The famous Russian liberal radical and Westernizer Alexander Ivanovich Herzen has long been portrayed in our historical literature as a model of love of freedom, civic purity and wisdom. However, consideration of the details of his biography reveals a completely different image: a rich aristocrat who despised Russia, who turned to politics for ambitious purposes and, despite many years of effort, did not achieve anything outstanding either in it or in literature, as an openly inflated authority.

Alexander Herzen (born March 25, 1812) was the illegitimate son of the well-born and wealthy Moscow nobleman Ivan Alekseevich Yakovlev, who, like the royal Romanov dynasty, descended from the boyar Andrei Kobyla. Alexander Herzen's mother was a 16-year-old German woman from Stuttgart, Henriette Wilhelmina Louise Haag (Yakovlev brought her from abroad, where he lived for 10 years). Since the parents’ marriage was not formalized, Yakovlev could not give his son his last name and came up with an “artificial” one - Herzen (“son of the heart”, from the German Herz).

Herzen's father was distinguished by oddities of character and a tendency toward skepticism, which his son inherited from him. A sarcastic misanthrope, Ivan Yakovlev annoyed those around him with his antics. He had almost no friends, so Alexander Herzen spent his childhood in seclusion. The teachers hired by his father were not highly trained, but they greatly influenced the boy in the sense of “free thinking.” The French teacher Bouchot told the boy about the great French Revolution. Student- medic I. E. Protopopov, who taught Russian literature, brought him forbidden political poems Pushkin(“Odes to Freedom”, “Dagger”) and Ryleeva(“Duma”).

Languishing in loneliness, young Sasha Herzen read many books from his father’s rich library. Previous acquaintance with the works of the “enlightenment” (Voltaire, Beaumarchais, Goethe, Schiller) strengthened and developed a “critical spirit” in him. He was encouraged by one of his cousins, A. A. Yakovlev, a natural scientist and materialist, as well as a peer and relative, Tanya Kuchina, the ardent and sentimental granddaughter of Uncle Herzen, who supported the childish pride of the young dreamer, predicting an extraordinary future for him.

At the age of 12-13, Alexander became close friends with another of his distant relatives - Nikolay Ogarev, who was no less prone to daydreaming than himself. Two boys often and with approval talked about the Decembrists - participants in the recent (1825) aristocratic conspiracy to “deliver peasants from serfdom” (taking away almost all the land from them in favor of the nobles) and “give Russia freedom” (after at least 10 years "preparatory" unlimited dictatorship). During one fit of enthusiasm, Herzen and Ogarev swore an oath on Vorobyovy Gory to “sacrifice their lives in the fight for the good of their homeland.” This naive theatrical act of two fledgling youngsters is still seriously revered by “liberals” almost as “the dawn of the liberation of Russia.”

In 1829, Alexander Herzen entered the physics and mathematics department at Moscow University. At the university, a circle of comrades formed around Herzen and Ogarev, who always gravitated towards leadership, consisting mainly of noble nobles like them. Together they admired constitutionalism, the idea of ​​a republic, the radicalism of the French Revolution, the execution of Louis XVI and the socialist doctrine that had become fashionable at that time. Saint-Simon. In Saint-Simonism, the golden youth were especially attracted to the preaching of free love and “redemption of the flesh.” Herzen's circle noisily welcomed the July Revolution of 1830 in France, which transferred power from the “clerics” to the hands of the thieving bourgeois oligarchy (“the July monarchy of Louis Philippe”).

Hoping for the patronage of wealthy fathers, Herzen and his friends did not hesitate to allow “noisy student antics” with political overtones. Little by little the police became interested in their circle. In 1833, Herzen graduated from the university, and in July 1834 he was arrested on charges of singing revolutionary songs at one unbridled party. During the protracted trial, Alexander Ivanovich spent nine months in prison. The investigative characterization certified him as “a freethinker, very dangerous to society.”

Portrait of Alexander Herzen in his youth. 1830s

Herzen was first exiled to Perm, but, apparently, through influential intercession, he was soon transferred from there to the much closer Vyatka. There the young rebel spent more than two years in a good official position, which was later presented as almost “martyrdom.” In 1837, the heir to the crown prince (the future Emperor Alexander II) passed through Vyatka with his tutor, the famous poet Zhukovsky. Herzen managed to please the Tsarevich by arranging for him an exhibition of local works and personal explanations during its inspection. At the request of Zhukovsky, Herzen was transferred from Vyatka to Vladimir (late 1837).

While still in Vyatka, Herzen began correspondence with Natalya Zakharyina, the illegitimate daughter of one of his father’s brothers. The exchange of letters turned into long-distance love. Relatives were against their marriage, but Herzen, having moved to Vladimir, secretly took Natalya from Moscow and married her (1838).

In Vyatka, Herzen began his literary career without any obstacles from the government: he sent an article about the German prose writer to the famous magazine "Telescope" Hoffmann. In July 1839, police surveillance was removed from Herzen and he was allowed to come to Moscow. At the beginning of 1840, Alexander Ivanovich received a new good position: in the office of the Minister of Internal Affairs, located in St. Petersburg. He was in no hurry to get into the service; before leaving for the capital, he lived in his native Moscow for two months. Here Herzen met with many old comrades who were already part of the circle founded by Nikolai Stankevich, who died in the summer of 1840. There they worshiped the philosophy of Hegel and its falsely interpreted thesis “everything that is real is rational.” This idea (which also tended towards a complete justification of the existing government) was at one time shared even by Bakunin and Belinsky. The revolutionary Herzen was shocked by such “servility to the government.” On this basis, a sharp clash occurred between him and Belinsky. Herzen, who was not very familiar with Hegelianism, turned to his study, interpreting this system not as a justification of existing reality, but as an “algebra of revolution.” This interpretation was soon accepted by Belinsky, who radically changed his views.

Herzen soon left to serve in the St. Petersburg ministry. At the end of 1840, the authorities opened his letter to his father with a harsh review of the metropolitan police. For this, Herzen was sent to a new “exile”: as an adviser to the provincial government in Novgorod. He arrived there in July 1841, and at the beginning of 1842 he already resigned, because thanks to his father’s rich funds he did not need official earnings. At first he was ordered not to leave Novgorod, but in the summer of 1842 he was allowed to return to Moscow.

In Novgorod, Alexander Ivanovich continued his study of philosophy and moved even more to the left, turning from deist V materialist. He was especially impressed by Feuerbach’s atheistic book “The Essence of Christianity.” In Moscow, Herzen, together with Belinsky and Granovsky became the leader of the Westerners. Other former members of Stankevich's circle founded the Slavophil movement, which Herzen and his friends viewed with extreme hostility. Herzen launched a fairly broad literary activity, the fruits of which were the journalistic articles “Amateurism in Science”, “Romantic Amateurs”, “Workshop of Scientists”, “Buddhism in Science”, “Letters on the Study of Nature”. Herzen preached his ideas in them rather carefully, but they were visible between the lines and had a considerable influence on young people. Soon Herzen switched to fiction, writing: “Notes of Doctor Krupov”, the novel “Who is to Blame?” (1846), which raised the issue of “freedom of feeling and the position of a woman in marriage,” and “The Thieving Magpie” (1848, the theme is the sad fate of the serf actress). Alexander Ivanovich's views on religious and moral issues were so radical that even many Westerners rejected them. On this basis, Herzen had to break with a number of friends.

This alone inclined him to go abroad. The decision to leave Russia was accelerated by the death of Herzen’s father in March 1846, after which Alexander Ivanovich inherited a huge fortune. In January 1847, Herzen and his wife left for Europe. From Paris he soon began sending to the liberal magazine " Contemporary» correspondence about French life: “Letters from Avenue Marigny”.

In 1855, the first book of Herzen’s famous almanac “The Polar Star” was published. This relatively small magazine, to which Russian liberals attached great importance, was published only once a year until 1862 (not published in 1860, after 1862 - skipped until 1868, when the last one was published - already in Geneva, eighth, number). At first, this almanac, sharply hostile to the Russian government, was met with anger even by Russian Westerners, but with the beginning of the reforms of Alexander II, the attitude towards it improved.

In 1856, his old soulmate Ogarev came to visit Herzen in London, by that time he was almost completely drunk and had squandered most of his family’s once enormous fortune. Romantic memories of the legendary oath on the Sparrow Hills did not prevent Herzen from wresting his wife from Ogarev: in 1857, Alexander Ivanovich began living with Natalya Ogareva-Tuchkova. Soon they had a daughter, Elizabeth (who committed suicide in 1875 at the age of 17 because of her unrequited love for a 44-year-old Frenchman).

Herzen and Ogarev. 1861

These family vicissitudes did not prevent Herzen and Ogarev from starting on July 1, 1857, the joint publication of Kolokol, an oppositional Russian magazine, published first once and then twice a month. Ogarev's role in the publication, however, was minimal. “The Bell” was filled with calls for “an end to arbitrariness in Russia” and for the liberation of the peasants, although the latter, according to Herzen, should then be continued with steps towards socialism (i.e., he only wanted to replace the “landlord slavery” of the peasants slavery to the state bureaucracy). In that era of ideological vacillation, “The Bell” was quite popular among the Russian high-ranking “educated people.” But the importance of this magazine should not be overestimated: its circulation at the peak of its popularity was only 2500-3000 copies.

At the end of 1861, the preacher of social violence, Bakunin, who had fled from Siberia, also arrived in London to visit Herzen. In 1863-1864, an uprising broke out against the Tsar in Poland, starting with the treacherous extermination of sleeping unarmed Russian soldiers in the barracks. One of the main reasons for the uprising was the reluctance of the Polish gentry to free their peasants with land according to the Russian model of 1861. Inciting national hatred against Russia, Polish and Lithuanian magnates stubbornly did not want to sacrifice any significant part of their aristocratic privileges for the benefit of their own people. As during the bloody uprising of 1830-1831, the rebels demanded the restoration of Poland within the borders of 1772 (up to three partitions) - that is along the Dnieper in the east, with the inclusion of most of the Ukrainian and Belarusian regions.

Despite such goals of the rebellion, despite the fact that the Poles immediately began to be actively supported by the French and English governments that had recently fought with Russia in the Crimea, Herzen’s “Bell” was entirely in favor of the Polish movement and called on Russian military personnel to go over to the side of the Poles with arms in hand. Bakunin was going to personally participate in a military landing against Russia from the shores of Scandinavia. This caused great indignation in Russia. The magazine's circulation immediately fell 5-6 times, to about 500 copies, and never again exceeded this figure.

Herzen's newspaper "Bell"

Herzen's spiritual influence on Russia immediately melted away, his rather inglorious political role was played. In March 1865, as a result of the persistent demands of the Russian government on the British editors of the Bell, they had to leave London for Geneva, which then became the new center of Russian emigration. But the elderly Herzen did not get along with the younger generation of Russian emigrants. In July 1867, Kolokol was finally discontinued. Six months later, Herzen tried to start publishing a newspaper under the same name in French “to familiarize France with Russian life,” but a year later it stopped at issues 14-15. The attempt to bring the Polar Star back to life also failed. The book of Herzen’s memoirs, “The Past and Thoughts,” published in full in 1868, has a certain value as a biographical and historical source, but does not differ in major literary merits.

In the fall of 1869, Alexander Herzen settled in Paris, still hoping to wait for the right moment to resume the Bell, but in January 1870 he died suddenly of pneumonia.

Russian history is full of ascetics who are ready to lay down their lives for their idea.

Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812-1870) was the first Russian socialist who preached the ideas of equality and brotherhood. And although he did not directly participate in revolutionary activities, he was among those who prepared the ground for its development. One of the leaders of the Westerners, he later became disillusioned with the ideals of the European path of development of Russia, went over to the opposite camp and became the founder of another significant movement for our history - populism.

The biography of Alexander Herzen is closely connected with such figures of the Russian and world revolution as Ogarev, Belinsky, Proudhon, Garibaldi. Throughout his life, he constantly tried to find the best way to create a just society. But it was precisely the ardent love for his people, the selfless service to the chosen ideals - this is what won the respect of the descendants of Herzen Alexander Ivanovich.

A short biography and overview of the main works will allow the reader to get to know this Russian thinker better. After all, only in our memory can they live forever and continue to influence minds.

Herzen Alexander Ivanovich: biography of the Russian thinker

He was the illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner Ivan Alekseevich Yakovlev and the daughter of a manufacturing official, 16-year-old German Henrietta Haag. Due to the fact that the marriage was not officially registered, the father came up with a surname for his son. Translated from German, it means “child of the heart.”

The future publicist and writer was brought up in his uncle’s house (now it is named after Gorky).

From an early age, he began to be overwhelmed by “freedom-loving dreams,” which is not surprising - literature teacher I. E. Protopopov introduced the student to the poems of Pushkin, Ryleev, Busho. The ideas of the Great French Revolution were constantly in the air of Alexander's study room. Already at that time, Herzen became friends with Ogarev, and together they hatched plans to transform the world. It made an unusually strong impression on the friends, after which they became fired up with revolutionary activity and vowed to defend the ideals of freedom and brotherhood for the rest of their lives.

Books constituted Alexander's daily book ration - he read a lot of Voltaire, Beaumarchais, and Kotzebue. He did not ignore early German romanticism - the works of Goethe and Schiller put him in an enthusiastic spirit.

University club

In 1829, Alexander Herzen entered Moscow University in the physics and mathematics department. And there he did not part with his childhood friend Ogarev, with whom they soon organized a circle of like-minded people. It also included the future famous writer-historian V. Passek and translator N. Ketcher. At their meetings, members of the circle discussed the ideas of Saint-Simonism, equal rights for men and women, the destruction of private property - in general, these were the first socialists in Russia.

"Malovskaya story"

Studying at the university was sluggish and monotonous. Few teachers could introduce lecturers to the advanced ideas of German philosophy. Herzen sought an outlet for his energy by participating in university pranks. In 1831, he became involved in the so-called “Malov story,” in which Lermontov also took part. The students expelled the criminal law professor from the classroom. As Alexander Ivanovich himself later recalled, M. Ya. Malov was a stupid, rude and uneducated professor. Students despised him and openly laughed at him in lectures. The rioters got off relatively lightly for their prank - they spent several days in a punishment cell.

First link

The activities of Herzen’s friendly circle were of a rather innocent nature, but the Imperial Chancellery saw in their beliefs a threat to the tsarist power. In 1834, all members of this association were arrested and exiled. Herzen first ended up in Perm, and then he was assigned to serve in Vyatka. There he organized an exhibition of local works, which gave Zhukovsky a reason to petition for his transfer to Vladimir. Herzen also took his bride there from Moscow. These days turned out to be the brightest and happiest in the writer’s stormy life.

The split of Russian thought into Slavophiles and Westerners

In 1840, Alexander Herzen returned to Moscow. Here fate brought him together literary circle Belinsky, who preached and actively propagated the ideas of Hegelianism. With typical Russian enthusiasm and intransigence, the members of this circle perceived the ideas of the German philosopher about the rationality of all reality somewhat one-sidedly. However, Herzen himself drew completely opposite conclusions from Hegel’s philosophy. As a result, the circle broke up into Slavophiles, whose leaders were Kirievsky and Khomyakov, and Westerners, who united around Herzen and Ogarev. Despite extremely opposing views on the future path of Russia's development, both were united by true patriotism, based not on blind love for Russian statehood, but on sincere faith in the strength and power of the people. As Herzen later wrote, they looked like whose faces were turned in different directions, but their hearts beat the same.

The collapse of ideals

Herzen Alexander Ivanovich, whose biography was already full of frequent moves, spent the second half of his life completely outside of Russia. In 1846, the writer's father died, leaving Herzen a large inheritance. This gave Alexander Ivanovich the opportunity to travel around Europe for several years. The trip radically changed the writer's way of thinking. His Western friends were shocked when they read Herzen’s articles published in the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski entitled “Letters from Avenue Marigny,” which later became known as “Letters from France and Italy.” The obvious anti-bourgeois attitude of these letters indicated that the writer was disillusioned with the viability of revolutionary Western ideas. Having witnessed the failure of the chain of revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848-1849, the so-called “spring of nations”, he began to develop the theory of “Russian socialism”, which gave birth to a new movement of Russian philosophical thought- populism.

New philosophy

In France, Alexander Herzen became close to Proudhon, with whom he began publishing the newspaper “Voice of the People.” After the suppression of the radical opposition, he moved to Switzerland, and then to Nice, where he met Garibaldi, the famous fighter for freedom and independence of the Italian people. The publication of the essay “From the Other Shore” belongs to this period, which outlined new ideas that Alexander Ivanovich Herzen became interested in. The philosophy of a radical reorganization of the social system no longer satisfied the writer, and Herzen finally said goodbye to his liberal convictions. He begins to be visited by thoughts about the doom of old Europe and the great potential of the Slavic world, which should bring the socialist ideal to life.

A. I. Herzen - Russian publicist

After the death of his wife, Herzen moved to London, where he began publishing his famous newspaper “The Bell”. The newspaper enjoyed its greatest influence in the period preceding the abolition of serfdom. Then its circulation began to fall; its popularity was especially affected by the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1863. As a result, Herzen’s ideas did not find support among either radicals or liberals: for the former they turned out to be too moderate, and for the latter too radical. In 1865, the Russian government persistently demanded from Her Majesty the Queen of England that the editors of Kolokol be expelled from the country. Alexander Herzen and his associates were forced to move to Switzerland.

Herzen died of pneumonia in 1870 in Paris, where he came on family business.

Literary heritage

The bibliography of Alexander Ivanovich Herzen includes a huge number of articles written in Russia and in emigration. But his greatest fame was brought to him by his books, in particular the final work of his life, “Past and Thoughts.” Alexander Herzen himself, whose biography sometimes took unimaginable zigzags, called this work a confession that evoked various “thoughts from his thoughts.” This is a synthesis of journalism, memoirs, literary portraits and historical chronicles. Over the novel “Who is to Blame?” the writer worked for six years. In this work, he proposes to solve the problems of equality of women and men, relationships in marriage, and education with the help of high ideals of humanism. He also wrote the highly social stories “The Thieving Magpie”, “Doctor Krupov”, “Tragedy over a Glass of Grog”, “For the Sake of Boredom” and others.

There is probably not a single educated person who does not know, at least from hearsay, who Alexander Herzen is. A brief biography of the writer is contained in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the Brockhaus and Efron dictionary, and who knows what other sources! However, it is best to get to know the writer through his books - it is in them that his personality comes into full view.

Alexander Ivanovich Herzen. Born on March 25 (April 6), 1812 in Moscow - died on January 9 (21), 1870 in Paris. Russian publicist, writer, philosopher.

Herzen was born into the family of a wealthy landowner Ivan Alekseevich Yakovlev (1767-1846), descended from Andrei Kobyla (like the Romanovs). Mother is 16-year-old German Henriette Wilhelmina Luisa Haag, the daughter of a minor official, a clerk in the state chamber in Stuttgart. The parents' marriage was not formalized, and Herzen bore the surname invented by his father: Herzen - “son of the heart” (from German Herz).

In his youth, Herzen received the usual noble education at home, based on reading works of foreign literature, mainly from the end of the 18th century. French novels, comedies, Kotzebue, works, from an early age set the boy in an enthusiastic, sentimental-romantic tone. There were no systematic lessons, but the tutors - French and Germans - imparted solid knowledge to the boy foreign languages. Thanks to his acquaintance with Schiller’s work, Herzen became imbued with freedom-loving aspirations, the development of which was greatly facilitated by the teacher of Russian literature I. E. Protopopov, who brought Herzen notebooks of poems: “Odes to Freedom”, “Dagger”, “Thoughts” by Ryleev, etc., as well as Busho , a participant in the French Revolution who left France when the “depraved and rogues” took over. Added to this was the influence of Tanya Kuchina, Herzen’s young “Korchev cousin” (married Tatyana Passek), who supported the childish pride of the young dreamer, predicting an extraordinary future for him.

Already in childhood, Herzen met and became friends with Nikolai Ogarev. According to his memoirs, the news of the Decembrist uprising on December 14, 1825 made a strong impression on the boys (Herzen was 13, Ogarev was 12 years old). Under his impression, their first, still vague dreams of revolutionary activity arise; During a walk on the Sparrow Hills, the boys vowed to fight for freedom.

