<http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/061030crat_atlarge>
THE REVOLUTIONIST
by KEITH GESSEN
The worldly idealist at the heart of Stoppard's "Coast of Utopia."
Issue of 2006-10-30
Posted 2006-10-23
The Russian radical writer and philosopher Alexander Herzen loved Rome
for its warmth and spontaneity, but he was a little chagrined to find
himself there when the revolution of 1848 erupted in Paris, seven
hundred miles away. Luckily, the Romans were equal to the event. As
Herzen watched, they gathered at the embassy of the oppressive
Austrians, pulled down the enormous imperial coat of arms, stomped on
it, then hitched it to a donkey and dragged it through the streets.
"An amazing time," Herzen wrote to his Russian friends. "My hand
shakes when I pick up a paper, every day there is something
unexpected, some peal of thunder." He raced to Paris, where the
provisional government was handing out grants, like some gonzo arts
foundation, to anyone willing to spread the revolution abroad.
Herzen's old friend the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin had already started
east to foment revolution against the Tsar; another friend, the German
Romantic poet Georg Herwegh, was raising a battalion of émigré workers
and intellectuals to march on Baden-Baden. Herzen stayed in Paris to
see what would happen next.
Nothing good, as it turned out. The liberal provisional government,
challenged by the radical Paris workers, called in the National Guard
and unleashed a slaughter. Bakunin was arrested in Dresden, commencing
a long journey through the prisons of Europe. And Herwegh's battalion
was routed by the Prussian Army outside Baden-Baden, the poet
returning to Paris in disgrace. "Our hero could no more bear the smell
of gunpowder," his rival Heinrich Heine jeered, "than Goethe could
that of tobacco." Within a few months, the revolutionary tide had
rolled back all across Europe.
Herzen, heartbroken by the developments, announced that he was turning
inward: if society was not ready to be liberated from a crumbling
order, individuals could at least save themselves, as he put it, "from
the danger of falling ruins." He and Herwegh began to discuss plans
for a two-family commune. The events of 1848 had left the Herweghs
without resources, but Herzen had managed to get his assets out of
Russia, foiling the Tsar's attempt to seize them. "Money is
independence and power, it is a weapon," he explained,
unapologetically. "And no one throws away a weapon in time of war,
even if it comes from the enemy and is a little rusty." He found the
two families a house in Nice, and together they moved there in the
middle of 1850. Herzen was unaware that six months earlier his beloved
wife, Natalie, had begun a serious affair with Herwegh.
On the day that Herzen finally learned about it, he found himself
standing with Herwegh on a sheer rock cliff overlooking the sea at
Nice. He was out of his mind with rage. "Why didn't I immediately
start a conversation or push him off the bluff into the sea?" he later
wondered. He'd been betrayed by Herwegh—but how, exactly? Didn't he
believe that people should break away from traditional bonds of family
and religion? That the old world was dying? And how, assuming that
Herwegh was unequivocally at fault, was Herzen to take revenge? He was
an aristocrat, and aristocrats—Pushkin, for example—fought duels, but
Herzen believed that duelling was barbaric. Lamely, he asked Herwegh
whether he'd read a certain novel by George Sand; Herwegh claimed not
to remember, and slithered off to the bookshop. It was the last they
saw of each other.
What happened next—in a cascade of vicious letters, letters in
response, unopened letters, letters that were claimed to have been
unopened, and letters spread around Nice and Zurich and Geneva—became
a major scandal on the European left. It seemed to carry a lesson
about the dangers of the new ideas. The German socialist Arnold Ruge
wrote a five-act verse drama, "The New World," based on the events;
Marx gossiped about them to Engels. Herwegh told everyone who would
listen that Herzen was keeping Natalie against her will; Herzen
defended himself to his allies in the revolutionary movement. "I
belong to the new society to which you and your friends belong," he
wrote to the French anarchist Proudhon. "I belong to the revolution to
which Mazzini and his disciples belong." They responded warmly,
politely. But what could they do?
