The illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner Ivan Alekseevich Yakovlev and a German woman, Louise Ivanovna Gaag. At birth, the father gave the child the surname Herzen (from the German word herz - heart).
He received a good education at home. From his youth, he was distinguished by his erudition, freedom and breadth of views. The December events of 1825 had a great influence on Herzen's worldview. Soon he met his distant paternal relative Nikolai Platonovich Ogarev and became his close friend. In 1828, being like-minded and close friends, they took an oath of eternal friendship on Sparrow Hills in Moscow and showed their determination to devote their whole lives to the struggle for freedom and justice.
Herzen was educated at Moscow University, where he met with a number of progressive-minded students who formed a circle in which a wide range of issues related to science, literature, philosophy and politics were discussed. After graduating from the university in 1833 with a PhD and a silver medal, he became interested in the teachings of the Saint-Simonists and began to study the works of the socialist writers of the West.
A year later, A.I. Herzen, N.P. Ogarev and their other associates were arrested for freethinking. After spending several months in prison, Herzen was exiled to Perm, and then to Vyatka, to the office of the local governor, where he became an employee of the Gubernskiye Vedomosti newspaper. There he became close to the exiled architect A.I. Witberg. Then Herzen was transferred to Vladimir. For some time he was allowed to live in St. Petersburg, but soon he was again exiled, this time to Novgorod.
Since 1838 he has been married to his distant relative Natalya Aleksandrovna Zakharyina. Parents did not want to give Natalya to the disgraced Herzen, then he kidnapped his bride, married her in Vladimir, where he was in exile at that time, and confronted his parents with a fait accompli. All contemporaries noted the extraordinary affection and love of the Herzen spouses. Alexander Ivanovich more than once turned in his works to the image of Natalya Alexandrovna. In marriage, he had three children: a son, Alexander, a professor of physiology; daughters Olga and Natalia. The last joint years of the life of the spouses were overshadowed by the sad passion of Natalya Alexandrovna for the German Georg Gerweg. This ugly story, which made all its participants suffer, ended with the death of Natalya Alexandrovna from childbirth. The illegitimate child died with his mother.
In 1842, Herzen received permission to move to Moscow, where he lived until 1847, engaging in literary activities. In Moscow, Herzen wrote the novel "Who is to blame?" and a number of stories and articles concerning social and philosophical problems.
In 1847, Alexander Ivanovich left for Europe, living alternately in France, then in Italy, then in Switzerland and working in various newspapers. Disillusioned with the revolutionary movement in Europe, he looked for a different path from the West for the development of Russia.
After the death of his wife in Nice, A.I. Herzen moved to London, where he organized the publication of a free Russian press: the Polar Star and the Bells. Speaking with a freedom-loving and anti-serfdom program for Russia, Herzen's Bell attracted the attention and sympathy of the progressive part of Russian society. It was published until 1867 and was very popular among the Russian intelligentsia.
Herzen died in Paris and was buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, then his ashes were transferred to Nice.
Born March 25, 1812 in Moscow. Father - I. A. Yakovlev, belonged to a noble noble family. Mother - G. - L. Haag, daughter of a petty official from Stuttgart. The marriage of the parents was not registered and the child received a fictitious surname, Herzen was considered officially a pupil of Yakovlev. At the age of 14, Herzen makes a choice for life, vowing to avenge the executed Decembrists.
In 1829, Alexander Ivanovich entered the Moscow University in the Department of Physics and Mathematics, at the same time he collaborated in the Moscow Society of Natural Investigators.
In June 1833, Herzen graduated from the university with a candidate's degree, received a silver medal for his essay "Analytical presentation of the solar system of Copernicus" (a work half astronomical, half philosophical). After university, Alexander Ivanovich is interested in circles with the ideas of utopian socialism (Saint-Simon, Fourier). In the summer of 1834 Herzen and the members of the circle were arrested. After serving nine months in prison, in the spring of 1835 Herzen was exiled to Perm, and then to Vyatka. Herzen is depressed by both police supervision and forced service. Moral support is provided to him by Ogarev and correspondence with the bride of Alexander Ivanovich N. A. Zakharyina. Only at the end of 1837, at the request of Zhukovsky and Arseniev, Herzen was transferred to Vladimir. May 9, 1839 in Vladimir Herzen married Zakharyina.
The Vladimir period (1838 - 1840) Herzen considers the happiest in his personal life, the first-born son Alexander appeared here.