Already in 1829-1830, Herzen wrote a philosophical article about “Wallenstein” by F. Schiller. During this youthful period of Herzen’s life, his ideal was Karl Moor, the hero of F. Schiller’s tragedy “The Robbers” (1782).

Herzen dreamed of friendship, dreamed of struggle and suffering for freedom. In this mood, Herzen entered Moscow University at the Department of Physics and Mathematics, and here this mood intensified even more. At the university, Herzen took part in the so-called “Malov story” (student protest against an unloved teacher), but got off relatively lightly - with a short imprisonment, along with many of his comrades, in a punishment cell. Of the teachers, only Kachenovsky, with his skepticism, and Pavlov, who managed to introduce listeners to German philosophy at agricultural lectures, awakened young thought. The youth were, however, quite stormy; she welcomed the July Revolution (as can be seen from Lermontov’s poems) and other popular movements (the cholera that appeared in Moscow contributed greatly to the revival and excitement of students, in the fight against which all university youth took an active and selfless part). At this time, Herzen met with Vadim Passek, which later turned into friendship, the establishment of a friendly connection with Ketcher and others. The group of young friends grew, made noise, seethed; from time to time she allowed small revelries, of a completely innocent nature, however; She read diligently, being carried away mainly by social issues, studying Russian history, assimilating the ideas of Saint-Simon (whose utopian socialism Herzen then considered the most outstanding achievement of contemporary Western philosophy) and other socialists.

In 1834, all members of Herzen's circle and he himself were arrested. Herzen was exiled to Perm, and from there to Vyatka, where he was assigned to serve in the governor’s office.

For organizing an exhibition of local works and the explanations given to the heir to the throne (future) during its inspection, Herzen, at the request of Zhukovsky, was transferred to serve as an adviser to the board in Vladimir, where he got married, having secretly taken his bride from Moscow, and where he spent his happiest and brightest years. days of your life.

At the beginning of 1840, Herzen was allowed to return to Moscow. In May 1840, he moved to St. Petersburg, where, at the insistence of his father, he began to serve in the office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But in July 1841, for a harsh review in one letter about the activities of the police, Herzen was exiled to Novgorod, where he served in the provincial government until July 1842, after which he settled in Moscow.

Here he had to face the famous circle of Hegelians Stankevich and, who defended the thesis of the complete rationality of all reality.

Most of Stankevich’s friends became close to Herzen and Ogarev, forming a camp of Westerners; others joined the Slavophil camp, with Khomyakov and Kireevsky at their head (1844).

Despite mutual bitterness and disputes, both sides had much in common in their views and, above all, according to Herzen himself, the common thing was “a feeling of boundless, all-existence love for the Russian people, for the Russian mentality.” The opponents, “like a two-faced Janus, looked in different directions, while the heart beat alone.” “With tears in our eyes”, hugging each other, recent friends, and now principled opponents, went in different directions.

Herzen often traveled to St. Petersburg for meetings of the Belinsky circle, and soon after the death of his father he went abroad forever (1847).

In the Moscow house where Herzen lived from 1843 to 1847, the A. I. Herzen House Museum has been operating since 1976.

Herzen arrived in Europe more radically republican than socialist, although the publication he began in Otechestvennye zapiski of a series of articles entitled “Letters from Avenue Marigny” (later published in revised form in “Letters from France and Italy”) shocked him friends - Western liberals - with their anti-bourgeois pathos. The February Revolution of 1848 seemed to Herzen the fulfillment of all his hopes. The subsequent June workers' uprising, its bloody suppression and the ensuing reaction shocked Herzen, who decisively turned to socialism. He became close to Proudhon and other prominent figures of the revolution and European radicalism; Together with Proudhon, he published the newspaper “The Voice of the People” (“La Voix du Peuple”), which he financed. His wife's sad infatuation with the German poet Herwegh dates back to the Parisian period. In 1849, after the defeat of the radical opposition by President Louis Napoleon, Herzen was forced to leave France and moved to Switzerland; from Switzerland he moved to Nice, which then belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia.

During this period, Herzen moved among the circles of radical European emigration that gathered in Switzerland after the defeat of the revolution in Europe, and, in particular, became acquainted with Giuseppe Garibaldi. He became famous for his book of essays “From the Other Shore,” in which he reckoned with his past liberal convictions. Under the influence of the collapse of old ideals and the reaction that occurred throughout Europe, Herzen formed a specific system of views about the doom, the “dying” of old Europe and the prospects for Russia and the Slavic world, which are called upon to realize the socialist ideal.

Literary activity Herzen began back in the 1830s. In the Athenaeum for 1830 (II volume) his name appears under one translation from French. The first article, signed under the pseudonym Iskander, was published in Telescope in 1836 (“Hoffmann”). The “Speech Delivered at the Opening of the Vyatka Public Library” and “Diary” (1842) date back to the same time. In Vladimir the following were written: “Notes of a Young Man” and “More from the Notes of a Young Man” (“Otechestvennye zapiski”, 1840-1841; in this story Chaadaev is depicted in the person of Trenzinsky). From 1842 to 1847, he published articles in “Domestic Notes” and “Contemporary”: “Amateurism in Science”, “Romantic Amateurs”, “Workshop of Scientists”, “Buddhism in Science”, “Letters on the Study of Nature”. Here Herzen rebelled against learned pedants and formalists, against their scholastic science, alienated from life, against their quietism. In the article “On the Study of Nature” we find a philosophical analysis of various methods of knowledge. At the same time, Herzen wrote: “About one drama”, “On various occasions”, “New variations on old themes”, “A few notes on the historical development of honor”, ​​“From the notes of Dr. Krupov”, “Who is to blame?”, “Magpie” -thief”, “Moscow and St. Petersburg”, “Novgorod and Vladimir”, “Edrovo Station”, “Interrupted Conversations”. Of all these works, the story “The Thieving Magpie”, which depicts the terrible situation of the “serf intelligentsia”, and the novel “Who is to Blame?”, dedicated to the issue of freedom of feeling, especially stand out. family relationships, the position of a woman in marriage. The main idea of ​​the novel is that people who base their well-being solely on the basis of family happiness and feelings, alien to the interests of social and universal humanity, cannot ensure lasting happiness for themselves, and in their lives it will always depend on chance.

Of the works written by Herzen abroad, the following are especially important: letters from “Avenue Marigny” (the first published in Sovremennik, all fourteen under the general title: “Letters from France and Italy”, edition of 1855), representing a remarkable description and analysis of events and the moods that worried Europe in 1847-1852. Here we encounter a completely negative attitude towards the Western European bourgeoisie, its morality and social principles, and the author’s ardent faith in the future significance of the fourth estate. Herzen’s work “From the Other Shore” (originally in German “Vom anderen Ufer”, Hamburg, 1850; in Russian, London, 1855; in French, Geneva, 1870) made a particularly strong impression both in Russia and in Europe. in which Herzen expresses complete disappointment with the West and Western civilization - the result of that mental revolution that determined Herzen’s worldview in 1848-1851. It should also be noted the letter to: “The Russian people and socialism” - a passionate and ardent defense of the Russian people against the attacks and prejudices that Michelet expressed in one of his articles. “The Past and Thoughts” is a series of memoirs, partly of an autobiographical nature, but also providing a whole series of highly artistic pictures, dazzlingly brilliant characteristics, and observations of Herzen from what he experienced and saw in Russia and abroad.

All other works and articles by Herzen, such as: “The Old World and Russia”, “Le peuple Russe et le socialisme”, “Ends and Beginnings”, etc., represent a simple development of ideas and sentiments that were fully defined in the period 1847-1852 .

The attraction to freedom of thought, “freethinking,” in the best sense of the word, was especially strongly developed in Herzen. He did not belong to any one party, either open or secret. The one-sidedness of “men of action” alienated him from many revolutionary and radical figures in Europe. His mind quickly comprehended the imperfections and shortcomings of those forms of Western life to which Herzen was initially drawn from his ugly, distant Russian reality of the 1840s. With amazing consistency, Herzen abandoned his passions for the West when it turned out in his eyes to be lower than the previously drawn up ideal.

As a consistent Hegelian, Herzen believed that the development of humanity proceeds in steps and each step is embodied in a certain people. Herzen, who laughed at the fact that Hegel’s god lived in Berlin, essentially transferred this god to Moscow, sharing with the Slavophiles the belief in the impending replacement of the Germanic period by the Slavic. At the same time, as a follower of Saint-Simon and Fourier, he combined this belief in the Slavic phase of progress with the doctrine of the upcoming replacement of the rule of the bourgeoisie with the triumph of the working class, which should come thanks to the Russian community, just discovered by the German Haxthausen. Together with the Slavophiles, Herzen despaired of Western culture. The West has rotted, and new life cannot be injected into its dilapidated forms. Faith in the community and the Russian people saved Herzen from a hopeless view of the fate of humanity. However, Herzen did not deny the possibility that Russia too would go through the stage of bourgeois development.

Defending the Russian future, Herzen argued that there is a lot of ugliness in Russian life, but there is no vulgarity that is rigid in its forms. The Russian tribe is a fresh, virgin tribe that has the “aspiration of the future century,” an immeasurable and endless supply of vitality and energy; “a thinking person in Russia is the most independent and most open-minded person in the world.” Herzen was convinced that Slavic world strives for unity, and since “centralization is contrary to the Slavic spirit,” the Slavs will unite on the principles of federations. Having a free-thinking attitude towards all religions, Herzen recognized, however, that Orthodoxy had many advantages and merits in comparison with Catholicism and Protestantism.

Herzen's philosophical and historical concept emphasizes the active role of man in history. At the same time, she recognizes that reason cannot realize its ideals without taking into account the existing facts of history, that its results constitute the “necessary basis” for the operations of reason.

In July 1849, Nicholas I arrested all the property of Herzen and his mother. After this, the seized property was pledged to the banker Rothschild, and he, negotiating a loan to Russia, achieved the lifting of the imperial ban.

After the death of his wife in 1852, Herzen moved to London, where he founded the Free Russian Printing House to print prohibited publications and, from 1857, published the weekly newspaper Kolokol.

The peak of the influence of the Bell occurs in the years preceding the liberation of the peasants; then the newspaper was regularly read in the Winter Palace. After the peasant reform, its influence begins to decline; support for the Polish uprising of 1863 sharply undermined circulation. At that time, Herzen was already too revolutionary for the liberal public, and too moderate for the radical one. On March 15, 1865, under the insistent demands of the Russian government to the British government, the editors of Kolokol, headed by Herzen, left London forever and moved to Switzerland, of which Herzen had by that time become a citizen. In April of the same 1865, the “Free Russian Printing House” was also transferred there. Soon people from Herzen’s entourage began to move to Switzerland, for example, in 1865 Nikolai Ogarev moved there.

On January 9 (21), 1870, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen died of pneumonia in Paris, where he had recently arrived on family business. He was buried in Nice (the ashes were transferred from the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris).

Herzen family:

In 1838, in Vladimir, Herzen married his cousin Natalya Alexandrovna Zakharyina. In 1839 their son Alexander was born, and in 1841 a daughter was born. In 1842, a son, Ivan, was born, who died 5 days after birth. In 1843, a son, Nikolai, was born, who was deaf and mute. In 1844, daughter Natalya was born. In 1845, a daughter, Elizabeth, was born, who died 11 months after birth.

While emigrating to Paris, Herzen's wife fell in love with Herzen's friend Georg Herwegh. She admitted to Herzen that “dissatisfaction, something left unoccupied, abandoned, was looking for another sympathy and found it in friendship with Herwegh” and that she dreams of a “marriage of three,” and more spiritual than purely carnal. In Nice, Herzen and his wife and Herwegh and his wife Emma lived in the same house. Herzen then demanded the Herwegs' departure from Nice, and Herwegh blackmailed Herzen with the threat of suicide. The Herwegs left anyway. In the international revolutionary community, Herzen was condemned for subjecting his wife to “moral coercion” and preventing her from uniting with her lover. In 1850, Herzen's wife gave birth to a daughter, Olga.

On November 16, 1851, near the Giers archipelago, as a result of a collision with another ship, the steamship "City of Grasse", on which Herzen's mother and his deaf-mute son Nikolai were sailing to Nice, sank, and they both died.

In 1852, Herzen's wife gave birth to a son, Vladimir, and died two days later; the son also died soon after.

Since 1857, Herzen began to cohabit with Nikolai Ogarev’s wife, Natalya Alekseevna Ogareva-Tuchkova, she raised his children. They had a daughter, Elizabeth. In 1869, Tuchkova received the surname Herzen, which she bore until her return to Russia in 1876, after Herzen’s death.

Elizaveta Herzen, the 17-year-old daughter of A.I. Herzen and N.A. Tuchkova-Ogareva, committed suicide because of unrequited love for a 44-year-old Frenchman in Florence in December 1875. The suicide had a resonance; he wrote about it in the essay “Two Suicides.”

Works of Herzen:

"Who is guilty?" novel in two parts (1846)
"Passing by" story (1846)
"Doctor Krupov" story (1847)
“The Thieving Magpie” story (1848)
"Damaged" story (1851)
"Tragedy over a Glass of Grog" (1864)
“For the sake of boredom” (1869).

Publications in the Literature section

Founder of Russian socialism

Writer and publicist, philosopher and teacher, author of the memoirs “The Past and Thoughts”, founder of Russian free (uncensored) printing, Alexander Herzen was one of the most ardent critics of serfdom, and at the beginning of the 20th century he turned out to be almost a symbol of the revolutionary struggle. Until 1905, Herzen remained a banned writer in Russia, and the complete collection of the author’s works was published only after the October Revolution.

Alexander Herzen was the illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner Ivan Yakovlev and a German woman, Louise Haag, and therefore received the surname that his father came up with for him - Herzen (“son of the heart”). The boy did not have a systematic education, but numerous tutors, teachers and educators instilled in him a taste for literature and knowledge of foreign languages. Herzen was brought up on French novels, the works of Goethe and Schiller, and the comedies of Kotzebue and Beaumarchais. The literature teacher introduced his student to the poems of Pushkin and Ryleev.

“The Decembrists woke up Herzen” (Vladimir Lenin)

The Decembrist uprising made a great impression on 13-year-old Alexander Herzen and his 12-year-old friend Nikolai Ogarev; biographers claim that the first thoughts about freedom, dreams of revolutionary activity in Herzen and Ogarev arose precisely then. Later, as a student at the Faculty of Physics and Technology at Moscow University, Herzen took part in student protests. During this period, Herzen and Ogarev became friends with Vadim Passek and Nikolai Ketcher. A circle of people is forming around Alexander Herzen, just like him, who are keen on the works of European socialists.

This circle did not last long, and already in 1834 its members were arrested. Herzen was exiled to Perm, and then to Vyatka, but, partly at the request of Zhukovsky, our hero was transferred to Vladimir. It is believed that it was in this city that Herzen lived his happiest days. Here he got married, secretly taking his bride from Moscow.

In 1840, after a short stay in St. Petersburg and service in Novgorod, Herzen moved to Moscow, where he met Belinsky. The union of two thinkers gave Russian Westernism its final form.

“Hegel’s philosophy - revolution” (Alexander Herzen)

Herzen's worldview was formed under the influence of left-wing Hegelians, French utopian socialists and Feuerbach. The Russian philosopher saw a revolutionary direction in Hegel’s dialectics; it was Herzen who helped Belinsky and Bakunin overcome the conservative component of Hegelian philosophy.

Having moved to the Mother See, Herzen became the star of Moscow salons; in oratory skills he was second only to Alexei Khomyakov. Publishing under the pseudonym Iskander, Herzen began to acquire a name in literature, publishing both works of art and journalistic articles. In 1841–1846, the writer worked on the novel “Who is to Blame?”

In 1846, he received a large inheritance after the death of his father and a year later he left for Paris, from where he sent four “Letters from Avenue Marigny” to Nekrasov for Sovremennik. They openly promoted socialist ideas. The writer also openly supported the February Revolution in France, which forever deprived him of the opportunity to return to his homeland.

“In the history of Russian social thought, he will always occupy one of the very first places” (Georgy Plekhanov)

Until the end of his days, Alexander Herzen lived and worked abroad. After the victory of General Cavaignac in France, he left for Rome, and the failure of the Roman Revolution of 1848–1849 forced him to move to Switzerland. In 1853, Herzen settled in England and there, for the first time in history, created a free Russian press abroad. The famous memoirs “The Past and Thoughts,” essays and dialogues “From the Other Shore” also appeared there. Gradually, the philosopher's interests moved from the European revolution to Russian reforms. In 1857, Herzen founded the magazine Kolokol, inspired by ideas that appeared in Russia after the Crimean War.

The special political tact of Herzen the publisher, who, without retreating from his socialist theories, was ready to support the reforms of the monarchy as long as he was confident in their effectiveness and necessity, helped “The Bell” become one of the important platforms on which the peasant issue was discussed. The magazine's influence declined when the issue itself was resolved. And Herzen’s pro-Polish position in 1862–1863 pushed him back toward that part of society that was not inclined towards revolutionary ideas. To young people, he seemed backward and outdated.

In his homeland, he was a pioneer in promoting the ideas of socialism and the European positivist and scientific worldview Europe XIX century. Georgy Plekhanov openly compared his compatriot with Marx and Engels. Speaking about Herzen’s “Letters”, Plekhanov wrote:

“One can easily think that they were written not in the early 40s, but in the second half of the 70s, and, moreover, not by Herzen, but by Engels. To such an extent the thoughts of the first are similar to the thoughts of the second. And this striking similarity shows that Herzen’s mind worked in the same direction in which the mind of Engels, and therefore Marx, worked.”.

en.wikipedia.org

Biography

Herzen was born on March 25 (April 6), 1812 in Moscow, in the family of a wealthy landowner Ivan Alekseevich Yakovlev (1767-1846); mother - 16-year-old German Henrietta-Wilhelmina-Louise Haag, the daughter of a minor official, a clerk in the state chamber in Stuttgart. The parents' marriage was not formalized, and Herzen bore the surname invented by his father: Herzen - “son of the heart” (from German Herz).

In 1833 Herzen graduated from the physics and mathematics department of Moscow University. A museum has been opened in the Moscow house where he lived from 1843 to 1847.

In his youth, Herzen received the usual noble education at home, based on reading works of foreign literature, mainly from the end of the 18th century. French novels, comedies by Beaumarchais, Kotzebue, works by Goethe and Schiller from an early age set the boy in an enthusiastic, sentimental-romantic tone. There were no systematic classes, but the tutors - French and Germans - gave the boy a solid knowledge of foreign languages. Thanks to his acquaintance with Schiller, Herzen was imbued with freedom-loving aspirations, the development of which was greatly facilitated by the teacher of Russian literature I. E. Protopopov, who brought Herzen notebooks of Pushkin’s poems: “Odes to Freedom”, “Dagger”, “Dumas” by Ryleev, etc., as well as Busho , a participant in the French Revolution who left France when the “depraved and rogues” took over. Added to this was the influence of the young “Korchev cousin” Herzen (later Tatyana Passek), who supported the childish pride of the young dreamer, prophesying an extraordinary future for him.

Already in childhood, Herzen met and became friends with Ogarev. According to his memoirs, the news of the Decembrist uprising made a strong impression on the boys (Herzen was 13, Ogarev was 12 years old). Under his impression, their first, still vague dreams of revolutionary activity arise; During a walk on the Sparrow Hills, the boys vowed to fight for freedom.

Already in 1829-1830, Herzen wrote a philosophical article about Schiller's Wallenstein. During this youthful period of Herzen's life, his ideal was first Karl Moor, and then Pose.

University

Herzen dreamed of friendship, dreamed of struggle and suffering for freedom. In this mood, Herzen entered Moscow University at the Department of Physics and Mathematics, and here this mood intensified even more. At the university, Herzen took part in the so-called “Malovsky story”, but got off relatively lightly - imprisonment, along with many of his comrades, in a punishment cell. University teaching was then poorly conducted and brought little benefit; Only Kachenovsky, with his skepticism, and Pavlov, who managed to introduce listeners to German philosophy at agricultural lectures, awakened young thought. The youth were, however, quite stormy; she welcomed the July Revolution (as can be seen from Lermontov’s poems) and other popular movements (the cholera that appeared in Moscow contributed greatly to the revival and excitement of students, in the fight against which all university youth took an active and selfless part). At this time, Herzen met with Vadim Passek, which later turned into friendship, the establishment of a friendly connection with Ketcher and others. The group of young friends grew, made noise, seethed; from time to time she allowed small revelries, of a completely innocent nature, however; I read diligently, being interested mainly in social issues, studying Russian history, assimilating the ideas of Saint-Simon and other socialists.

