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A Cheerful Revolutionary

‘Oh please, Nurse, tell me again how the French came to Moscow!’ This was a constant petition of mine, as I stretched myself out in my crib . . .

‘You were still with your foster mother; you were very small and weak then,’ and I smiled with pride at the thought I had taken a part in the Great War.

Alexander Herzen was a nineteenth-century Russian political reformer and philosopher who wrote five volumes of what he described as ‘memoirs in progress’. These are the opening lines of Childhood, Youth and Exile – the first two volumes of the sequence My Past and Thoughts – which covers his early years, 1812 to 1840. The other three volumes carry on from there and end around 1868.

The thread running through them is Herzen’s turbulent, often tragic life and the terrible times – so far, so standard gloomily Russian – but they are unlike any other books of the era. Neither straightforward biography nor philosophical treatises, they’re an entrancing mixture of personal recollections, political observations, social life in various countries, travel, economics, sharp comments on friends and enemies, and thoughts about Russia’s past and future, all interspersed with extraordinary digressions and individual stories. Every now and then Herzen breaks off the narrative to say ‘In this context I must tell you what happened to . . .’ and a story follows. It may be about the mad count who fed his guests on dog pie, or the vicious Governor of Siberia who, uniquely, was sacked for his brutality, or the honest doctor who let a thief go, or the disasters that befell his father’s bailiff, or the Muslim Tartar who forcibly converted the pagan Finns to Russian Orthodoxy. Herzen describes nineteenth-century Russian life in a way no one else does, with a modern lightness of touch, acute observation, energy and wit I find irresist

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‘Oh please, Nurse, tell me again how the French came to Moscow!’ This was a constant petition of mine, as I stretched myself out in my crib . . .

‘You were still with your foster mother; you were very small and weak then,’ and I smiled with pride at the thought I had taken a part in the Great War.

