Alexander Herzen

“ We are told that a man is a murderer, and we instantly imagine a hidden dagger, a savage expression, and dark designs, as if murder were the regular occupation, the trade, of anyone who has once in his life without design killed a man. A spy, or a man who makes money by the profligacy of others, cannot be honest; but it is possible to be an officer of police and yet to retain some manly worth, just as a tender and womanly heart and even delicacy of feeling may constantly be found in the victims of what is called “social incontinence.” ”

“ Later, our officers began to return from foreign service to Moscow. Men who had served in former days with my father in the Guards and had taken a glorious part in the fierce contest of the immediate past, were often at our house; and to them it was a relief from their toils and dangers to tell them over again. That was indeed the most brilliant epoch in the history of Petersburg: the consciousness of power breathed new life into Russia; business and care were, so to speak, put off till the sober morrow, and all the world was determined to make merry to-day and celebrate the victory. ”

“ The police seemed to have forgotten me or to ignore me. I was utterly weary and wretched. But when all the sky was covered with gloomy clouds and the long night of exile and prison 213was coming close, just then a radiant sunbeam fell upon me.
§9 A few words of deep sympathy, spoken by a girl [68] of sixteen, whom I regarded as a child, put new life in me.
68. This was Natálya Zakhárin, Herzen’s cousin, who afterwards became his wife.
This is the first time that a woman figures in my narrative; and it is practically true that only one woman figures in my life. ”

“ The political prisoners, who are mostly of noble birth, are strictly guarded and vindictively punished; but they suffer infinitely less than the unfortunate “men with beards.” With them the police stand on no ceremony. In what quarter can a peasant or workman seek redress? Where will he find justice?
The Russian system of justice and police is so haphazard, so inhuman, so arbitrary and corrupt, that a poor malefactor has more reason to fear his trial than his sentence. ”

“ Next morning Count Apraxin gave me leave to stay three days at Kazán and to put up at a hotel.
For those three days I wandered about the city, attended everywhere by my keeper. The veiled faces of the Tatar women, the high cheekbones of their husbands, the mosques of true believers standing side by side with the churches of the Orthodox faith—it all reminds one of Asia and the East. At Vladímir or Nizhni the neighbourhood of Moscow is felt; but one feels far from Moscow at Kazán. ”

“ Without a knowledge of natural science, there is no salvation for the modern man. This wholesome food, this strict training of the mind by facts, this proximity to the life that surrounds ours, and this acknowledgement of its independence—without these there lurks somewhere in the soul a monastic cell, and this contains a germ of mysticism which may cover like a dark cloud the whole intellect.
Before I had gone through College, The Chemist had moved to Petersburg, and I did not meet him again till my return from exile. ”

“ Alexander and Herzen had met long before, at Vyatka. February 19, 1861, when Alexander published the edict abolishing slavery throughout his dominions, must have been one of the brightest days in Herzen’s life. There was little brightness in the nine years that remained. When Poland revolted in 1863, he lost his subscribers and his popularity by his courageous refusal to echo the prevailing feeling of his countrymen; and he gave men inferior to himself, such as Ogaryóv and Bakúnin, too much influence over his journal. ”

“ People who would not have dreamed of publishing their articles in the Moscow Gazette or the Petersburg newspapers, now began to print their writings in the privacy of their own houses. Thus the dangerous habit of possessing an organ of one’s own took root, and men became accustomed to publicity. And indeed it is not a bad thing to have a weapon which is always ready for use. A printing press, like the human tongue, has no bones. ”

“ So long as a man moves modestly forwards, never stopping and never reflecting, and until he comes to the edge of a precipice or breaks his neck, he continues to believe that his life lies ahead of him; and therefore he looks down upon his past and is unable to appreciate the present. But when experience has laid low the flowers of spring and chilled the glow of summer—when he discovers that life is practically over, and all that remains a mere continuance of the past, then he feels differently towards the brightness and warmth and beauty of early recollections. ”