Philosophical quest

In 1834, all members of Herzen's circle and he himself were arrested. Herzen was exiled to Perm, and from there to Vyatka, where he was assigned to serve in the governor’s office. For organizing an exhibition of local works and the explanations given to the heir (the future Alexander II) during its inspection, Herzen, at the request of Zhukovsky, was transferred to serve as an adviser to the board in Vladimir, where he got married, having secretly taken his bride from Moscow, and where he spent the happiest and bright days of your life.

In 1840, Herzen was allowed to return to Moscow. Here he had to face the famous circle of Hegelians Stankevich and Belinsky, who defended the thesis of the complete rationality of all reality. The passion for Hegelianism reached its extreme limits; the understanding of Hegel’s philosophy was one-sided; with purely Russian straightforwardness, the disputing parties did not stop at any extreme conclusion (“Borodinsky Anniversary” by Belinsky). Herzen also took up Hegel, but from a thorough study of him he came up with results completely opposite to those made by supporters of the idea of ​​rational reality. Meanwhile, the socialist ideas of Proudhon, Cabet, Fourier, Louis Blanc spread greatly in Russian society, simultaneously with the ideas of German philosophy; they had influence on the grouping of literary circles of that time. Most of Stankevich’s friends became close to Herzen and Ogarev, forming a camp of Westerners; others joined the Slavophil camp, with Khomyakov and Kireevsky at their head (1844). Despite mutual bitterness and disputes, both sides had much in common in their views and, above all, according to Herzen himself, the common thing was “a feeling of boundless, all-existence love for the Russian people, for the Russian mentality.” The opponents, “like a two-faced Janus, looked in different directions, while the heart beat alone.” “With tears in our eyes”, hugging each other, recent friends, and now principled opponents, went in different directions.

In 1842, Herzen, after serving a year in Novgorod, where he ended up not of his own free will, received his resignation, moved to live in Moscow, and then, soon after the death of his father, left forever abroad (1847).

In exile

Herzen arrived in Europe more radically republican than socialist, although the publication he began in Otechestvennye Zapiski of a series of articles entitled “Letters from Avenue Marigny” (later published as a book entitled “Letters from France and Italy”) shocked his friends - Western liberals - with their anti-bourgeois pathos. The February Revolution of 1848 seemed to Herzen the fulfillment of all his hopes. The subsequent June workers' uprising, its bloody suppression and the ensuing reaction shocked Herzen, who decisively turned to socialism. He became close to Proudhon and other prominent figures of the revolution and European radicalism; Together with Proudhon, he published the newspaper “The Voice of the People” (“La Voix du Peuple”), which he financed. His wife's sad infatuation with the German poet Herwegh dates back to the Parisian period. In 1849, after the defeat of the radical opposition by President Louis Napoleon, Herzen was forced to leave France and moved to Switzerland, where he was naturalized; from Switzerland he moved to Nice, which then belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia. During this period, Herzen moved among the circles of radical European emigration that gathered in Switzerland after the defeat of the revolution in Europe, and in particular became acquainted with Garibaldi. He became famous for his book of essays “From the Other Shore,” in which he reckoned with his past liberal convictions. Under the influence of the collapse of old ideals and the reaction that occurred throughout Europe, Herzen formed a specific system of views about the doom, the “dying” 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, where he lived for about 10 years, founding the Free Russian Printing House to print prohibited publications and, since 1857, publishing the weekly newspaper Kolokol. It is noteworthy that in July 1849, Nicholas I arrested all the property of Herzen and his mother. The latter at that time had already been pledged to the banker Rothschild, and he, threatening Nesselrode, who then held the post of Minister of Finance in Russia, with publicity, achieved the lifting of the imperial ban.

The peak of the influence of the Bell occurs in the years preceding the liberation of the peasants; then the newspaper was regularly read in the Winter Palace. After the peasant reform, its influence begins to decline; support for the Polish uprising of 1863 sharply undermined circulation. At that time, Herzen was already too revolutionary for the liberal public, and too moderate for the radical one. On March 15, 1865, under the persistent demand of the Russian government to the government of Her Majesty, the editorial board of Kolokol, headed by Herzen, left England forever and moved to Switzerland, of which Herzen was a citizen by that time. In April of the same 1865, the “Free Russian Printing House” was also transferred there. Soon people from Herzen’s entourage began to move to Switzerland, for example, in 1865 Nikolai Ogarev moved there.

On January 9 (21), 1870, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen died of pneumonia in Paris, where he had recently arrived on family business.

Literary and journalistic activities

Herzen's literary activity began in the 1830s. In the Athenaeum for 1830 (II volume) his name is found under one translation from French. The first article, signed by the pseudonym Iskander, printed. in the Telescope for 1836 (“Hoffmann”). The “Speech Delivered at the Opening of the Vyatka Public Library” and “Diary” (1842) date back to the same time. In Vladimir it is written: “Zap. one young man" and "More from the notes of a young man" (Department of the Zap., 1840-41; in this story Chaadaev is depicted in the person of Trenzinsky). From 1842 to 1847 placed in “Ot. Zap." and Sovremennik articles: “Amateurism in Science”, “Romantic Amateurs”, “Workshop of Scientists”, “Buddhism in Science”, “Letters on the Study of Nature”. Here Herzen rebelled against learned pedants and formalists, against their scholastic science, alienated from life, against their quietism. In the article “On the Study of Nature” we find a philosophical analysis of various methods of knowledge. At the same time, Herzen wrote: “About one drama”, “On various occasions”, “New variations on old themes”, “A few notes on the historical development of honor”, ​​“From the notes of Dr. Krupov”, “Who is to blame?”, “Magpie” -thief”, “Moscow and St. Petersburg”, “Novgorod and Vladimir”, “Edrovo Station”, “Interrupted Conversations”. Of all these works, amazingly brilliant, both in depth of thought, and in artistry and dignity of form, the ones that especially stand out are: the story “The Magpie Thief,” which depicts the terrible situation of the “serf intelligentsia,” and the novel “Who’s to Blame,” dedicated to the question of freedom of feeling, family relationships, a woman’s position in marriage. The main idea of ​​the novel is that people who base their well-being solely on the basis of family happiness and feelings alien to social and universal interests cannot ensure lasting happiness for themselves, and in their lives it will always depend on chance.

Of the works written by Herzen abroad, the following are especially important: letters from “Avenue Marigny” (the first published in Sovremennik, all fourteen under the general title: “Letters from France and Italy”, published in 1855), representing a remarkable description and analysis events and sentiments that worried Europe in 1847-1852. Here we encounter a completely negative attitude towards the Western European bourgeoisie, its morality and social principles, and the author’s ardent faith in the future significance of the fourth estate. A particularly strong impression both in Russia and in Europe was made by Herzen’s work: “From the Other Shore” (originally in German “Vom andern Ufer” Gamb., 1850; in Russian, London, 1855; in French, Geneva, 1870 ), in which Herzen expresses complete disappointment with the West and Western civilization - the result of the mental revolution that ended and determined Herzen’s mental development in 1848-1851. It is also worth noting the letter to Michelet: “The Russian people and socialism” - a passionate and ardent defense of the Russian people against the attacks and prejudices that Michelet expressed in one of his articles. “The Past and Thoughts” is a series of memoirs, partly of an autobiographical nature, but also providing a whole series of highly artistic pictures, dazzlingly brilliant characteristics, and observations of Herzen from what he experienced and saw in Russia and abroad.

All other works and articles by Herzen, such as “The Old World and Russia”, “Le peuple Russe et le socialisme”, “Ends and Beginnings”, etc. represent a simple development of ideas and sentiments that were fully defined in the period 1847-1852 years in the works mentioned above.

Philosophical views of Herzen during the years of emigration

There are quite misleading views about the nature of Herzen's social activities and his worldview, mainly due to the role that Herzen played in the ranks of the emigration. By nature, Herzen was not suitable for the role of an agitator and propagandist or revolutionary. He was, first of all, a widely and diversified man, with an inquisitive and contemplative mind, passionately seeking the truth. The attraction to freedom of thought, “freethinking,” in the best sense of the word, was especially strongly developed in Herzen. He did not understand fanatical intolerance and exclusivity and never belonged to any party, either open or secret. The one-sidedness of “men of action” alienated him from many revolutionary and radical figures in Europe. His subtle and insightful mind quickly comprehended the imperfections and shortcomings of those forms of Western life to which Herzen was initially drawn from his ugly, distant Russian reality of the 1840s. With amazing consistency, Herzen abandoned his passions for the West when it turned out in his eyes to be lower than the previously drawn up ideal. This mental independence and open-mindedness of Herzen, the ability to question and test the most cherished aspirations, even such an opponent general N. N. Strakhov calls Herzen’s activity a wonderful and useful phenomenon in many respects, since “it is not for nothing that real freedom is considered one of the necessary conditions for correct thinking.” As a consistent Hegelian, Herzen believed that the development of humanity proceeds in steps and each step is embodied in a certain people. According to Hegel, such a people were the Prussians. Herzen, who laughed at the fact that Hegel’s god lived in Berlin, essentially transferred this god to Moscow, sharing with the Slavophiles the belief in the impending replacement of the Germanic period by the Slavic. At the same time, as a follower of Saint-Simon and Fourier, he combined this belief in the Slavic phase of progress with the doctrine of the upcoming replacement of the rule of the bourgeoisie with the triumph of the working class, which should come thanks to the Russian community, just discovered by the German Haxthausen. Together with the Slavophiles, Herzen despaired of Western culture. The West has rotted and new life cannot be injected into its dilapidated forms. Faith in the community and the Russian people saved Herzen from a hopeless view of the fate of humanity. However, Herzen did not deny the possibility that Russia too would go through the stage of bourgeois development. Defending the Russian future, Herzen argued that there is a lot of ugliness in Russian life, but there is no vulgarity that is rigid in its forms. The Russian tribe is a fresh, virgin tribe that has the “aspiration of the future century,” an immeasurable and endless supply of vitality and energy; “a thinking person in Russia is the most independent and most open-minded person in the world.” Herzen was convinced that the Slavic world was striving for unity, and since “centralization is contrary to the Slavic spirit,” the Slavs would unite on the principles of federations. Having a free-thinking attitude towards all religions, Herzen recognized, however, that Orthodoxy had many advantages and merits in comparison with Catholicism and Protestantism. And on other issues, Herzen expressed opinions that often contradicted Westernist views. Thus, he was rather indifferent to different forms of government.

Social activities in exile

Herzen's influence in his time was enormous. The significance of Herzen’s activities in the peasant question has been fully clarified and established (V.I. Semevsky, Prof. Ivanyukov, Senate Semenov, etc.). Disastrous for Herzen's popularity was his passion for the Polish uprising. Herzen, not without hesitation, took the side of the Poles, being somewhat suspicious of their delegates for quite a long time (See cit., pp. 213-215); He finally yielded only thanks to persistent pressure from Bakunin. As a result, Kolokol lost its subscribers (instead of 3,000, there were no more than 500 left).

Herzen died on January 9 (21), 1870 in Paris. He was buried in Nice (the ashes were transferred from the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris).

Biography

“Herzen did not emigrate, did not initiate Russian emigration; no, he was born an emigrant.” F.M. Dostoevsky Old People (Diary of a Writer. 1873).

Herzen, A. I. (1812 - 1870) - famous Russian writer and revolutionary. He began his revolutionary activities under the influence of the great utopian socialists. In 1834, together with Ogarev and others, he was exiled to Perm, and then to Vyatka. Upon returning to Moscow, Herzen becomes one of the leaders of the “Westerners” and leads the fight against the Slavophiles. Despite disagreements with the Slavophiles, Herzen, nevertheless, himself believed that socialism in Russia would grow out of the peasant community. This mistake was largely due to his disappointment in the political system of Western Europe. In 1851, the Senate decided to deprive him of all rights to the estate and consider him an eternal exile. Since 1857, Herzen published in London the famous collection “Polar Star” and the magazine “Bell”, where he demanded the liberation of peasants, the abolition of censorship, a public court and other reforms. Herzen's works had a huge impact for education younger generation revolutionaries.

Herzen Alexander Ivanovich (1812-70), Russian revolutionary, writer, philosopher. Illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner I. A. Yakovlev. He graduated from Moscow University (1833), where, together with N.P. Ogarev, he headed a revolutionary circle. Arrested in 1834, he spent 6 years in exile. Published since 1836 under the pseudonym Iskander. Since 1842 in Moscow, head of the left wing of Westerners. In the philosophical works “Amateurism in Science” (1843), “Letters on the Study of Nature” (1845-46), and others, he asserted the union of philosophy with the natural sciences. He sharply criticized the serfdom in the novel "Who is to Blame?" (1841-46), the stories "Doctor Krupov" (1847) and "The Thieving Magpie" (1848). Since 1847 in exile. After the defeat of the European revolutions of 1848-49, he became disillusioned with the revolutionary capabilities of the West and developed the theory of “Russian socialism”, becoming one of the founders of populism. In 1853 he founded the Free Russian Printing House in London. In the newspaper "Bell" he denounced the Russian autocracy, conducted revolutionary propaganda, and demanded the liberation of peasants with land. In 1861 he took the side of revolutionary democracy, contributed to the creation of Land and Freedom, and supported the Polish uprising of 1863-64. Died in Paris, grave in Nice. The autobiographical essay “The Past and Thoughts” (1852-68) is one of the masterpieces of memoir literature.

HERTZEN Alexander Ivanovich, pseudonym Iskander (1812 - 1870), prose writer, publicist, critic, philosopher. Born on March 25 (April 6 n.s.) in Moscow. He was the illegitimate son of a wealthy Russian landowner I. Yakovlev and a young German bourgeois woman Louise Haag from Stuttgart. The boy received the fictitious surname Herzen (from the German word for “heart”). He was brought up in Yakovlev's house, received a good education, became acquainted with the works of French educators, and read the forbidden poems of Pushkin and Ryleev. Herzen was deeply influenced by his friendship with his talented peer, the future poet N. Ogarev, which lasted throughout their lives.

The event that determined Herzen’s entire future fate was the uprising of the Decembrists, who forever became for him patriotic heroes who went “consciously to obvious death in order to awaken the younger generation to a new life.” He vowed to avenge those executed and continue the work of the Decembrists. In the summer of 1828, he and his friend Ogarev on the Sparrow Hills, in sight of all of Moscow, swore allegiance to the great cause of the struggle for the liberation of the people. They remained faithful to this oath until the end of their lives.

His youthful love of freedom was strengthened during his years of study at Moscow University, where he entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics in 1829, graduating with a candidate's degree in 1833. Within the walls of the university, a circle of progressive youth who were seriously involved in politics and sociology was grouped around Herzen and Ogarev. The ideas of freedom, equality, fraternity, enlightenment, the idea of ​​equality, including women's, occupied Herzen's attention. In the eyes of his superiors, Herzen was known as a brave freethinker, very dangerous to society.

In the summer of 1834 he was arrested and exiled to a remote province: first to Perm, then to Vyatka and Vladimir. The first year in Vyatka he considered his life “empty”; he found support only in correspondence with Ogarev and his fiancée N. Zakharyina, whom he married while serving exile in Vladimir. These years (1838 - 40) were also happy in his personal life. A unique artistic outcome of the first exile was the story “Notes of a Young Man” (1840 - 41).

In 1840 he returned to Moscow, but soon (for “spreading unfounded rumors” - a harsh review in a letter to his father about the tsarist police) he was sent into exile in Novgorod, from where he returned in 1842. In 1842 - 47 he published in “Notes of the Fatherland”, which he had begun in Novgorod, a series of articles “Amateurism in Science” (1842 - 43). Herzen's second philosophical cycle, "Letters on the Study of Nature" (1844 - 46), occupies an outstanding place in the history of not only Russian, but also world philosophical thought.

In 1845, the novel “Who is to Blame?”, begun in Novgorod, was completed. In 1846 the stories “The Thieving Magpie” and “Doctor Krupov” were written. In January 1847 he left with his family abroad, not expecting that he was leaving Russia forever.

In the fall of 1847 in Rome, he took part in popular processions and demonstrations, visited revolutionary clubs, and met prominent figures of the Italian national liberation movement. In May 1848 he returned to revolutionary Paris. Later he wrote a book about these events, “Letters from France and Italy” (1847 - 52). In the June days of 1848 he witnessed the defeat of the revolution in France and the rampant reaction, which led him to an ideological crisis, expressed in the book “From the Other Shore” (1847 - 50). In the fall of 1851 he experienced a personal tragedy: his mother and son died during a shipwreck. His wife died in May 1852. “Everything collapsed - the general and the particular, the European revolution and home shelter, the freedom of the world and personal happiness.”

In 1852 he moved to London, where he began work on a book of confession, a book of memoirs, “The Past and Thoughts” (1852 - 68).

In 1853 Herzen founded the Free Russian Printing House in London. (It is noteworthy that it was during these years that London and Paris prepared and in March 1854 concluded a military alliance together with Turkey against Russia, and in September 1854 they landed military troops in the Crimea. Thus, the opportunity Herzen received to conduct propaganda work from London was not random. - Ed.) In 1855 he began publishing the almanac "Polar Star", and in the summer of 1857, together with Ogarev, he began publishing the newspaper "Bell". This was a platform from which he could speak freely to the people. Herzen announced that the “Bell” would ring about everything, no matter what it was affected by: an absurd decree, theft of dignitaries or the ignorance of the Senate. Sheets of "Bell" printed on thin paper were transported across the border and became widespread in Russia.

The last years of Herzen's life were spent mainly in Geneva, which was becoming the center of revolutionary emigration. In 1865, the publication of "The Bell" was moved here. In 1867 he stopped publishing, believing that the newspaper had played its role in the history of the liberation movement in Russia. Herzen now considered his main task to be the development of revolutionary theory. In the spring of 1869 he decided to settle in Paris. Here on January 9 (21 BC) 1870 Hertz died. He was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery. His ashes were later transported to Nice and buried next to his wife's grave.

Materials used from the book: Russian writers and poets. Brief biographical dictionary. Moscow, 2000.