Alexander Herzen was a nineteenth-century Russian political reformer and philosopher who wrote five volumes of what he described as ‘memoirs in progress’. These are the opening lines of Childhood, Youth and Exile – the first two volumes of the sequence My Past and Thoughts – which covers his early years, 1812 to 1840. The other three volumes carry on from there and end around 1868. The thread running through them is Herzen’s turbulent, often tragic life and the terrible times – so far, so standard gloomily Russian – but they are unlike any other books of the era. Neither straightforward biography nor philosophical treatises, they’re an entrancing mixture of personal recollections, political observations, social life in various countries, travel, economics, sharp comments on friends and enemies, and thoughts about Russia’s past and future, all interspersed with extraordinary digressions and individual stories. Every now and then Herzen breaks off the narrative to say ‘In this context I must tell you what happened to . . .’ and a story follows. It may be about the mad count who fed his guests on dog pie, or the vicious Governor of Siberia who, uniquely, was sacked for his brutality, or the honest doctor who let a thief go, or the disasters that befell his father’s bailiff, or the Muslim Tartar who forcibly converted the pagan Finns to Russian Orthodoxy. Herzen describes nineteenth-century Russian life in a way no one else does, with a modern lightness of touch, acute observation, energy and wit I find irresistible. Russian scholars know about Alexander Herzen but hardly anyone else seems to. He was a journalist who founded the first free Russian press in Europe and a prescient and influential political thinker, sometimes called the Father of Russian Socialism. For nearly thirty years he was a pivotal figure in Russian revolutionary politics, advocating emancipation of the serfs and an agrarian socialist society based on land reform. There were celebrations in Russia on the hundredth anniversary of his birth when even the exiled Lenin gave him grudging endorsement while denouncing him as a petty-bourgeois socialist who didn’t understand the reality of the class struggle. Tolstoy on the other hand said he’d never met anyone with ‘so rare a combination of scintillating brilliance and depth’. Herzen has two famous modern supporters – Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher, who wrote the illuminating introduction to my edition and saw Herzen as one of the great thinkers of history, and Tom Stoppard, whose trilogy The Coast of Utopia features Herzen and many of his revolutionary friends. It opened at the National Theatre in 2002 and on Broadway in 2007 but it’s not one of Stoppard’s best-known set of plays and is hardly ever revived. Yet with two such eminent fans – and me – why is Herzen the forgotten revolutionary? It’s time to rescue him from undeserved oblivion. Alexander Ivanovitch Herzen was born in Moscow in 1812 and died in France in 1870. He was the illegitimate son of Ivan Yakovlev, a wealthy and well-connected Russian nobleman, and his German mistress. His father brought his mother to live in Moscow but never married her and although Herzen inherited his fortune, he was never legitimized. He was, in short, a real Pierre Bezukhov. His childhood was difficult to say the least. His parents lived in separate parts of the same ghastly, lonely house. He was simultaneously ignored and mollycoddled – was 7 before he could go down the stairs unsupervised, at 15 wasn’t allowed out alone, and until he was 21 had to be home by 10.30. He had no friends except the servants, and saw few people other than his parents and uncles. His mother he hardly speaks of; his father might have been a model for Charles Ryder’s father in Brideshead Revisited – clever, mean, selfish, disappointed and cold. He disapproved of all spontaneity or show of emotion, and could never understand why he had no friends. (His son grew up the opposite – impulsive, vivid and original, bursting with a humane joie de vivre.) His father never, says Herzen, ever did anything to oblige other people. His contempt for mankind was unconcealed without exceptions. Stinging mockery and cool contemptuous irony were the weapons he could wield with the skill of an artist but  . . . who did he mean to impress by the performance? A woman whose will he had broken . . . a boy whom his own treatment drove from mere naughtiness to positive disobedience, and a score of footmen whom he did not reckon as human beings. Russia in the nineteenth century was a terrible place – poor, undeveloped, brutal, venal and totally corrupt from top to bottom. There was no justice at any level. Nobles could buy their way out of trouble; the bribery continued on a descending scale until it reached the serfs, who were owned by their masters and had no rights. The Tsar, Nicholas I, had set up the Third Section, a prototype KGB, that sniffed out rebellion everywhere. Where they couldn’t find it, they made it up, and the so-called courts meted out severe punishments. Once Herzen got to university (and even then he had to take a servant with him to lectures) he flourished ‒ writing, drinking and dreaming of a new and better socialist Russia. And talking endlessly. Pavel Annenkov, a contemporary, wrote that he was almost overwhelmed by Herzen’s ‘extraordinary mind which darted from one topic to another with unbelievable swiftness, with inexhaustible wit and brilliance. He had the most astonishing capacity for instantaneous, unexpected juxtaposition of quite dissimilar things . . . You had to be prepared to respond instantly. All pretentiousness, all pedantic self-importance simply melted like wax before a fire.’ Mind you, Annenkov added, ‘I knew people, serious practical men, who could not bear Herzen’s presence’ – so maybe he makes for easier reading than listening. As soon as he graduated in 1834 he was arrested by the Third Section, imprisoned, tried and sentenced to internal exile in Kirov. His crime – possibly singing anti-monarchist songs at a student party he could prove he had not attended. Russian justice in those days ran on sentence-first, verdict-afterwards lines. Many of his close friends suffered the same fate, and some did not survive. Herzen coolly writes that he preferred being in prison, where he could think in peace, to small-town Kirov, where he was surrounded by incompetents and dullards. Childhood, Youth and Exile ends with his return to Moscow in 1840. Ahead lay even more turbulent years. Having inherited his father’s fortune and married his cousin Natalie, in 1847 he left for France. Along went Natalie, three children, his mother, a tutor, a nanny and two servants. None of them ever set foot in Russia again. His closest friend, Nicholas Ogarev, and his wife (another Natalie who was also Herzen’s mistress and bore him another three children) joined them. In 1848 he experienced the heady excitement of that year’s French revolution and its disappointing aftermath. Personal tragedy struck. He lost his wife, his mother and his son and in 1852, sad and disillusioned, he moved to England to lick his wounds. He didn’t much care for London. He never learned to speak English properly (Jane Carlyle said his English was unintelligible), thought the women ugly and the men boring. However, he admired British institutions, particularly the legal system and the general tolerance of ideas. In London he founded the Free Russian press and published Kolokol (The Bell), probably the most effective crusading, muck-raking newspaper ever. Written in Russian and aimed at everyone concerned with the future of the country, it uncovered and published stories of corruption, violence and injustice. It was astonishingly influential, read by everyone from, so people said, the Tsar downwards. Herzen’s outlook was that of a modern campaigner. Publicity is the great weapon, he insisted – name and shame, and things will be done. In a prolix world he understood the value of the soundbite: ‘Houses for free men cannot be built by specialists in prison architecture’ hits the spot even now. Basically Herzen was a socialist with a thick anarchic streak, a sceptical idealist. He passionately advocated an agrarian revolution and he campaigned for trial by jury and freedom of the press. Some part of all these reforms was granted by the new Tsar, Alexander II. Herzen was against nobles, rulers, politicians, judges, officials, police, most institutions and priests of all denominations, and in favour of people of goodwill, energy and honesty who want to change the world. But reform had to come from below, he insisted: the time had come to stop ‘taking the people for clay and ourselves for sculptors’. He wasn’t a naïve dreamer; he understood the reality that revolutions consume themselves and he knew how easily men exchange one tyranny for another. Astonishingly prescient, while he feared the oppressors he feared the liberators just as much. As Isaiah Berlin says, ‘He is terrified of them because for him they are the secular heirs of the religious bigots of the ages of faith; because anybody who has a cut and dried scheme, a straitjacket which he wishes to impose on humanity as the sole possible remedy for all human ills, is bound to create a situation intolerable for free human beings.’ What would he have made of the Arab Spring? Herzen met his fellow exile Marx in London. I thought they might have had convivial coffees together in Soho, discussing revolutionary theories, but in fact the air between them was thick with mutual dislike and distrust. Marx’s grand theory that binds history, progress and the individual to some overarching abstraction was the antithesis of what Herzen believed. Another social reformer once said to him that man must always sacrifice himself to society.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘But surely the whole purpose and mission of man is the well-being of society?’