The episode is both awful and absurd. Even Tom Stoppard's witty,
crowded nine-hour play about Herzen and his circle, "The Coast of
Utopia"—over the next several months, it will be performed at Lincoln
Center in three parts—skirts most of this material, despite managing
to incorporate just about every significant event (and speech!) in
Russian intellectual history between 1833 and 1868. For Stoppard, a
playwright who has made a specialty of illuminating, with a gentle,
probing intelligence, the private lives of public figures, what Herzen
called his "family drama" may have been too private. It is also just
too sad: In late 1851, at the height of the scandal, Herzen's mother
and his young son Kolya drowned at sea. Natalie fell ill, a situation
that was compounded by another pregnancy. In the spring of 1852, she
and the child died.
Reeling and agitated—"I feel all the faintheartedness of my behavior,"
he wrote to a friend, "but everything is so terribly broken
inside"—Herzen moved to London, and began to write his bitter tale.
The result, "My Past and Thoughts," is one of the most remarkable
books in the Russian canon. In attempting to explain Herwegh's
perfidy, Herzen had first to explain whom it had been perpetrated
against. And who was Herzen? In 1852, he was forty years old, a
sharp-tongued aristocrat, a fervent revolutionary, and a writer of
genius. He had refused the Tsar's order to return to Russia, and so
had also become an exile. "I have lived too long as a free man," he
explained, "to allow myself to be chained again." This last fact was
especially notable because, more than anyone in his generation, Herzen
identified himself with Russia. From the very first sentence of his
memoirs, he was able to connect his life with the great currents of
the preceding half century. He was born in 1812, the year Napoleon's
Grand Armée entered Russia—and not only in 1812 but in Moscow, as it
was being evacuated and set on fire. Herzen's father had neglected to
remove his family in time, so he had to seek a special audience with
Napoleon to get them all out. "Tales of the fire of Moscow, of the
battle of Borodino . . . of the taking of Paris were my cradle songs,
my nursery stories, my Iliad and my Odyssey," Herzen wrote.
How did someone born to the top caste of a rigid, traditional
society—and imbued with this deep patriotism—come to reject the bases
of that society? That is the central question of the memoirs. As
always with Herzen, the personal was bound up with the political. In
early adolescence, he learned that his father had never got around to
marrying his mother, rendering Herzen illegitimate. Then, on December
14, 1825, a group of officers who had returned from Western Europe
after the Napoleonic Wars held a demonstration in Petersburg demanding
that the Tsar grant a constitution. The so-called Decembrists were
crushed, and the leaders—the flower of the educated nobility, friends
of Pushkin and readers of Voltaire—were hanged.
The executions made an indelible impression on Herzen, who watched
Nicholas I's subsequent march into Moscow ("He always looked like a
slightly bald Medusa") with disgust. He soon befriended a young man
named Nicholas Ogarev, and the two swore a "Hannibalistic oath" to
avenge the fallen heroes of December 14th. Less than a decade later,
Herzen and Ogarev were under arrest for having formed what was little
more than an anti-tsarist book club.
Herzen's Russian, in the memoirs, is clear and classical, like that of
his friend and contemporary Turgenev, and Herzen, like Turgenev, has a
romantic tenderness for Russia and for childhood. But, every few
pages, Herzen's memoir interrupts itself to make quick, acerbic
comments about a screaming injustice. "That was my first journey
through Russia," he writes at the end of his story about the family's
exit from Moscow in 1812, escorted first by Napoleon's cavalry, then
by Ukrainian Cossacks. His second journey, he continues dryly, took
place without such exalted company: "I was alone, and next to me sat a
drunken gendarme."
The gendarme escorted Herzen to his first stint of internal exile,
where he would spend four years for his anti-tsarist sentiments.
During this time, he struck up an intense correspondence with his
cousin Natalie and eloped with her in the middle of 1838. They had a
son, Sasha, and the next year were allowed to return to Moscow.
Herzen found the city in an intellectual frenzy: the Russians had
discovered Hegel, and, as always, they were taking things too
seriously. Herzen's friend Vissarion Belinsky, the literary critic,
was an especially rhapsodic Hegelian, unhampered by his lack of
German. But young Bakunin was the worst: He "learned German from Kant
and Fichte and then set to work upon Hegel, whose method and logic he
mastered to perfection—and to whom did he not preach it afterward? To
us and to Belinsky, to ladies and Proudhon."