HERTZEN Alexander Ivanovich (1812, Moscow - 1870, Paris) - rev. activist, writer, philosopher. Illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner I.A. Yakovlev and Henrietta Louise Haag, who came to Russia from Stuttgart. Herzen bore the surname invented by his father, hinting at the cordial affection of his parents (Herz - heart), and was very upset about his “false position”. Herzen's first home teachers were the French Republican Bouchot and a connoisseur of the freedom-loving poetry of A.S. Pushkin and K.F. Ryleev seminarian I. Protopopov did not hide his views from his student. The Decembrist uprising (“Tales of indignation, trial, horror in Moscow greatly struck me”), the subsequent execution of five of them, reading F. Schiller, Plutarch, J.J. Rousseau had a strong influence on Herzen's worldview. He and his friend Ya. P. Ogarev vowed to avenge the death of the Decembrists. In 1829 - 1833 Herzen was a student at the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow. un-ta. At this time, a friendly circle of free-thinking youth formed around him, in which they “preached hatred of all violence, of all government tyranny.” Study of the writings of the utopian socialists Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, rev. events of the 30s in France and Poland contributed to the formation of Herzen’s own understanding of historical events. In 1834, Herzen and some circle members were arrested on false charges of singing anti-monarchist songs, but in fact for freethinking. In 1835, Herzen was exiled to Perm, and then to Vyatka, where he served in the provincial chancellery. There he wrote his first published work - the essay "Hoffmann", which he signed with the later famous pseudonym Iskander. In 1837 Herzen received permission to move to Vladimir, in 1841 he was again exiled to Novgorod, and only in 1842 he returned to Moscow, where he became close friends with V.G. Belinsky, M.A. Bakunin, T.N. Granovsky and other Westerners who entered into battle with the Slavophiles. Herzen wrote: “We saw in their teaching a new oil anointing the pious autocrat of all Russia, a new chain imposed on independent thought, a new subordination of it to some monastic order of the Asian church, always kneeling before secular power.” In the 40s Herzen wrote the novel "Who is to Blame?" and the stories “The Thieving Magpie” and “Doctor Krupov” are a vivid denunciation of serfdom. Along with artistic works, Herzen wrote a number of philosophical works. About one of them - “Letters on the Study of Nature” - G.V. Plekhanov said: “One can easily think that they were written not in the early 40s, but in the second half of the 70s, and, moreover, not by Herzen, but Engels. To such an extent the thoughts of the first are similar to the thoughts of the second." In 1846, after the death of his father, Herzen became a wealthy man. In 1847 he went abroad, where he witnessed the defeat of the revolution. 1848 - 1849 (“I have never suffered so much before”). Not accepting the spiritual world of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois morality with its admiration for money and order, Herzen was imbued with socialist convictions, but pointed out the weakness of contemporary socialist teachings. In 1849, in the article “Russia”, he expressed thoughts that later became the basis of the Russian theory. socialism - a utopian doctrine, according to which the embryo of the future socialist society is the peasant community, and the populist movement. Herzen lived in Geneva, Nice and became close to many leaders of the Western European revolution. movements. In 1850, Herzen refused to return to Russia at the request of Nicholas 1, for which he was deprived of all rights of the estate and declared an “eternal exile.” From 1852, Herzen began to live in London, where in 1853 he created the “Free Russian Printing House” to publish uncensored works for Russia: “The Polar Star”, “Voices from Russia”, “The Bell”, “Notes of the Decembrists” and many others that played huge role in the formation of Russian. social thought and rev. movements. Herzen’s memoirs “The Past and Thoughts” were also published here; in his own words, “not a historical monograph, but a reflection of history in a person who accidentally came across it on the road” - a chronicle of social life and revolution. life of his time. Herzen, together with Ogarev, was among the creators of the roar. organization "Land and Freedom", which played a large role in the liberation movement of Russia. A thinker and artist, Herzen believed that the main driving force of history is not the state, but the people. Violence, Herzen believed, can only clear a place for a new society, but it cannot create it. It is necessary to educate through a representative system, through which most of the people have passed or are passing through. European countries. Without the development of popular consciousness, freedom is impossible: “People cannot be liberated in external life more than they are liberated internally.” In the last years of his life, Herzen lived in many European cities. He was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery, and then his ashes were transported to Nice. Herzen's dreams of returning his children to Russia remained unfulfilled. Only his grandson P.D. returned to his homeland. Herzen, a wonderful surgeon, whose name Mosk is named. oncological institute Huge lit. Herzen's legacy still attracts readers and researchers today with its artistic talent and depth of thought directed to the future.

Book materials used: Shikman A.P. Figures of Russian history. Biographical reference book. Moscow, 1997

Biography

Main pseudonym Iskander, Russian prose writer, publicist. Born on March 25 (April 6), 1812 in Moscow in the family of a noble Moscow gentleman I.A. Yakovlev and a German woman, Louise Haag. The parents' marriage was not officially registered, so the illegitimate child was considered his father's pupil. This explains the invented surname - from the German word Herz (heart).

The future writer spent his childhood in his uncle’s house on Tverskoy Boulevard (now building 25, which houses the A.M. Gorky Literary Institute). Although Herzen was not deprived of attention from childhood, his position as an illegitimate child gave him a feeling of orphanhood. In his memoirs, the writer called his home a “strange abbey”, and considered the only pleasures of childhood to be playing with the yard boys, playing in the hall and playing with the girls. Childhood impressions of the life of serfs, according to Herzen, aroused in him “an irresistible hatred of all slavery and all arbitrariness.”

Oral memories of living witnesses of the war with Napoleon, the freedom-loving poems of Pushkin and Ryleev, the works of Voltaire and Schiller - these are the main milestones in the development of the soul of young Herzen. The uprising of December 14, 1825 turned out to be the most significant event in this series. After the execution of the Decembrists, Herzen, together with his friend N. Ogarev, vowed to “take revenge on those executed.”

In 1829, Herzen entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University, where he soon formed a group of progressively thinking students. Members of this group Ogarev, N.H. Ketcher and others discussed the burning problems of our time: French Revolution 1830, Polish uprising of 1830–1831, other events of modern history. This time included a fascination with the ideas of Saint-Simonism and attempts to present his own vision of the social order. Already in his first articles (On the place of man in nature, 1832, etc.) Herzen showed himself not only as a philosopher, but also as a brilliant writer. The essay by Hoffmann (1833–1834, published 1836) showed a typical style of writing: introducing vivid figurative language into journalistic discussions, confirming the author’s thoughts with a plot narrative.

In 1833 Herzen graduated from the university with a silver medal. Work in the Moscow expedition of the Kremlin building. The service left the young man enough free time to engage in creativity. Herzen planned to publish a magazine, but in July 1834 he was arrested for allegedly singing songs defaming royal family. During interrogations, the Investigative Commission, without proving Herzen’s direct guilt, nevertheless considered that his beliefs posed a danger to the state.

In April 1835, with the obligation to remain in public service under the supervision of local authorities, Herzen was exiled first to Perm, then to Vyatka. He was friends with the architect A.L. Vitberg and other exiles, corresponded with his cousin N.A. Zakharyina, who later became his wife. In 1837, the heir to the throne visited Vyatka, who was accompanied by V.A. Zhukovsky. At the poet's request, at the end of 1837 Herzen was transferred to Vladimir, where he served in the governor's office. From Vladimir, Herzen secretly traveled to Moscow to visit his bride, and in May they got married. From 1839 to 1850, four children were born into the Herzen family.

In July 1839, police surveillance was removed from Herzen, he was given the opportunity to visit Moscow and St. Petersburg, where he was accepted into the circle of V.G. Belinsky, T.N. Granovsky, I.I. Panaev and others. In 1840, Herzen’s letter was illustrated, in in which he wrote about the “murder” of a St. Petersburg security guard. The enraged Nicholas I ordered Herzen to be expelled “for spreading unfounded rumors” to Novgorod without the right to enter the capital. Only in July 1842, having retired with the rank of court councilor, after the petition of friends, Herzen returned to Moscow. He began hard work on a series of articles on the connection of science and philosophy with real life under the general title Amateurism in Science (1843).

After several unsuccessful attempts appeal to artistic prose Herzen wrote the novel Who is to Blame? (1847), the stories Doctor Krupov (1847) and The Thieving Magpie (1848), in which he considered his main goal to expose Russian slavery. In the critics' reviews of these works, a general trend was visible, which Belinsky most accurately defined: "...his main strength is not in creativity, not in artistry, but in thought, deeply felt, fully conscious and developed."

In 1847, Herzen and his family left Russia and began their many-year journey through Europe. Watching life Western countries, interspersed personal impressions with historical and philosophical research (Letters from France and Italy, 1847–1852; From the Other Shore, 1847–1850, etc.).

In 1850–1852, a series of Herzen’s personal dramas took place: his wife’s betrayal, the death of his mother and youngest son in a shipwreck, his wife’s death from childbirth. In 1852 Herzen settled in London. By this time he was perceived as the first figure of the Russian emigration. Together with Ogarev, he began to publish revolutionary publications - the almanac “Polar Star” (1855–1868) and the newspaper “Bell” (1857–1867), the influence of which on the revolutionary movement in Russia was enormous. Despite the many articles published by the writer in Polar Star and Kolokol and published in separate editions, his main creation of the emigrant years is The Past and Thoughts (published 1855–1919).

The past and thoughts by genre - a synthesis of memoirs, journalism, literary portraits, autobiographical novels, historical chronicles, short stories. The author himself called this book a confession, “about which stopped thoughts from thoughts were collected here and there.” The first five parts describe Herzen's life from childhood until the events of 1850–1852, when the author suffered difficult mental trials associated with the collapse of his family. The sixth part, as a continuation of the first five, is devoted to life in England. The seventh and eighth parts, even more free in chronology and theme, reflect the life and thoughts of the author in the 1860s.

At first, Herzen intended to write about the tragic events of his personal life. But “everything old, half-forgotten, was resurrected,” and the architecture of the plan gradually expanded. In general, work on the book lasted about fifteen years, and the chronology of the narrative did not always coincide with the chronology of writing.

In 1865, Herzen left England and went on a long trip to Europe, trying to unwind after another family drama (three-year-old twins died of diphtheria, the new wife did not find understanding among the older children). At this time, Herzen distanced himself from the revolutionaries, especially from the Russian radicals. Arguing with Bakunin, who called for the destruction of the state, he wrote: “People cannot be liberated in external life more than they are liberated internally.” These words are perceived as Herzen’s spiritual testament.

Like most Russian Westernized radicals, Herzen went through his spiritual development through a period of deep fascination with Hegelianism. Hegel's influence can be clearly seen in the series of articles Amateurism in Science (1842–1843). Their pathos lies in the affirmation and interpretation of Hegelian dialectics as an instrument of knowledge and revolutionary transformation of the world (“algebra of revolution”). Herzen severely condemned abstract idealism in philosophy and science for its isolation from real life, for “apriorism” and “spiritism.” The future development of humanity, in his opinion, should lead to the “removal” of antagonistic contradictions in society, the formation of philosophical and scientific knowledge inextricably linked with reality. Moreover, the result of development will be the merging of spirit and matter. In the historical process of cognition of reality, a “universal mind, freed from personality,” will be formed.

These ideas were further developed in Herzen’s main philosophical work, Letters on the Study of Nature (1845–1846). Continuing his criticism of philosophical idealism, Herzen defined nature as “the genealogy of thinking,” and saw only an illusion in the idea of ​​pure being. For a materialistically minded thinker, nature is an ever-living, “fermenting substance”, primary in relation to the dialectics of knowledge. In the Letters, Herzen, quite in the spirit of Hegelianism, substantiated consistent historiocentrism: “neither humanity nor nature can be understood without historical existence,” and in understanding the meaning of history he adhered to the principles of historical determinism. However, in the thoughts of the late Herzen, the old progressivism gives way to much more pessimistic and critical assessments.

First of all, this relates to his analysis of the process of formation of a new type of society mass consciousness, exclusively consumer, based on completely materialistic individualism (egoism). Such a process, according to Herzen, leads to the total massification of social life and, accordingly, to its peculiar entropy (“the turn of all European life in favor of silence and crystallization”), to the loss of individual and personal originality. “Personalities were erased, generic typism smoothed out everything sharply individual and restless” (Ends and Beginnings, 1863). Disappointment in European progress, as Herzen admitted, led him “to the brink of moral death,” from which only “faith in Russia” saved him. Herzen hoped for the possibility of establishing socialist relations in Russia (although he had considerable doubts about the previous revolutionary paths, as he wrote about in the article To an Old Comrade, 1869). Herzen associated the prospects for the development of socialism primarily with the peasant community.

Isaiah Berlin

Alexander Herzen and his memoirs

The article is a preface to the English edition of Past and Thought (1968). Translation by V. Sapov is based on the publication: Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind. An Anthology of Essays. Ed. by N. Hardy and R. Hausheer, London, 1997, p. 499-524.

Alexander Herzen, like Diderot, was a brilliant dilettante * whose views and activities changed the direction of social thought in his country. Like Diderot, he was also a brilliant and tireless speaker: equally fluent in Russian and French, he spoke both among his close friends and in Moscow salons, invariably captivating them with a stream of images and ideas. The loss of his speeches (as in the case of Diderot) is probably an irreparable loss for posterity: for neither Boswell nor Eckermann ** were with him to record his conversations, and he himself was a man who I would hardly allow myself to be treated like this.

* The word “amateur” in this case does not contain the pejorative connotation characteristic of it in the Russian language. Among the “dilettantes” I. Berlin includes all general lay philosophers who were not professors and did not occupy departments at the university: Marx, Dostoevsky, F. Bacon, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Berkeley; the first professional philosopher in this sense of the word is Christian Wolf (see: Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, New York, 1991, p. 28-29). Notes marked with an asterisk and additions to the author's notes in square brackets are those of the translator.

** James Boswell is an English writer and friend of S. Johnson, who created his colorful portrait in the book “The Life of Samuel Johnson” (1792); Johann Peter Eckermann - long-term secretary of I.-V. Goethe, author of the book "Conversations with Goethe in the last years of his life" (1835).

His prose is, in fact, a kind of oral story, with its inherent advantages and disadvantages: eloquence, spontaneity, - accompanied by increased emotionality and exaggeration, characteristic of a born storyteller, unable to resist long digressions, which themselves carry him into the whirlpool of colliding streams memories and reflections, but always returning to the main stream of his story or argument. But above all, his prose has the liveliness of colloquial speech - it seems that it owes nothing either to the impeccable form of the maxims of the French philosophical systems that he admired, or to the terrible philosophical style of the Germans from whom he studied; both in his articles, pamphlets and autobiography, and in his letters and fragmentary notes about friends, his living voice is almost equally heard.

Being a comprehensively educated man, endowed with a rich imagination and self-criticism, Herzen was an extremely gifted social observer; the description of what he happened to see is unique even for the eloquent 19th century. He had a penetrating, lively and ironic mind, an indomitable and poetic temperament, the ability to create vivid and often lyrical descriptions - in a series of brilliant literary portraits of people, events, ideas, in stories about personal relationships, political conflicts and numerous manifestations of life that abound in him works, all these qualities combined and reinforced each other. He was an extremely subtle and sensitive person, possessing enormous intellectual energy and caustic wit, an easily wounded sense of self-esteem and polemical fervor; he was inclined to analysis, research and exposure, considering himself a “tearer of masks” from masks and conventions and pretending to be a merciless exposer of their social and moral essence.

Leo Tolstoy, who did not share Herzen's views and was not inclined to excessive praise for contemporary writers, especially if they were his compatriots from the same circle as himself, admitted at the end of his life that he had never met " such a rare combination of depth and brilliance of thoughts." These merits make most of Herzen's essays, political and journalistic articles, random notes and reviews, and especially his letters addressed to people close to him or political figures, extremely interesting even today, although the topics they touch on are mostly a thing of the past and of interest mainly to historians.

Although much has already been written about Herzen - and not only in Russia - the task of his biographers has not become easier due to the fact that he left behind an incomparable monument, a literary masterpiece and his best creation - "The Past and Thoughts", a work worthy of being on a par with the novels of his compatriots and contemporaries - Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky. And they, in general, were not mistaken about this. Turgenev, a long-time and close friend of Herzen (the conflicts of their personal relationships played a big role in the lives of both, this complicated and interesting story has not yet been truly told), admired him both as a writer and as a revolutionary publicist. The famous critic Vissarion Belinsky discovered, analyzed and highly appreciated Herzen's outstanding literary talent when both of them were still young and relatively little known. Even the angry and suspicious Dostoevsky, who did not deprive Herzen of the malicious hatred with which he treated pro-Western Russian revolutionaries, recognized the poetry of his work and treated him with sympathy until Herzen’s death. As for Tolstoy, he admired both his communication with Herzen and his works: half a century after their first meeting in London, he vividly recalled this scene.

It is strange that such a remarkable writer, who enjoyed European fame during his lifetime, an ardent friend of Michelet, Mazzini *, Garibaldi and Victor Hugo, who has long been recognized in his homeland not only as a revolutionary, but also as one of the greatest writers, to this day Known in the West only by name. Considering the inspiration that comes from reading his prose, most of which has not yet been translated, this is an unfortunate and irreparable loss.

* Jules Michelet (1798-1874) - French historian of the romantic movement and politician; Giuseppe Mazzini (Mazzini; 1805-1872) - Italian figure in the national liberation movement.

Alexander Herzen was born in Moscow on April 6, 1812, a few months before the Great Moscow Fire destroyed the city during the Napoleonic occupation following the Battle of Borodino. His father, Ivan Aleksandrovich Yakovlev, came from an ancient noble family, distantly related to the Romanov dynasty. Like other representatives of the rich and noble Russian nobility, he spent several years abroad and during one of his travels he met the daughter of a minor official from Württemberg, Louise Haag, a meek, submissive, unremarkable girl, much younger than him, whom he brought with him to Moscow. For some reason, perhaps due to the inequality of their social positions, he never married her according to church rites. Yakovlev belonged to the Orthodox Church; she remained a Lutheran.

A proud, independent person who despises everyone, he eventually turned into a gloomy misanthrope. Even before the War of 1812, he retired and during the French invasion, he lived in gloomy and capricious idleness in his house in Moscow. Here, during the occupation, he was recognized by Marshal Mortier, whom they had once met in Paris, and Yakovlev - in exchange for a safe conduct giving him the right to take his family out of the devastated city - agreed to deliver a message from Napoleon to Emperor Alexander. For this rash act, he was sent back to his estates, from where he was only allowed to return to Moscow after some time. Here, in a large and gloomy house on Arbat, he raised his son Alexander, to whom he gave the surname Herzen, as if emphasizing that the child born as a result of an illegal love affair was the fruit of heartfelt affection.

Louise Haag never achieved the status of a full-fledged wife, but the boy was given every possible attention. He received the usual education of a young Russian nobleman at that time, that is, he was served by a whole legion of nannies and serf servants, teachers - Germans and French - carefully selected by his capricious, irritable, distrustful, but loving father, gave him private lessons. Everything was done to develop his talents. Herzen was a lively, imaginative boy who absorbed knowledge easily and quickly. His father loved him in his own way; in any case, more than his other son, also illegitimate, who was born ten years earlier and whom he christened Yegor (George). But by the beginning of the 1820s. Herzen's father was a broken and gloomy man, incapable of communicating either with his family or, of course, with anyone else. Insightful, honest, not at all heartless and not devoid of a sense of justice - a “heavy” man, like the old Prince Bolkonsky from Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” - Ivan Yakovlev appears from the memories of his son as a gloomy, unsociable, half-frozen man, prone to " self-criticism" and terrorized his household with his whims and ridicule. He kept all the doors and windows locked, the curtains were constantly drawn, and apart from a few old friends and siblings, he actually did not communicate with anyone. Subsequently, his son described it as the product of “the meeting of two things as opposite as the eighteenth century and Russian life” - the product of a clash of two cultures, which, during the reign of Catherine II and her successors, broke quite a few of the most sensitive representatives of the Russian nobility.

The boy took pleasure in escaping from the oppressive and frightening intercourse with his father into the rooms occupied by his mother and servants; the mother was a kind and modest woman, depressed by her husband, frightened by an environment alien to her by blood and, apparently, enduring her almost eastern position in the house with resigned submission. As for the servants, who were serfs from Yakovlev's estates, they were accustomed to behave servilely with the son and likely heir of their master. Herzen himself, more later years, his deepest social feeling - the desire for freedom and dignity of the human person (so aptly defined by his friend, the critic Belinsky) - attributed to the barbaric conditions that surrounded him in childhood. He was a beloved, very spoiled child, but from gossip circulating among the servants, as well as from a conversation he once accidentally overheard between his father and one of his former army colleagues, he learned about the fact of his illegitimate birth and the status of his mother . The blow, by his own admission, was quite sensitive: perhaps it became one of the decisive factors that influenced his life.

Herzen was taught Russian literature and history by a young university student, a passionate admirer of the then new movement of romanticism, which - especially in its German version - began to penetrate Russian intellectual life at that time. Herzen knew French (and in French his father wrote more freely than in Russian), German (he spoke German with his mother) and European history better than Russian - his home teacher was a French emigrant who came to Russia after the French revolution.

The Frenchman, as Herzen says, did not reveal his political views until one day his student asked him why Louis XVI was executed, to which he replied in a trembling voice: “Because he betrayed his fatherland.” Noticing the boy's sympathy for his ideas, he cast aside his reserve and spoke frankly with him about the freedom and equality of people.

Herzen grew up alone, being both pampered and oppressed, alive and bored; he voraciously read books from his father's large library, especially the works of French enlighteners. He was fourteen years old when, by order of Emperor Nicholas I, the leaders of the Decembrist conspiracy were hanged. This event, as he later claimed, became a critical turning point in his life; Whether it was true or not, the memory of these noble martyrs for the cause of constitutional freedom in Russia over time turned for him, as for many other representatives of his class and generation, into a sacred symbol that inspired him until the end of his days. He tells how, a little later after this event, he and his close friend Nik Ogarev, standing on the Sparrow Hills in sight of all of Moscow, took a solemn “Annibal” oath to avenge these fighters for human rights and devote their lives to the cause for which they died.

