In 1852 Herzen moved to London, and the following year, with the aid of Polish exiles, he founded the “Free Russian Press in London,” the first uncensored printing enterprise in Russian history. In 1855 Nicholas I died, and soon thereafter Alexander II proclaimed his intention of emancipating the serfs. Responding to this unprecedented “thaw,” Herzen rapidly launched a series of periodicals that were designed to be smuggled back to Russia: “The Polar Star” in 1855, “Voices from Russia” in 1856, and a newspaper, Kolokol (The Bell), created in 1857 with the aid of his old friend Ogaryov, now also an émigré. Herzen's aim was to influence both the government and the public toward emancipation of the peasants, with generous allotments of land and the liberalization of Russian society. To this end, he moderated his political pronouncements, speaking less of socialist revolution and more of the concrete issues involved in Alexander's reforms. For a time he even believed in enlightened autocracy, hailing Alexander II in 1856 (in words that echoed the famous dying tribute of Julian the Apostate to Christ) with: “you have conquered, oh Galilean!” Kolokol soon became a major force in public life, read by the tsar's ministers and the radical opposition.
Soon, however, the ambiguity of Herzen's position between reform and revolution began to cost him support. After 1858 moderate liberals, such as the writer Ivan Turgenev, attacked Herzen for his utopian recklessness; and after 1859 he quarreled with the political writer N.G. Chernyshevsky (Chernyshevsky, N.G.) and the younger generation of radicals, whose intransigent manner appeared to him as “very dangerous” to reform. He also lost faith in the government; when the Emancipation Act (Emancipation Manifesto) was finally enacted in 1861, he denounced it as a betrayal of the peasants.
He therefore veered again to the left and called on the student youth to “go to the people” directly with the message of Russian socialism. Furthermore, on the urging of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich), he threw the support of Kolokol behind the unsuccessful Polish revolt of 1863. He immediately regretted this rashness, for it cost him the support of all moderate elements in Russia without restoring his credit among the revolutionaries. Kolokol's influence declined sharply. In 1865 Herzen moved his headquarters to Geneva to be near the young generation of Russian exiles, but in 1867 public indifference forced Kolokol to cease publication.
Amidst these political reverses, Herzen turned his energies increasingly to his memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, which were designed to enshrine both his own legend and that of Russian radicalism. A loosely constructed personal narrative, interspersed with sharp vignettes of both Russian and Western political figures and with philosophical and historical digressions, it provides a masterful fresco of contemporary European radicalism. At times witty, irreverent, and playful in style, and at other times lyrical, passionate, and rhapsodical, it is one of the most original and powerful examples of Russian prose. My Past and Thoughts was published principally between 1861 and 1867, and its scope and quality have placed it alongside the great Russian novels of the 19th century in artistic stature.
In 1869 Herzen wrote letters K staromu tovarishchy (“To an Old Comrade”; Bakunin), in which he expressed new reservations about the cost of revolution. Still, he was unable to accept liberal reformism completely, and he expressed interest in the new force of the First International, Karl Marx's federation of working-class organizations. This wavering position between socialism and liberalism, which characterized so much of his career, proved to be his political testament. The ambiguities of his position have made it possible ever since for both Russian liberals and socialists to claim his legacy with equal plausibility.
Martin E. Malia
Additional Reading
Works on Herzen include Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812–1855 (1961), exploring his ideology and politics; Edward Hallett Carr, The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth-Century Portrait Gallery (1933, reissued 1981), treating his personal life; Edward Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary (1979); and N.M. Pirumova, Aleksandr Gertsen: Revoliutsioner, Myslitel', Chelovek (1988). Collected editions of his works are Polnoe sobranie sochineniĭ i pisem, ed. by M.K. Lemke, 21 vol. in 22 (1919–23); and Sobranie sochineniĭ,
Garshin, Vsevolod Mikhaylovich
▪ Russian writer
born February 2 [February 14, New Style], 1855, Bakhmutsky district, Russian Empire
died March 24 [April 5], 1888, St. Petersburg
Russian short-story writer whose works helped to foster the vogue enjoyed by that genre in Russia in the late 19th century.
Garshin was the son of an army officer whose family was wealthy and landed. The major Russo-Turkish war of the 19th century broke out when Garshin was in his early twenties, and, perhaps feeling obligated by his father's profession, he renounced his youthful pacifism to serve.
He wrote of the plight of injured soldiers in his first story, “Chetyre dnya” (1877; “Four Days”), the title of which refers to the length of time the wounded main character remains unattended on the battlefield. The theme of wartime casualty is continued in his “A Very Short Novel,” the story of a soldier whose injury precipitates an emotional crisis when he returns home. In perhaps his most famous story, “Krasny tsvetok” (1883; “The Red Flower”), a madman dies after destroying a flower he believes to contain all of the world's evil. Haunted by similar delusions in his own life, Garshin committed suicide by throwing himself down a stairwell.
Tolstoy, Aleksey Nikolayevich, Graf
▪ Soviet writer
(Count)
born Jan. 10, [Dec. 29, 1882, old style], 1883, Nikolayevsk, Russia
died Feb. 23, 1945, Moscow
novelist and short-story writer, a former nobleman and “White” Russian émigré who became a supporter of the Soviet regime and an honoured artist of the Soviet Union.
The son of a count distantly related to the great 19th-century novelist Leo Tolstoy, he studied engineering at St. Petersburg. His early novels Chudaki (1910; “The Eccentrics”) and Khromoy barin (1912; “The Lame Squire”) deal with gentry families in a spirit of comic realism reminiscent of Gogol. After the Bolshevik Revolution he supported the Whites in the Russian Civil War and emigrated to western Europe, where he lived from 1919 to 1923. During this time he wrote one of his finest works, Detstvo Nikity (1921; Nikita's Childhood, 1945), a nostalgic, partly autobiographical study of a small boy's life.
In 1923, prompted by homesickness, Tolstoy asked to return to Russia, where he enjoyed a productive and prosperous career for the rest of his life. He was a natural storyteller and many of his works are purely entertaining. He wrote science fiction (Aelita, 1922), children's stories, thrillers, stories of international intrigue, and more than 20 plays. His most extensive serious work is his trilogy of novels Khozhdeniye po mukam. Consisting of Sestry (1920–21; “Sisters”), Vosemnadtsaty god (1927–28; “The Year 1918”), and Khmuroe utro (1940–41; “A Gloomy Morning”), it is a study of Russian intellectuals converted to the Bolshevik cause during the Civil War. An English translation of the trilogy appeared in 1946 under the title The Road to Calvary (1946). For the trilogy and for his long unfinished historical novel Pyotr I (1929–45; Peter the First, 1956), he received Stalin prizes. During World War II he was a prolific author of patriotic articles and also composed his two-part play Ivan the Terrible (1943), a dramatic apologia for the pathologically cruel tsar. The play earned Tolstoy his third Stalin Prize.