which are magnificent but also 1 07 pages, and not even so fat an abridged edition as this could contain them ; they are in Volume prisons, handcuffs and gra\'!'S, will he revealed in the full glare of day."
Turgenev once told Herzcn that when the actors of the Imperial Theater in l\Ioscow had a row with the director and were getting nowhere, one of them finally exclaimed: "\Ye will write to Koloko/1" The director ca\'!•d in at once . . . . Tangentially but profoundly to the present point is nn anecdote from an Parlier period of tsarism. Peter the Great asked an old hi therto faithful mansenant why lw had conspired to kill him.
"Because the mind loves space." was the reply, "and you cramp me."
Preface
XVll
IV, along with letters to and from Herzen and a rich variety of political, social and cultural speculations from his last decadesome of his most important writings. Herzen didn't peter out.
Nor did he abandon his anarchist belief in creative disorder.
Structural coherence, which has begun to erode by the end of Volume I, has by IV yielded completely to Chaos and Old Night.
But a night with many stars in it.5
A note on the text: Constance Garnett made the first English translation of My Past and Thoughts. She worked from the most complete Russian text then available, Slovo's five-volume edition (Berlin, 1 921 ) . Her translation was published in six small (duodecimo) and attractive volumes between 1 922 and 1 927 by Chatto and Windus (London) and Alfred A. Knopf (New York) .
In 1 968 the same publishers put out a new edition, in four large (and attractive) volumes-a revision of the Garnett translation by Humphrey Higgens. Mr. Higgens also added additional material, lacking in Slovo (and hence in Garnett), from the Collected Works recently published by the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (Moscow, 30 vols., 1 954-64 ) . The present volume is based on Mr. Higgens's edition.
Footnotes: They come in five varieties. (Tr. ) indicates Miss Garnett's notes (A.S.) the Soviet Academy of Sciences', (R.) Mr. Higgens's, and (D.M.) mine. Herzen's own, or those condensed from Herzen's text, are unmarked.
Omissions: Cuts of a page or more are indicated by ornaments between paragraphs or, when one or more following chapters are omitted, by ornaments at the end of the preceding chapter.
Lesser cuts are not indicated-i.e., all dots ( . . . . ) were in the original. I've made very few lesser cuts because ( a ) I think they 5 The most discerning appreciation of Herzen as a writer I know is V. S.
Pritchett's in The New Statesman cf: Nation for June 12 and. 19, 1943.
Some excerpts: "His power of observation is extraordinary . . . . Herzen's memory particularizes and generalizes . . . . His most important quality is his sense of situation . . . . his gift for knowing not only what people are but how they are [historically l situated. How rare is the capacity to locate character in its time . . . . His memoirs are the autobiography of a European . . . . He tells a story with the economy of a great reporter .
. . . Herzen hardened into a man who could record his experience with an uncommon mixture of nostalgia and scorn. One tempers the other .
. . . He is interesting because he is, in many ways, writing our own history, but in that stringent and speculative manner which has disappeared since the decline of philosophic education. Somewhere in the pages of this hard, honest observer of what movements do to men, we shall find ourselves."
PREFACE
XVUJ
distort an author's style more than the big ones do, and (b) Herzen is too good a writer, his prose is too close-knit and texturally harmonious to need, or deserve, retail editing. That's for patzers, not for grand masters like Herzen, who is articulate but not verbose, explicit but never otiose.
Supplementary reading: There are two important books in English. For Herzen's political-intellectual development in the context of his period and for a critical psycho biography (the book's range is wider than its title suggests), read Martin Malia's Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855 (Harvard University Press, 1961 ) . For Herzen's personal life after he left Russia in 1 847 up to his death in 1 870, see E. H. Carr's The Romantic Exiles (London 1933; Penguin paperback, 1968) , a fascinating piece of scholarly detective work like A. J. A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo. Mr. Carr has tumed up new material from Herzen's daughter, Herwegh's son, and other primary sources that supplements, or corrects, factually at least, the more intimate sections of the memoirs such as "A Family Drama," Herzen's story of the liaison between his wife and the German revolutionary poetaster, Georg Herwegh. Carr's book is subtitled "A 1 9th-Century Portrait Gallery," which is accurate.
Mr. Carr throws new light on many other figures in the memoirs, notably N. P. Ogarev ("Poor Nick" ), Herzen's lifelong friend and collaborator, whose wife, Natalie, became in the London years Herzen's mistress without breaking up, or even straining, their friendship.
INTRODU CTION
by Isaiah Berlin
ALEXANDER HERZEN, like Diderot, was an amateur of genius whose opinions and activities changed the direction of �ocial thought in his country. Like Diderot, too, he was a brilliant and irrepressible talker: he talked equally well in Russian and in French to his intimate friends and in the Moscow salons-always in an overwhelming flow of ideas and images; the waste, from the point of view of posterity (just as with Diderot) is probably immense: he had no Boswell and no Eckermann to record his conversation, nor was he a man who would have suffered such a relationship. His prose is essentially a form of talk, with the vices and virtues of talk: eloquent, spontaneous, liable to the heightened tones and exaggerations of the born story-teller, unable to resist long digressions which themselves carry him into a network of intersecting tributaries of memory or speculation, but always returning to the main stream of the story or the argument; but above all, his prose has the vitality of spoken words-it appears to O\ve nothing to the carefully composed formal sentences of the French 'philosophes' whom he admired or to the terrible philosophical style of the Germans from whom he learnt; we hear his voice almost too much-in the essays, the pamphlets, the autobiography, as much as in the letters and scraps of notes to his friends.