The time has come, and Herzen became a student at Moscow University. He had already gone through a period of fascination with Schiller and Goethe; Now he plunged into the study of German metaphysics - Kant and especially Schelling. Having then taken up the French historians, representatives of the new school - Guizot, Aupostin Thierry and, in addition to them, the French utopian socialists - Saint-Simon, Fourier, Leroux and other social prophets, whose works were smuggled into Russia, bypassing censorship, he turned into a convinced and passionate radical. He and Ogarev were members of a student circle in which banned books were read and dangerous ideas were discussed; For this, he and most of the other “unreliable” students were eventually arrested, and Herzen, probably for the reason that he refused to renounce the views with which he was accused, was sentenced to prison.

The father used all his influence to mitigate the sentence, but still could not save his son from exile to Vyatka, a provincial town not far from the border with Asia, where, of course, he was not kept in prison, but where he was obliged to work in the local administration. Much to his surprise, this new test of his strength gave him pleasure; he showed administrative ability and became a much more competent and perhaps even more zealous official than he was subsequently willing to admit, and helped to expose the corrupt and cruel governor whom he hated and despised.

In Vyatka, he began a passionate love affair with a married woman; he considered his behavior unworthy and experienced painful repentance. He read Dante, went through a period of fascination with religion, and began a long love correspondence with his cousin Natalie, who, like him, was illegitimate and lived as a companion in the house of her rich and oppressive aunt. Thanks to his father's incessant efforts, Herzen was transferred to Vladimir and, with the help of his young Moscow friends, arranged Natalie's escape. They got married in Vladimir against the will of their relatives. After the expiration of the period of exile, Herzen was allowed to return to Moscow, and he was soon assigned to a clerical position in St. Petersburg.

Whatever his aspirations at this time, he maintained his unshakable independence and devotion to radicalism. Because of a careless letter in which Herzen criticized the actions of the police and which was opened by censorship, he was again sentenced to serve exile, this time in Novgorod. Two years later, in 1842, he was again allowed to return to Moscow. By the time he began to publish in the progressive magazines of that time, he was already considered one of the members of the new radical intelligentsia, and, moreover, suffered for its cause. Its main theme has always been the same: the oppression of the individual, the humiliation and suppression of people by tyranny - personal and political, the oppression of social conventions, dark ignorance and savagery, the gross arbitrariness of power that crippled and destroyed the lives of people in the ruthless and vile Russian Empire .

Like other representatives of his circle - the aspiring poet and writer Turgenev, the critic Belinsky, the future politicians Bakunin and Katkov (the first - a supporter of revolution, the second - reaction), the essayist Annenkov and his closest friend Ogarev - Herzen, along with the majority of his educated contemporaries became interested in Hegelian philosophy. He wrote fascinating historical and philosophical articles and stories that touched on social problems; they were published, read and widely discussed and created a solid reputation for their author. He took an uncompromising position and became the main representative of the dissident Russian nobility, and his socialist beliefs were not so much a reaction to the cruelty and chaos of the free enterprise economy of the bourgeois West - for Russia, which had barely entered the path of industrial development at that time, was still a semi-feudal country, underdeveloped socially and economically - as a direct response to the painful problems in his home country: poverty of the population, serfdom and lack of personal freedom at all levels, arbitrariness and cruelty of the autocracy.

Added to this was the injured national pride of a powerful and semi-barbaric society, whose leaders experienced a mixed feeling of admiration, envy and resentment towards the civilized West. The radicals believed in Western-style reforms towards democratization and secularization; Slavophiles fell into mystical nationalism and advocated the need for a return to original, “organic” forms of life and to faith, on which, in their opinion, everything rested, but which were destroyed by the reforms of Peter I, which encouraged only a diligent and humiliating imitation of the soulless and, in in any case, to the hopelessly decaying West. Herzen was an extreme “Westernizer,” but he maintained connections with his Slavophile opponents, considering the best of them reactionary romantics, misguided nationalists, but still reliable allies in the fight against the tsarist bureaucracy; he later sought to minimize his differences with them , perhaps guided by the desire to see all Russians, in whom the sense of humanity is still alive, in a unified formation of mass protest against the inhumane regime.

Ivan Yakovlev died in 1847. He bequeathed most of his fortune to Louise Haag and her son Alexander Herzen. Filled with faith in his own strength and burning with the desire to “stay and act” in the world (according to Fichte, which reflects the mood of the entire generation), Herzen decided to emigrate from Russia. It is not known whether he guessed that he would have to stay abroad for the rest of his days, and whether he wanted this, but that is exactly what happened. He left that same year with his wife, mother, two friends, and servants; the trip was accompanied by unrest, but, having passed through Germany, by the end of 1847 he reached his desired goal - Paris, the capital of the civilized world.

He immediately plunged into the life of exiled radicals and socialists of many nationalities who played a leading role in the vigorous intellectual and artistic activity of this city. In 1848, when one country after another in Europe found itself engulfed in revolution, Herzen, along with Bakunin and Proudhon, found himself on the extreme left wing of the revolutionary socialist movement. When rumors about his activities reached the Russian government, he was ordered to immediately return to Russia. He refused. Then his property here, as well as his mother's property, was declared confiscated. Thanks to the efforts of the banker James Rothschild, who was sympathetic to the Russian "baron" and was able to put pressure on the Russian government, Herzen managed to regain most of his funds, and from then on he did not experience financial difficulties, which provided him with a degree of independence, which very few exiles possessed at that time. At the same time, he received financial resources to support other emigrants and revolutionary processes.

Soon after his arrival in Paris, but even before the revolution, he published a series of brilliant articles in a Moscow magazine run by his friends, where he gave a colorful and extremely critical description of the social and cultural life of Paris and where, in particular, he subjected a merciless analysis to the process of degradation of the French of the bourgeoisie, an indictment unsurpassed even by the writings of his contemporaries Marx and Heine. Herzen's Moscow friends, for the most part, disapproved of these articles; they considered his analysis to be a typical flight of rhetorical fancy, an irresponsible extremism, hardly adequate to the needs of a poorly governed and backward country, in comparison with which the progress of the middle classes in the West, whatever its shortcomings, appears to be a huge step towards universal enlightenment.

In these early works of Herzen - "Letters from Avenue Marigny" and the Italian sketches that followed - one finds features that have since become typical of all his works: a rapid flow of descriptions, fresh, vivid, precise, full of lively and always appropriate digressions and variations on the same topic, viewed from different angles, puns, neologisms, real and imaginary quotations, verbal discoveries, Gallicisms that irritated his nationalistic Russian friends, caustic personal observations and cascades of living images and incomparable epigrams, which with their virtuosity did not They bore the reader and do not lead him astray, but add charm and persuasiveness to the story. One gets the impression of involuntary improvisation: a living scene drawn by an intellectually vivid, extremely intelligent and the most honest person endowed with extraordinary powers of observation and power of expressiveness. The tone of passionate political radicalism is colored by a purely aristocratic (and even more purely Moscow) contempt for everything that is limited, calculating, self-satisfied, commercial, for any precaution and everything petty or striving for compromise and juste milieu *, which is embodied in the most repulsive form in Louis Philippe and Guizot.

* Golden mean (French).

In these essays, Herzen takes a position that combines optimistic idealism - the dream of a socially, intellectually and morally free society, the origins of which he, like Proudhon, Marx and Louis Blanc, saw in the French working class, faith in a radical revolution that only and can create the conditions for this liberation, and, at the same time, a deep distrust (not shared by the majority of Herzen’s allies) to all general formulas as such, to all programs and slogans of all political parties, to all officially recognized historical goals - progress, freedom, equality, national unity, historical life, human solidarity - to all the principles and slogans in the name of which blood was shed, violence was committed and will undoubtedly soon be committed again against people, and their way of life was condemned and subjected to destruction.

Like those students of Hegel who occupied an extreme left position, in particular like the anarchist Max Stirner, Herzen considered majestic, pompous abstractions dangerous, the mere sound of which makes people go wild and commit senseless bloodshed - these, in his opinion, are the new idols on whose altars human blood is shed today as recklessly and uselessly as it was shed yesterday or the day before in honor of old deities - church or monarchy, feudal order or sacred customs - which are now debunked as obstacles to humanity's path to progress.

In addition to skepticism regarding the meaning and value of abstract ideas in general, contrasted with the concrete, immediate, immediate goals of individual living people - real freedoms and fair pay for daily work, Herzen expressed an even more alarming thought about the steadily widening and insurmountable gap between the humanistic values ​​of the relatively free and civilized minority (to which he was aware that he belonged) and by the pressing needs, aspirations and tastes of the vast silent masses of the people, rather barbaric in the West and even more savage in Russia or on the Asian plains beyond it.

The old world was collapsing before our eyes and it fully deserved it. It was up to its victims to destroy it - the slaves, who did not at all regret either the art or the science of their masters; and why, Herzen asks, should they regret them? Was it not this art and this science that contributed to their suffering and savagery? New barbarians, young and strong, full of hatred for the old world, built on the bones of their fathers, will completely destroy the buildings erected by their oppressors, and with them everything that is most majestic and beautiful that is in Western civilization; and this cataclysm will, apparently, not only be inevitable, but also fair, because the existing civilization, high and valuable in the eyes of those who enjoy its fruits, cannot offer the vast majority of humanity anything other than suffering and a meaningless existence. However, he did not expect that brighter prospects would open up for those who, like him, appreciated the fruits of an advanced civilization.

Russian and Western critics often argued that Herzen came to Paris as an ardent, even utopian idealist, and that only the failure of the 1848 revolution became the cause of his disappointment and new, more pessimistic realism. This point of view is not entirely true.

A note of skepticism, particularly pessimism about the extent to which people can be changed, and an even deeper doubt as to whether such a change will lead, if the fearless and intelligent revolutionaries or reformers, whose ideal images were pictured in the imagination of his Russian Western friends, it will be possible to implement it, to a more just and free system - this ominous note sounds from him even in 1847, even before the disaster.

The spectacle of the workers' uprising and its brutal suppression in Italy and France haunted Herzen throughout his life. His description of the events of 1848-1849, of which he was an eyewitness, especially the July uprising drowned in blood in Paris, is a sociological and historical-narrative masterpiece. These are also his stories and thoughts about the people who participated in these events. Most of these essays and letters have not yet been translated.

Herzen could not and did not want to return to Russia. He became a citizen of Switzerland, and to the disasters of the revolution was added his personal tragedy: Herzen’s wife, whom he passionately loved, was seduced by the closest of his new friends, the German revolutionary poet Georg Herwegh, who was friends with Marx and Wagner, the “iron lark” of the German revolution, as G. Heine half-ironically called it. Hertz's progressive views, somewhat reminiscent of Shelley's views on love, friendship, gender equality and the irrationality of bourgeois morality, were tested and destroyed during this crisis. He almost lost his head from grief and jealousy: his love, pride, the deepest concepts about the basis of all human relations a cruel blow was dealt from which he never fully recovered.

He did what almost no one had ever done before: he described his grief in great detail, traced in detail how his relationship with his wife, Herwegh and Herwegh’s wife changed, recorded every meeting with them that took place, every outburst of anger, despair , feelings of love, hope, hatred, contempt and painful suicidal self-contempt. Every stroke and nuance of his moral and psychological state is drawn against the sublime background of his social life in the world of emigrants and conspirators of different nationalities - French, Italians, Germans, Russians, Austrians, Hungarians - who flash on the stage where he himself plays the main role of the tragic, self-absorbed hero. The story is told with restraint - there are no obvious distortions - but it is absolutely self-centered.

All his life, Herzen perceived the outside world clearly, in due proportions, albeit through the prism of his romantic personality, in accordance with his impressionable, painfully organized Self, located at the center of his universe. No matter how great his suffering, he, as an artist, maintains complete control over the tragedy that he experiences, and at the same time he also describes it. Perhaps the artist’s egoism, which demonstrates all of his work, is partly the reason for the suffocation that Natalie experienced, and the reason for the absence of any reticence in his description of the events that took place: Herzen has no doubt at all that the reader will understand him correctly, moreover that the reader is sincerely interested in every detail of his - the writer's - mental and emotional life. Nathalie's letters and her desperate desire for Herwegh show the extent of the increasingly destructive impact of Herzen's self-blinding on her fragile and exalted nature. We know relatively little about Natalie's relationship with Herwegh: it is quite possible that there was physical intimacy between her and Herwegh - the pompous literary style of these letters hides more than it reveals; but one thing is certain - she felt unhappy, driven into a dead end and irresistibly attracted to her lover. If Herzen felt this, he understood it very vaguely.

He assimilated the feelings of those closest to him in the same way as the ideas of Hegel or George Sand: that is, he took what he needed and poured it into the frantic stream of his own experiences. He opened up generously, if impulsively, to others; told them all his life, but with all his deep, never-abandoning faith in freedom and the absolute value of the individual and human relationships, he hardly imagined or allowed completely independent lives next to his own; he describes his suffering in detail, accurately, eloquently, without hiding bitter details and without mercy towards himself, but without sentimentality and focusing exclusively on himself. This is a heartbreaking document. During his lifetime, Herzen did not publish this story in full, but it now forms part of his memoirs.

Self-expression - the need to say one's own word - and perhaps the desire for recognition from others, in Russia and Europe, was inherent in Herzen's character. That is why even in this, the darkest period of his life, he still wrote a lot of letters and articles in different languages ​​on political and social topics; helped Proudhon financially, carried on a lively correspondence with Swiss radicals and Russian emigrants, read a lot, took notes, developed ideas, polemicized, worked a lot both as a publicist and as an active supporter of the cause of left radicals and revolutionaries.

After a short separation, Natalie returned to him in Nice, but only to die in his arms. Shortly before her death, the ship on which Herzen's mother and his deaf-mute son were sailing from Marseilles sank during a storm. Their bodies were never found. Herzen's despair reached its extreme limit. He left Nice and the circle of Italian, French and Polish revolutionaries, with many of whom he had warm friendships, and went to England with his three surviving children. America was too far away and, moreover, seemed too provincial to him. England, although it was also quite removed from the arena in which he suffered defeat - both political and personal - was still part of Europe. At that time, England was the most civilized and hospitable country towards political refugees, tolerant or even indifferent to their strange antics, proud of its civil liberties and its sympathy for the victims of oppression in other countries. Herzen arrived in London in 1851.

Together with his children, Herzen changed several houses in London and its suburbs when, after the death of Nicholas I, as soon as the opportunity to leave Russia opened, his closest friend Nikolai Ogarev joined him. Together they set up a printing house and began publishing a magazine in Russian called “Polar Star” - the first printed organ entirely devoted to uncompromising agitation against the autocracy in Russia. The very first chapters of "Past and Thoughts" were published on its pages. Memories of the horrors experienced in 1848-1851 took hold of Herzen’s thoughts and deprived him of his mental balance: he felt an urgent psychological need to find salvation by telling about his bitter story. This is how the first part of his future memoirs was written. Working on them became a remedy for the terrible loneliness in which he found himself, living among an indifferent alien people, while political reaction seemed to sweep the whole world, leaving not the slightest hope. Unnoticed, he found himself immersed in the past. He went further and further into it and found in this a source of freedom and strength.

This is how the work on this book went, which Herzen considered an analogy to David Copperfield. He began writing it in the last months of 1852. He worked in fits and starts. The first three parts were probably completed by the end of 1853. In 1854, the excerpt “Prison and Exile” was published in England, the title of which was perhaps inspired by Silvio Pellico’s famous memoirs “My Dungeons.” The book was a success; Encouraged by him, Herzen continued his work. By the spring of 1855 the first four parts were completed; they were published in 1857. Herzen revised part IV, supplemented it with new chapters and wrote part V; by 1858 he had largely completed Part VI. The chapters that dealt with the details of his personal life - that is, about love and the first years of family life - were written in 1857: until then he could not overcome himself to touch on these years. This was followed by a seven-year suspension.

Individual essays, for example about Robert Owen, the actor Shchepkin, the artist Ivanov, Garibaldi (“Camicia rossa” *), were published in London between 1860 and 1864; but these essays, although usually included in memoirs, were not intended for them. The first complete edition of the first four parts appeared in 1861, the last parts, that is, VIII and almost all of VII, were written in 1865 and 1867 respectively.

* Red shirt (Italian).

Herzen deliberately left some parts unpublished: most of the intimate details of his personal tragedy appeared posthumously - only one chapter of this part, entitled “Oceano Nox” **, was published during his lifetime. He also omitted the story of his relationship with Medvedeva in Vyatka and the episode with the serf girl Katerina in Moscow - his confession about this to Natalie cast the first shadow on their relationship, a shadow that never disappeared; the thought of seeing these memories printed during his lifetime was unbearable for him. He also kept a chapter on “Germans in Emigration,” which contains his unflattering reviews of Marx and his supporters, and several literary portraits, written in Herzen’s characteristic lively and ironic manner, of some of his old friends among the Russian radicals. He strongly condemned the practice of publicly washing revolutionaries' dirty linen and made it clear that he did not intend to ridicule his comrades-in-arms to the delight of the common enemy.

** Night on the ocean (lat.).

The first authoritative edition of the memoirs was prepared by Mikhail Lemke in the first complete collection of Herzen's works, which was begun before the 1917 revolution and completed several years after it. It was then corrected in subsequent Soviet editions. The most complete version was published in a comprehensive edition of Herzen's works, an outstanding monument of Soviet philological science.

The memoirs paint a living, unadorned panorama against the background of which Herzen’s main activity took place: revolutionary journalism to which he devoted his life. Most of it is contained in the most famous of all Russian newspapers printed abroad, Kolokola, which Herzen and Ogarev published from 1857 to 1867, first in London and then in Geneva, with the motto (borrowed from Schiller) “Vivos voco" "Bell" was a huge success. It was the first regular organ of revolutionary propaganda directed against the Russian autocracy; the newspaper was distinguished by its knowledge of the matter, sincerity and caustic eloquence; everyone who was not intimidated not only in Russia and Russian circles abroad, but also among the Poles and other oppressed nations, united around her.

Through secret channels, the Bell began to penetrate into Russia and was regularly read by the highest officials of the state, including, according to rumors, the emperor himself. Herzen used the extensive information about various crimes of the Russian bureaucracy, which came to him from secret letters and oral communications, to make public the most characteristic of them: cases of bribery, judicial injustice, despotism and dishonesty of officials and influential persons. "Kolokol" named names, provided documentary evidence, raised difficult questions and highlighted the disgusting aspects of Russian reality.

Russian travelers visited London to meet the mysterious leader of the resistance to the Tsar. Among the many visitors who crowded around Herzen - some out of curiosity, others - to shake his hand, express a feeling of sympathy or admiration, there were generals, senior officials and other loyal subjects of the empire. He reached the height of popularity, both political and literary, after the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War and the death of Nicholas I. Herzen’s open appeal to the new emperor with a call to free the peasants and begin broad radical reforms “from above” and his panegyric to Alexander II, after 1858 the first concrete steps were taken in this direction, ending with the words “You have won, Galilean!”, gave rise to the illusion on both sides of the Russian border that a new liberal era had finally arrived, when between the tsarist government and its opponents could some understanding, and perhaps true cooperation, can be achieved. This mentality did not last long. But Herzen's authority was extremely high - higher than that of any other Russian in the West: in the late 1850s - early 1860s. he was the recognized leader of all healthy, enlightened, cultural and humane forces in Russia.

More than Bakunin and even Turgenev, whose novels served as the main source of knowledge about Russia for the West, Herzen contributed to debunking the legend ingrained in the minds of progressive Europeans (the most typical of whom was perhaps Michelet) according to which there is nothing in Russia beyond government boots , on the one hand, and the dark, wordless, gloomy mass of peasants reduced to a bestial state, on the other.

This image of Russia was a by-product of widespread sympathy for the main victim of Russian despotism, the martyr nation Poland. Some of the Polish exiles involuntarily agreed that in this case the truth was on Herzen’s side, if only because he was one of the rare Russians who sincerely loved and admired individual Poles, inspired them with secret sympathy and identified the liberation movement in Russia with liberation of all its oppressed nations. This unshakable aversion to chauvinism became, in fact, one of the main reasons for the decline in the popularity of the Bell and the political collapse of Herzen himself.

After Russia itself great love Herzen was Italy and the Italians. The closest ties connected him with the Italian exiles: Mazzini, Garibaldi, Saffi and Orsini *.

* Aurelio (Marcus Aurelius) Saffi (1819-1890) - Italian revolutionary, close friend of Mazzini and publisher of his works; Felice Orsini (1819-1858) - Italian revolutionary, member of the secret patriotic organization "Young Italy", executed in Paris for an attempt on the life of Emperor Napoleon III.

