Civilised, imaginative, self-critical, Herzen was a marvellously gifted social observer; the record of what he saw is unique even in the articulate nineteenth century. He had an acute, easily stirred and ironical mind, a fiery and poetical temperament, and a capacity for vivid, often l)Tical, writing--qualities that combined and reinforced each other in the succession of sharp vignettes of men, events, ideas, personal relationships, political situations and descriptions of entire forms of life in which his writings abound. He was a man of extreme refinement and sensibility, great intellectual energy and biting wit, easily irritated amour propre and a taste for polemical writing; he was addicted to analysis, investigation, exposure ; he saw himself as an expert 'unmasker' of appearances and conventions, and dramatised himself as a devastating discoverer of their social and moral core. Tolstoy, who had little sympathy with Herzen's opinions, and was not given to excessive praise of his contempo-xix
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raries among men of letters, especially when they belonged to his own class and country, said towards the end of his life that he had never met anyone with 'so rare a combination of scintillating brilliance and depth.' These gifts make a good many of Herzen's essays, political articles, day-to-day journalism, casual notes and reviews, and especially letters written to intimates or to political correspondents, irresistibly readable even to-day, when the issues with which they were concerned are· for the most part dead and of interest mainly to historians.
Although much has been written about Herzen-and not only in Russian-the task of his biographers has not been made easier by the fact that he left an incomparable memorial to himself in his own greatest work-translated by Constance Garnett as My Past and Thoughts-a literary masterpiece \"\"Orthy to be placed by the side of the novels of his contemporaries and countrymen, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky. Nor were they altogether unaware of this. Turgenev, an intimate and life-long friend (the fluctuations of their personal relationship were important in the life of both; this complex and interesting story has never been adequately told) admired him as a writer as well as a revolutionary journalist. The celebrated critic Vissarion Belinsky discovered, described and acclaimed his extraordinary literary gift when they were both young and relatively unknown. Even the angry and suspicious Dostoyevsky excepted him from the virulent hatred with which he regarded the pro-Western Russian revolutionaries, recognised the poetry of his writing, and remained well-disposed towards him until the end of his life. As for Tolstoy, he delighted both in his society and his writings: half a century after their first meeting in London he still remembered the scene vividly.1
It is strange that this remarkable writer, in his lifetime a celebrated European figure, the admired friend of Michelet, Mazzini, Garibaldi and Victor Hugo, long canonised in his own country not only as a revolutionary but as one of its greatest men I P. Sergeyenko, in his book on Tolstoy, says that Tolstoy told him in 1 908 that he had a very clear recollection of his visit to Herzen in his London house in March 1861. 'Lev Nikolaevich remembered him as a not very large, plump little man, who generated electric energy. "Lively, responsive, intelligent, interesting", Lev Nikolaevich explained (as usual illustrating every shade of meaning by appropriate movements of his hands), "Herzen at once began talking to me as if we had known each other for a long time. I found his personality enchanting. I have never met a more attractive man. He stood head and shoulders above all the politicians of his own and of our time. " ' (P. Sergeyenko, Tolstoi i ego sovremenniki, Moscow, 1 9 1 1 , pp. 13-14.)
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of letters, is, even to-day, not much more than a name in the West. The enjoyment to be obtained from reading his prose-for the most part still untranslated-makes this a strange and gratuitous loss.
Alexander Herzen was born in Moscow on the 6th April, 1812, some months before the great fire that destroyed the city during Napoleon's uccupation after the battle of Borodino. His father, Ivan Alexandrovich Yakovlev, came of an ancient family distantly related to the Romanov dynasty. Like other rich and wellborn members of the Russian gentry, he had spent some years abroad, and, during one of his journeys, met, and took back to Moscow with him, the daughter of a minor Wiirttemberg official, Luiza Haag, a gentle, submissive, somewhat colourless girl, a good deal younger than himself. For some reason, perhaps owing to the disparity in their social positions, he never married her according to the rites of the Church. Yakovlev was a member of the Orthodox Church; she remained a Lutheran.2 He was a proud, independent, disdainful man, and had grown increasingly morose and misanthropic. He retired before the war of 1 81 2, and at the time of the French invasion was living in bitter and resentful idleness in his house in Moscow. During the occupation he was recognised by Marshal Mortier, whom he had known in Paris, and agreed-in return for a safe conduct enabling him to take his family out of the devastated city-to carry a message from Napoleon to the Emperor Alexander. For this indiscretion he was sent back to his estates and only allowed to return to Moscow somewhat later. In his large and gloomy house on the Arhat he brought up his son, Alexander, to whom he had given the surname Herzen, as if to stress the fact that he was the child of an irregular liaison, an affair uf the heart. Luiza Haag was never accorded the full status of a wife, but the boy had every attention lavished upon him. He received the normal education of a young Russian nobleman of his time, that is to say, he was looked after by a host of nurses and serfs, and taught by private tutors, German and French, carefully chosen by his neurotic, irritable, devoted, suspicious father. Every care was taken to develop his gifts. He was a lively and imaginative child and absorbed knowledge easily and eagerly. His father loved him after his fashion: more, certainly, than his other son, also illegitimate, born ten years earlier, whom he had christened Yegor (George) . But he was, by the eighteen-twenties, a defeated and 2 There is evidence, although it is n'lt conclusive, that she was married to him according to the Lutheran rite. not recognised by the Orthodox Church.
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gloomy man, unable to communicate with his family or indeed anyone else. Shrewd, honourable, and neither unfeeling nor unjust, a 'difficult' character like old Prince Bolkonsky in Tolstoy's War and Peace, Ivan Yakovlev emerges from his son's recollections a self-lacerating, grim, shut-in, half-frozen human being, who terrorised his household with his whims and his sarcasm.
He kept all doors and windows locked, the blinds permanently drawn, and, apart from a few old friends and his own brothers, saw virtually nobody. In later years his son described him as the product of 'the encounter of two such incompatible things as the eighteenth century and Russian life'-a collision of cultures that had destroyed a good many among the more sensitive members of the Russian gentry in the reigns of Catherine II and her successors. The boy escaped with relief from his father's oppressive and frightening company to the rooms occupied by his mother and the servants; she was kind and unassuming, crushed by her husband, frightened by her foreign surroundings, and seemed to accept her almost Oriental status in the household with uncomplaining resignation. As for the servants, they were serfs from the Yakovlev estates, trained to behave obsequiously to the son and probable heir of their master. Herzen himself, in later years, attributed the deepest of all his social feelings (which his friend, the critic Belinsky, diagnosed so accurately) , concern for the freedom and dignity o f human individualsl to the barbarous condi tions that surrounded him in childhood. He was a favourite child, and much spoiled; but the facts of his irregular birth and of his mother's status were brought home to him by listening to the servants' gossip and, on at least one occasion, by overhearing a conversation about himself between his father and one of his old army comrades. The shock was, according to his own testimony, profound : it was probably one of the determinin� factors of his life.