Rare sources of the Presidential Library represent Alexander Herzen in all the contradictions of his insurgent spirit and brilliant intellect

Shortly before the 205th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812-1870), which falls on April 6, 2017, the Presidential Library reviews some rare digitized books that let us to expand our notions of so-called “schoolbook” author.

Alexander Ivanovich Herzen is the Russian writer, publicist, philosopher, revolutionary, a publisher of the Kolokol (means “bell”) Magazine - once the most progressive magazine in Russian language, lived an incredibly bright and productive life, which was spread within three capitals - St. Petersburg, Geneva and Paris. This restless urge for change of place was not a whim, he has been forced to leave for Europe with his family: Alexander Ivanovich was in conflict with the tsarist authorities. It saw in him an absolute revolutionary, whose he’s never been, which is obvious as soon as you get a grasp of the rarities, featured on the Presidential Library website.

In different periods of his full of dramatic events and the highest spiritual takeoffs life, Alexander Ivanovich never failed to analyze “a peculiarity of current situation.” “I was moving away from Russia along the almost abandoned country road that connected the Pskov Province with Livonia, on the cold and snowy winter,” - Herzen wrote in his Russian social thought movement publication. - These two, laying so close to each other, corners are not similar to each other at all; this is like a cultivated field near a desert; like “yesterday” is neighboring “tomorrow,” or a wretched existence against an agonizing.”

A real love he had for native land was strange enough. Who knows whatever you think while travelling in a carriage, continuously pounding. And no doubt you will return to that inner wound from which you newer go away: the illegitimate status…

In the 1912 year’s edition of V. Bogucharsky directly entitled Alexander Ivanovich Herzen is said: “Herzen was extremely richly endowed with Nature itself, his mental apparatus, one might say, was saturated with her very gifts, and probably this person would never get lost in the crowd in any circumstances; but would it be that “Herzen,” the great Russian citizen, whom we all well know, if the old man Yakovlev made his son “legitimated” immediately after his birth? It is possible to assume that without the acute sensation of his mother’s and his own “injustice” the boy's eyes would probably open much later… Then the inner activity that laid the foundation for development hereafter of the great personality of the fighter for justice, human rights and human freedom, has begun.”

Herzen arrived in Europe being more radical-republican than socialist, although his last article in Otechestvennye Zapiski (native notes) shocked his friends, the liberal-westerners, with its anti-bourgeois pathos. The February revolution in France in 1848 seemed to Herzen the fulfillment of all the hopes. Forthcoming June workers’ uprising, its bloody suppression and the reaction that followed shocked Herzen, who turned to socialism with hope.

Under the influence of the collapse of old ideals and the reaction across Europe, Herzen formed his own system of views about the doom, “an expiration” essence of old Europe and the prospects for Russia and the Slavic world, which are called upon to realize the socialist ideal. After the death of his wife, he went to London, having decided to open his own publishing business there - the Free Russian Printing House: “The printing house shall be, and if I will do nothing, this initiative of Russian publicity will someday be appreciated.”

In 1855, Herzen became the publisher of the “Polyarnaya Zvezda” (Polar star) almanac, and two years later, after his friend and associate Nikolai Ogaryov moved to London, began to publish the famous weekly “Kolokol” (bell) weekly publication, according the book Bogucharsky. The appeals for cardinal reforms, publicity in court, and elimination of censorship made their way from its pages. Peak influence of the newspaper falls on the years preceding the liberation of the peasants; then the newspaper was regularly delivered to the Winter Palace. “It was read by Alexander the Second, appointing the investigations of brought by the London magazine cases.”

These days Herzen was having over practically everyone: Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Nikolay Chernyshevsky! His “opponent” Michael Katkov came from Moscow who were flattering Herzen, repeating that the “Kolokol” is power.

In parallel, Herzen continues to write an autobiographical novel entitled “My Past and Thoughts,” started as far back as in the 50s of XIX century and published in 1868. This is the peak of his work as a word artist, one of the best examples of Russian memoirs. It would seem that everything went well with the Russian political emigrant.

However, Bogucharsky pointed in his book: “Emigration is such a terrible thing that very Herzen in his later life said, that if he could live his life again and would have been offered a choice between an emigration and a penal servitude in Siberia, he chose the last without hesitation.

The publication entitled Materials for the history of the social movement in Russia; A. I. Herzen, his friends and pals abounds with the revelations of the best people of the time, who knew Alexander Ivanovich closely. Collected posthumous works of Herzen were released in October 1879 in Geneva, and Turgenev wrote to Annenkov about this: “There are some true pearls in it. What clever man he was, and how deeply he has penetrated into the very essence of our nonsense! But it was from this reason that he was a politician least of all. In types of people whom he faced he has no rivals. When he “composes” purely, there is a constant tension with all the brilliance of the form. His language, insanely wrong, leads me to delight: a living body.”

It appears from the Geneva collected works of Herzen that by the end of his life he held the view that violence and terror are inadmissible methods of fighting for a better future.

Alexander Ivanovich died on January 9 (21), 1870, in Paris from pneumonia. He was buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, and then his remains were reburied in Nice.