Herzen himself was soon immersed in Hegel. He recognized the
significance of the debate: in the wake of Napoleon, Hegel had
announced a philosophy of history in which each country contributed
through its genius to the development of the World Spirit. Mired in
serfdom, tyranny, and daily violence, Russia had been left out. In
response, the Russians split into two camps: Westernizers, who wanted
to remedy Russia's backwardness, and Slavophiles, who thought it
should be lovingly preserved. Herzen became a Westernizer, though he
argued with one camp and then the other, wrote abstruse articles about
the Weltgeist for the literary magazines, and then argued some more.
These arguments—as well as the irresistible historical connections
afforded by such a small and influential élite—are the main reason
that Stoppard's play is nine hours long. Audiences may even suspect
that they've seen these Russians before, on their country estates,
arguing interminably among themselves about the meaning of life and
the direction of history. This is Peter from "The Cherry Orchard,"
this is Uncle Vanya. But two generations separate Chekhov from Herzen;
by the eighteen-nineties, history had indeed overtaken Uncle Vanya. It
had not done so when Herzen began his journey. Then, as he wrote
beautifully, "The Russia of the future existed exclusively among a few
boys, hardly more than children, so insignificant and unnoticed that
there was room for them between the soles of the great boots of the
autocracy and the ground." His generation was the best educated and
most privileged in Russian history, and incarnated a uniquely
optimistic moment: the old world was on its way out; the question was
merely what they would replace it with. If, for the time being, they
talked and talked, it was because they lived in a police state that
outlawed everything other than talk, and sometimes that, too.
They hashed over their personal relationships with equal fervor. The
last of the European Romantics—the British historian E. H. Carr
shrewdly titled his 1933 book about them "The Romantic Exiles"—they
believed they must be progressive in their private as well as their
political lives. The men and women of Herzen's circle kept a constant
surveillance of their feelings and the feelings of those around them,
to make sure that everyone was happy. In the course of their endless
correspondence, their all-night conversations, their complicated
marriages, they analyzed and analyzed. "Tell Melgunov that there may
really be some element lacking in our friendship," Herzen wrote
offhandedly to one friend. To the mild-mannered Ogarev he remarked,
"You have the strongest character of anyone I know—it is the strength
of weakness. . . . You have a broad comprehension of everything that
is human, and a dull incomprehension of everything that is particular
to Ogarev." The courtship letters of Natalie and Herzen are filled
with reflections on Schiller and the religion of love. When Ogarev's
first marriage began to fall apart—his wife cheated on him with every
literary journalist in Moscow—all their friends reread Goethe, and
George Sand, and talked about the morality of matrimony. Herzen
concluded that marriage without love was a crime; Natalie believed
this with all her heart.
As the eighteen-forties progressed, Herzen became a fixture in the
literary magazines; he even wrote a novel, "Who Is to Blame?," about a
love triangle. (Everyone was to blame.) But real thought and real
action were impossible under the police regime of Nicholas I. "So long
as we were arguing that Goethe was objective but that his objectivity
was subjective," as Herzen put it, "while Schiller as a poet was
subjective but that his subjectivity was objective, and vice versa,"
things were fine; but the censorship would become ruinous, he knew, as
soon as writers began to address political subjects. Many of Herzen's
contemporaries succumbed to despair, retiring to their estates and
various forms of dissipation. They became—gentle, alcoholic Ogarev for
a time was a perfect specimen—"superfluous men." Some of the more
ambitious went abroad. In 1847, a year after Herzen's father died and
made him the richest socialist revolutionary in Europe, he followed
them.
He was, it seemed, right on time. The steppes of Russia closed behind
him—a year after his departure, Nicholas I imposed severe travel
restrictions—while Europe stood on the brink of the transformation
he'd been waiting for since the Decembrists were hanged. And then it
failed. The simultaneous collapse of both his marriage and the 1848
uprisings was the major blow of Herzen's life. Politically, he
concluded that a premature revolution would inevitably lead to a
crushing reaction. (Lenin, who loved Herzen's writings, drew a
slightly different conclusion: one can picture him reading with glee
the scenes of social-democratic incompetence that Herzen describes so
well.) Personally, he decided that everything was finished for him. In
the years to come, he repeatedly returned to this moment. "The event
draws a line through my life," he wrote. It was, he believed, an "end
to my personal life."