“ What wonder that such a man, after working six days as a lever or wheel or spring or screw, breaks out on Saturday night, like a savage, from the factory which is his prison, and drinks till he is dead drunk? ”

“ The Christian faith began to contend with scepticism, the Gothic spire with the Greek façade, religious sanctity with worldly beauty. This is why St. Peter’s at Rome is so significant; in that colossal erection Christianity is struggling to come alive, the Church turns pagan, and Michael Angelo uses the walls of the Sistine Chapel to depict Jesus Christ as a brawny athlete, a Hercules in the flower of youth and strength. ”

“ These men are broken in a hopeless and ill-matched struggle against hunger and beggary; after all their efforts, they have found everywhere a leaden vault above their heads, and a sullen opposition which has cast them down into the nether darkness of society and condemned them to a life of endless toil—toil without an object and equally destructive of mind and body. ”

“ He was on a visit to Paris, when he died rather suddenly of inflammation of the lungs on January 9, 1870. At Nice there is a statue of Herzen on the grave where he and his wife are buried.
II The collected Russian edition of Herzen’s works—no edition was permitted by the censorship till 1905—extends to seven thick volumes. These are: one volume of fiction; one of letters addressed to his future wife; two of memoirs; and three of what may be called political journalism. ”

“ In that dreary distant backwater of exile, separated from all I loved, surrounded by the unclean horde of officials, and exposed without defence to the tyranny of the Governor, I met nevertheless with many warm hearts and friendly hands, and there I spent many happy hours which are sacred in recollection.
Where are you now, and how are you, my snowbound friends? It is twenty years since we met. I suppose you have grown old, as I have; you are thinking about marrying your daughters, and have given up drinking champagne by the bottle and tossing off bumpers of vodka. ”

“ Ogaryóv had that magnetic power which forms the first point of crystallisation in any medley of disordered atoms, provided the necessary affinity exists. Though scattered in all directions, they become imperceptibly the heart of an organism. In his bright cheerful room with its red and gold wall-paper, amid the perpetual smell of tobacco and punch and other—I was going to say, eatables and drinkables, but now I remember that there was seldom anything to eat but cheese—we often spent the time from dark till dawn in heated argument and sometimes in noisy merriment. ”

“ He knew his guests thoroughly and despised them. Sometimes he showed his claws, but he generally treated them as a man treats his dogs, either with excessive familiarity or with a roughness beyond all bounds. But all the same he continued to invite them, and they came in a flutter of joy, prostrating themselves before him, currying favour by tales against others, all smiles and bows and complaisance.
I blushed for them and felt ashamed.
Our intimacy did not last long: the Governor soon perceived that I was unfit to move in the highest circles of Vyatka. ”

“ Then foreign events, the taking of Paris, the history of the Hundred Days, expectations and rumours, Waterloo, Napoleon on board the Bellerophon, mourning for the dead and anxiety for the living, the returning armies, the warriors restored to their homes,—all this had a strong effect upon the least susceptible natures. Now imagine a young man, an artist and a mystic, endowed with creative power, and also an enthusiast spurred on by current events, by the Tsar’s challenge, and by his own genius. ”

“ And yet it was hateful to see the triumph of his subordinates. Asses in plenty raised their heels against this stricken wild-boar. To compare small things with great, the meanness of mankind was shown as clearly then as when Napoleon fell. Between Tufáyev and me there had been an open breach for a long time; and if he had not been turned out himself, he would certainly have sent me to some frontier town like Kai. ”

“ When he had read the newspaper, he noticed for the first time the presence of Sonnenberg in the room. When Niko reached the age of fifteen, Sonnenberg professed to start a shop; but having nothing to sell and no customers, he gave it up, when he had spent such savings as he had in this useful form of commerce; yet he still called himself “a commercial agent.” He was then much over forty, and at that pleasant age he lived like the fowls of the air or a boy of fourteen; he never knew to-day where he would sleep or how he would secure a dinner to-morrow. ”

