Who is alexander herzen

In Herzen moved to London. The accession of Alexander II in gave Herzen hope that reform would take place in Russia and he established the Free Russian Press that published a series of journals including The Bell.

Herzen predicted that because of its backward economy, socialism would be introduced into Russia before any other European country. Herzen was joined in England by Mikhail Bakunin. The two men worked together on the journal until when Bakunin went to join the insurrection in Poland.

The Bell was smuggled into Russia where it was distributed to those who favoured reform. According to Isaiah Berlin "Herzen He exposed, he denounced, he derided, he preached, he became a kind of Russian Voltaire of the mid-nineteenth century. He was a journalist of genius, and his articles, written with brilliance, gaiety and passion, although, of course, officially forbidden, circulated in Russia and were read by radicals and conservatives alike.

Herzen's views expressed in the newspaper appeared fairly conservative to those embracing the ideas of revolutionary groups such as the People's Will and the Liberation of Labour. Herzen criticized the desire to impose a new system on the people arguing that the time had come to stop "taking the people for clay and ourselves for sculptors".

Herzen wrote that left-wing intellectuals should stop taking "the people for clay and ourselves for sculptors". On one occasion Louis Blanc , a committed socialist, said to Herzen that human life was a great social duty, that man must always sacrifice himself to society.

Herzen asked him why? Blanc replied "Surely the whole purpose and mission of man is the well-being of society. Herzen rejected the ideas of people like Karl Marx who promoted the idea that socialism was inevitable.

As Isaiah Berlin points out: "The purpose of the struggle for liberty is not liberty tomorrow, it is liberty today, the liberty of living individuals with their own individual ends, the ends for which they move and fight and perhaps die, ends which are sacred to them. To crush their freedom, their pursuits, to ruin their ends for the sake of some vague felicity in the future which cannot be guaranteed, about which we know nothing, which is simply the product of some enormous metaphysical construction that itself rests upon sand, for which there is no logical, or empirical, or any other rational guarantee - to do that is in the first place blind, because the future is uncertain; and in the second place vicious, because it offends against the only moral values we know; because it tramples on human demands in the name of abstractions - freedom, happiness, justice - fanatical generalizations, mystical sounds, idolized sets of words.

In Herzen wrote: "Social progress is possible only under complete republican freedom, under full democratic equality. A republic that would not lead to Socialism seems an absurdity to us - a transitional stage regarding itself as the goal. On the other hand, Socialism which might try to dispense with political freedom would rapidly degenerate into an autocratic Communism.

The senile barbarism of the sceptre or the wild barbarism of communism, the bloody sabre, or the red flag? Communism will sweep across the world in a violent tempest - dreadful, bloody, unjust, swift. Isaiah Berlin has argued: "The purpose of the struggle for liberty is not liberty tomorrow, it is liberty today, the liberty of living individuals with their own individual ends, the ends for which they move and fight and perhaps die, ends which are sacred to them.

Herzen believed that any socialist revolution in Russia would have to be instigated by the peasantry. According to Edward Acton : "Nineteenth-century Russia was overwhelmingly a peasant society, and it was to the peasantry that Herzen looked for revolutionary upheaval and socialist construction. Central to his vision was the existence of the Russian peasant commune.

In most parts of the empire the peasantry lived in small village communes where the land was owned by the commune and was periodically redistributed among individual households along egalitarian lines. In this he saw the embryo of a socialist society. If the economic burdens of serfdom and state taxation were to be removed, and the land of the nobility made over to the communes, they would develop into flourishing socialist cells.

Acton goes on to argue: "The oppression of the central state could be done away with altogether and replaced by a socialist society of independent, egalitarian communes.

There was no need for Russia to follow in the footsteps of the West, to pass through the purgatory of capitalist, industrial and urban development or of bourgeois constitutional government.

She could benefit from her late arrival on the historical scene and avoid the mistakes of others. Lenin was later to criticise the ideas of Herzen: "Herzen belonged to the generation of revolutionaries among the nobility and landlords of the first half of the last century His 'socialism' was one of the countless forms and varieties of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois socialism of the period of , which were dealt their death-blow in the June days of that year.

In point of fact, it was not socialism at all, but so many sentimental phrases, benevolent visions, which were the expression at that time of the revolutionary character of the bourgeois democrats, as well as of the proletariat, which had not yet freed itself from the influence of those democrats Tom Stoppard has written about Herzen's relationship with Karl Marx : "Marx distrusted Herzen, and was despised by him in return.