But life never ends just like that. Herzen wrote the first four parts
of "My Past and Thoughts" between 1852 and 1855. It was immediately
acknowledged as a masterpiece and widely translated. "It's a wonder,"
Turgenev told him. "It possesses a kind of manly and artless truth."
Marx learned to read Russian by studying it; Nabokov, a few
generations later, recalled that it was his father's favorite book.
Isaiah Berlin considered it "a literary masterpiece to be placed by
the side of the novels of his contemporaries and countrymen, Turgenev,
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky."
This is not quite right. Herzen's book is a loose, baggy monster that
lacks the dramatic tension and economy of "Fathers and Sons." Turgenev
was the first realist novelist in Russia; his books were wonderfully
normal, as if Russia were like other places, even if Russians weren't
quite like other people. Herzen's memoirs are, in contrast,
fundamentally generative: he saw everything in Russia as though for
the first time. Perhaps it was just his natural skepticism ("I see you
are going to poke fun," Bakunin tells him), or perhaps it was his
reading of Hegel, but nothing seems natural to Herzen. "Where do these
people come from?" he asks upon seeing an uncommonly
disciplined-looking officer in full military regalia. "He must have
flogged soldiers in his day for the way they paraded." He is never so
amused by absurd injustice that he ceases to be outraged, but never so
outraged that he ceases to be amused. Having been told to report for
an interrogation by the head of the secret police, he is struck by the
aristocratic collegiality of the request: "It was exactly as if we'd
agreed to go to Smurov's for oysters."
And whereas Turgenev's characters are always rendered with a distanced
precision, Herzen is frankly enamored of his friends. "He could not
preach or lecture; what he needed was a quarrel," he wrote of
Belinsky, who died of consumption in 1848:
If he met with no objection, if he was not stirred to irritation, he
did not speak well, but when he felt stung, when his cherished
convictions were called in question, when the muscles of his cheeks
began to quiver and his voice to burst out, then he was worth seeing;
he pounced on his opponent like a panther, he tore him to pieces, made
him a ridiculous, a piteous object, and incidentally developed his own
thought, with unusual power and poetry. The dispute would often end in
blood, which flowed from the sick man's throat; pale, gasping, with
his eyes fixed on the man with whom he was speaking, he would lift his
handkerchief to his mouth with shaking hand and stop, deeply
mortified, crushed by his physical weakness. How I loved and how I
pitied him at those moments!
This is much more than the description of an individual. Like
Emerson's early essays, it inaugurates a national style. Herzen does
this sociologically and through the dramatic retelling of literary and
intellectual history; Emerson did so through exhortation and
reflections on nature. (This is why Russia has literary and
philosophical debate, and we have "Snow Falling on Cedars.") The
memoirs became, as Isaiah Berlin beautifully put it, a Noah's Ark,
into which Herzen stowed the people he loved before the terrible storm
that was sure to sweep them away.
The composition of the memoirs returned Herzen to the world. In early
1853, he purchased a printing press and Cyrillic fonts and, with the
help of a group of Polish exiles, began printing books and sending
them to Russia. He started by publishing his own work, including his
book of essays on 1848, "From the Other Shore," with its famous
dedicatory preface to his teen-age son, Sasha: "We do not build, we
destroy; we do not proclaim a new truth, we abolish an old lie.
Contemporary man only builds the bridge; another, unknown man of the
future will walk across it. You perhaps will see it. I beg of you: Do
not remain on this shore." Soon came the Crimean War, which Russia
lost, and the death of Nicholas I, whom Herzen loathed. Change was
afoot! He launched a literary magazine, The Polar Star, in which he
serialized "My Past and Thoughts." In 1856, his childhood friend
Ogarev arrived from Russia with his new wife. Encouraged by tales of
his work's reception in his homeland, Herzen joined Ogarev to start
the monthly, and later fortnightly, newspaper, The Bell.
