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The earliest chapters of Mr Past and Thoughts appeared in its pages. The memory of the terrible years 1 848-51 obsessed Herzen's thoughts and poisoned his blood stream: it became an inescapable psychological necessity for him to seek relief by setting down this bitter history. This was the first section of his Memoirs to be written. It was an opiate against the appalling loneliness of a life lived among uninterested strangers5 while political reaction seemed to envelop the entire world, leaving no room for hope. Insensibly he was drawn into the past. He moved further and further into it and found it a source of liberty and strength. This is how the book which he conceived on the analogy of David Copperfield came to be composed.6 He began to 5 Herzen had no close English friends, although he had associates, allies, and admirers. One of these. the radical journalist '"'· J. Linton, to whose English Republic Herzen had contributed articles, described him as

'short of stature, stoutly built, in his last days inclined to corpulence, with a grand hPad, long chestnut hair and beard, small ltJminous eyes, and rather ruddy complexion. Sua\·e in his manner, courteous, but with an intense power of irony, witty, . . . clear, concise and impressiYe, he was a subtle and profound thinker, with all the passionate nature of the

"barbarian, " yet generous and humane.' (Jlfcmories, London, 1 895, pp.

1 46-7.) And in his European Republicans, published two years earlier, he spoke of him as 'hospitable and taking pleasure in society, . . . a good com·ersationalist, with a frank and pleasing manner,' and said that the Spanish radical Castelar declared that Herzen, with his fair hair and beard, looked like a Goth. but possessed the warmth. YiYacity, 'verve and inimitable grace' and 'marn�llous variP!y' of a Southerner. Turgenev and Herzen were the first Russians to mon• freely in European society.

The impression that they made did a good deal, though perhaps not enough, to dispel the myth of the dark 'Sla,· soul,' which took a long time to die; perhaps it is not altogether dead yet.

ll 'Copperfield is Dickens's Past and Thoughts,' he said in one of his letters in the early sixties ; humility was not among his virtues.

Introduction

XXXl

write it in the last months of 1 852. He wrote by fits and starts.

The first two parts were probably finished by the end of 1 853. In 1 854 a selection which he called Prison and Exile-a title perhaps inspired by Silvio Pellico's celebrated Le Mie Prigioni, was published in English. I t was an immediate success; encouraged by this, he continued. By the spring of 1 855, the first five parts of the work were completed ; they were all published by 1857. He revised part IV, added new chapters to it and composed part V; he completed the bulk of part VI by 1858. · The sections dealing with his intimate life-his love and the early years of his marriage-were composed in 1 857: he could not bring himself to touch upon them until then. This was followed by an interval of seven years. Independent essays such as those on Robert Owen, the actor Shchepkin, the painter Ivanov, Garibaldi (Camicia Rossa), were published in London between 1 860

and 1 864; but these, although usually included in the Memoirs, were not intended for them. The first complete edition of the first four parts appeared in 1 861 . The final section-part VIII and almost the whole of part VII-were \Vritten, in that order, in 1 865-7. Herzen deliberately left some sections unpublished: the most intimate details of his personal tragedy appeared posthumously-only a part of the chapter entitled Oceano Nox was printed in his lifetime. He omitted also the story of his affairs with Medvedeva in Vyatka and with the serf girl Katerina in Moscow-his confession of them to Natalie cast the first shadow over their relationship, a shadow that never lifted; he could not bear to see it in print while he lived. He suppressed, too, a chapter on 'The German Emigrants' which contains his unflattering comments on Marx and his followers, and some characteristically entertaining and ironical sketch('s of some of his old friends among the Russian radicals. He genuinely detested the practice of washing the revolutionaries' dirty linen in public, and made it clear that he did not intend to make fun of allies for the entertainment of the common enemy. The first authoritative edition of the Memoirs was compiled by Mikhail Lemke in the first complete edition of Herzen's works, which was begun before, and completed some years after, the Russian Revolution of 1 9 1 7. It has since been revised in successive Soviet editions. The fullest version is that published in the new exhaustive edition of Herzen's works, a handsome monument of Soviet scholarshipwhich at the time of writing is still incomplete.

The Memoirs formed a vivid and broken background accompaniment to Herzen's central activity: revolutionary journalism, to which he dedicated his life. The bulk of it is contained in the

I N T R O D U C T I O N

xxxii

most celebrated of all Russian periodicals published abroad

Kolokol-The Bell-edited by Herzen and Ogarev in London and then in Geneva from 1 857 until 1 867, with the motto (taken from Schiller) Vivos voco. The Bell had an immense success. It was the first systematic instrument of revolutionary propaganda directed against the Russian autocracy, written with knowledge, sincerity and mordant eloquence; it gathered round itself all that was uncowed not only in Russia and the Russian colonies abroad, but also among Poles and other oppressed nationalities.

It began to penetrate into Russia by secret routes and was regularly read by high officials of State, including, it was rumoured, the Emperor himself. Herzen used the copious information that reached him in clandestine letters and personal messages, describing various misdeeds of the Russian bureaucracy to expose specific scandals-cases of bribery, miscarriage of justice, tyranny and dishonesty bv officials and influential persons. The Bell named names, offered documentary evidence, asked awkward questions and exposed hideous aspects of Russian life.

Russian travellers visited London in order to meet the mysterious leader of the mounting opposition to the Tsar. Generals, high officials and other loyal subjects of the Empire were among the many visitors who thronged to see him, some out of curiosity, others to shake his hnnd, to express sympathy or admiration. He reached the peak of his fame, both political and literary, after the defeat of Russia in the Crimean \Var and the death of Nicholas I. The opPn nppeal by HerzPn to the new Emperor to free the serfs and initinte hold and radical reforms 'from above,'

and, after the first concrete steps towards this had been taken in 1 8'i9, his paean of praise to AlPxander II under the title of 'Thou hast ConquerPd, 0 Galilean,' created the i llusion on both sides of the Russian frontier that a new liberal era was at last dawning, in which a degree of understanding-perhaps of actual coopPration--could be achievPd between Tsardom and its opponents. This state of mind did not last long. But Herzen's credit stood very high-high<'r than that of any other Russian in the