Alexander Herzen was a radical socialist thinker of Russian extraction, best known for his newspaper The Bell. I have written about him and his thoughts on this blog before, after reading Aileen Kelly’s biography of the man, The Discovery of Chance.
Herzen was not just a radical thinker, he was also a talented writer, with his massive My Past and Thoughts as worthy a monument to Russia’s 19th century as anything by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Turgenev. This is a memoir, taking us from the author’s birth in 1812 to his later life in London. It is hard to find in English, and hard to find in a modern Russian edition too for the matter, but there are some old Oxford World’s Classics versions of the text for those who are willing to search them out or stumble upon them, the first of which, entitled Childhood, Youth and Exile, has prompted this particular post.
We may come to Herzen’s writings from different paths. Perhaps we want to see a different vision of Russia and its potential to the one we see in the religious nationalism of Dostoevsky, the ascetic pacifism of the later Tolstoy, or the wishy-washy liberalism of Turgenev. But there is a better reason to read this book and one that places My Past and Thoughts next to the great works of Russia’s 19th century – it is a brilliantly humane, sympathetic work that covers the ground the writers mentioned above occasionally seem not to know exists.
In Russia, Progress
The two sections in this book deal with Herzen’s youth and university years, and then his first experience of exile. There is a temptation, one I had to struggle with when writing about Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, just to write a blog post about how little has changed. But this is a terribly pernicious way of thinking that forces us into a kind of historical fatalism that is unworthy of us, and of the people whom we ignorantly aim to criticise. Still, I had to give a chuckle on reading this dialogue after Herzen has been led out onto the street following his arrest:
“Who is that?” I asked, as I took my seat in the cab.
“He is a witness: you know that the police must take a witness with them when they make an entrance into a private house.”
“Is that why you left him outside?”
When Russia’s secret police raided my flat, one joyous September morning in 2019, they did at least allow the witnesses to come in. I do not think they had any practical use, however, and the report that the officers drew up, sitting at the kitchen table, with me and my then girlfriend standing awkwardly in our pyjamas, bore little relation to the actual facts that they must have felt they had been dragged out of bed early for nothing. But the witnesses were at least allowed in the room, and therefore we must give progress its dues.
Justice and Humour
Moving on from this little joke, justice is a central theme of My Past and Thoughts. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it occupied the thoughts of a man who was exiled both within his country, ultimately ending his days alone far from it. In the work Herzen’s approach is twofold – the first is to draw our attention towards injustice, and the second is to remedy it, as much as he can. In this he might seem to be following those other Russian writers whose greatness we identify vaguely as being of a piece with their loosely defined “sympathy”, but I find Herzen’s treatment of the matter, and his heart, much more convincing. In this, perhaps, the autobiographical nature of his text is key.
The first thing that sets Herzen apart is his interest in systems. Dostoevsky liked to find sympathy for unlikely characters, but he was always careful to keep his magnifying glass focused on the ideological systems of the mind, not the practical systems that states live upon. Here is what Herzen has to say about an uncle:
“On his return to Russia, he was created a lord-in-waiting at Moscow – a capital which has no Court. Then he was elected to the Senate, though he knew nothing of law or Russian judicial procedure; he served on the Widows’ and Orphans’ Board, and was a governor of hospitals and other public institutions. All these duties he performed with a zeal that was probably superfluous, a love of his own way that was certainly harmful, and an integrity that passed wholly unnoticed.”
I hope readers have chuckled to themselves at this. My Past and Thoughts is one of the funniest books I have read, with a grand sense of comedic timing. But what does this paragraph say? It describes a man getting positions that aren’t right for him, thus causing havoc.
Let’s hear Herzen’s evidence on torture and the effectiveness of Russian state power:
“Peter III abolished the torture-chamber, and the Russian star-chamber.
Catherine II abolished torture.
Alexander I abolished it all over again.
Evidence given under torture is legally inadmissible, and any magistrate applying torture is himself liable to prosecution and severe punishment.”
This is ridiculous, yet again. I am reminded of the satirist, Saltyakov-Shchedrin’s famous quote that “the strictness of Russian laws is tempered somewhat by the fact that obeying them is optional.”
But of course, Herzen was a man who experienced the justice system first-hand. For him, punishments were not optional. He does not merely laugh at the injustice or get us to laugh at it. Laughter breaks down our defences, and it is then that we are made to see the horror, that, “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.”
Herzen himself is lucky, as the son of a nobleman. His time in prison is boring, but not overly miserable, though he struggles with the noxious gases floating through his cell. This is what a peasant has to go through:
“The enquiry went on just as enquiries do in Russia: the peasants were flogged on examination, flogged as a punishment, flogged as an example, and flogged to get money out of them; and then a number of them were exiled to Siberia.”
Statistics and Serfs
The Russian Empire was a country which was not working. One of the funniest sections concerns Herzen’s work on statistics for the remote town of Vyatka, now Kirov. The challenge in producing statistical analysis for the past ten years, as requested by the Ministry of the Interior itself, was that one also had to produce data for the past nine of those years where none actually existed. But once the determination to record things has taken root, there comes the matter of actually recording them correctly. I consider myself to be slightly poor at maths, but Herzen has convinced me I am at least better than a petty functionary in a remote province in the Russian Empire.