The Bell and The Polar Star were a revelation. They were mailed into
Russia and smuggled into Russia—and read by everyone. The Polar Star
contained long philosophical essays, Herzen's memoirs, and classic
banned works, like Pushkin's pro-Decembrist poems. The Bell, more
timely, consisted of political statements, compromising materials on
government officials, and letters from all corners of the empire.
Above all, though, they were written by free men, who did not cringe
before the censor, who could call plainly for the abolition of
serfdom, say, instead of "the rational allocation of economic forces."
Finally, they were mostly written by Herzen, and Herzen could really
write. His words leaped from the page and danced, and when they needed
to they stung. Here he is thundering at the gentry about serfdom:
We are slaves because our great-grandfathers sold their human dignity
for inhumane rights, and we profit from them. We are slaves because we
are masters. We are servants because we are landowners, and landowners
without any belief in our rights. We are serfs because we keep our
brothers against their will who are our equals by birth, by blood, and
by language.
With Herzen's publications, the years between 1855 and 1861 became one
of those strange, hopeful interludes that punctuate Russian history,
when it seems as if all the country's humiliations and failures might
be righted by the efforts of a few just men. Young people collected
money and travelled to London to tell Herzen they would die for
him—and to ask him how they should live. (Herzen invariably suggested
that they help with distribution.) He gave money to poor political
émigrés, and to those in Russia he gave hope. Bakunin, upon escaping
from Siberia, in 1861, headed straight to the Herzen household. Two
forces contended in Russia during those years: Alexander II, Tsar of
all the Russias, and Alexander Herzen, whose name couldn't even be
mentioned in print.
Even as Herzen achieved success with The Bell, he managed to get
involved, incredibly, in another love triangle. Ogarev had lost his
riches during his divorce, and so he and his second wife, Natalie—who
had once been the closest friend of Natalie Herzen—had moved into
Herzen's house upon arriving in London. Before long, Natalie Ogarev
developed feelings for Herzen. Ogarev let her go quietly—he did not
believe in marriage, and, what's more, he was sterile. Soon Natalie
was pregnant with a daughter, Liza, and Ogarev had taken up with an
English prostitute named Mary Sutherland, whom he'd met at a bar.
Stoppard, this time, is more than equal to the madness of the
triangle. He weaves it into the fabric of Herzen's political life: as
the domestic arrangement begins to unravel, so, too, does the standing
of The Bell. In the years leading up to the emancipation of the serfs,
in 1861, Herzen threw his support behind the liberal policy of
emancipation "with land." But the young people who had been reared on
Herzen's political writings wanted more. Morbidly sincere where Herzen
was quick and ironic, "scientific" where he was romantic, contemptuous
of art and unable, in Herzen's words, to eat a good meal without
gnashing their teeth, they were the "sons," depicted with a certain
amount of sympathy by Turgenev; ten years later, having radicalized
and degenerated, they became "the Possessed" depicted with pure venom
by Dostoyevsky. They criticized Herzen for thinking that tsarist
Russia could be reformed when it needed to be destroyed, and they
repeatedly pleaded with him to call for Russians to rise up against
their oppressors. Herzen resisted.
In an inspired scene, Stoppard imagines the famous but unrecorded
London visit of the young radicals' leader, Nikolai Chernyshevsky. He
has come from Petersburg to have it out at last with Herzen, whom he
used to worship, but finds the great man surrounded by bedlam: Natalie
is hysterical, Ogarev has brought Mary Sutherland over for the first
time, the kids are running around, and the nearsighted Chernyshevsky
can't tell whose children are whose. (They're all Herzen's.) He feels
humiliated. In the play, as in history, the radicals and Herzen never
see eye to eye again. The emancipation, when it came, was onerous to
the peasants, proving the radicals right. Two years later, Herzen
supported a Polish uprising against the tsarist Army and lost the
liberals. (In a clash between Russian serfs and Russian landowners,
your sympathies might be determined by your politics. But a clash
between Russians and Poles was a clash between Russians and Poles.)
The circulation of The Bell plummeted. And though Herzen and Natalie
and Ogarev and Mary settled down somewhat, no one was entirely happy
or calm or in the right.