In the spring of 1840, Herzen was appointed to serve (actually a new link) in Novgorod. Life in Novgorod was difficult for the writer, he was burdened by a servitude and was outraged by the attitude of the authorities towards him.
In 1842, Herzen returned to Moscow, fell into the familiar atmosphere of an active social life, studied philosophy, literature, his articles were published in the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski.
In 1845, Herzen finished and published the novel "Who is to blame?", which brought him fame, and a year later, the novels "The Thieving Magpie" and "Doctor Krupov" were published.
At the beginning of 1847, Alexander Ivanovich went abroad with his family, not assuming that he was no longer destined to return to his homeland.
Belinsky lives in Rome, participates in revolutionary demonstrations and rallies, tries to be at the center of socio-political and literary life.
In 1847 Herzen goes to Paris. Soon, Alexander Ivanovich suffers a personal drama: his wife cheats on him, who soon dies along with his youngest son. Herzen takes all these events hard, and an attempt to get out of the crisis is writing his memoirs "The Past and Thoughts", on which the writer worked for sixteen years.
In 1852, Herzen moved to London, he writes a lot, develops the theory of Russian socialism.
In 1853, Herzen organized an independent Russian printing house in London, and in 1855 he began to publish the almanac "Polar Star". In his publications, Alexander Ivanovich publishes the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Radishchev, Ryleev and other poets and writers who, for reasons of censorship, could not be published in Russia.
In 1857, Herzen began publishing the newspaper Kolokol, which called for a revolutionary struggle for the liberation of the peasants. The newspaper was secretly distributed in Russia.
Many revolutionary democrats of Russia did not agree with the policy of Herzen's newspaper, who believed that in the "Bell" it was necessary to openly call for the overthrow of the autocracy, and Herzen called for reforms and the solution of the peasant question by peaceful means, believing that Alexander II the peasant question could solve painlessly for the country, without revolutionary upheavals.
In 1865, Herzen's printing house was transferred to Geneva, two years later the publication of The Bells ceased. Herzen's views on life change somewhat, he develops the theory of free socialism, warning Russian revolutionaries against "barracks socialism", forced equality and bloodshed.
In 1869, Herzen settled in Paris, but he had only three months to live. Herzen died on January 21, 1870, his ashes were transferred to Nice, where his wife's grave was.
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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 Henriette-Wilhelmina-Louise Haag, daughter of a petty official, clerk in the state chamber in Stuttgart. The marriage of the parents 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 was opened in the Moscow house where he lived from 1843 to 1847.
In his youth, Herzen received the usual noble upbringing at home, based on reading works of foreign literature, mainly of the late 18th century. French novels, comedies by Beaumarchais, Kotzebue, works by Goethe, Schiller from an early age set the boy in an enthusiastic, sentimental-romantic tone. There were no systematic classes, but the tutors - the 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. , a participant in the French Revolution, who left France when "lecherous and rogues" took over. This was joined by the influence of the young “Korchevskaya 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 Ogaryov. According to his memoirs, the news of the Decembrist uprising made a strong impression on the boys (Herzen was 13, Ogaryov was 12 years old). Under his impression, they have the first, still vague dreams of revolutionary activity; while walking on 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 Posa.
University
Herzen dreamed of friendship, dreamed of struggle and suffering for freedom. In this mood, Herzen entered the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University, and here this mood intensified even more. At the university, Herzen took part in the so-called "Malov story", but got off relatively lightly - by imprisonment, along with many comrades, in a punishment cell. University teaching was bad then and brought little benefit; only Kachenovsky, with his skepticism, and Pavlov, who managed to acquaint listeners with German philosophy at lectures on agriculture, awakened young thought. The youth was set, however, rather violently; 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). By this time, Herzen's meeting with Vadim Passek, which later turned into friendship, the establishment of friendly relations with Ketcher, etc., dates back. The bunch of young friends grew, made noise, seethed; at times she allowed small revels, of a completely innocent, however, character; diligently engaged in reading, carried away primarily by public issues, studying Russian history, assimilation of 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 appointed to serve in the office of the governor. For the organization of the exhibition of local works and the explanations given during its inspection to the heir (the future Alexander II), Herzen, at the request of Zhukovsky, was transferred to serve as an adviser to the board in Vladimir, where he married, secretly taking 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 last limits, the understanding of Hegel's philosophy was one-sided; with purely Russian straightforwardness, the arguing parties did not stop at any extreme conclusion (Belinsky's Borodino Anniversary). Herzen also set to work on Hegel, but from a thorough study of him he brought out results completely opposite to those made by the supporters of the idea of reasonable reality. Meanwhile, in Russian society, along with the ideas of German philosophy, the socialist ideas of Proudhon, Cabet, Fourier, and Louis Blanc were widely spread; they had an influence on the grouping of literary circles of that time. Most of Stankevich's friends approached Herzen and Ogarev, forming the Westerners' camp; others joined the camp of the Slavophiles, with Khomyakov and Kireevsky at the 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 love for the Russian people, for the Russian mindset, embracing the whole existence." Opponents, "like a two-faced Janus, looked in different directions, while the heart beat one." “With tears in their eyes”, embracing each other, the recent friends, and now the principal opponents, went in different directions.
