It has often been asserted by both Russian and Western critics that Herzen arrived in Paris a passionate, even utopian idealist, and that it was the failure of the Revolution of 1 848 which brought about his disillusionment and a new, more pessimistic realism. This is not sufficiently borne out by the evidence.� Even in 1 847, the sceptical note, in particular pessimism about the degree to which human beings can be transformed, and the still deeper scepticism about whether such changes, even if they were 4 The clearest formulation of this well-worn and almost universal thesis is to be found in Mr E. H. Carr's livelv and well documented treatment of Herzen in his The Romantic Exiles- and elsewhere. Mr Malia's book avoids this error.
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achieved by fearless and intelligent revolutionaries or reformPrs, ideal images of whom floated before the eyes of his Westernising friends in Russia, would in fact lead to a juster and freer order, or on the contrary to the rule of ne\v masters over new slavesthat ominous note is sounded before the great debacle. Yet, despite this, he remained a convinced, ultimately optimistic revolutionary. The spectacle of the workers' revolt and its brutal suppression in Italy and in France, haunted Herzen all his life.
His first-hand description of the events of 1 848-9, in particular of the drowning in blood of the July revolt in Paris, is a masterp iece of 'committPd' historical and sociological \\Titing. So, too, are his sketches of the personalities involved in these u pheavals, and his reflections upon them. Most of these essays and letters remain untranslated.
Herzen could not and would not return to Russia. He became a Swiss citizen, and to the disasters of the revolution was added a personal tragedy-the seduction of his adored wife by the most intimate of his new friends, the radical German poet Georg HPrwegh, a friend of Marx and Wagner, the 'iron lark' of the German Revolution, as Heine half ironically called him.
Herzen's progressive, somewhat Shelleyan, views on love, friendship, equality of the sexes, and the irrationality of bourgeois morality, were tested by this crisis and broken by it. He went almost mad with grief and jealousy: his love, his vanity, his deeper assumptions about the basis of all human relationships, suffered a traumatic shock from which he was never fully to recover. He did what few others have ever done: described every detail of his own agony, every step of his altering relationship
\vith his wife, with Herwegh and Herwegh's wife, as they seemed to him in retrospect; he noted every communication that occurred between them, every moment of anger, despair, affection, love, hope, hatred, contempt and agonised, suicidal selfcontempt. Every tone and nuance in his own moral and psychological condition are raised to high relief against the background of his public life in the world of exiles and conspirators, French, Italian, German, Russian, Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, who move on and off the stage on which he himself is always the central, self-absorbed, tragic hero. The account is not unbalanced
-there is no obvious distortion-but it is wholly £>gocentric. All his life H£>rzen perc£>ived the external world clearly, and in proportion, but through the medium of his own self-romanticising personality, with his own impressionable, ill-organised self at the CPntre of his universe. No matter how violent his torment, he retains full artistic control of the tragedy which he is living
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through, but also wntmg. It is, perhaps, this artistic egotism, which all his work exhibits, that was in part responsible both for Natalie's suffocation and for the lack of reticence in his description of what took place: Herzen takes wholly for granted the reader's understanding, and still more, his undivided interest in every detail of his own, the writer's, mental and emotional life.
Natalie's letters and desperate flight to Herwegh show the measure of the increasingly destructive effect of Herzen's selfabsorbed blindness upon her frail and exalte temperament. We know comparatively little of Natalie's relationship with Herwegh: she may well have been physically in love with him, and he with her: the inflated literary language of the letters conceals more than it reveals; what is clear is that she felt unhappy, trapped and irresistibly attracted to her lover. If Herzen sensed this, he perceived it very dimly. He appropriated the feelings of those nearest him as he did the ideas of Hegel or George Sand: that is, he took what he needed, and poured it into the vehement torrent of his own experience. He gave generously, if fitfully, to others; he put his own life into them, but for all his deep and life-long belief in individual liberty and the absolute value of personal life and personal relationships, scarcely understood or tolerated wholly independent lives by the side of his own: his description of .his agony is scrupulously and bitterly detailed and accurate, never self-sparing, eloquent but not sentimental, and remorselessly self-absorbed. It is a harrowing document. He did not publish the story in full during his lifetime, but now it forms part of his Memoirs.
Self-expression-the need to say his ovvn word-and perhaps the craving for recognition by others, by Russia, by Europe, were primary needs of Herzen's nature. Consequently, even during this, the darkest period of his life, he continued to pour out a stream of letters and articles in various languages on political and social topics; he helped to hep Proudhon going, kept up a correspondence with Swiss radicals and Russian emigres, read widely, made notes, conceived ideas, argued, worked unremittingly both as a publicist and as an active supporter of left wing and revolutionary causes. After a short while Natalie returned to him in Nice, only to die in his arms. Shortly before her death, a ship on \vhich his mother and one of his children, a deaf-mute, were travelling from :Marseilles, sank in a storm. Their bodies were not found. Herzen's life had reached its lowest ebb. He left Nice and the circle of Italian, French and Polish revolutionaries to many of whom he was bound by ties of warm friendship, and with his three surviving children went to England. America was
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too far away and, besides, seemed to him too dull. England was no less remote from the scene of his defeats, political and personal, and yet still a part of Europe. It was then the country most hospitable to political refugees, civilised, tolerant of eccentricities or indifferent to them, proud of its civil liberties and its sympathy with the victims of foreign oppression. He arrived in London in 1851.
He and his children \vandered from home to home in London and its suburbs, and there, after the death of Nicholas I had made it possible for him to leave Russia, his most intimate friend, Kicholay Ogarev, joined them. Together they set up a printing press, and began to publish a periodical in Russian called The Pole Star-the first organ wholly dedicated to uncompromising agitation against the Imperial Russian regime.