Although he supported any liberal endeavor in France, his attitude towards it was very ambiguous. There were many reasons for this. Like Tocqueville (whom he personally disliked), Herzen had an aversion to any centralization, bureaucracy, hierarchy, submission to rigid forms or rules; France was for him the embodiment of order, discipline, worship of the state, unity and forced, abstract formulas that reduced all things to the same rule and pattern, which was the generic property of the great serf states - Prussia, Austria, Russia; to all of them he constantly contrasts the decentralized, unconstrained, ungovernable, “truly democratic” Italians, who, in his conviction, have a deep kinship with the spirit of Russian will, embodied in the village community with its sense of natural justice and human dignity.

England seemed to him less hostile to this ideal than legalistic and calculating France: with these sentiments, Herzen was close to his romantically minded opponents - the Slavophiles. In addition, he could not forget the betrayal of the revolution in Paris by the bourgeois parties in 1848, the execution of workers, the suppression of the uprising in Rome by the troops of the French Republic, the ambition, impotence and rhetoric of radical political figures of France - Lamartine, Marrast, Ledru-Rollin, Felix Pia*.

* Alphonse Marie Louis Lamartine (1790-1869) - French poet and historian, Minister of Foreign Affairs; Armand Marrast (1801-1852) - politician, republican, editor of the newspaper National, member of the provisional government in 1848; Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin (1808-1874) - politician and publicist, head of the Montagnards in the Constituent Assembly of France in 1848-1849; Felix Pia (1810-1889) - politician and playwright.

Herzen's essays, which describe the life and behavior of French exiles in England, are masterpieces of a fascinating, half-sympathetic, half-contemptuous description of the grotesque and sterile aspects of any political emigration, condemned to idleness, intrigue and an inescapable stream of self-justifying eloquence before a foreign audience too far from it and yawning during a speech. Nevertheless, he had a rather high opinion of some French emigrants: for some time he was a faithful ally of Proudhon and, despite all the contradictions with him, retained respect for him; he valued Louis Blanc as an honest and fearless democrat, was in good relations with Victor Hugo, loved and admired Michelet. In later years, he attended at least one Parisian political salon - it is believed that the salon belonged to a Pole - and with obvious pleasure: there the Goncourt brothers met him and left a vivid description of his appearance and manner of speaking in their diary.

Although Herzen himself was half-German, and perhaps for this reason, he, like his friend Bakunin, had a strong aversion to what he regarded as the incurable philistinism of the Germans and what seemed to him a particularly repulsive combination of the desire for blind power with a penchant for dirty tricks. and public recriminations, more obvious than among other emigrants. It is possible that his hatred of Herwegh, who, as he knew, was on friendly terms with both Marx and Wagner, played some role in this, as well as Marx’s attacks on Karl Vogt, the Swiss naturalist to whom Herzen was very attached . At least three of his closest friends were full-blooded Germans. Goethe and Schiller meant more to him than any of the Russian authors. Nevertheless, there is a real bitterness in his account of the German emigrants, quite different from the subtle humor with which he describes the characteristics of the other foreign colonies that gathered in the 1850s and 1860s. in London - a city which, according to Herzen, treated both their eccentricities and their torment with the same indifference.

As for its owners, the English, they rarely appear on its pages. Herzen met with Mill, Carlyle and Owen*. His first evening in England was spent in the company of his English hosts. He was on fairly good terms with one or two editors of radical publications (some of them, such as Linton and Cowan, contributed to the propaganda of his views and helped maintain contacts with revolutionaries on the mainland, as well as helping to smuggle Herzen's publications into Russia) and several radical members of Parliament, including heads of minor ministries. However, he appears to have had less contact with the British than his contemporary and fellow exile Karl Marx.

* John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) - English philosopher, author of the treatise “On Freedom,” about which Herzen wrote in the addition to the third chapter of the sixth part of “Past and Thoughts”; in the ninth chapter of the same part, he talks in detail about his meetings with the English utopian socialist Robert Owen (1771-1858); Herzen was also personally acquainted with the English writer and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and was in correspondence with him; he placed one of Carlyle’s letters and his response letter to him in the addition to “The Past and Thoughts” (“Old Letters” ).

Herzen admired England: its system, the spontaneously formed and tangled jungle of its unwritten laws and traditions provided abundant food for his romantically minded imagination. Interesting places from "Past and Thoughts", where he compares the French and the English or the English and the Germans, demonstrate his subtle and insightful understanding of the national characteristics of the English. But he did not like them in everything: for him they remained too closed, too indifferent, lacking imagination, too far from those moral, social and aesthetic problems that were close to his soul, too materialistic and self-satisfied.

Herzen's judgments about the English, always smart and sometimes insightful, are rather restrained and reminiscent of traditional ideas about them. The description of the trial that took place in London of a French radical who killed his political opponent in a duel in Windsor Great Park is amazingly done, but still remains a genre sketch, an amusing and brilliant caricature. The French, Swiss, Italians, even Germans, not to mention the Poles, are more close to him. Herzen is unable to establish any genuine personal relationships with the British. When he thinks about humanity, he doesn't think about them.

In addition to his main activities, Herzen paid a lot of attention to the education of his children, which he partially entrusted to the idealistic German woman Malvida von Meisenbug*, who later became friends with Nietzsche and Romain Rolland. His personal fate was closely intertwined with the fates of his close friend Ogarev and the latter’s wife, who later became Herzen’s wife; but, despite this, the mutual devotion of the two friends remained unchanged - Herzen's memoirs contain few interesting emotional details of these vicissitudes.

* Malwida Amalia von Meysenbug (1816-1908) - German writer who emigrated to London in 1852; in 1853-1856 was the teacher of Herzen’s daughters, and in the 1860s. raised his youngest daughter Olga, with whom she lived in Italy; author of the book “Memoirs of an Idealist” (Russian, translation: M.-L., 1933), in which many pages are dedicated to Herzen.

In all other respects, Herzen led the life of a wealthy noble Russian - rather, even a purely Moscow - writer, a nobleman, cut off from his native soil, unable to create an established life or at least the appearance of an internal or external world - a life filled with random moments of hope and even triumph, which were replaced by long periods of despair, corrosive self-criticism and, above all, oppressive, all-consuming, sorrowful nostalgia.

Perhaps this, along with objective arguments, was the reason why Herzen idealized the Russian peasantry and dreamed that the solution to the main “social” problem of that time - growing inequality, exploitation, dehumanization of both oppressors and oppressed - lies in the preservation of the Russian peasant community. He saw in it the sprouts of a future non-industrial, semi-anarchist socialism. Only such a decision, to which he came clearly under the influence of the views of Fourier, Proudhon and George Sand, seemed to him free both from the suppressive barracks discipline on which Western communists insisted from Cabet to Marx, and from the equally murderous and, as it seemed to him, much more more primitive and philistine ideals put forward by moderate, “semi-socialist” teachings with their belief in the progressive role of developing industrialism, preached by the predecessors of social democracy in Germany and France and Fabian socialism in England.

From time to time he modified his point of view: towards the end of his life he began to realize historical meaning organized urban workers. But on the whole he retained faith in the Russian peasant community as an embryonic form of life in which the desire for personal freedom would be consistent with the need for collective action and responsibility. He retained to the end a romantic view of the inevitable advent of a new, fair, all-changing social system.

Herzen is not distinguished by either strict consistency or systematicity. In his mature years, his style has lost the air of self-confidence that characterized him in his youth, and reflects the nostalgia that has gripped him, which never left him. He is overcome by a feeling of absurd randomness, although his faith in the values ​​of life remains unshaken. Almost all traces of Hegelian influence disappear.

“It’s as if someone (except ourselves) promised that everything in the world would be graceful, fair and go like clockwork. We were quite surprised at the abstract wisdom of nature and historical development; it’s time to realize that in nature and history there is a lot of accidental, stupid, failed, confused."

This is very typical of his mood in the 1860s; and it is not at all accidental that his narrative loses strict order and breaks up into a number of fragments, episodes, individual sketches in which Dichtung is intertwined with Wahrheit *, facts with poetic fiction.

* Dichtung und Wahrheit (German) - fiction and reality; the title of Goethe's autobiographical work, posthumously reworked by publishers into "Wahrheit und Dichtung" (in Russian, translation: "From my life. Poetry and truth").

His moods change dramatically. Sometimes he believes in the need for a great, refreshing revolutionary storm, even if it takes the form of a barbaric invasion and destroys all the values ​​that are personally dear to him.

In other cases, he reproaches his old friend Bakunin, who came to him in London after escaping from a Russian prison and sought to carry out a revolution as quickly as possible, for not understanding that dwellings for free people cannot be built from prison stones; that the average European of the nineteenth century was too deeply marked by the slavery of the old order to be able to lay the foundations of true freedom, that it would not be freed slaves who would create the new order, but new men raised in freedom.

History has its own pace. Only patience and gradualism - and not the haste and violence of Peter the Great - can promote permanent transformation.

At such moments, Herzen asks the question: who owns the future - a free, anarchic peasant or a self-confident and ruthless projector; Or maybe the industrial proletarian is destined to inherit the new, inevitable, collectivist social system? He then returns to his previous moods of disappointment and wonders whether all people really crave freedom; perhaps only a few in each generation strive for it, while the majority want only good government, no matter in whose hands it is. Herzen anticipates Emil Faguet's evil parody of Rousseau's aphorism that people are born free, but everywhere they are in chains: “it would be no less fair to say that a sheep is born carnivorous, but everywhere it feeds on grass” *. Herzen uses the same technique of reductio ad absurdum. People don't want freedom any more than fish want to fly. The fact that there are flying fish does not prove that fish were created to fly in the first place, or that they are categorically unhappy with being forever under water, away from the sun and light. After which he once again returns to his earlier optimism and to the idea that somewhere out there - in Russia - lives an unspoiled man, a peasant who has not yet exhausted his abilities and is not infected by the depravity and sophistication of the West.

* E. Faguet, Politiques et moralistes de dix-neuvieme siecle, Paris, 1899, 1st series, p. 266. (Emile Fage (1847-1916) - French literary historian, follower of I. Taine.)

But this faith, which Rousseau inspired in Herzen, becomes less and less strong as he grows older. He is endowed with too strong a sense of reality. Despite all his efforts and those of his socialist friends, he cannot be completely deceived. He oscillates between pessimism and optimism, between pessimism and doubt in his own skepticism and finds moral salvation only in his hatred of all injustice, all arbitrariness, all mediocrity - especially in his inability to make even the slightest compromise with the brutality of reactionaries or the hypocrisy of bourgeois liberals . He saves himself by this, supported by the belief that such evil forces will destroy themselves, by his love for children and loyal friends, and by his admiration for the diversity of life and the comedy of human characters.

Overall he became more pessimistic.

He began with an ideal view of human life and did not at all notice the abyss that lies between the ideal and reality, be it Nicholas Russia or rotten Western constitutionalism. In his youth, he praised the radicalism of the Jacobins and condemned their opponents in Russia - the stubborn conservatism, Slavophile nostalgia, the cautious gradualism of his friends Granovsky and Turgenev, as well as Hegel's calls for patience and reasonable submission to the inevitable laws of history, which supposedly should ensure the triumph of the new bourgeois class. His position before he went abroad was confidently optimistic.

What happened abroad was - no, not a change in worldview, but a cooling, a tendency towards a more sober and critical view of things. Any real change, he began to think in 1847, necessarily occurs slowly; the power of tradition (which he mocks and which at the same time he admires in England) is extremely great; people are less malleable than was believed in the eighteenth century, and do not strive for freedom at all, but only for security and contentment; communism is nothing more than tsarism in reverse, replacing one yoke with another; political ideals and slogans turn out to be empty formulas, in the name of which true-believing fanatics joyfully commit hecatombs of their neighbors.

He no longer feels confident that the gap between the enlightened minority and the people can ever in principle be bridged (this will become a constant refrain of subsequent Russian thought), since awakened people, for invariable psychological or sociological reasons, despise and deny the gifts a civilization that has no meaning for them. But if all this is at least partly true, then is a radical transformation possible, is it desirable? This is why Herzen has a growing feeling that there are obstacles that cannot be overcome, boundaries that cannot be crossed, this is where his empiricism, skepticism, hidden pessimism and despair of the mid-1860s come from.

Some Soviet scientists interpret this position of Herzen in such a way that he supposedly began to independently approach the Marxist recognition of the unchangeable laws of social development - in particular, the inevitability of industrialism and, above all, the main role that the proletariat will play.

Left-wing Russian critics during Herzen's lifetime and in the subsequent half-century after his death interpreted his views differently. Whether they were right or wrong, all these provisions seemed to them symptoms of conservatism and treason. For in the 1850s and 1860s. A new generation of radicals grew up in Russia, and the backward country was taking the very first, uncertain and not always correct steps along the path of the painful process of industrialization. These were raznochintsy, who treated the impotent compromises of 1848 with contempt, and who had no illusions about the prospects for freedom in the West; advocating the most decisive methods of struggle; who accepted as truth only what was proven by science, and were ready to take extreme, and if necessary, immoral and cruel measures, just to crush the power of their equally ruthless oppressors; who did not hide their hostility towards the characteristic “soft” generation of the 1840s. aestheticism and devotion to cultural values.

Herzen understood that the criticism that fell upon him from the “nihilists” (as they began to be called after Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons,” in which the conflict between generations was first artistically depicted), and their attitude towards him as an outdated amateurish aristocrat in In general, they are no different from the contempt with which he himself, in his youth, treated the sophisticated and incompetent reformers of the reign of Alexander I; but this did not make his situation any easier.

What strongly-minded revolutionaries had a negative attitude towards was appealing to Leo Tolstoy, who repeated more than once that the censorship ban on Herzen’s works in Russia was obvious stupidity on the part of the government; the government stops young people going into the revolutionary swamp, exiles them to Siberia and puts them in prison even before they see this swamp, when they are still walking on a flat road; Herzen walked this very path, he saw the abyss and warned about it, especially in his “Letters to an Old Comrade.” Nothing, Tolstoy argued, would be a better antidote to the “revolutionary nihilism” he condemned than the brilliant research of Herzen. “Our Russian life over the past 20 years would not have been the same if this writer [Herzen] had not been hidden from the younger generation.” The banning of his books, Tolstoy further wrote, was both criminal and, from the point of view of those who did not want a violent revolution, an idiotic policy.

In other times, Tolstoy was not so generous. In 1860, six months before meeting Herzen, he read his works with a mixed feeling of admiration and irritation: “Herzen is a scattered mind - sick pride,” he wrote in his diary, “but [his] breadth, dexterity and kindness, grace - Russians." From time to time, various correspondents note the fact that Tolstoy reads Herzen, sometimes even aloud to his family and with the greatest admiration. In 1896, once again in an irritated and anti-rationalist mood, Tolstoy - in response to the argument that people of the 1840s. could not express everything they wanted to say because of the ferocity of Russian censorship - he remarked about Herzen: “...despite his enormous talent, what did he say that was new and necessary?” . After all, he wrote in Paris in complete freedom and yet could not say anything useful.

What irritated Tolstoy most was Herzen's socialism. In a letter to his aunt Alexandra Tolstoy, he writes that he despises Herzen's proclamations, which the Russian police suspected him of keeping. The fact that Herzen believed in politics as a tool was quite reprehensible in the eyes of Tolstoy. Beginning in 1862, Tolstoy openly stated that he did not believe in liberal reforms and the possibility of improving people's lives by changing legislation or public institutions. Herzen fell into the same category as those whom Tolstoy condemned. Moreover, Tolstoy apparently experienced some kind of personal antipathy towards Herzen and his public position- even something like jealousy. When, in a moment of painful melancholy and intense irritation, Tolstoy wrote (perhaps not entirely seriously) that he would leave Russia forever, he added that under no circumstances would he join Herzen and stand under his banner: “Herzen himself on my own, I'm on my own."

He greatly underestimated Herzen's revolutionary temperament and instincts. No matter how skeptical Herzen was about individual revolutionary doctrines or revolutionary plans for Russia - and he was more skeptical than anyone - until the end of his life he believed in the moral and social necessity and inevitability of revolution in Russia, in the fact that sooner or later Russia would radically will be transformed and a just, that is, socialist, system will come.

True, he did not close his eyes to the possibility, even the likelihood, that a great rebellion would destroy the values ​​that he personally held dear - in particular the freedom without which he and others like him could not breathe. Nevertheless, he recognized not only the inevitability, but also the historical justice of the coming cataclysm. His moral sense, his respect for humanistic values, his whole style of life alienated him from the younger, die-hard radicals of the sixties, but, despite all his aversion to political fanaticism, be it right or left, Herzen did not turn into a cautious liberal reformist constitutionalist . Even at the “gradual” stage, he remained an agitator, egalitarian and socialist to the end. This is precisely what both Russian populists and Russian Marxists - both Mikhailovsky and Lenin - recognized and credited to him.

Without being cautious or circumspect, Herzen came out with strong support for Poland during its uprising against Russia in 1863. The wave of extreme Russian nationalism that accompanied the suppression of the uprising deprived him of sympathy even from Russian liberals. The circulation of "The Bell" has decreased. The new, “hard” revolutionaries needed his money, but made it clear that they viewed him as a liberal dinosaur, a preacher of outdated humanistic ideas, useless when there is a brutal social struggle.

At the end of the 1860s. Herzen left London and tried to establish a French publication of the Bell in Geneva. When this failed, he visited his friends in Florence and returned to Paris in early 1870, before the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Here he died of pleurisy, broken morally and physically, but not disillusioned, writing to the end, straining all his mind and all his strength. His body was transported to Nice, where he was buried next to the grave of his wife. A full-length monument still marks his grave.

Herzen's ideas have long been included in the general context of Russian political thought: liberals and radicals, populists and anarchists, socialists and communists - all declared him their forerunner. But what is alive today from all his incessant and stormy activity, even in his homeland, is not a system or doctrine, but a volume of essays, several remarkable letters and an unusual amalgam of memories, observations, moral pathos, psychological analysis and political notes combined with great literary talent, which immortalized his name. What remains above all is his passionate and unfading temperament, his sense of the movement of nature and its unpredictable possibilities, which he felt so deeply that even his extremely rich and flexible prose is not able to fully express it.

He believed that the main goal of life is life itself, that each day and each hour are ends in themselves, and not the means of another day or another experience. He believed that distant goals were a dream, that belief in them was a fatal delusion, that if one sacrifices the present or the immediate foreseeable future for the sake of these distant goals, this always inevitably leads to cruel and useless human sacrifices. He believed that goals do not lie in a faceless objective reality, but are created by people and change with each generation, but nevertheless bind those who live by them, that suffering is inevitable, and infallible knowledge is both unattainable and unnecessary.

He believed in reason, scientific methods of knowledge, individual action, empirically discovered truths, but he always suspected that belief in general formulas, laws, predestination in human affairs was an attempt, sometimes catastrophic and always reckless, to turn away from the inexhaustible and unpredictable diversity of life and to find peace in our own fantasies, in which we ourselves are reflected. He was fully aware of what he believed. He acquired this knowledge through painful, sometimes unintentional self-analysis and described what he saw in amazingly vivid, precise and poetic language. His purely personal credo remained unchanged from his earliest days. “Art... together with the lightnings of personal happiness is our only, undoubted good...” * - he declared in one autobiographical passage, which deeply outraged the young and harsh Russian revolutionaries of the sixties. But still, they and their followers did not deny his artistic and intellectual merits.

* Quote from the book “Ends and Beginnings” (first letter, June 10, 1862). See: Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, Works in 2 volumes, vol. 2, M., 1986, p. 352.

Herzen was not and did not strive to be a dispassionate observer. Along with the poets and writers of his country, he created a direction, a perspective and, in Gorky’s words about him, “a whole region, a country amazingly rich in thoughts,” where everything is immediately recognized as belonging to him, and only to him, a country that he inhabits with everyone, came into contact with everything, in which things, sensations, feelings, people, ideas, private and public events, institutions and entire cultures take shape and live thanks to his rich and logically consistent imagination and resisted the forces of oblivion in that safe world, which is restored and transformed by his memory, his mind and artistic genius. “Past and Thoughts” is Noah’s Ark, on which he saved himself, and not only himself, from the deadly flood in which many idealistic radicals of the 1840s sank.