“ In Alexander’s reign, he wrote reform pamphlets in French; then he had a German correspondence with Goethe on Greek matters. After becoming minister, he discoursed on Slavonic poetry of the fourth century, which made Kachenovsky remark to him that our ancestors were much busier in fighting bears than in hymning their gods and kings. As a kind of patent of nobility, he carried about in his pocket a letter from Goethe, in which Goethe paid him a very odd compliment: “You have no reason to apologise for your style: you have succeeded in doing what I could never do—forgetting German grammar.” ”

“ To readers who are not countrymen or contemporaries of Herzen’s, the Memoirs are certainly the most interesting part of his production. They paint for us an astonishing picture of Russian life under the grim rule of Nicholas, the life of the rich man in Moscow, and the life of the exile near the Ural Mountains; and they are crowded with figures and incidents which would be incredible if one were not convinced of the narrator’s veracity. Herzen is a supreme master of that superb instrument, the Russian language. ”

“ It was nine months since I had taken a walk without the presence of a sentry.
I had been walking half an hour when a man came up to me; he was wearing uniform without epaulettes and a blue medal-ribbon. He stared very hard at me, walked past, turned round at once, and asked me in an insolent manner:
“Is it you who are going to Perm with a police-officer?”
“Yes,” I answered, still walking.
“Excuse me! excuse me! How does the man dare...?” ”

“ Enthusiasm of some kind is a better safeguard against real degradation than any sermon. I can remember youthful follies, when high spirits carried us sometimes into excesses; but I do not remember a single disgraceful incident among our set, nothing that a man need be really ashamed of or seek to forget and cover up. ”

“ I have met men of this type, men to whom political activity was an absolute necessity, who never could find rest within the four walls of their study or in family life. To them solitude is intolerable: it makes them fanciful and unreasonable; they quarrel with their few remaining friends, and are constantly discovering plots against themselves, or else they make plots of their own, in order to unmask the imaginary schemes of their enemies. ”

“ Five of the conspirators were afterwards hanged, and over a hundred banished to Siberia.
Then followed the arrests—“They have taken so-and-so”; “They have caught so-and-so”; “They have arrested so-and-so in the country.” Parents trembled in fear for their sons; the sky was covered over with black clouds.
During the reign of Alexander, political persecution was rare: it is true that he exiled Púshkin for his verses, and Labzin, the secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts, for proposing that the imperial coachman should be elected a member ”

“ A tall man of athletic build, with large and dignified features, and an air of the profoundest reflexion, he lived to old age in the belief that a footman’s place is one of singular dignity.
This respectable old man was constantly out of temper or half-drunk, or both together. He idealised the duties of his office and attributed to them a solemn importance. He could lower the steps of a carriage with a peculiarly loud rattle; when he banged a carriage-door he made more noise than the report of a gun. ”

“ Volkov, who had held this office, had gone mad, his delusion being that the Poles wished to elect him as their king, and Lisovski had succeeded to the position. Lisovski was a Pole himself; he was not a cruel man or a bad man; but he had spent his fortune, thanks to gambling and a French actress, and, like a true philosopher, he preferred the situation of chief of the police at Moscow to a situation in the slums of that city.
He summoned Ogaryóv, Ketcher, Satin, Vadim, Obolenski, and others, and charged them with having relations with political prisoners. ”

“ Orlóv was a very fine-looking man. His tall figure, dignified bearing, handsome manly features, and entirely bald scalp seemed to suit one another perfectly, and lent an irresistible attraction to his outward appearance. His head would make a good contrast with the head of General Yermólov, that tough old warrior, whose square frowning forehead, penthouse of grey hair, and penetrating glance gave him the kind of beauty which fascinated Marya Kochubéi in the poem. [67] ”