Herzen's last years were spent fitfully trying to revive The Bell and
dashing through Europe to sort out the tangled lives of his children.
Sasha had earned a medical degree but wasn't practicing medicine; his
eldest daughter, Tata, kept getting involved with men Herzen didn't
approve of. Natalie threatened to take their daughter Liza back to
Russia if Herzen didn't marry her. Meanwhile, Chernyshevsky was
arrested; the younger generation grew more radical. "The Decembrists
were our great fathers," Herzen wrote to Ogarev. "These . . . are our
prodigal sons." In 1866, a student in Petersburg fired a pistol at the
Tsar, inaugurating the modern age of political terror. He, too, would
have read Herzen as a youth.
Stoppard ends his monumental play in 1868, on a note of despair and
futility and impending disaster. Herzen is left with his ten-year-old
daughter, Liza, whom he asks for a kiss. She obliges happily. But, as
the lights fade, we know that the revolution is coming, merciless and
terrible—and we also know, if we know about Herzen, that five years
after his death little Liza, seventeen and depressed about an unhappy
love affair, committed suicide by smothering herself with a
chloroform-soaked cloth.
Alexander Herzen, the most noble, humane, passionate, and touching
figure of the Russian nineteenth century, gets dusted off every fifty
years or so, when liberalism feels that it is in crisis. This happened
in 1912, his centenary, when Lenin fought over him with those he
called "the knights of liberal verbiage," and again in the
nineteen-fifties, when Isaiah Berlin produced the essays about Herzen
that later formed the core of his classic "Russian Thinkers." And this
is fair enough: Herzen was one of the first to experience fully, in
both his personal and his political life, the crisis of in-betweenness
that was to characterize the best of progressive thought for the next
century and a half.
The trouble with this in-betweenness, of course, is that it makes it
difficult to say what, exactly, Herzen was for. ("The abolition of
serfdom from above or below," Stoppard's Ogarev says, "except from
below.") Berlin solved the problem by turning him into the ultimate
skeptic of history and progress, explaining very clearly what he was
against. "We have marveled enough at the deep abstract wisdom of
nature and history," Berlin quotes Herzen declaring. "It is time to
realize that nature and history are full of the accidental and the
senseless, of muddles and bungling." This is a Herzen of perpetual
negation and disillusionment, a Cold War Herzen, a British Herzen,
and, for the most part, this is Stoppard's Herzen, too.
There were other Herzens, though, and other possible endings to
Stoppard's play. Herzen was a great negative thinker, but he was also
the founder of Russia's peculiar brand of messianic socialism, whereby
the backward nation would save Europe by bypassing all forms of
capitalist development and simply performing, as Marx put it, a
"somersault into the anarchist-socialist-atheist millennium." He
thought that Russia would win the Crimean War, that the peasant
commune could form the basis for socialist government, that Europe was
exhausted and beyond rescue. He told the students to go "to the
people," and they did. He became a gradualist, but he was never a
liberal; he approvingly quotes Proudhon: "I reject your constitution,
not only because it is bad, but because it is a constitution."
As a political prophet, then, Herzen was a bust. What one finds so
moving about him is, instead, his capacity for self-examination and
his commitment to ordinary life. Unlike the great, blithe fanatics of
the revolutionary movement, he always wondered if he might be wrong.
"I am angry with you and with myself," he wrote to Ogarev in 1866,
"that we weren't able to make anything out of our lives for
ourselves." In his diary, he confessed, "We all thought we could get
away with everything. No one got away with anything."
But he never made an idol of his disillusionment; he never turned his
failure into a principle of action. Herzen had failed to save Natalie,
and then failed with the other Natalie, but when he heard, in late
1869, that his daughter Tata was in trouble, he raced to Florence to
help her. Tata had experienced a nervous breakdown after a failed
engagement to an Italian intellectual, who had begun to behave
viciously in the wake of the affair. "I have found my Herwegh," she
told her father. Yet she had also found her Herzen. He sat by her
bedside until she recovered. Then he took her to Paris.