A true work of art outlives and exceeds its immediate purpose. The building that Herzen built, probably primarily for the sake of his own salvation, which he built on the material of personal bitter experience - exile, loneliness, despair - stands intact. His memoirs, written abroad and largely devoted to European problems and events, are a great and eternal monument to the cultured, sensitive, morally concerned and gifted Russian society to which Herzen belonged; their vitality and charm have not diminished in the hundred-plus years that have passed since their first chapters saw the light of day.

Notes

1. According to P. Sergeenko in his book “Tolstoy and his contemporaries”, M., 1911, p. 13.

2. Sergeenko writes that Tolstoy told him in 1908 that he retained a very vivid memory of his visit to Herzen at his London home in March 1861.

“He amazed Lev Nikolaevich with his appearance as a small, plump man and with the internal electricity emanating from him.

Lively, responsive, intelligent, interesting,” explained Lev Nikolaevich, as usual, illustrating the shades of his thoughts with hand movements, “Herzen immediately spoke to me as if we had known each other for a long time, and immediately interested me in his personality... I have never met anyone like him.” charming people like him. He is immeasurably higher than all political figures of that and this time" (P. A. Sergeenko, Tolstoy and his contemporaries, pp. 13-14).

3. There is evidence, which does not inspire confidence, however, that she married him according to the Lutheran rite, which Orthodox Church didn't admit it.

4. A. I. Herzen, Collection. Op. in 30 volumes, M., 1954-1966, vol. 8, p. 86; in subsequent references this publication is referred to as: Collected Works.

5. Collected Works, vol. 8, p. 64: "Parce qu"il a ete traitre a la patrie."

6. It is not possible here to give a historical and sociological description of the origin of Russian socialism and Herzen’s participation in it. In Russia - both before and after the revolution - a number of monographs were written on this topic (not translated into English language). The most detailed and original study of this topic to date is the book: M. Maia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812-1855, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1961.

7. J. G. Fichte, Sammtliche Werke, Berlin, 1846, Bd. 6, S. 383 [quote from Fichte’s speech “On the Dignity of Man” (1794). - Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Works in 2 volumes, St. Petersburg, MSMHSIII, vol. 1, p. 439].

8. This trivial and almost universally shared opinion received its clearest expression in the fascinating and well-documented monograph by E. G. Kappa, “The Romantic Exiles” (London, 1933). Malia, in the book quoted above, avoids this mistake.

9. In the essay "Georg Herwegh" (1841).

10. Herzen did not have close friends among the British, although he had assistants, allies and admirers. One of them, the radical journalist William Linton, in whose newspaper "English Republic" Herzen published several of his articles, described him as a man

"short, stocky, having put on weight in recent years, with a large head, long brown hair and beard, small light eyes and a rather ruddy complexion. Gentle and courteous in communication, but extremely ironic and witty... clear, concise and expressive, he was a subtle and deep thinker, with all the obsession of a "barbarian", but at the same time humane and generous... Hospitable and sociable... an excellent conversationalist, frank and pleasant in manners" ("Memoires", London, 1895, p. 146 -147).

And in his book “European Republicans” (London, 1893) he writes that the Spanish radical Emilio Castelar said that Herzen, with his blond hair and beard, looked like a Goth, but had ardor, liveliness, verve, “inimitable grace” and the "amazing variety" of the Southerner (pp. 275-276). Turgenev and Herzen were the first Russians to move freely in European society. The impression they made was great, although perhaps not enough to dispel the myth of the mysterious “Slavic soul” that took a long time to die; perhaps it has not been completely debunked to this day.

11. “[Copperfield] is Dickens’s Past and Thought,” he wrote in one of his letters in the early 1860s. (Collected Works, vol. 27, book 1, p. 394; letter dated December 16, 1863); modesty was not one of his virtues.

12. See note above. 1 on p. 117.

13. Fragment of the inscription on the bell cathedral in Schaffhausen, which Schiller chose as the epigraph to his poem "Das Lied von der Glocke" (1799).

14. “Letter to Emperor Alexander the Second” (Collected Works, vol. 12, pp. 272-274).

"Lunch at Charles Edmond [Khoetsky's] place...

A Socratic skull and a soft, plump body from a Rubens painting, a red mark between the eyebrows, made as if by a brand, a beard and gray hair.

When he speaks, ironic mockery flies from his lips every now and then. His voice is not at all rough, as one might think, looking at his thick neck, but soft, melancholy, musical, ideas - sublime, deep, sharp, sometimes subtle and always definite, colored with words, to find which it takes him some time. that time, but which always possess the fortunate qualities of the French language, as spoken by educated and witty foreigners.

He talks about Bakunin, about the eleven months he spent in prison, where he was chained to the wall, about his escape from Siberia, his voyage on the Amur, his return journey through California and his arrival in London, where his first words [to Herzen] , after tears and wild hugs, were: “Can I order oysters here?”

Herzen delighted the Goncourts with his stories about Emperor Nicholas, about how, after the fall of Evpatoria during the Crimean War, he walked around his empty palace at night, walking with the heavy inhuman steps of the stone statue of the Commander from Don Juan. This was followed by anecdotes about the traditions and customs of England - "the country he loved as the land of freedom" - satirizing its absurd, class-conscious, staunch traditionalism, especially noticeable in the relations between masters and servants. The Goncourts cite an epigram composed by Herzen showing the difference between French and English characters. They correctly tell the story of how James Rothschild helped save Herzen's property in Russia.

17. Collected Works, vol. 10, p. 120.

18. Based on this thesis, orthodox Soviet scientists are trying to prove that at the end of his life Herzen approached the teachings of Marx.

19. Collected works, vol. 6, p. 94.

20. Letter to N.N. Ge (father) dated February 13, 1888. See also letter to V. G. Chertkov dated February 9, 1888.

22. Diary entry from May 17, 1896. But on October 12, 1905, he writes in his diary that he is reading “From the Other Shore” by Herzen, and adds: “Our intelligentsia has fallen so low that it is no longer able to understand him.”

25. M. Gorky, History of Russian literature, M., 1939, p. 206.

Alexander Ivanovich Herzen

In the summer of 1833, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812 - 1870) completed a four-year course of study at Moscow University. By decision of the Council

Herzen University, on the basis of the Regulations on the production of academic degrees and “for excellent success and behavior” on June 30, 1833 (All dates in the article are given in the old style) was approved as a candidate in the Department of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. He was also awarded a silver medal for his dissertation "Analytical presentation solar system Copernicus." The path to a successful scientific career was open to the young graduate, but Herzen's fate turned out differently. A year after graduating from the university, he was arrested for participating in a "secret society" and after a 9-month prison sentence was sent into exile, which lasted in total until 1842 G.

After returning from exile to Moscow, Herzen resumed the study of theoretical foundations, methodology and modern achievements natural sciences. He studied the works of foreign and domestic scientists in physics, chemistry, zoology and physiology, attended lectures and public readings at the university, and also in the period from 1842 to 1846. writes and publishes philosophical and scientific works "Amateurism in Science", "Letters on the Study of Nature" and "Public Readings of Mr. Professor Roulier"

In these works, which were widely known among students and the capital's intelligentsia, Herzen showed himself to be a serious methodologist and a brilliant popularizer of science. However, this new stage of his scientific activity was interrupted. In 1847, unable to withstand the police’s nagging, Herzen left Russia forever and, while abroad, was no longer involved in science, concentrating his efforts on revolutionary journalistic activities and the creation of an independent Russian press.

And yet the reactionary atmosphere of Nikolaev political regime was not the only reason for Herzen’s transformation from a promising scientist into a revolutionary. The fact is that both he himself and his circle of like-minded Westerners initially saw in science not only a powerful factor of social development and renewal, but also an alternative to attempts at a purely violent transformation of society, such as the youth of the late 30s - early 40s . the Decembrist uprising and some other revolutionary actions in Europe first appeared thirds of the XIX V. But what, in this case, made Herzen prefer revolution to science?

(Participant of the Herzen university circle N.I. Sazonov recalled in this regard: “The disappointments of 1825 and 1830 served us as a useful lesson, after which we began to strive to resolve major national issues primarily with the help of science.”)

In this essay I will try to answer this question by analyzing the problems that Herzen encountered when becoming acquainted with contemporary Western science and which led him to the conviction that this science was in a state of deep crisis, mired in trifles and in need of salvation from the outside. bold and broad-minded “people of life”, capable of overcoming the disunity of scientific disciplines and achieving the organic unity of science, philosophy and practice.

It seems to me that the main role in Herzen’s disappointment was played primarily by his lack of understanding of the specifics of the work of professional scientists engaged in solving their highly specialized problems, the meaning of which can only be understood by being in constant creative contacts with teams of researchers at advanced laboratories. At the same time, as modern experience shows, similar misunderstanding (and disappointment) arises among many scientists from developing countries. Even having received an excellent education, such scientists experience enormous, primarily ideological, difficulties when entering the Western scientific community

In this regard, it is interesting to compare philosophical and scientific works

Herzen with modern problems of perception of advanced science. Such a comparison, in my opinion, would allow a deeper understanding of the features of the development of Russian science in the first half of the 19th century. and role in this development

Herzen. Dreaming of quality new science future and trying to prepare Russian youth for the creation of such a science, Herzen was unable to notice those truly revolutionary changes that the everyday work of Western and domestic professionals contained. As a result, with his articles he only disoriented the students, provoking them into conflicts with “backward and reactionary” professors and, as a result, leaving science.

Moreover, Herzen himself became one of the first victims of such disorientation.

Failed scientist

In June 1833, A. I. Herzen completed his studies at the physics and mathematics department of Moscow University. He was preparing for final exams and working on his Ph.D. thesis, “An Analytical Exposition of the Copernican Solar System.” Writing such a work - a small essay of the abstract type, as well as obtaining a sufficiently high score in the exams was necessary for those who wanted to become a university candidate in order to continue scientific work and then defend their master's and doctoral dissertations.

Judging by his letters to friends, Herzen was optimistic. He thanked and blessed the university, rejoiced at the topic of the dissertation proposed to him by the curator, Professor D. M. Perevoshchikov. The first failure occurred

“I took a shortcut in mechanics from Perevoshchikov, this greatly shocked my ambition, I was sick the next day; but in all other subjects I answered well, in some excellent, and I am a candidate; now all that remains is to get a medal (gold), and I am satisfied with the university”

(The exams were held on June 22, 1833. To obtain a candidate’s degree, it was necessary to score at least 28 points with grades from “0” to “4”. Herzen scored 29 points: “4” - in botany, mathematics, mineralogy, zoology, chemistry and " 3" - in physics, mechanics, astronomy. )

Unfortunately, this hope of Herzen did not come true either. His dissertation was awarded a silver medal. Gold medal another student of Perevoshchikov, A. N. Drashusov, received for an essay on the same topic, who was left at the university observatory and in 1851 became its second, after

Perevoshchikov, director.

T. P. Passek, a friend of Herzen’s youth, wrote that Perevoshchikov preferred Drashusov’s dissertation because “he found too much philosophy and too few formulas in Sasha’s work. The gold medal was received by a student who, they said then, copied his dissertation from astronomy Bio and stretched out formulas on sheets of paper."

Perhaps Passek is right, and after not entirely successful passing the exams in physical sciences, Perevoshchikov could have been wary of Herzen’s overly philosophical work. At the same time, Perevoshchikov categorically did not want to take on Drashusov as an assistant at the observatory.

Moreover, Perevoshchikov kept this place vacant for almost a month and agreed to hire Drashusov only under pressure from the latter’s high patrons.

It is possible that Perevoshchikov kept a vacancy for Herzen (he simply had no other candidates at that time). But Herzen, instead of showing any initiative, ridiculed his teachers and the university in his letters and told his friends that he spent the whole day eating, sleeping, bathing and was going to seriously study social philosophy and political science.

What these studies led to is known. Exactly a year later, Herzen was arrested for organizing a revolutionary group (quite harmless even by the standards of that time). Then there were 9 months in prison and exile compulsory service as a junior official in the chancellery, where Herzen was able to see enough of all the “delights” of Russian life.

It is not surprising, therefore, that soon after returning from exile to Moscow

(1842) Herzen began to apply for a foreign passport and in 1847 he and his family went abroad. There he became close to many Russian and European revolutionaries and in the 50s. together with Ogarev created

Free Russian printing house, which published, among other things, the famous newspaper

"Bell".

It is difficult to say whether Russian science lost an outstanding scientist with the passing of Herzen, but one can only regret that it lost a talented and widely educated popularizer and publicist, as well as an excellent organizer. Did Herzen himself regret his failed scientific career? In his autobiographical book “The Past and Thoughts,” Herzen writes with undisguised envy about his friend the German physiologist Karl Vogt, who, before being drawn into the defeated German revolution of 1848, became a recognized scientist who did not part with a microscope even during the years of emigration. At the same time, Herzen especially admired the Vogt family - one of those old German families, whose members, from century to century, became professionals of the highest class in crafts, sciences, art, and finally, simply in the ability to raise healthy, purposeful and hardworking children.

I was deprived of all this, Herzen writes, the moral connection of generations, the positive example of fathers, proper upbringing, having been forced from childhood to fight with everything around me. Therefore, leaving the nursery, Herzen concludes his comparison, “threw himself into another battle and, having just finished his university course, was already in prison, then in exile. Science turned a corner at this, here a different study presented itself - the study of the world of the unfortunate on the one hand, dirty - on the other."

Herzen and the problems of the development of science in Russia

And yet, was it only circumstances and living conditions that prevented Herzen from becoming a scientist? Of course, the atmosphere of Nikolaev Russia in the 30s and 40s. was not very favorable for scientific research. Nevertheless, an increasing number of people began to engage in science, some of them on a global scale. Enough to remember the names

Lobachevsky, Ostrogradsky, Struve, Pirogov, Lenz, Zinin and other outstanding scientists. At the same time, the government began to realize the national importance of science and sometimes allocated funds for its development without stint. So, for the construction of a prestigious, then the most advanced in the world

The Pulkovo Observatory was in the 30s. a colossal amount of 1.5 million silver rubles was allocated.

In the first third of the 19th century. Universities in

Dorpat (Tartu), Vilno, Kazan, Kharkov, St. Petersburg and Kyiv. Of course, such a number of universities was completely insufficient for the gigantic

Russian Empire, however, the development of the university system was largely hampered by an acute shortage of qualified teachers. Often, in hastily created universities, many departments were empty for a long time or eked out a miserable existence, and teachers were suffocating from an unbearable workload, which, naturally, had a detrimental effect on the quality of student training.

In its activities, the Russian government could only rely on an army of semi-literate officials. Therefore, it is not surprising that vital reforms for the country were delayed, and when they did begin, they were carried out hastily, by simply copying Western institutions. As a result, as V. O. Klyuchevsky reasonably believed, the actions of the reformers only depleted the people’s strength and caused a lasting aversion to all attempts at government education. However, being disappointed in the government’s ability to “develop Russia” and not wanting to cooperate with an incompetent and despotic regime, people like Herzen only increased the lack of civilization in the state and thereby reduced the possibility of progressive changes. Thus a vicious circle arose, in the existence of which only Russian officials were interested.

Of course, it is difficult to imagine Herzen or Ogarev voluntarily serving in the Nikolaev administration. However, in the field of scientific development and university education, they could cooperate with the government without compromising principles too much. Moreover, it was in this area that the Russian nobility of the first half of the 19th century, at least its enlightened part, could, in my opinion, play an outstanding role. Possessing political weight, material resources, leisure, the right to freely travel abroad, being the most educated part of society, it had the opportunity not only to significantly accelerate the formation of domestic science, but also, having taken a leading position in it, to take revenge for its sidelining by the bureaucrats, which had sharply intensified after the defeat of the Decembrists.

Of course, creating a national science is a monstrously difficult task. But the Russian nobility created great literature, which could hardly have been easier

(organization of publishing, overcoming censorship obstacles, assimilation of artistic forms belonging to another culture, etc.) than, for example, the development of universities. Nevertheless, the development of literature in Russia, essentially on a voluntary basis, was much more successful than state-supported science.

Speaking about Herzen’s possible role in the “scientization” of Russia, it is important to emphasize that the Westerners, to whom he belonged, unconditionally advocated the spread of science in the country, seeing in it, in the style of European social ideas, most powerful tool material and spiritual transformation of society.

But why then did Herzen and other radically minded intellectuals not engage in scientific research themselves, did not teach at universities, but preferred to turn into “repentant nobles,” socialists and revolutionaries? Why didn’t the same Herzen, disillusioned with Moscow University, go to continue his education abroad? Did he even want to do science and, if so, how and what kind? To answer these questions we must turn to the analysis of his philosophical views. In the end, it was they who actually became the main cause of resentment against

Perevoshchikov, disappointment in science and leaving it.

The articles mentioned by Perevoshchikov are philosophical and journalistic work

Herzen's "Amateurism in Science", which in 1843 was published in parts in the journal "Otechestvennye zapiski". It is also possible that Perevoshchikov could have been familiar, at least by hearsay, with the first articles of “Letters on the Study of Nature” - a large historical-philosophical and historical-scientific work on which Herzen worked in 1844 - 1845. and in February 1845 began publishing in the same magazine. Perevoshchikov also actively collaborated with Otechestvennye Zapiski from 1840, publishing in them a number of very interesting popular articles about astronomy, its history and methodology. Thus, during this period, Herzen and his teacher, at first glance, were engaged in the same thing - the popularization and propaganda of science in Russia. What, then, again caused Perevoshchikov’s irritation?

"Amateurism in Science" by A. I. Herzen

Herzen's work "Amateurism in Science" is a unique work in many ways, being practically the first attempt in Russia to build a detailed philosophical concept of the development of science, to determine its place in society and in the spiritual life of man. Herzen himself characterized his work as propaedeutic, intended primarily for those who are just beginning to study science. At the same time, its main goal is to protect beginners from that dangerous disappointment in science that is spreading in Russian society. (Naturally, that part of it with which Herzen was in contact.) He writes that, having encountered the first difficulties and not going further than the prefaces, domestic amateurs are now moaning louder and louder that science does not correspond to the high aspirations of the spirit and “instead of bread it offers stones "that she is too complex, uninteresting and, moreover, uses unfamiliar words. But most importantly, since modern science is just the “development of materials”, an intermediate stage, there is no point in poring over it, since anyway, a new, more perfect and more advanced one will soon appear. accessible science. It is clear how dangerous such sentiments were in a country where there were no strong scientific traditions and where, until quite recently, remembering Magnitsky’s “purge” of Kazan University, even skeptical professors inserted quotations from the Bible into their lectures and textbooks, emphasizing in every possible way the harmony of science and religion . Therefore, it is not surprising that Herzen, without sparing sarcasm and indignation, writes that what these romantics and false friends of science actually need is not science itself, but their own vague ideas about it, the opportunity to easily philosophize about various problems, without bothering themselves with the need to test their own judgments by experience or calculations. Moreover, philosophy turns out to be especially defenseless against such “lovers” of science, where they most often undertake to judge any things without even bothering with a superficial acquaintance with the subject.

Herzen quite reasonably explained this attitude towards science by the fact that Russia received it ready-made, without pain or labor. Hence that wild mixture of reverence and condescension, mystical hopes and suspicion, which, unfortunately, to this day we often encounter in our country and which, oddly enough, we find in Herzen himself, when he moves from criticizing amateurs to criticism of modern scientists for excessive specialization, formalism, isolation from life and other “sins”. With some amazing inconsistency, he presents to them all the same accusations and claims for which he just ridiculed the amateurs. Thus, in the chapter “Amateurs and the Guild of Scientists,” Herzen writes that modern science is rushing out of cramped classrooms and conference rooms into real (?!) life, which, however, is prevented by a caste of scientists who jealously surrounded science with a forest of scholasticism, barbaric terminology and heavy , repulsive language.

“Finally, the last opportunity to keep science in the workshop was based on the development of purely theoretical aspects, not always accessible to laymen.”

Herzen writes that modern scientists have finally turned into medieval guild craftsmen who have lost their broad view of the world and do not understand anything other than their narrow topic. Of course, Herzen condescendingly notes, there may be some benefit from the activities of such scientists, at least in the accumulation of facts, but he immediately frightens the reader with the possibility of drowning in a sea of ​​information, somehow connected by artificial theories and classifications, which scientists “know in advance.” that they are not true."

It is important to emphasize that, criticizing guild scientists, Herzen has in mind primarily Germany, in whose science, as he believes, to the greatest extent“pedantry, disintegration with life, insignificant pursuits, artificial constructions and unapplied theories, ignorance of practice and arrogant complacency”, etc., triumphed. But what, in fact, gives

Does Herzen have the right to judge the state of science in Germany? Did he study at its universities, communicate with German scientists, work in their laboratories?