Herzen had no time for the kind of mono-theory that bound history, progress and individual autonomy to some overarching abstraction like Marx's material dialecticism. What he did have time for - and what bound Isaiah Berlin to him - was the individual over the collective, the actual over the theoretical. What he detested above all was the conceit that future bliss justified present sacrifice and bloodshed.

The future, said Herzen, was the offspring of accident and wilfulness. There was no libretto or destination, and there was always as much in front as behind. The book was a mixture of autobiography and an analysis of the social, political and ideological developments that had taken place during his life. Edward Acton has pointed out: "In its pages the pattern of his own life was skillfully woven into the fabric of political, social and ideological developments around him In fusing his personal experience with the history of an era, Herzen created a literary and political masterpiece which shows no signs of losing its force.

Neither my father nor my uncle was specially tyrannical, at least in the way of corporal punishment. My uncle, being hot-tempered and impatient, was often rough and unjust to servants; but he thought so little about them and came in contact with them so seldom, that each side knew little of the other.

My father wore them out by his fads : he could never pass over a look or a word or a movement without improving the occasion; and a Russian often resents this treatment more than blows or bad language. Corporal punishment was almost unknown with us; and the two or three cases in which it was resorted to were so exceptional, that they formed the subject of conversation for whole months downstairs; it should also be said that the offences which provoked it were serious.

I was strongly affected by those horrible scenes: at the summons of the landowner, a file of military police would appear like thieves in the night and seize their victim without warning; the bailiff would explain that the master had given orders the night before for the man to be sent to the recruiting office; and then the victim, through his tears, tried to strike an attitude, while the women wept, and all the people gave him presents, and I too gave what I could, very likely a sixpenny necktie.

I remember too an occasion when a village elder spent some money due from peasants to their master, and my father ordered his beard to be shaved off, by way of punishment.

This form of penalty puzzled me, but I was impressed by the man's appearance: he was sixty years old, and he wept profusely, bowing to the ground and offering to repay the money and a hundred roubles more, if only he might escape the shame of losing his beard.

In nature, as in the souls of men, there slumber endless possibilities and forces, and in suitable conditions The life of people becomes a pointless game Men build something with pebbles and sand only to see it all collapse again; and human creatures crawl out from underneath the ruins and again start clearing spaces and build huts of moss and planks and broken capitals and, after centuries of endless labour, it all collapses again.

Not in vain did Shakespeare say that history was a tedious tale told by an idiot To this I reply that you are like Human beings have an instinctive passion to preserve anything they like. Man is born and therefore wishes to live for ever. Man falls in love and wishes to be loved, and loved for ever as in the very first moment of his avowal Life does not ensure existence, nor pleasure; she does not answer for their continuance.

Every historical moment is full and is beautiful, is self-contained in its own fashion. Every year has its own spring and its own summer, its own winter and autumn, its own storms and fair weather.

Every period is new, fresh, filled with its own hopes and carries within itself its own joys and sorrows. The present belongs to it. But human beings are not content with this, they must needs own the future too What is the purpose of the song the singer sings? If you look beyond your pleasure in it for something else, for some other goal, the moment will come when the singer stops and then you will only have memories and vain regrets You are confused by categories that are not fitted to catch the flow of life.

What is this goal for which you [he means Mazzini and the liberals and the socialists are seeking - is it a programme? An order? Who conceived it? To whom was the order given? Removed from his native environment, though, the Russian intelligent encountered societies in which fewer — perhaps very few — educated people had qualms about the acquisition of material wealth and in which there were myriad opportunities to make money, through enterprise or speculation. In Herzen after his arrival in the West one detects a disjunction between the idealism of the Russian intelligentsia and a more pragmatic outlook encouraged by Western economic conditions.

We have seen signs in Herzen's behaviour even before his departure from Russia that he was predisposed to a greater extent than many of his Russian contemporaries to adopt this outlook. On the one hand, Herzen was a barin or gentleman who used the Romantic ideas and manner of his age to deplore the vulgar bourgeois world and to exalt the common man, the Russian peasant who supposedly led an authentic, natural life.

On the other hand, he was an investor and speculator who, to be sure, wished from the mids to fund his political and literary ventures but who also intended to continue to live in the style of a nobleman and relished the unprecedented opportunities for money-making that opened up before him in the West.