“Persons drowned: 2
Causes of drowning unknown: 2
Total: 4”
Or a particular favourite, “Under the heading ‘Morality of the inhabitants’ this was entered: ‘No Jews were found living in the town of Kay.’”
This is stupid. At another point, an old officer tells the story of the abduction and murder of a Moldavian woman, which was requested by his commander out of jealousy. The officer grabbed her and threw her over a bridge into a river, where she drowned. Herzen thinks of this neither as a funny story nor an example of the wondrous power of duty.
“I was horrified by the childlike indifference with which the old man told me this story. He appeared to guess my feelings or to give a thought for the first time to his victim; for he added, to reassure me and make it up with his own conscience:
‘You know, Sir, she was only a benighted heathen, not like a Christian at all.’”
Serfdom is also an enemy here, and one that we will probably be familiar with at this point from the likes of Turgenev, whose criticism of the system in the Sportsman’s Sketches made him famous. However, what Herzen writes seems more direct because of its unambiguous basis in reality. We read of a serf whose devotion was great, but who once sold some of his master’s wood in 1812 – when he had no way of contacting his master under Napoleonic occupation – in order to avoid starvation. After Herzen’s uncle, whose serf he was, returns to his estate, he discovers the sale, nullifies the past service of the serf and removes him from his office, throwing him and his family into poverty. Yet what is the serf’s reaction? “The old man, now paralysed and walking on crutches, never failed to visit us, in order to make a bow to my father and talk to him” – about none other than his old master. This kind of innocent devotion, even after a terrible punishment, strikes us as insane. But it is the insanity of an awful system, and Herzen makes us well aware of it.
We learn the practical methods of serf control, things like the punishments a master could hand out, and the practicalities of exiling a peasant into the army. We learn how much money a servant is paid, for each role, as well. This kind of granular information, absent from the great novels of the period, fills their downtrodden, half-hidden from view characters with new blood.
What justice is within Herzen’s power to give?
So much for injustice, in all its varied forms – exile, bad governors, serfdom, inefficient and cruel government ministries – for I could go on but will not. Readers looking for continuity between the Russia of today and the Russia of the past may enjoy ample shocking stories of corruption and the impossibility of removing it, and the use of insanity as an excuse to remove problematic characters from view. But I said that Herzen’s intention in My Past and Thoughts is twofold – he also seems to aim at rectifying some of these injustices, or at least softening them.
This statement gives the best indication of what he means to do: “This publicity is the last paltry compensation to those who suffered unheard and unpitied.” He aims to make aware of the miseries of those whose names vanish from the record, whether serf or friend. Herzen dedicates a whole, lengthy chapter to Alexander Vitberg, an architect who found royal favour and then lost it, ending up exiled in Vyatka alongside him. He ends the chapter thus: “’Poor martyr,’ thought I, ‘Europe shall learn your fate – I promise you that.’” These and other phrases indicate Herzen’s feeling of duty towards his friends. “I should record here some details about Polezhayev,” – the emphasis is mine. Here are some others: “Kohlreif returned to Moscow, where he died in the arms of his grief-stricken father.” “After writing the preceding narrative, I learned that Sungurov died at Nerchinsk.”
Death, death, death. There are no happy endings here. Even those who survive, like the Polish exiles, are still victims of exile. But Herzen gives them a voice, an identity as individuals. Here is a touching moment from a parting visit to a Polish exile: “After dinner he came up to me with his glass in his hand, embraced me, and said with a soldier’s frankness, ‘Oh, why are you a Russian?’ I made no answer, but his question made a strong impression on me.” This is, indeed, a quote that makes you pause.
Herzen identifies the injustice of systems, but he never condemns groups. My Past and Thoughts is a collection of stories about individuals – corrupt governors, inane petty officials, heroic friends, desperate serfs – but not groups. He is aware, as some of us never are enough, that people are individual people, and it is as individuals that we must attempt to deal with him.
I quote at length a paragraph of his on the subject, to give a sense of how he writes, and his spirit:
“Nothing in the world can be more stupid and more unfair than to judge a whole class of men in the lump, merely by the name they bear and the predominating characteristics of their profession. A label is a terrible thing. Jean-Paul Richter says with perfect truth: ‘If a child tells a lie, make him afraid of doing wrong and tell him that he has told a lie, but don’t call him a liar. If you define him as a liar, you break down his confidence in his own character.’ 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’”.
Conclusion
Herzen was, it is hard to deny from these pages, a thinker with the right spirit. In this first part of My Past and Thoughts, there is little philosophy, but there is the spirit upon which that philosophy will later be built. That spirit is enough. It is the spirit of love for one’s comrades and a recognition of the individual’s non-negotiable value and the importance of hearing about their lives, instead of deciding on the basis of their membership of arbitrary categories. Where other thinkers of the time were willing to allow for mass suffering to achieve some distant utopian goals, even condoning murder, Herzen always saw people, even his enemies, as people first. That makes My Past and Thoughts not only entertaining but a wise and worthy book too.