In 1842, Herzen, after serving a year in Novgorod, where he did not come of his own free will, receives a resignation, moves to live in Moscow, and then, shortly after the death of his father, leaves forever abroad (1847).
In exile
Herzen arrived in Europe more radically republican than socialist, although his publication in Otechestvennye Zapiski of a series of articles entitled Letters from Avenue Marigny (subsequently 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 realization of all his hopes. The subsequent June uprising of the workers, its bloody suppression and the ensuing reaction shocked Herzen, who resolutely 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 "Voice of the People" ("La Voix du Peuple"), which he financed. The sad passion of his wife for the German poet Herweg belongs 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 naturalized; from Switzerland, he moved to Nice, which then belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia. During this period, Herzen rotates among the circles of radical European emigration, who gathered in Switzerland after the defeat of the revolution in Europe, and in particular met Garibaldi. Fame brought him an essay book "From the Other Shore", in which he made a calculation with his past liberal convictions. Under the influence of the collapse of the old ideals and the reaction that came throughout Europe, Herzen formed a specific system of views about the doom, "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 leaves for London, where he lives for about 10 years, having founded the Free Russian Printing House for printing prohibited publications, and since 1857 he has published 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 publicity with Nesselrode, who then held the post of Minister of Finance in Russia, achieved the lifting of the imperial ban.
The peak of Kolokol's influence falls on the years preceding the emancipation of the peasants; then the newspaper was regularly read in the Winter Palace. After the peasant reform, her influence begins to decline; support for the Polish uprising of 1863 dramatically undermined circulation. At that time, for the liberal public, Herzen was already too revolutionary, for the radical - too moderate. On March 15, 1865, under the insistent demand of the Russian government to the government of Her Majesty, the editors of the Bell, headed by Herzen, leave England forever and move to Switzerland, of which Herzen is 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 also began to move to Switzerland, for example, in 1865 Nikolai Ogaryov moved there.
On January 9 (21), 1870, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen died of pneumonia in Paris, where he had arrived shortly before on his family business.
Literary and journalistic activity
Herzen's literary activity began in the 1830s. In the "Atheneum" for 1830 (II vol.), his name is found under one translation from the French. The first article, signed by the pseudonym Iskander, print. in "Telescope" for 1836 ("Hoffmann"). The “Speech given at the opening of the Vyatka public library” and “Diary” (1842) belong to the same time. In Vladimir it is written: “Zap. one young man” and “More from the Notes of a Young Man” (“Departmental Record”, 1840-41; in this story, Chaadaev is depicted in the person of Trenzinsky). From 1842 to 1847 he places in "From. 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: "On One Drama", "On Different Occasions", "New Variations on Old Themes", "A Few Remarks on the Historical Development of Honor", "From Dr. Krupov's Notes", "Who is to Blame?", "Forty -vorovka”, “Moscow and 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 following stand out especially: the story "The Thieving Magpie", which depicts the terrible situation of the "serf intelligentsia", and the novel "Who is to blame", dedicated to the question of freedom of feeling, 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 public and universal, cannot ensure lasting happiness for themselves, and it will always depend on chance in their life.
Of the works written by Herzen abroad, the letters from Avenue Marigny (the first published in Sovremennik, all fourteen under the general title Letters from France and Italy, ed. 1855) are especially important, representing a remarkable characterization and analysis events and moods that worried Europe in 1847-1852. Here we meet 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 Bank" (originally in German "Vom andern Ufer" Gamb., 1850; in Russian, London, 1855; in French, Geneva, 1870 ), in which Herzen expresses his complete disillusionment with the West and Western civilization - the result of that mental upheaval that ended and determined Herzen's mental development in 1848-1851. It should also be noted the letter to Michelet: "The Russian people and socialism" - a passionate and ardent defense of the Russian people against those 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 giving a whole series of highly artistic paintings, dazzlingly brilliant characteristics, and Herzen’s observations from what he experienced and saw in Russia and abroad.