(By the way, acquaintance with real German scientists, in particular, with K. Vogt, shook Herzen’s confidence that scientific specialization leads to stupidity, complacency and philistine narrow-mindedness.)

It is clear that Herzen could judge with such confidence the insignificance of German science only because he was based on the criticism that could be found in abundance in the articles and books of outstanding German writers, scientists and publicists who were painfully experiencing the humiliated position of their homeland, its economic backwardness, fragmentation, political dependence and dreamed of the revival of Germany that science, philosophy and art would bring to it. However, to fulfill such a mission, these areas of spiritual activity had to reach unprecedented heights, and the colossal successes of the Germans in the development of philosophy raised hopes that this achievement was quite possible. This is the first.

Second. For European science of the 30s - 40s. The 19th century, and especially German science, was characterized by an acute conflict with philosophy. Closely connected in the 17th century, at the origins of modern science, in the 19th century. the two disciplines quickly grew apart, accusing each other of incompetence and neglect of truly important issues. It is well known that the separation of science and philosophy was on the whole a beneficial process, allowing them both to acquire their own subjects and methods of research and thereby accelerate their development. However, in order to then see positive results behind mutual criticism and, in particular, to understand the features of philosophical criticism of science

(Constituting itself as an analysis of the theoretical thinking of the culture of Modern times (“pure reason”) and groping for the contours of some other logics, philosophy could not help but criticize the science in which this thinking was embodied most consistently. In addition, criticism of the science of that time for excessive empiricism was correct in principle, although it did not take into account the fact that scientists, especially experimenters, simply “overtook” the theorists at that time.)

a disproportionately deeper acquaintance with the intellectual life of Europe was required than that which Herzen had. But this means that by importing Western criticism of science without science itself, he found himself in the position of the amateurs he ridiculed, who received the Western product ready-made and did not think about the difficult history of its appearance or the context in which it makes sense.

Of course, we can say that Herzen, using the example of the West, warned domestic science against possible dangers. But was such a warning useful? While Russian science was taking the first steps towards professionalism, Herzen mocked specialists, calling them modern troglodytes and Hottentots. After this, is it any wonder that Russian literature is in search of positive hero turned to anyone, but not to a scientist?

No less serious consequences were also had by the dissemination in society of views on the need to create a new, simpler and understandable science for the people, which, thanks to the use of the dialectical method, could organically combine philosophy and science, the theoretical and the empirical, etc. Moreover, the main role in the creation of such a science was Herzen in his next work, “Letters on the Study of Nature,” he naturally devoted himself to Russia, drawing parallels between the European Renaissance, which began after the West accepted ancient education, and the post-Petrine development of Russia, which is now assimilating Western culture. Thus, in relation to science, a dangerous idea was formed to turn Russia’s lag for the good and at once overcome all the difficulties and contradictions in which the West was entangled.

(At the same time, Herzen resorts to an actual apology for Russian amateurism, comparing it with naive, but aesthetically bright, rich in potential ancient philosophy)

It is clear that such ideas also did not contribute to the growth of respect for professionalism and to a large extent contributed to the politicization of Russian universities, whose students often saw themselves not as future specialists, but as bearers of a new, revolutionary worldview capable of saving the world. Thus, trying to help the spread of science in the country,

Herzen only harmed her. With his articles, he actually disoriented young people, instilling in them inadequate, or even simply false, ideas about the world of scientists.

A fundamental role in this disorientation (primarily of himself) was played by Herzen’s passion for philosophy, the critical pathos of which presupposed the existence of a fairly developed scientific community in the country. But why, in fact, Herzen, trying to save science from amateurism, did not turn to normal propaganda of its results and achievements?

It turns out that borrowing not only the revolutionary ideas of Western philosophers, but also completely respectable information from scientific and popular science magazines could lead to similar, disorienting results.

In 1829 - 1830 D. M. Perevoshchikov, in order to disseminate modern scientific concepts among students, translated and published in the journal “New Natural History Store” about a hundred articles from foreign scientific periodicals, devoted mainly to studies of the relationship between various classes of phenomena, including living and non-living matter , as well as ideas about the fundamental role of electrical forces in nature.

As is known, discoveries in early XIX V. chemical, thermal, physiological and magnetic effects of electric current had a fundamental impact on the development of natural science. These discoveries confirmed previously expressed guesses about the universal interconnection of various forces of nature and encouraged scientists to assume and look for other connections of this type. Unfortunately, the unusual nature of new phenomena, their inconsistency with existing theoretical concepts, as well as the element of chance in many discoveries gave rise, especially in the pseudo-scientific environment, to the idea that in order to accomplish scientific discoveries no serious theoretical preparation is needed and only bold hypotheses and perseverance are enough. Perevoshchikov’s collections and reviews suffered from the same drawback, creating (contrary to the beliefs of the author himself, who soon abandoned this form of popularization of science) among students a dangerous image of an easy science, fluttering from discovery to discovery, which then led them to disappointment and amateurism.

Thus, Perevoshchikov’s attempt to form an adequate image of modern science among students and to bring them to the forefront of research conducted in Europe failed. But was this problem solvable at all?

Problems of creating Western-style scientific communities

Russia was the first developing country, who tried to introduce Western science. Since then, such attempts have been and are being made in many countries. Therefore, it is possible that we will be able to better understand domestic experience by comparing it with the experience of other countries. For such a comparison, I want to use a very interesting and original article by Indian astrophysicist A. R. Chowdhury, devoted to the analysis of the problems of adaptation of trainees from Asian countries to the Western scientific community.

Published in the American journal Social Studies of Science, Choudhury's article, however, bears little resemblance to traditional sociological research and rather represents an outline of the author's personal impressions of the Indian and American scientific communities, as well as reflections on the psychological problems of the perception of Western science by representatives from countries with non-European cultural backgrounds. traditions.

In his article, Chowdhury first of all notes the well-known fact that it has not yet been possible to create full-fledged science capable of working at the highest European or American level, even in countries with highly developed modern industry (Japan and South Korea, Australia, South Africa). At the same time, of course, highly gifted scientists can appear even in economically backward regions, but they have little influence on their scientific communities, which continue to remain backward and provincial.

To clarify what he means by advanced scientific community,

Chowdhury introduces the following criteria:

1. There are members of the community who are well versed in well-established scientific knowledge of the past.

2. There are members of the community who constantly maintain themselves at the level of good familiarity with the current achievements of world science.

3. There are members of the community who continually make significant contributions to the development of science.

According to Chowdhury, good results on all three points give complete (total), and on individual ones - partial (partial) science. Thus, the author characterizes Indian physics as partial, with a high “score” on the first point, and a low “score” on the third. As a consequence, he writes, physics in India is developing in only a few well-established directions, which gives students a completely distorted idea of ​​the nature of modern science.

Let's try to look at Russian science of the 30s and 40s from the point of view of the proposed classification. XIX century Of course, this is a “partial” science, whose representatives made truly heroic efforts to develop it in all three areas identified by Choudhury: teaching the fundamentals of science and popularizing its achievements, maintaining stable contacts with the European scientific community, and conducting independent research at the appropriate level.

It is important to emphasize that domestic scientists have achieved the greatest results in the third area of ​​activity. As a result, in Russia the first half

XIX century a paradoxical situation arose when the country already had first-class scientists, but in fact there was no scientific community,

(Apparently, this situation was a consequence of Peter the Great’s approach to the development of science in Russia, when a research center (Academy of Sciences) was created much earlier than universities. Thanks to this, scientists for a long time represented an enclave, extremely weakly connected with the rest of society. which significantly slowed down further development of science and its transformation into an integral factor of national culture.Scientists continued to remain foreigners in their country, more connected with foreign colleagues than with their own society, and in order to overcome this situation, it was necessary, first of all, to organize mass training of high-quality specialists. However, the solution to this seemingly quite real problem both in the times of Perevoshchikov and in the times of Choudhury encountered some incomprehensible and almost insurmountable difficulties.

Problems of perception of Western science

Analyzing the reasons why complete science cannot be established in India,

Chowdhury first refers to the lack of funds, poor development of scientific communications, etc. However, he himself further emphasizes that main reason still not in this. At leading Indian universities, students have the necessary equipment and are trained in the best foreign programs, often with the assistance of highly qualified Western teachers. As a result, students receive an excellent education, in no way inferior to Western education, successfully participate in various international competitions, but, as a rule, do not know how to independently and creatively apply the acquired knowledge.

Such students, Chowdhury believes, lack the appropriate mindset, the psychological gestalt, without which they can only copy Western science by conducting fairly routine research. At the same time, such a gestalt can be formed during 1-2 years of internship in leading scientific centers of the West, when students are completely immersed in the atmosphere of the research teams of these centers. However, returning home, trainees are unable to create an appropriate psychological climate in their universities and, deprived of the usual intellectual communication, either leave for the West or begin to move towards a teaching or administrative career.

But what is this mysterious gestalt, without which a full perception of Western science is impossible, and is it only non-Western scientists who experience difficulties in its formation? In his response to Chowdhury’s article, the American scientist R. Handberg writes that in provincial universities

The US has to face exactly the same problems as India.

Returning home after studying or training at leading universities, a scientist, first of all, is forced to devote a lot of time to pedagogical and administrative activities, which in provincial universities acquire self-sufficient importance. In addition, the need to constantly supplement the courses taught with new products gradually forms in him the habit of superficiality.

(An example of the formation of such superficiality is provided by the reviews mentioned above

Perevoshchikov, who, moreover, could not always separate the correct results from the chimeras that appeared in abundance on the pages of Western journals)

And finally, deprived of constant live communication with other researchers, he gradually ceases to be a scientist.

Thus, in order to become and continue to remain a full-fledged scientist, it is necessary to constantly maintain intensive, direct contacts with teams of advanced research centers. But what, exactly, can be learned during such contacts? After all, Western science is not an esoteric teaching and all its results and methods for obtaining them are published in full detail in articles, monographs, all kinds of textbooks, etc.

Chowdhury writes that when Indian students enter modern Western laboratories, they are literally shocked by the fact that the science in these centers bears little resemblance to the image they formed in the course of studying Western scientific literature or classes, often taught by foreigners or graduates. foreign training by teachers. First of all, it turns out that real science is much cruder, more utilitarian and even more primitive than students previously imagined. It turns out, for example, that an ordinary physicist is not at all a person striving to understand the laws of nature. He is not at all interested in global issues

In any case, in his own field of activity - and is busy solving his own narrowly professional problems that have no meaning outside the corresponding paradigms shared by a community of specialists like himself.

(Let us recall in this regard Herzen’s indignation at narrow specialists turning into some kind of monsters, or his bewilderment at the fact that K. Vogt, whom he so respected, is not at all interested in philosophical disputes and other global problems.)

And so, recalls Chowdhury, “at some point I suddenly realized that my work as a physicist had nothing to do with knowledge of nature in the usual sense of the word, that I was increasingly immersed in the world of shadows and could become a specialist only then when this artificial world turns into reality for me. This transformation is the formation of the corresponding psychological gestalt." (Chowdhury specifically emphasizes that Western science has no analogues and cannot be considered as the development of curiosity about nature. Such curiosity, he believes, All civilizations have, but they have not created anything like the Western European natural science of modern times. "Science is one of the deepest forms of creative expression of the human mind. Until we have human minds properly trained to create science, it is absurd to expect it to pour out of buildings, libraries and laboratories, no matter how well equipped they are.")

It is important to emphasize that the world of shadows that Chowdhury talks about is not the world of mathematics at all. It would surprise a physicist the least. Here the point is in some kind of breakdown in thinking, which allows a scientist, in the course of research, to forget about the universal (although he cognizes the universal) and concentrate on particular and seemingly secondary issues. And for such a transformation of thinking, and then maintaining it in this strange state, constant contacts with the relevant community of researchers are necessary. Thus, the most important result of the activities of such communities is not so much the acquisition of specific scientific knowledge, but the formation of the very ability to do science.

(This feature of leading scientific centers was very well explained by P.L.

Kapitsa. He wrote that the specifics of leadership in science can be compared to the movement of a caravan of ships on ice, “where the leading ship must pave the way, breaking the ice. It must be the strongest and must choose the right path. And although the gap between the first and second ship is small, the meaning and value of the work of the forward vessel is completely different." In fact, we can say that a leading science is a different science, primarily concerned with justifying its own possibility. )

Moreover, as can be seen from the memoirs of many scientists, the atmosphere of informal communication plays an extremely important role in the preparation of scientific thinking: from quite serious discussions at conferences to completely frivolous

“scientific chatter”, cultivating a playful attitude towards science and thereby allowing for a better awareness of its “madeness”, and therefore the possibility of renewal.

In leading centers, scientists get used to looking at science as a workshop, where the role of instruments is played by both the simplest instruments and the most complex theories. This is what allows Western scientists to deal with their own particular problems, seemingly without thinking at all about universal ones. The point, however, is that they simply get used to working with a different type of universal, which is not given in actuality.

(as a certain picture of the world, requiring only some specification), and potentially, as a space of possible applications of one’s tools and methods.

This is a fundamental shift of attention from global problems methodological ones occurred in European science in the 17th century.

(So, in the Royal Society of London, when discussing experiments, they specially learned to argue not about the essence of the phenomena being studied (such a debate can be carried on ad infinitum), but “only” about how various instruments and devices are specifically used and function in a given experiment..)

Russia began to intensively get acquainted with this science in the first quarter

XVIII century, that is, during the period when its cognitive and institutional foundations were already laid and science moved to the stage of evolutionary development. This science, which had begun to actively function, could be relatively easily copied, but it was extremely difficult to assimilate creatively. As I reasonably noted

Herzen, Russia had to study European science when in the West they had already stopped talking about many things, and in our country they were not even suspected.

Unnoticed revolutions.

Terrorists and theorists

The creative assimilation of science was greatly hampered by the fact that its evolutionary nature was often apparent. Very serious changes were constantly taking place in it, but unlike, for example, the revolution of Bohr and Einstein, such changes can only be noticed (and, more importantly, correctly assessed) through intensive cooperation with the Western scientific community.

I have already said above that Herzen’s criticism of science for its break with philosophy did not take into account (and could not take into account) the fact that this gap created favorable opportunities for the development of both disciplines. The surge of empiricism in natural science in the first half of the 19th century, ridiculed by Herzen, was no less favorable in its potential. Despite the obvious and quite rightly criticized not only by philosophers, but also by scientists, shortcomings (avalanche-like growth of raw practical material, the blind trust of many researchers in any experience and at the same time the fear of more or less serious theoretical generalizations), this surge, for example, allowed experimental physics to emerge as an independent direction of research, which predetermined the rapid development of theoretical physics in the second half of the 19th century.

(Identification of experimental physics (apparent ignoring of theory by experimenters) was a very complex process. Such ignoring made sense (i.e. did not turn into a naive “poke at random”) only within a certain community of scientists who intensively discussed the results of their research and precisely in the course of such discussions used implicit, often unconscious, forms of theoretical analysis..)

Finally, Herzen’s calls for science to leave the cramped classrooms “into the wild” and get closer to the practical needs of society were fundamentally incorrect.

In fact, rather, practitioners should have been invited to universities, where at that time research was carried out, which later made it possible to create electrical engineering, electrochemical and other fundamentally new areas of industry that radically transformed the world.

In his essay “Intolerance,” critic A. A. Lebedev wrote that the tragedy of the Narodnaya Volya terrorists lay primarily in their complete misunderstanding

(and unwillingness to understand) the logic of those deep, truly revolutionary changes that took place in Russian society after the reform of 1861. Desperately trying to spur the development of society, speed up the course of history, the Narodnaya Volya members did not understand that history was actually eluding them, and they were sliding into sidelines of the social development of the country they are saving, effectively turning into reactionaries.

Unfortunately, approximately the same thing that Lebedev said about the half-educated student and somewhat stupid person Andrei Zhelyabov can be said about the widely educated, talented Alexander Herzen. Dreaming of a radical renewal of science and the transformation of society with its help, Herzen was unable to realize the revolutionary processes that were taking place in science in his time. But the most important thing that Herzen did not understand in Western science was its professionalism, which represents not so much the “consistent and deep work” of individual researchers, but rather the special culture of their communication. As a result, Herzen’s calls for progress turned out to be no less reactionary than the actions of the People’s Will. These calls only disoriented young people going into science, forcing them to turn from specialists into “people of life”

(Herzen), “critically thinking individuals” (Lavrov), etc., that is, again and again go through the path from studying the Copernican revolution to creating revolutionary newspapers.

In memory of Herzen

(ballad about historical lack of sleep)
a cruel romance based on the work of the same name by V.I. Lenin
Poems by Naum Korzhavin
Love for the Good sons of the nobles burned the heart in dreams,
And Herzen slept, not knowing about the evil...
But the Decembrists woke Herzen.
He didn't get enough sleep. It all went from there.
And, stunned by their daring act,
He raised a terrible ringing bell throughout the world.
What accidentally woke up Chernyshevsky,
Not knowing himself what he did.
And he, from sleep, having weak nerves,
He began to call Russia to the axe, -
What disturbed Zhelyabov’s sound sleep?
And he didn’t let Perovskaya get enough sleep.
And I immediately wanted to fight with someone,
Go among the people and not be afraid of the racks.
This is how conspiracy was born in Russia:
A big deal is a long lack of sleep.
The king was killed, but the world did not heal again.
Zhelyabov fell and fell into an unsweetened sleep.
But before that he prompted Plekhanov,
So that he goes a completely different way.
Everything could have worked out over time.
Russian life could be brought back into order...
What bitch woke up Lenin?
Who cares if the baby is sleeping?
There is no exact answer to that question.
We've been looking for him for years in vain...
Three components - three sources
They don't clarify anything for us here.
He began to look for the culprits - will there be any?
And being woken up terribly angry,
He immediately started a revolution for everyone,
So that no one escapes punishment.
And with a song they went to Golgotha ​​under the banners
The fathers are behind him - like a sweet life...
May our half-asleep faces be forgiven,
We are the children of those who did not finish their sleep.
We want to sleep... And we can’t escape anywhere
From the thirst for sleep and the thirst to judge everyone...
Oh, Decembrists!.. Don’t wake up Herzen!..
You can't wake anyone up in Russia.

HERTZEN Alexander Ivanovich (1812-70), Russian revolutionary, writer, philosopher. Illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner I. A. Yakovlev. He graduated from Moscow University (1833), where, together with N.P. Ogarev, he headed a revolutionary circle. Arrested in 1834, he spent 6 years in exile. Published since 1836 under the pseudonym Iskander. Since 1842 in Moscow, head of the left wing of Westerners. In his philosophical works “Amateurism in Science” (1843), “Letters on the Study of Nature” (1845-46), and others, he asserted the union of philosophy with the natural sciences. He sharply criticized the serfdom in the novel “Who is to Blame?” (1841-46), the stories “Doctor Krupov” (1847) and “The Magpie Thief” (1848). Since 1847 in exile. After the defeat of the European revolutions of 1848-49, he became disillusioned with the revolutionary capabilities of the West and developed the theory of “Russian socialism”, becoming one of the founders of populism.

In 1853 he founded the Free Russian Printing House in London. In the newspaper “Kolokol” he denounced the Russian autocracy, conducted revolutionary propaganda, and demanded the liberation of peasants with their land. In 1861 he took the side of revolutionary democracy, contributed to the creation of Land and Freedom, and supported the Polish uprising of 1863-64. Died in Paris, grave in Nice.

The autobiographical essay “The Past and Thoughts” (1852-68) is one of the masterpieces of memoir literature.

Bibliography

1. Volodin V. A. A. I. Herzen in reflections on science // Nature. 1987.

2. Bugaevsky A.V., Mentsin Yu.L. Creator of the first observatory of Moscow University. (To the 200th anniversary of the birth of D. M. Perevoshchikov) // Earth and Universe. 1988. No. 4.

3. Guryanov V. P. A. I. Herzen - student of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University // Tr. IIE. 1953. T. 5. P. 379 - 386.

4. Kapitsa P. L. About leadership in science // Kapitsa P. L. Experiment, theory, practice. 2nd ed. M., 1977.

5. Lebedev A. A. Intolerance // Lebedev A. A. Choice. Articles. M., 1980.