His relations with the Rothschilds suggest a private acceptance that the disdain of the Russian intelligentsia for material goods and bourgeois values was a restrictive pose. Publicly, though, he continued to condemn the financial activity in which he allowed himself privately to participate, thus helping significantly to perpetuate in the Russian intelligentsia a deep antipathy towards the bourgeois world and its values and, arguably, to retard Russia's economic, social and political development.

In the nineteenth century the Julian calendar was twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar. Pis'ma iz Frantsii i Italii , in A. References to Herzen's works and letters in brackets in the text of this article are to this definitive edition volumes are indicated by Roman numerals and pages by Arabic numerals. S togo berega , ibid. In El'sberg's biography of over six hundred and fifty pages, for example, Rothschild's name does not appear except in a quotation from one of Herzen's works: see Ia.

El'sberg, Gertsen: Zhizn' i tvorchestvo , 3rd edn, Moscow, Even in Judith Zimmerman's monograph, which is devoted almost entirely to Herzen's life and career in the years , there is but a handful of references to Rothschild: see Judith Zimmerman, Mid-Passage: Alexander Herzen and European Revolution, , Pittsburgh, PA, See , e.

Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly, London, , pp. Elena Dryzhakova's monograph, Gertsen na zapade: v labirinte nadezhd, slavy i otrechenii , St Petersburg, , belongs in the same tradition, as its title suggests. The first twelve of these letters of Herzen's and the letter from Luise Haag relate to the period Several of the letters written after , especially some of a spate in , also have pertinence for this study of Herzen's relations with James de Rothschild in the early years of his emigration, for they relate to investments arranged in those years through the Paris branch of the banking house.

Also at CAMT are copies of thirty-one of the letters written by the bank to Herzen over the period June to July and one letter written to Herzen's surviving son in after Herzen's death. These copies are preserved in the surviving volumes, or registers, of copies of the bank's correspondence with its private customers.

Unfortunately there are no copies of letters from Rothschilds' to their private customers before February , i. The entire correspondence between Herzen and the bank was conducted in French.

I gratefully acknowledge the permission granted by The Rothschild Archive to have access to the material at CAMT, to draw on and quote from it in this article and to publish it in an edited form. For a more detailed summary of the weaknesses in Herzen's writings to which I draw attention in this and the next two paragraphs see my book Journeys to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing , Dordrecht, , pp.

Berlin, "Introduction", op. Carr: Herzen "felt himself something of a Byron" E. In she married the German composer Adolf Reichel , whom Bakunin had befriended in Paris, and who had been widowed the previous year. On the death of Natalie Herzen Mariia and her husband took care of Herzen's daughters, Natal'ia Tata and Ol'ga, who did not rejoin Herzen until April , by which time he had settled in London.

There is a large literature on the family. Ferguson briefly touches on the relations between James de Rothschild and Herzen on pp. This reference to the Rothschilds remained unchanged in later editions of this letter, published in and , even though by that time Herzen was much indebted to the family.

There is a further reference to the Rothschilds on p. Only about one quarter of Russia's serf-owners possessed more than one hundred souls at this period: see Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia , Dekalb, , p. Besides the silver rouble there existed in nineteenth-century Russia a paper rouble, or assignat.

The silver rouble was worth between three and four times more than a paper rouble. Roubles mentioned hereafter in this article are silver roubles unless otherwise stated. Egorov et al. Gertsena , 5 vols. This institution the Russian term for which is Sokhrannaia kazna originated within the Board of Guardians Opekunskii sovet founded in the age of Catherine ruled for the care of widows and orphans.

In the documents that I have consulted both these Russian terms are used to denote the institution that issued the bonds inherited by Herzen and his mother. Some impression of the extent of this wealth can be gained from the fact that a million francs would have been sufficient to maintain Herzen's large household in comfort in central Paris, at the rate of expenditure that Herzen was incurring there in Herzen, SS , xxiii, p.

A further indication of the strength of Herzen's financial position after the recovery of his estate and in the post-revolutionary French climate is provided by a letter of April , in which Herzen told Kliuchariov that one could rent a marvellous furnished and carpeted flat in central Paris for 8, francs a year, that the prices of everything had recently fallen, and that one needed hardly any servants ibid.

On the terms of Iakovlev's deposit see Herzen, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem , ed. Lemke, 22 vols. It is not clear whether this sum is in roubles, francs or dollars. At the time when Herzen cashed his bonds from the Moscow Savings Bank the silver rouble was worth 3 francs and 85 centimes Herzen, SS , xxiv, p. If we assume that Herzen's bonds yielded a sum in the region of , francs, then the purchase of the house would have accounted for only one-third of his assets.