All other works and articles by Herzen, such as, for example, "The Old World and Russia", "Le peuple Russe et le socialisme", "Ends and Beginnings", etc., represent a simple development of ideas and moods that were completely determined in the period 1847-1852 years in the works mentioned above.
Philosophical views of Herzen during the years of emigration
There are rather erroneous views about the nature of Herzen's social activity and about 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. First of all, he was a man widely and versatilely educated, with an inquisitive and contemplative mind, passionately seeking truth. The attraction to freedom of thought, "free-thinking", in the best sense of the word, was especially strongly developed in Herzen. He did not understand fanatical intolerance and exclusiveness, and he himself never belonged to any one, either open or secret party. The one-sidedness of the "people of action" repelled him from many revolutionary and radical figures in Europe. His subtle and penetrating mind quickly comprehended the imperfections and shortcomings of those forms of Western life, to which Herzen was initially attracted from his unbeautiful distant Russian reality of the 1840s. With astonishing consistency, Herzen gave up his enthusiasm for the West when in his eyes it turned out to be below the ideal he had previously drawn up. This mental independence and open-mindedness of Herzen, the ability to question and test the most cherished aspirations, even such an opponent of the general nature of Herzen’s activity as N. N. Strakhov, calls a phenomenon in many respects wonderful and useful, since “real freedom is not for nothing considered one of necessary conditions for right thinking. As a consistent Hegelian, Herzen believed that the development of mankind proceeds in stages, and each stage is embodied in a certain people. Such a people, according to Hegel, were the Prussians. Herzen, who laughed at the fact that the Hegelian god lives in Berlin, in essence transferred this god to Moscow, sharing with the Slavophils the belief in the coming change of the German period by the Slavic one. At the same time, as a follower of Saint-Simon and Fourier, he combined this faith in the Slavic phase of progress with the doctrine of the forthcoming replacement of the rule of the bourgeoisie by 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 away and new life cannot be poured into its dilapidated forms. Faith in the community and the Russian people saved Herzen from a hopeless view of the fate of mankind. However, Herzen did not deny the possibility that Russia, too, would pass through the stage of bourgeois development. Defending the Russian future, Herzen argued that in Russian life there is a lot of ugliness, but on the other hand there is no vulgarity that has become rigid in its forms. The Russian tribe is a fresh, virginal tribe that has "aspirations for the future century," an immeasurable and inexhaustible 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. With 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 Western views. So, he was rather indifferent to different forms of government.
Social activities in exile
The influence of Herzen in his time was enormous. The significance of Herzen's activity in the peasant question has been fully elucidated and established (V. I. Semevsky, Prof. Ivanyukov, Senate Semyonov, and others). Disastrous for Herzen's popularity was his passion for the Polish uprising. Herzen, not without hesitation, took the side of the Poles, treating their delegates somewhat suspiciously for quite a long time (See soc., pp. 213-215); finally he yielded, only thanks to persistent pressure from Bakunin. As a result, Kolokol lost its subscribers (instead of 3,000, no more than 500 remained).
Herzen died on January 9 (21), 1870 in Paris. He was buried in Nice (the ashes were transferred from the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris).
Biography
"Herzen did not emigrate, did not lay the foundation for Russian emigration; no, he was just 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 fights 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 disillusionment with the political system of Western Europe. In 1851, the Senate decided to deprive him of all the rights of the state and consider him an eternal exile. Since 1857, Herzen published in London the famous collection "Polar Star" and the magazine "The Bell", where he demanded - the release of the peasants, the abolition of censorship, a public trial and other reforms. Herzen's works had a huge impact on the education of the younger generation of 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. In 1834 he was arrested and spent 6 years in exile. Published from 1836 under the pseudonym Iskander. Since 1842 in Moscow, the head of the left wing of the Westerners. In the philosophical works "Amateurism in Science" (1843), "Letters on the Study of Nature" (1845-46), etc., he affirmed the union of philosophy with the natural sciences. He sharply criticized the feudal system in the novel "Who is to blame?" (1841-46), the stories "Doctor Krupov" (1847) and "The Thieving Magpie" (1848). From 1847 in exile. After the defeat of the European revolutions of 1848-49, 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 1853 he founded the Free Russian Printing House in London. In the newspaper "Kolokol" he denounced the Russian autocracy, conducted revolutionary propaganda, demanded the release of the peasants from the 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 "Past and Thoughts" (1852-68) is one of the masterpieces of memoir literature.
GERTSEN 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 Louise Haag from Stuttgart. The boy received the fictitious surname Herzen (from the German word for "heart"). He was brought up in the house of Yakovlev, received a good education, got acquainted with the works of the French enlighteners, read the forbidden poems of Pushkin, Ryleev. Herzen was deeply influenced by friendship with a talented peer, the future poet N. Ogarev, which lasted all their lives.
The event that determined the entire future fate of Herzen was the uprising of the Decembrists, who forever became patriotic heroes for him, who went "consciously to obvious death in order to awaken the younger generation to a new life." He vowed to avenge the executed and continue the work of the Decembrists. In the summer of 1828, he and his friend Ogarev on Sparrow Hills, in front of all of Moscow, swore an oath 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.
Youthful love of freedom was strengthened during the years of study at Moscow University, where he entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics in 1829, graduating with a Ph. The ideas of freedom, equality, fraternity, enlightenment, the ideas of equality, including women's rights, occupied Herzen's attention. In the eyes of the authorities, Herzen was known as a bold 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 bride N. Zakharyina, whom he married while serving a link in Vladimir. These years (1838 - 40) were happy and his personal life. A peculiar artistic result 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 sharp review in a letter to his father about the tsarist police) was sent into exile in Novgorod, from where he returned in 1842. 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 back in Novgorod, was completed. In 1846, the novels "The Thieving Magpie" and "Doctor Krupov" were written. In January 1847 he went abroad with his family, not assuming that he was leaving Russia forever.
In the autumn of 1847 in Rome, he participates in popular processions, demonstrations, visits revolutionary clubs, gets acquainted with prominent figures of the Italian national liberation movement. In May 1848 he returned to revolutionary Paris. Later on these events he will write the book "Letters from France and Italy" (1847 - 52). In the June days of 1848, he witnessed the defeat of the revolution in France and rampant reaction, which led him to an ideological crisis, expressed in the book "From the Other Shore" (1847 - 50). In the autumn of 1851, he experienced a personal tragedy: his mother and son died during a shipwreck. In May 1852 his wife died. "Everything has 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 confessions, a book of memoirs 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 were preparing and in March 1854 concluded a military alliance together with Turkey against Russia, and in September 1854 they landed a military landing in the Crimea. Thus, the opportunity Herzen received to conduct propaganda work from London was not random - ed.) In 1855 he began to publish the almanac "Polar Star", in the summer of 1857, together with Ogarev, he began to publish the newspaper "The Bell". It was a platform from which he could address the people with a free word. Herzen announced that the "Bell" would ring about everything, no matter what was affected: an absurd decree, theft of dignitaries, or the ignorance of the Senate. Sheets of Kolokol 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 Bells 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 a revolutionary theory. In the spring of 1869 he decided to settle in Paris. Here on January 9 (21 n.s.) 1870 Hertz died. He was buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery. Later, his ashes were taken to Nice and buried next to the grave of his wife.
Used materials of the book: Russian writers and poets. Brief biographical dictionary. Moscow, 2000.
