Alexander Herzen

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexander Herzen was born in Moscow in 1812, just weeks before Napoleon's armies marched into the city. His very name was invented by his father, a rich Russian landowner named Ivan Yakovlev, who derived it from the German word Herz, meaning heart, because Alexander was a child born outside of marriage, a "child of his heart." That invented name would go on to carry enormous weight. By the time Herzen died in Paris in 1870, he had founded the first independent Russian political press operating outside Russia, published a journal that the Emperor himself was said to read in secret, and helped create the intellectual conditions that led to the emancipation of millions of serfs. Yet at the moment of his death, he was nearly forgotten. What does it mean to spend a lifetime fighting for a country you can never return to? How does a man born on the wrong side of a ledger become the conscience of a nation? And why did Isaiah Berlin, one of the most admired philosophers of the twentieth century, call Herzen's autobiography one of the great monuments of Russian literary and psychological genius?

• 2. An Illegitimate Beginning

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  Ivan Yakovlev, Herzen's father, conducted a personal interview with Napoleon during the French occupation of Moscow, and in exchange for carrying a letter from the French emperor to the Russian court, was allowed to escort his family safely through the Russian lines. The child Alexander traveled with them. That brush with the most convulsive event in early nineteenth-century European history set a tone. Herzen grew up in a household shaped by privilege and secrecy. His mother, Henriette Wilhelmina Luisa Haag, had come to Russia from Stuttgart, and the circumstances of her relationship with Yakovlev meant that Alexander occupied an ambiguous social position from birth. He was materially comfortable but legally precarious. He was first cousin to Count Sergei Lvovich Levitsky, whom historians regard as the patriarch of Russian photography. In 1860, Levitsky photographed Herzen in an image that became one of the most recognized portraits of the man. Herzen completed his studies at Moscow University, and in 1834, he and his lifelong friend Nikolay Ogarev were arrested. Their offense was attending a festival where verses mocking the tsar were sung. He was found guilty and in 1835 banished to Vyatka, a city in north-eastern European Russia now called Kirov.

• 3. Exile Within Russia

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  Vyatka was not a prison, but it was a form of confinement. Herzen remained there until 1837, when an unexpected visitor arrived: the tsar's son, Grand Duke Alexander, accompanied by the poet Zhukovsky. Their intervention secured Herzen's transfer to Vladimir, where he was appointed editor of the city's official gazette. That same year he eloped with his cousin Natalya Zakharina, marrying her in secret. His return to Moscow in 1840 brought him into contact with Vissarion Belinsky, the literary critic who would become a formative figure in the Russian intelligentsia and whom Herzen would strongly influence. A complaint Herzen made about a death caused by a police officer resulted in a fresh banishment, this time to Novgorod, where he served as a state councillor until 1842. In 1846, his father died and left him a large inheritance, the financial foundation that would later make his independent press possible. A year after receiving that inheritance, in 1847, Herzen emigrated with his wife, mother, and children, heading first to Italy. He never returned to Russia.

• 4. London and the Free Russian Press

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  Tragedy arrived in a cluster. Herzen's mother and one of his sons drowned in a shipwreck in 1851. His wife Natalia, who had carried on an affair with the German poet Georg Herwegh, died of tuberculosis in 1852. Herzen left Geneva and settled in London. In 1853, he founded the Free Russian Press, the first independent Russian political publishing house operating outside of Russia's borders. Its early years were grim. For three full years, the press printed without selling a single copy and could barely get one copy across the Russian border. The editors reportedly set aside a half-sovereign coin in a place of honor the day a bookseller bought ten shillings worth of their publication Baptized Property, an attack on serfdom. The death of Emperor Nicholas in 1855 changed everything. Herzen's writings were suddenly smuggled wholesale into Russia. Their influence spread across the country and into Europe. In 1856, his old friend Nikolay Ogarev joined him in London, and together they worked on Kolokol, known in English as The Bell. Published between 1857 and 1867 at Herzen's personal expense, The Bell broke the story in July 1857 that the government was considering serf emancipation, though it noted the government lacked the ability to resolve the question. It was said that the Emperor himself read the journal.

• 5. The Politics of the Middle Ground

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  Herzen refused easy allegiances. Russian liberals led by Boris Chicherin and Konstantin Kavelin believed individual freedom would emerge from rationalized social relations and a Hegelian evolution of the state toward reason. Herzen rejected this as blindness to historical reality. Russian radicals including Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolay Dobrolyubov pressed him to turn The Bell into a platform for violent revolution. He refused that too, warning that a new revolutionary government would merely replace one dictatorship with another. To the radicals who pushed him, he offered a blunt response: "You want happiness, I suppose? I dare say you do! Happiness has to be conquered. If you are strong, take it. If you are weak, hold your tongue." He had been shaped by Voltaire, Schiller, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, Hegel, and Feuerbach, and he worked to combine the ideals of the French Revolution with German philosophical thought. He disliked bourgeois values and sought authenticity among the Russian peasantry. After the Emancipation reform of 1861, Herzen did not declare victory but escalated. The Bell shifted its campaign to a program called Liberty and Land, pushing for constitutional rights, common ownership of land, and government by the people. His position began to collapse when the January Uprising of 1863-1864 forced Russian liberals to side with the tsar against the Poles. Herzen had pleaded the insurgents' cause. That breach cost him his liberal readership. The Bell ceased publication in 1867.

• 6. Complexity Over Doctrine

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  Herzen had been influenced by Hegel in his youth, but he arrived at an intellectual position that refused to crystallize into any single doctrine. He came to believe the complex questions of society could not be answered by grand narratives or predestined historical destinations. His writings in exile argued for small-scale communal living, protected by a non-interventionist government. He warned that grand doctrines ultimately produce enslavement, sacrifice, and tyranny. He described a Russia governed by Genghis Khan with a telegraph as one possible future, a vision of autocracy armed with modern technology. Tolstoy said he had never met another man with "so rare a combination of scintillating brilliance and depth." Isaiah Berlin, the twentieth-century philosopher who regarded Herzen as a personal hero, returned repeatedly to a specific strand of Herzen's thought: the condemnation of sacrificing actual human beings on the altar of abstractions, the refusal to subordinate present individual happiness to glorious dreams of the future. Berlin echoed Herzen's conviction that "the end of life is life itself." Berlin's collection of essays Russian Thinkers, published by the Hogarth Press in 1978, became the inspiration for Tom Stoppard's trilogy The Coast of Utopia, performed at London's National Theatre in 2002 and at New York's Lincoln Center in 2006-2007. Stoppard's plays examined Herzen alongside Bakunin, Belinsky, and Turgenev, with Herzen's character at their center. Herzen's autobiography, My Past and Thoughts, written between 1852 and 1870, remains his most enduring work, and Berlin placed it beside the great novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy.