He, "awakened by the Decembrists", who devoted his life to the fight against prejudice and the tsarist regime, had a difficult life full of personal dramas.
From the heart. Iskander
Herzen was the fruit of the love of a wealthy landowner Ivan Yakovlev and a German woman, Louise Gaag. Since the marriage was not church, the boy bore a surname invented by his father. Herzen - from the German Herz Sohn. Literally - "son of the heart". Not a surname, but a pseudonym. All the illegitimate children of Yakovlev wore it, and there were many of them - either seven or eight. At a conscious age, Herzen will choose a pseudonym for himself already consciously. "Iskander" is the Persian version of the name Alexander The signature "Iskander" first appeared in 1836 in the magazine "Telescope".
Bastard
A heavy imprint for the rest of his life was left in Herzen's soul by the emotional drama he experienced in childhood and youth - an early awareness of his dual position in the family, associated with illegitimate birth. The father, who adored the boy while he was a baby, became more and more distant from his son as he grew up. Sasha began to feel superfluous and unnecessary early on, finding more and more rest in philosophical searches and drunken reading of books.
The oath
Once Herzen's father witnessed an incident - a Ural Cossack rescued a German tutor from the Moskva River. Yakovlev decides to apply for a reward for the savior. Gradually it turns out that the rescued man is the tutor of the son of a distant relative, the wealthy landowner Ogaryov. They managed to get the award, and the circumstances subsequently developed in such a way that the saved tutor began to visit Yakovlev's house often. Once he brought with him his pupil, Nikolenka Ogaryov. The teenagers started a conversation and it turned out that they read the same books, they have the same inspirations and idols. Thus begins the friendship between Herzen and Ogarev. There was a lot in common between them, they complemented each other very much - the impulsive Alexander and the calm, balanced Nikolai. They were especially inspired by the Decembrists. Friends passionately hate and despise autocracy. In 1828, during one of the walks on Sparrow Hills, friends vow to fight against tyrants, sacrificing their lives for freedom and struggle. In place of their oath now stands a commemorative sign.
secret circle
In 1829, Herzen entered Moscow University, where a society of radical and progressive people quickly gathered around him. They gather in Ogaryov's house, are fond of the ideas of Saint-Simonism - French utopian socialism, discuss European revolutionary events, Decembrist ideas, read, talk a lot about freedom, breathe freely, go on a carouse ... "Gatherings" will end with exposure in 1834, arrest and exile . Herzen was first exiled to Perm, and from there to Vyatka.
family secrets
Herzen's family life is described in detail in his memoir masterpiece Past and Thoughts. She was very passionate and stormy, tense, but hardly happy. The fatal name for him was the name Natalya - that was the name of both his wives.
First, Natalya Zakharyina, his cousin. He marries her in 1839. The main drama of this marriage will unfold already in Europe, in Paris. There, Natalia falls in love with Herzen's friend, Georg Herweg. She confesses to her husband that she wants a "threesome marriage". They will agree that in Nice Herzen and Natalya and Herweg and Emma will live in the same house. Then there will be blackmail, a storm of passions, a suicide threat. Public morality will condemn Herzen for forcing and "preventing lovers from reuniting." The family tragedy will continue with the death of Herzen's mother and son Nikolai in a shipwreck in 1851. In 1852, two days after giving birth, Natalia also dies, followed by their newborn son.
The second wife of Herzen in 1857 will be ... the wife of his friend Nikolai - Natalya Ogareva-Tuchkova. From marriage with her, he will have a daughter, Lisa, who will commit suicide because of unhappy love. Dostoevsky will write about this suicide, which had a great resonance, in his essay "Two Suicides".
Herzen and the Rothschilds
For radical activity in 1849, Nicholas I arrested the inheritance of Herzen. He will turn to the banker Rothschild for help, who, after a long litigation, will help to get the money out. Subsequently, Rothschild will not leave Herzen unattended. He will help him cash out securities and acquire them, and also - according to rumors - will sponsor his publishing activities, in particular, the issue of the Kolokol newspaper, the main mouthpiece of Westernism and the main emigre brainchild of Herzen, in which secret documents were published several times. It was rumored that Herzen had his own “agent” in the Synod, who delivered important information.
Worldview transformation
Once in Europe, Herzen will face the fact that what he so dreamed of - all ideas, all things that are so understandable and close to him from afar, will turn out to be unbearable and disgusting up close. Especially European practicality and bourgeoisness. He will go a long way, from denial to insight and philosophical understanding of what was unclear and not close to him in Russian thought and Russian reality. His worldview will undergo a serious metamorphosis: from a radical social democrat to a pantheist philosopher who is no longer burdened by faith and does not deny the Gospel.
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen - Russian writer, publicist, philosopher, revolutionary, founder of the national political emigration - was the illegitimate child of a wealthy Moscow landowner I. Yakovlev. The boy who was born on March 25, 1812 was given the surname Herzen invented by his father. He grew up in his father's house and received an upbringing typical of noble families of that time. The opportunity to read French enlighteners and encyclopedists from the home library influenced the formation of his worldview. As a teenager, Alexander met Nikolai Ogarev, with whom he carried his friendship through the years. The Decembrist uprising of 1825 was a landmark event for Herzen's biography. The impressions from him were so strong that Herzen and Ogarev swore an oath to serve freedom all their lives.
In 1829 Herzen became a student at Moscow University (Physics and Mathematics Department). He and his faithful comrade Ogarev become active participants in a circle of freedom-loving youth opposed to the actions of the government. In 1834, Herzen was among the arrested participants and was exiled to Perm. Later he was sent to Vyatka, where he served in the governor's office. When the tsar's heir, the future Alexander II, came to the city, Herzen participated in a local exhibition and gave explanations to a high-ranking person. Thanks to this, he was transferred to Vladimir, where he served as an adviser to the board and married a Moscow bride. Despite being in exile, Herzen recalled those days as the happiest in his life.
In 1836, he began to publish, act as a publicist, taking the pseudonym Iskander. In early 1840, Herzen was allowed to return to Moscow, and in the spring he changed his place of residence to St. Petersburg. The father insisted that his son get a job in the office of the Ministry of the Interior, but after Herzen spoke unflatteringly about the police in a letter to him, he was exiled again in July 1841, this time to Novgorod.
A year later, in 1842, Herzen returned to the capital. At that time, the main direction of social thought was the ideological dispute between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers. Herzen is not just actively involved in it, shares the position of the latter - thanks to erudition, the talent to think, to debate, he turns into one of the key figures in Russian public life. In 1842-1843. he publishes a series of articles "Amateurism in Science", in 1844-1845. - "Letters on the Study of Nature", in which he calls for an end to the opposition between philosophy and the natural sciences. Seeing in literature a mirror of public life and an effective way of fighting, the writer presents to the public anti-serf fiction works - "Doctor Krupov" (1847), "The Thieving Magpie" (1848). During the years 1841-1846. Herzen writes a socio-psychological novel, one of the first of its kind in Russia - "Who is to blame?"
The move to Europe (France) in 1847 after the death of his father marked the beginning of a new period in Herzen's biography. He happened to become an eyewitness to the defeat of the revolutions of 1848-1849, and under the influence of disappointment in the revolutionary potential of Western countries, thoughts about the dying of old Europe, the philosopher creates the "theory of Russian socialism", lays the foundations of populism. The literary embodiment of the ideas of that time were the books From the Other Bank (1847-1850), On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia (1850).
In 1850, Alexander Ivanovich and his family settled in Nice, where he closely communicated with representatives of European emigration and the Italian national liberation movement. In 1851, the Russian government awarded Herzen the status of an eternal exile, deprived him of all rights for disobeying the demand to return to his homeland. Having lost his wife, in 1852 Herzen went to live in London and a year later founded the Free Russian Printing House, designed to print literature banned in Russia. In 1855, Herzen became the publisher of the almanac Polar Star, and in 1857, after N. Ogarev moved to London, he began publishing the first Russian revolutionary newspaper, The Bell. Ruthless criticism fell upon the Russian government from its pages, calls were made for fundamental reforms, for example, the liberation of the peasantry, publicity in court, the elimination of censorship, etc. This publication played a huge role in shaping Russian public thought, the worldview of young revolutionaries. "The Bell" lasted 10 years.
In 1868, Herzen finished writing the autobiographical novel Past and Thoughts, begun back in 1852. It is considered not only the pinnacle of his work as an artist of the word, but also one of the best examples of Russian memoirs. At the end of his life, Herzen came to the conclusion that violence and terror were unacceptable methods of struggle. The last years of his life are connected with different cities: Geneva, Lausanne, Brussels, Florence. A.I. died. Herzen January 9, 1870 in Paris from pneumonia. He was buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, then his ashes were reburied in Nice.
One of the most prominent pillars of Russian liberalism, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, was born on March 25, 1812, into the family of a very wealthy Moscow aristocrat, Ivan Yakovlev. Herzen was his illegitimate son from a 16-year-old German woman, Henrietta Haag, whom Yakovlev, who had lived abroad for a long time, brought from Germany. As an illegitimate child, Alexander could not receive his father's family name. His parents themselves came up with the surname Herzen (“son of the heart”, from the German “Herz”).
Portrait of Alexander Herzen in his youth. 1830s
Herzen's father was distinguished by a strange, difficult character, a penchant for unbelief and skepticism. For his young son, he hired teachers to his liking: one of the teachers acquainted the boy in detail with the events of the great French revolution, the other bore him forbidden "freedom-loving" poems Ryleeva and Pushkin. In his father's library, Herzen got acquainted early with the books of the "enlighteners" of the 18th century. The same "critical" spirit was supported in Alexander by many relatives.
At the age of 12-13, Herzen met his distant relative Nikolai Ogaryov who also came from a very wealthy family. Ogaryov, like Alexander, was filled with an ardent "love of freedom", admired the Decembrists. During one walk on the Sparrow Hills, two boys took an oath to “sacrifice their lives in the struggle for the good of the motherland,” which adherents of Russian liberalism to this day extol almost as an important historical event.
In 1829 Herzen became a student at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at Moscow University. Around him and Ogaryov there formed a circle of noble youth who admired constitutions, the terror of the French Revolution and fashionable Saint-Simonism with its "innovative" sexual morality.
The circle fell under police surveillance. Shortly after Herzen graduated from the university, he was arrested (1834) for participating in a revel with the singing of revolutionary songs. After a nine-month stay in prison under investigation, Herzen was exiled to Perm, but then transferred from there closer to the capitals, to Vyatka, where he held an official post. During the journey through Vyatka in 1837, the heir to the throne (the future Emperor Alexander II), Herzen managed to please him. At the end of 1837 he received permission to move to Vladimir, and in the summer of 1839 police supervision was removed from him. While still in Vyatka, Alexander Ivanovich, without obstacles from the authorities, began to publish articles in the capital's magazines.
In 1840 Herzen received a good post at the Ministry of the Interior in St. Petersburg. Prior to moving there, he lived for several months in Moscow, where there was now a new well-known free-thinking circle of Stankevich. Under the influence of Herzen, the members of this circle (including Belinsky) switched from a conservative interpretation of Hegelian philosophy to a revolutionary radical one.
Herzen did not serve long in the Petersburg ministry: the police opened his letter to his father with sharp criticism of the police. For this, Alexander Ivanovich was "exiled" to the post of adviser to the provincial government in Novgorod (1841). Having rich paternal means, he already resigned in 1842 and returned to Moscow.
By this time, Herzen's views were even more "to the left." He finally leaned towards materialism, admired Feuerbach's atheistic work The Essence of Christianity. In Moscow, Stankevich's circle broke up into Westernizers and Slavophiles. Herzen, Belinsky and the historian Granovsky became the head of Westernism. Herzen began to write journalistic and philosophical articles in journals, carrying out his radical views in them. He also published several fiction works in the same vein: "Notes of Dr. Krupov", "Who is to blame?" (1846), "The Thieving Magpie". Herzen's views were so uncompromising that even some of his Western friends broke with him because of them.
After his father's death (March 1846), Herzen inherited his vast fortune and in January 1847 left "unwashed" Russia with his family for "enlightened" Europe. From Paris, he began to send letters about French life for publication in the Sovremennik magazine.
April 6 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Russian prose writer, publicist and philosopher Alexander Ivanovich Herzen.
Russian prose writer, publicist and philosopher Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was born on April 6 (March 25, old style) 1812 in Moscow in the family of a wealthy Russian landowner Ivan Yakovlev and a German woman Louise Gaag. The marriage of the parents was not officially registered, so the child was illegitimate and was considered a pupil of his father, who gave him the surname Herzen, which comes from the German word Herz and means "child of the heart."
The childhood of the future writer was spent in the house of his uncle, Alexander Yakovlev, on Tverskoy Boulevard (now house 25, which houses the Gorky Literary Institute). From childhood, Herzen was not deprived of attention, but the position of an illegitimate child evoked in him a feeling of orphanhood.
From an early age, Alexander Herzen read the works of the philosopher Voltaire, the playwright Beaumarchais, the poet Goethe and the novelist Kotzebue, so he early acquired free-thinking skepticism, which he retained until the end of his life.
In 1829, Herzen entered the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University, where soon, together with Nikolai Ogarev (who entered a year later), he formed a circle of like-minded people, among whom the most famous were the future writer, historian and ethnographer Vadim Passek, translator Nikolai Ketcher. Young people discussed the socio-political problems of our time - the French Revolution of 1830, the Polish Uprising (1830-1831), were fond of the ideas of Saint-Simonism (the teaching of the French philosopher Saint-Simon - building an ideal society through the destruction of private property, inheritance, estates, equality of men and women ).
In 1833, Herzen graduated from the university with a silver medal and went to work in the Moscow expedition of the Kremlin building. The service left him enough free time for creative work. Herzen was going to publish a journal that was supposed to unite literature, social issues and natural science with the idea of Saint-Simonism, but in July 1834 he was arrested for singing songs defaming the royal family at a party where a bust of Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich was smashed. During interrogations, the Investigative Commission, without proving the direct guilt of Herzen, considered that his beliefs posed a danger to the state. In April 1835, Herzen was exiled first to Perm, then to Vyatka with the obligation to be in the public service under the supervision of the local authorities.
From 1836 Herzen published under the pseudonym Iskander.
At the end of 1837, he was transferred to Vladimir and was given the opportunity to visit Moscow and St. Petersburg, where he was accepted into the circle of critic Vissarion Belinsky, historian Timofey Granovsky and novelist Ivan Panaev.
In 1840, the gendarmerie intercepted Herzen's letter to his father, where he wrote about the murder of a St. Petersburg guard - a street guard who killed a passerby. For spreading unfounded rumors, he was exiled to Novgorod without the right to enter the capitals. The Minister of the Interior Stroganov appointed Herzen as an adviser to the provincial government, which was an official promotion.
In July 1842, having retired with the rank of court adviser, after the petition of his friends, Herzen returned to Moscow. In 1843-1846, he lived in Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane (now a branch of the Literary Museum - the Herzen Museum), where he wrote the stories "The Thieving Magpie", "Doctor Krupov", the novel "Who is to Blame?", articles "Amateurism in Science" , "Letters on the Study of Nature", political feuilletons "Moscow and Petersburg" and other works. Here Herzen, who headed the left wing of the Westerners, was visited by history professor Timofey Granovsky, critic Pavel Annenkov, artists Mikhail Shchepkin, Prov Sadovsky, memoirist Vasily Botkin, journalist Yevgeny Korsh, critic Vissarion Belinsky, poet Nikolai Nekrasov, writer Ivan Turgenev, forming the Moscow epicenter of the Slavophile controversy and Westerners. Herzen visited the Moscow literary salons of Avdotya Elagina, Karolina Pavlova, Dmitry Sverbeev, Pyotr Chaadaev.
In May 1846, Herzen's father died, and the writer became the heir to a significant fortune, which provided the means to travel abroad. In 1847, Herzen left Russia and began his long journey through Europe. Observing the life of Western countries, he interspersed personal impressions with historical and philosophical studies, of which the most famous are "Letters from France and Italy" (1847-1852), "From the Other Shore" (1847-1850). After the defeat of the European revolutions (1848-1849), Herzen became disillusioned with the revolutionary possibilities of the West and developed the theory of "Russian socialism", becoming one of the founders of populism.
In 1852 Alexander Herzen settled in London. By this time, he was perceived as the first figure of the Russian emigration. In 1853 he Together with Ogarev, he published revolutionary publications - the almanac "Polar Star" (1855-1868) and the newspaper "The Bell" (1857-1867). The motto of the newspaper was the beginning of the epigraph to the "Bell" by the German poet Schiller "Vivos voso!" (I call the living!). The Bells program at the first stage contained democratic demands: the liberation of peasants from serfdom, the abolition of censorship, and corporal punishment. It was based on the theory of Russian peasant socialism developed by Alexander Herzen. In addition to articles by Herzen and Ogarev, Kolokol published a variety of materials about the state of the people, the social struggle in Russia, information about abuses and secret plans of the authorities. The newspapers Pod sud' (1859-1862) and Obshchee veche (1862-1864) were published as supplements to Kolokol. Sheets of Kolokol printed on thin paper were illegally transported to Russia across the border. At first, Kolokol's employees included writer Ivan Turgenev and Decembrist Nikolai Turgenev, historian and publicist Konstantin Kavelin, publicist and poet Ivan Aksakov, philosopher Yuri Samarin, Alexander Koshelev, writer Vasily Botkin and others. After the reform of 1861, articles appeared in the newspaper sharply condemning the reform, texts of proclamations. Contact with the editors of Kolokol contributed to the formation of the revolutionary organization Land and Freedom in Russia. In order to strengthen ties with the "young emigration" concentrated in Switzerland, the publication of The Bells was transferred to Geneva in 1865, and in 1867 it practically ceased to exist.
In the 1850s, Herzen began to write the main work of his life, Past and Thoughts (1852-1868), a synthesis of memoirs, journalism, literary portraits, autobiographical novels, historical chronicles, and short stories. The author himself called this book a confession, "about which stopped thoughts from thoughts gathered here and there."
In 1865 Herzen left England and went on a long journey through Europe. At this time, he distanced himself from the revolutionaries, especially from the Russian radicals.
In the autumn of 1869 he settled in Paris with new plans for literary and publishing activities. Alexander Herzen died in Paris on January 21 (9 old style) January 1870. He was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery, and his ashes were later transferred to Nice.
Herzen was married to his cousin Natalya Zakharyina, the illegitimate daughter of his uncle, Alexander Yakovlev, whom he married in May 1838, taking him secretly from Moscow. The couple had many children, but three survived - the eldest son Alexander, who became a professor of physiology, daughters Natalya and Olga.
The grandson of Alexander Herzen, Pyotr Herzen, was a famous surgeon, founder of the Moscow School of Oncology, director of the Moscow Institute for the Treatment of Tumors, which currently bears his name (P.A. Herzen Moscow Research Oncological Institute).
After the death of Natalya Zakharyina in 1852, Alexander Herzen was married in a civil marriage from 1857 to Natalya Tuchkova-Ogaryova, the official wife of Nikolai Ogaryov. The relationship had to be kept secret from the family. The children of Tuchkova and Herzen - Liza, who committed suicide at the age of 17, the twins Elena and Alexei, who died at a young age, were considered the children of Ogarev.
Tuchkova-Ogaryova led the proofreading of The Bell, and after Herzen's death she was engaged in publishing his works abroad. From the end of the 1870s she wrote "Memoirs" (came out as a separate edition in 1903).
The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources.
Russian revolutionary, writer and publicist. The founder of the Russian political emigration, the publisher of the first domestic revolutionary newspaper "The Bell" (1857-1867).
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was the illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner Ivan Alekseevich Yakovlev (1767-1846). He received an artificial surname invented by his father (from the German Herz - heart). He was brought up in the house of I. A. Yakovlev, received a good education.
The event that determined the entire future fate of A. I. Herzen was the Decembrist uprising (1825) and the subsequent execution of five of its leaders (1826). They forever remained for him patriotic heroes who sacrificed themselves in order to wake up a new generation of revolutionaries. In his youth, A. I. Herzen swore to avenge the executed and continue their work.
In 1829-1833 A. I. Herzen was a student of the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University. At this time, a friendly circle of freethinking youth formed around him and his friend N.P. Ogarev, in which "they preached hatred for any violence, for any governmental arbitrariness." In 1834 A. I. Herzen and some members of the circle were arrested on a false charge of singing anti-monarchist songs, but in fact for freethinking.
In April 1835, A. I. Herzen was exiled to, from there to, where he served in the provincial office. During a visit by Tsarevich Alexander Nikolaevich (the future Emperor Alexander II) in 1837, he was responsible for organizing an exhibition of local works, and gave explanations to the heir to the throne during its inspection. At the end of 1837, at the request of A. I. Herzen, he was transferred to the service of an adviser to the provincial government in.
At the beginning of 1840, A. I. Herzen returned to, and in May of the same year he moved to, where, at the insistence of his father, he entered the service in the office of the Ministry of the Interior. In July 1841, for a sharp review of the police in a letter to his father, A. I. Herzen was sent to, where he served in the provincial government.
Returning from exile in July 1842, A. I. Herzen retired and settled in. He took an active part in the struggle between the main directions of social thought - the Slavophiles and Westernizers, sharing the positions of the latter. The brilliant abilities of a polemicist, erudition, talent as a thinker and artist gave A. I. Herzen the opportunity to become one of the key figures in Russian public life.
Since 1836, A. I. Herzen began his journalistic activity, published his works under the pseudonym Iskander. In the 1840s, he published a number of philosophical works: a series of articles "Amateurism in Science" (1842-1843), "Letters on the Study of Nature" (1844-1845), etc., in which he asserted the union of philosophy with the natural sciences. Considering literature as a reflection of public life and an effective means of combating autocratic reality, A. I. Herzen spoke with a number of fiction works imbued with anti-serfdom pathos: “Doctor Krupov” (1847), “The Thieving Magpie” (1848), etc. Roman A I. Herzen "Who is to blame?" (1841-1846) became one of the first Russian socio-psychological novels.
In 1847, A. I. Herzen went abroad with his family. Having witnessed the defeat of the European revolutions of 1848-1849, he became disillusioned with the revolutionary possibilities of the West and developed the theory of "Russian socialism", becoming one of the founders of populism.
In 1849, in Geneva (Switzerland), he participated in the publication of P. J. Proudhon's newspaper The Voice of the People. In 1850, A. I. Herzen settled in Nice, where he became close to the leaders of the Italian national liberation movement. In the same year, he refused the government's demand