It was January, 1870, and the capital of world revolution was once
again in turmoil. The streets were filled with protesters, and the
halls were filled with meetings. Herzen took it all in. "History is
being decided here," he wrote excitedly to Ogarev, who, Herzen
lamented, was wasting his time in provincial Geneva. In those final
weeks of his life, before he succumbed suddenly to inflammation of the
lungs, the most sardonic member of his generation—the scourge not only
of the Tsar but of radical blowhards and utopian schemers—was seen
going from meeting to meeting, like a young revolutionary.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/books/review/Grimes.t.html>
February 25, 2007
Essay
Rediscovering Alexander Herzen
By WILLIAM GRIMES
AT the end of "The Coast of Utopia," Tom Stoppard's trilogy about
Russia's radical intelligentsia in the 19th century, the aristocratic
socialist Alexander Herzen has a dream. Karl Marx appears before him,
expounding his theories of determinism and the proletariat's forward
march. Herzen protests. "History knocks at a thousand gates at every
moment, and the gatekeeper is chance," he argues. "We shout into the
mist for this one or that one to be opened for us, but through every
gate are a thousand more. We need wit and courage to make our way
while our way is making us."
Both qualities suffuse Herzen's "My Past and Thoughts," the memoirs
that furnished Stoppard with a wealth of source material for his
trilogy. In the midst of a run at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at
Lincoln Center, "The Coast of Utopia" has already made a surprise
backlist hit of Isaiah Berlin's "Russian Thinkers," a collection of
incisive portraits of Herzen, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the
literary critic Vissarion Belinsky and others. Perhaps it can do the
same for Herzen's memoirs, quite possibly the least-read great work of
Russia's glorious 19th century.
It was in a reflective mood that Herzen, living in exile in London,
put pen to paper in 1852 and wrote the opening chapters of what would
eventually become "My Past and Thoughts." He was a lonely, isolated
figure, struggling to make sense of his own history. His personal life
was in ruins. His mother and son had recently drowned in a shipwreck,
and his grief-stricken wife, who had been carrying on a ruinous affair
with the radical German poet Georg Herwegh, soon fell ill and died as
well.
Although still in his early 40s, he had already lived several
lifetimes politically. After enduring years of harassment and internal
political exile in Russia, he plunged into the swirl of revolutionary
politics in Italy and France as the fateful year 1848 approached.
After being expelled from France, he carried on his brilliant career
as a polemicist by founding the Free Russian Press in London, where
his home was a magnet for the great revolutionary figures of the age,
from Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini to Louis Blanc and Lajos
Kossuth.
Until his death in 1870, Herzen worked on "My Past and Thoughts" in
fits and starts, adopting an idiosyncratic approach that gave free
reign to his restless, skeptical intellect and allowed him maximum
freedom of movement. "My Past and Thoughts" includes bright vignettes,
memorable set pieces, sharply drawn character sketches, observations
on national customs, correspondence with friends and mini-treatises on
various political thinkers. Digressive and wayward, it could be read
as the outtakes from his more formal political writing, the "Letters
From France and Italy," "From the Other Shore" and "The Russian People
and Socialism." It is at the same time a mesmerizing self-portrait.
Herzen's mind and personality, reflected in an exquisite prose style,
elevates "My Past and Thoughts" into the higher reaches of literary
art. "He possessed a singular combination of fiery imagination,
capacity for meticulous observation, moral passion and intellectual
gaiety," wrote Isaiah Berlin, "with a talent for writing in a manner
at once pungent and distinguished, ironical and incandescent,
brilliantly entertaining and at times rising to great nobility of
feeling and expression." Herzen was also by all accounts a brilliant
conversationalist, and one of the many pleasures of "My Past and
Thoughts" is the chance to hear him speak, if only in snippets.
Dwight Macdonald, who shortened Constance Garnett's four-volume
translation of "My Past and Thoughts" into a single book in the early
1970s, suggested that if The New Yorker had existed in the 19th
century, Herzen would have been one of its prize writers. That sounds
exactly right. A better "far-flung correspondent" would be hard to
imagine. Herzen had a novelist's gift for rendering character and
dialogue, a journalist's zeal for on-the-spot reporting and an
instinct for the happy phrase and apt metaphor. Fluent in five modern
languages, he had a vast repertory of literary allusions at his
fingertips. Best of all, his acute sense of the absurd never flagged,
even in dismal circumstances.
