He was taught Russian literature and history by a young university student, an enthusiastic follower of the new Romantic movement, which, particularly in its German form, had then begun to dominate Russian intellectual life. He learned French (which his father \\TOt!.' more easily than Russian) and German (which he spoke with his mother) and European, rather than Russian, history-his tutor was a French refugee who had emigrated to Russiil aftPr the Fn'nch Revolution. The Frenchman did not reveal his political opinions, so Herzen tells us, uutil mit' day, wlwn his pupil ilsked him why Louis XVI had been cx('cuted ; to this he replied in iln altf.'red voice, 'Because he
\ViiS il trili tor· to his country', ilrHl finding the boy responsive,
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threw off his reserve and spoke to him openly about the liberty and equality of men. Herzen was a lonely child, at once pampered and cramped, lively and bored; he read voraciously i n his father's large library, especially French books o f the Enlightenment. He was fourteen when the leaders of the Decembrist conspiracy were hanged by the Emperor Nicholas I. He later declared that this event was the critical turning point of his life; whether this was so or not, the memory of these aristocratic martyrs in the cause of Russian constitutional liberty later became a sacred symbol to him, as to many others of his class and generation, and affected him for the rest of his days. He tells us that a few years after this, he and his intimate friend Nick Ogarev, standing on the Sparrow Hills above Moscow, took a solemn 'Hannibalic' oath to avenge these fighters for the rights of man, and to dedicate their own lives to the cause for which they had died.
In due course he became a student in the University of Moscow, read Schiller and Goethe, and somewhat later the French utopian socialists, Saint-Simon, Fourier and other social prophets smuggled into Russia in defiance of the censorship, and became a convinced and passionate radical. He and Ogarev belonged to a group of students who read forbidden books and discussed dangerous ideas ; for this he was, together with most other 'unreliable' students, duly arrested and, probably because he declined to repudiate the views imputed to him, condemned to imprisonment. His father used all his influence to get the sentence mitigated, but could not save his son from being exiled to the provincial city of Vyatka, near the borders of Asia, where he was not indeed kept in prison, but put to work in the local administration. To his astonishment, he enjoyed this new test of his powers; he displayed administrative gifts and became a far more competent and perhaps even enthusiastic official than he was later prepared to admit, and helped to expose the corrupt and brutal governor, whom he detested and despised. In Vyatka he became involved in a passionate love affair with a married woman, behaved badly, and suffered agonies of contrition. He read Dante, went through a religious phase, and began a long and passionate correspondence with his first cousin Natalie, who, like himself, was illegitimate, and lived as a companion in the house of a rich and despotic aunt. As a result of his father's ceaseless efforts, he was transferred to the city of Vladimir, and with the help of his young Moscow friends, arranged the elopement of Natalie. They were married in Vladimir against their relations' wishes. He was in due course allowed to return to
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Moscow and was appointed to a government post in Petersburg.
Whatever his ambitions at the time, he remained indomitably independent and committed to the radical cause. As a result of an indiscreet letter, opened by the censors, in which he had criticised the behaviour of the police, he was again sentenced to a period of exile, this time in Novgorod. Two years later, in 1 842, he was once more permitted to return to Moscow. He was by then regarded as an established member of the new radical intelligentsia, and, indeed, as an honoured martyr in it� cause, and began to write in the progressive periodicals of the time. He always dealt with the same central theme: the oppression of the individual ; the humiliation and degradation of men by political and personal tyranny; the yoke of social custom, the dark ignorance, and savage, arbitrary misgovernment which maimed and destroyed human beings in the brutal and odious Russian Empire.
Like the other members of his circle, the young poet and novelist Turgenev, the critic Belinsky, the future political agitators Bakunin and Katkov ( thf> first in the cause of revolution, the second of reaction), the literary essayist Annenkov, his own intimate friend Ogarev, Herzen plunged into the study of German metaphysics and French sociological theory and historythe ,,·orks of Kant, Schelling, and above all, Hegel; also Saint
Simon, Augustin Thierry, Leroux, Mignet and Guizot. He composed arresting historical and philosophical essays, and stories dealing with social issucs: they were published. ,,·idely read and discussed, and created a considerable reputation for their author. He adopted an uncompromising position. A leading representative of the dissident Russian gentry, his socialist beliefs were caused less by a reaction against the cruelty and chaos of the laissc::.-fairc economy of the bourgeois \Vest-for Russia, then in its early industrial beginnings, was still a semi-feudal, socially and ec'anomically primitive society-than as a direct responsc to the agonising social problems in his native land: the poverty of the masscs, serfdom and lack of individual freedom at all levels. and a lawless and brutal autocracy.3 In addition, there was. thc wounded national pride of a po,�·erful and semibarbarous socicty. whose leaders were aware of its backwardness, 3 The historical aiHI sociolop;ical t•xplanation of the orip;ins of Russian socialism and of lferzpn's part in it cannot bP attempted her!'. It has been treated in a number of ( unlranslatPd) Russian monop;raphs. both preand post-revolutionary. ThP most dPtailPd a nd original study of this topic to rlatp is Alt·randrr 1/rr::.rn and thr Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855 ( 1961 ) by Profpssor Martin Malia.