The dollar was worth roughly six French francs at this time. Two extant documents written by Herzen himself, besides his correspondence with Rothschild, shed light on Herzen's investments in this period, namely: i a letter that he wrote to a Piedmontese diplomat, Michelangelo Pinto, in October when he was contemplating settling in or near Nice and therefore decided to state his financial credentials to a man who might have been able to help him, and ii most importantly, a schedule of his assets written in December shortly after the death of his mother, whose assets he had also controlled but now formally inherited.

See Herzen, SS , xxiv, pp. On the distraint and attempts to have it removed see Lemke, op. Lemke, op. See also register no. It would seem that some of the new investment in United States Government stock was purchased with the capital already available to Herzen before recovery of his mother's share of Iakovlev's legacy, since the certificates that Herzen came to surrender in include only two, for 5, dollars each, issued after receipt of the moneys released by the Russian government.

The precise sums, in francs, that were paid for the United States Government stock, Virginia stock and Ohio stock that Herzen purchased in were 94,, 97, and , respectively. See Herzen, SS , xxiv, p.

See also Rothschilds' letter of 22 August ibid. Herzen soon contemplated selling his Dutch stock, though, because it produced so little income Herzen, SS , xxiv, pp.

Muhlstein, op. See Stanley L. Gallman, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, , ii, pp. At the beginning of the American Civil War Virginia was the state with the largest number of slaves. It is unlikely, despite his later agitation in favour of the emancipation of the Russian serfs, that Herzen saw negro slavery as a social evil, if we are to judge by the racist witticism with which he concludes the first of his "Letters from the Avenue Marigny".

He lives in an age, he tells his readers there apropos of a visit to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, in which one may observe "wild people" in Africa and tame animals in a zoo: in Africa the people are like monkeys and in the zoo the monkeys are like people Herzen, SS , v, p.

We should not lose sight of the fact that Herzen was a serf-owning lord, or barin , mindful that the serfs on his Kostroma estate were obliged to pay him a tithe. On the rent received from letting his property in Russia see Lemke, op.

See also Herzen, SS , xxiii, pp. The loan was not finally made until a year later. On other loans made by Herzen see letters 11 and 31 in Herzen's correspondence with James de Rothschild published for the first time in this number of Toronto Slavic Quarterly and my notes 64 and on these letters. On records of interest earned on these loans see Lemke, op. It is not unreasonable to suppose that it suited Herzen, a self-centred and controlling personality, to permit, indeed to encourage, the financial dependency of such people on him.

That he is not above consciously using his wealth as a psychological weapon is evident from a glacial letter that he wrote in January to Emma Herwegh — who after all had been no less wronged than Herzen himself by the adulterous relationship between her husband and Herzen's wife — in which he bludgeoned her with reminders of her financial indebtedness to him Herzen, SS , xxiv, Twickenham can have sheltered few more remarkable men.

Duff World's Classics paperback E. The Twickenham Museum. When the ruthless and autocratic Tsar Nicholas I died in , bewildered urchins in Twickenham cried: 'Hurrah! Zarnicoll is dead'. They had been given sixpences to do so by a renegade Russian aristocrat living in their midst, Alexander Herzen. His foreign tutors exposed him to radical ideas and in his early teens he dedicated himself to the fight for freedom. In Herzen entered the University of Moscow to study natural sciences and became the leader of a small group of like-minded students.

In fact, there were two circles centered at the Moscow University, the most influential of which was the circle of Nikolay Stankevich. Stankevich's circle flourished in the s and enlisted the loyalties of all of the above men at one time or another before the untimely and premature death of Stankevich in from tuberculosis. Herzen's circle, to which his close friend Ogaryov belonged, was separate. Their most famous alumnus turned out to be Bakunin.

Their leader was the young Herzen. In , when Herzen was 22, he and a few others, including his closest colleague, the poet Nikolay Ogarev, were arrested. Herzen spent six years in prison and exile. By the time he was deemed to have expiated his sins sufficiently to be allowed abroad, Herzen was 34, married to his first cousin Natalie and, by the death of his father, rich. They might have expected to return in six months but, of the family, none saw Russia again.

The Herzens were visiting Italy when revolution broke out in Paris in February , but returned in time for Herzen to experience, with growing disgust, the events that were to transform the Second Republic into the Empire of Napoleon III.

Herzen wrote to his Russian friends. Herzen stayed in Paris to see what would happen next.