Simply as a portrait gallery, "My Past and Thoughts" makes
irresistible reading, as Herzen moves through the turbulent political
events that engage figures like Garibaldi, Mazzini, Proudhon, Belinsky
and Turgenev. The dread Nicholas I is "a slightly bald Medusa with
cropped hair and mustaches," convinced that his imperial gaze "had the
power of a rattlesnake, of freezing blood in the veins." An
incorrigible gossip, Herzen cannot resist describing the scene in
which Nicholas engages his equally iron-willed daughter in a staring
contest so prolonged that nearby courtiers begin to panic.
Mikhail Bakunin, the anarchist, slips in and out of the pages of "My
Past and Thoughts" like quicksilver, always delivering, courtesy of
Herzen, a scintillating comic turn. Herzen admired Bakunin as a noble
soul, but he saw all too clearly his friend's manifold defects, above
all his childlike irresponsibility and impetuousness.
These qualities were on full display as Poland prepared to rise
against Russia, its overlord, in 1862. "Bakunin grew younger," Herzen
writes. "He was in his element. He loved not only the uproar of revolt
and the noise of the club, the marketplace and the barricade; he loved
the preparatory agitation, the excited and at the same time restrained
life spent among conspiracies, consultations, sleepless nights,
conferences, agreements, corrections of ciphers, invisible inks and
secret signs."
Herzen regarded the world with a cool, ironic eye. It is the source of
his comedy. But he burned with a sense of the world's injustices. His
denunciations of the bourgeoisie match Marx for vituperative heat. The
petty, calculating side of British and French middle-class life
repulsed him. Italy, with its spontaneity and warmth, was more to his
taste — more Russian, in fact.
"My Past and Thoughts" embraces a wide range of moods and emotional
registers, from the poignant lyricism of the chapters on childhood to
the anguished, self-lacerating examination of the Herwegh affair (not
included in the Macdonald abridgement). Herzen's version is hot,
vindictive and wildly unfair — in other words, the one you want to
read first. Herwegh is portrayed as a weak-willed, cowardly
narcissist, a third-rate poet who, while protesting undying devotion
to Herzen, sets about seducing his wife. Herwegh's slavishly adoring
wife, whom Herzen loathed, gets her share of abuse as well. With cruel
precision, Herzen describes her foghorn voice, her simpering Romantic
vocabulary, her appetite for self-abasement before the altar of
genius. As a character assassin, Herzen knows no peer.
At the time he published the first chapters of "My Past and Thoughts,"
Herzen's best years lay ahead of him. In July 1857 he and his
childhood friend, the poet Nikolai Ogarev, began publishing a new
periodical, The Bell. A rough equivalent of I. F. Stone's Weekly, The
Bell analyzed political developments in Russia, exposed crimes and
abuses and put the fear of God into czarist functionaries high and
low. "V. P. Botkin himself," Herzen wrote, referring to a famous
reactionary, "constant as a sunflower in his inclination toward any
manifestation of power, looked with tenderness on The Bell as though
it had been stuffed with truffles."
"My Past and Thoughts" winds down inconclusively. Its final chapter
contains a brief account of Herzen's last years in Switzerland, some
random observations on Italian architecture and Heinrich Heine, and
some fascinating predictions about the United States ("The standard of
their civilization is lower than that of Western Europe, but they have
one standard and all attain to it: in that is their fearful
strength"). Most telling, however, is his attack on the new breed of
radical coming to the fore in Russia, and epitomized in the "nihilist"
Bazarov, the antihero of Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons."
In Bazarov, Herzen recognized his replacement. The world had turned
since he and Ogarev, aflame with the ideas of the French Revolution
and German philosophy, had stood on the hills overlooking Moscow and
sworn eternal faith to the liberal Decembrist uprising of 1825. By the
year of his death, Herzen was yesterday's man, and his natural heirs
would be among the first victims of the revolution to come. His
enduring legacy was not a just, democratic Russia. It was "My Past and
Thoughts."
William Grimes is a book critic for The Times.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