‘But it will never be attained if everyone makes sacrifices and nobody enjoys himself!’

That’s why, for me personally, Herzen is such an important figure. I was quite politically naïve when I first read him, sure the world  was divided into Them and Us: the privileged and powerful on one side and Us on the other. I was bowled over by finding a serious writer who seemed to agree. He’s an infinitely more sophisticated thinker than I could ever be but he laid the foundations of all my subsequent political beliefs then and I’ve never found reason to seriously doubt him. He supports the individual over the collective, the actual over the theoretical every time. What he really hated was the idea that some future blissful state justified present sacrifice and bloodshed; that people must endure terrible suffering now for some possible wondrous time ahead. Life was for living, he said, the present was what mattered, the future belonged to us, not we to it. He is the antidote to the gloomy Marx and the didactic Lenin. With courage and gaiety Herzen faced a world where, he said, nothing was certain, everything possible and ‘only art and the summer lightning of personal happiness’ could be counted on. When I took my copy off the shelf to write this piece, it fell apart. I have no idea where or when I acquired it – it’s a paperback, printed in 1980, it cost £2.50 second-hand or third-hand, and to me it’s a treasure. Herzen’s wisdom, humanity and wit shine out from its battered pages. You only have to look at the world around us to see how right he was. And he straddles one of the most turbulent centuries in history. Napoleon had just entered Moscow when he was born in 1812. His father met the Emperor and got a free family pass out of the flames in exchange for taking a message to the Tsar. Aged 6, he debated loyalty and nationalism with an elderly French general who had been dining at Versailles in 1789 when Marie Antoinette raised her glass, toasting confusion to the French Revolution. His youngest daughter lived until 1920. From hoops, powdered hair and the guillotine to modern times in one giant stride. Add an unshakeable belief in individual freedom and human decency and the importance of having fun – how can such a man be forgotten?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 51 © Amanda Theunissen 2016


About the contributor

Amanda Theunissen is a television producer who would like to be a serious political thinker but spends too much time trying to have fun.

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