff in that prolonged Academy way which will soon have passed away altogether: "Notre ami abuse de la parenthese avec intemperance!" It is for the sake of digressions and parentheses that I prefer writing in the form of letters to friends; one can then write without embarrassment whatever comes into one's head.
My Past and Thoughts began as a series of reminiscences of his childhood and youth which he ran in the Russian-language magazines-The Pole Star and, later, The Bell-he published and edited from London, where he was a political refugee for the last twenty years of his life.4 They were an immediate success, 4 The Bell (Kolokol) was perhaps the most effective muckraking magazine in radical history. Its influence reached its apogee, 1 857-62, after the liberal Alexander II had succeeded the despotic Nicholas I. Kolokol was widely distributed inside Russia, through underground channels, and was read in the highest offices of the state bureaucracy, including the study of the Tsar himself. "It seemed as if Herzen's Kolokol had as many contributors as readers," William Jackson Armstrong observed in Siberia and the Nihilists ( Pacific Press, Oakland, Cal., 1890 ) . "State secrets of which not ten persons in the empire dreamed were treated by him as things of common knowledge. . . . He kept track as accurately of the corruption and cruelties of the most insignificant police officer as he did of the transactions in the Senate and Council chamber. The dread of appearing in Kolokol soon paralyzed the hand of the boldest and most hardened officials in the service." Herzen explains why in the preface to the 1 855 English edition of My Ezile in Siberia: "There is no country in which memoirs can be more useful than in ours. We Russians, thanks to the censorship, are little accustomed to publicity; it frightens, astonishes and offends us. It is time the lmperi:�l artists of the police of St. Petersburg should know that sooner or later their actions, so well hidden by
PREFACE
XVl
and so to this nucleus he added from time to time the variegated products of his prolific journalism, finally giving the medley a title which covers anything and everything.
The four volumes of the recent Garnett-Higgens version (Knopf, 1 968), from which I have quarried the present abridgment, arc structurally an anthology which includes a variety of subjects in a variety of prose styles. THE NovEL: "Nursery and University," whose 150 pages begin Volume I (they are here given nearly complete ) , and in Volume II the 1 00 pages of "A Family Drama" plus two short stories, "The Engelsons" and
"N. I. Sazonov" (all regretfully omitted here ) . THE MEMOIR: his political life and hard times from his first arrest in 1 834 to his arrival in London as an exile for the rest of his life, in 1 852
(these occupy the rest of Volumes I and I I ) . THE "PRoFILE": mini and major, of the myriad characters of every class, nation and politics he met in his active and gregarious life-most are vignettes, some are full-length portraits (Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth, Owen, Bakunin, Proudhon, Vitberg, Belinsky, Ketscher), all are executed with verve, wit, psychological acuity and a novelist's flair for detail. REPORTAGE that would have made his fortune-not that he needed another one-had there been a nineteenth-century New Yorker: "The Tsarevich's Visit" in Volume I ; "Money and the Police" in Volume II, with the vivid, and admiring, sketch of Rothschild at work in his bank (Herzen was the least snobbish of radicals-like Gandhi, he treated the rich as social equals) ; the superb chapters in Volume III on the national idiosyncrasies of the post-1848 French, Italian, Polish, Russian and German refugees in London, with whom as the only comrade in town with ready cash (and a reputation as a soft touch not completely deserved-his brain was always working) he became widely acquainted ; and his story of Prince Golitsyn and his serf musicians (see pp. 539-49 ). a Gogolian comedy Herzen does full justice to. HisTORY: the chief examples are "The Emperor Alexander an(l Karazin" and "Princess Dashkov,"