GERTSEN Alexander Ivanovich (1812, Moscow - 1870, Paris) - rev. activist, writer, philosopher. The illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner I.A. Yakovlev and Henrietta Louise Haag, who came to Russia from Stuttgart. Herzen wore a surname invented by his father, hinting at the cordial affection of his parents (Herz - heart), and he was very worried about his "false position". Herzen's first home teachers were Republican-French 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 the student. The uprising of the Decembrists ("Tales of indignation, of the trial, horror in Moscow struck me strongly"), the subsequent execution of five of them, reading F. Schiller, Plutarch, J.J. Rousseau had a strong influence on the worldview of Herzen. He and his friend Ya. P. Ogarev swore to avenge the death of the Decembrists. In 1829 - 1833 Herzen was a student of the Physics and Mathematics Department of the Moscow. university At this time, a friendly circle of free-thinking youth formed around him, in which "they preached hatred for any violence, for any governmental arbitrariness." A 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 members of the circle were arrested on false charges of singing anti-monarchist songs, but in reality for freethinking. In 1835 Herzen was exiled to Perm, and then to Vyatka, where he served in the provincial office. There he wrote the first published work - the essay "Hoffmann", which he signed with the subsequently famous pseudonym Iskander. In 1837, Herzen received permission to move to Vladimir, in 1841 he was once 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 kind of monastic order of the Asiatic Church, always kneeling before secular power.” In the 40s. Herzen wrote the novel "Who is to blame?" and the novels "The Magpie-Thief" 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: 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 person. In 1847 he went abroad, where he witnessed the defeat of the roar. 1848 - 1849 ("I have never suffered like this before"). the world of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois morality, with its reverence for money and order, Herzen was imbued with socialist convictions, but pointed out the weakness of his contemporary socialist teachings. In 1850, Herzen refused to return to Russia at the request of Nicholas 1, for which he was deprived of all rights of state and declared an "eternal exile." From 1852 Herzen began to live in London, where in 1853 he created the Free Russian Printing House, which oby publish uncensored works for Russia: "Polar Star", "Voices from Russia", "The Bell", "Notes of the Decembrists" and many others, which played a huge role in the formation of Russian. public thought and roar. movement. 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 fell on her way" - a chronicle of the public and the roar. the 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 in Russia. A thinker-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 European states have passed or are passing through. Freedom is impossible without the development of people's consciousness: "People cannot be liberated in the external life more than they are liberated inside." In the last years of his life, Herzen lived in many European cities. He was buried in the Pere 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 is Moscow. oncological in-t. Huge Lit. Herzen's legacy even today attracts readers and researchers with artistic talent, depth of thought directed to the future.
Used materials of the book: Shikman A.P. Figures of national history. Biographical guide. Moscow, 1997
Biography
The main pseudonym is 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 Gaag. The marriage of the parents was not formalized, so an illegitimate child was considered a pupil of his father. 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 house 25, which houses the Gorky Literary Institute). Although from childhood Herzen was not deprived of attention, the position of an illegitimate child evoked in 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, the hall and the girl's. Childhood impressions of the life of serfs, according to Herzen, aroused in him "an insurmountable hatred for any slavery and for any arbitrariness."
Oral memoirs of living witnesses of the war with Napoleon, freedom-loving poems by Pushkin and Ryleev, works by 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 the executed."
In 1829 Herzen entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University, where he soon formed a group of progressive-minded students. The members of this group, Ogarev, N.Kh. By this time, he was fascinated by the ideas of Saint-Simonism and attempts to present his own vision of the social order. Already in the 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. Hoffmann's essay (1833–1834, published 1836) showed a typical manner of writing: an introduction to journalistic reasoning with a vivid figurative language, confirmation of 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 structure. The service left the young man enough free time to engage in creativity. Herzen conceived the idea of publishing a magazine, but in July 1834 he was arrested - for allegedly singing songs in the company of friends discrediting the royal family. During interrogations, the Investigative Commission, without proving the direct guilt of Herzen, nevertheless considered that his convictions posed a danger to the state.
In April 1835, with the obligation to be in the public service under the supervision of the 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 Vyatka was visited by the heir to the throne, 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 went to Moscow to see his bride, and in May they got married. From 1839 to 1850, four children were born in the Herzen family.
In July 1839, police supervision was removed from Herzen, he got 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 which he wrote about the "murder" of the St. Petersburg guard. The enraged Nicholas I ordered Herzen to be sent "for spreading unfounded rumors" to Novgorod without the right to enter the capitals. Only in July 1842, having retired with the rank of court adviser, after the petition of his 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 Dilettantism in Science (1843).
After several unsuccessful attempts to turn to fiction, Herzen wrote the novel Who is to blame? (1847), the novels Doctor Krupov (1847) and the Magpie-Thief (1848), in which he considered the denunciation of Russian slavery to be his main goal. In the critics' reviews of these works, a general trend was traced, 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 left Russia with his family and began his long journey through Europe. Observing the life of Western countries, he interspersed personal impressions with historical and philosophical studies (Letters from France and Italy, 1847-1852; From the other side, 1847-1850, etc.).
In 1850–1852, a series of personal dramas by Herzen took place: the betrayal of his wife, the death of his mother and youngest son in a shipwreck, the death of his wife 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 "The Bell" (1857-1867), whose influence on the revolutionary movement in Russia was enormous. Despite the many articles published by the writer in the "Polar Star" and "The Bell" and published in separate editions, his main creation of the emigrant years is the Past and Thoughts (published 1855-1919).
The past and thoughts on the 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 gathered here and there." The first five parts describe Herzen's life from childhood to the events of 1850-1852, when the author suffered severe spiritual 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 subject matter, reflect the life and thoughts of the author in the 1860s.
Initially, Herzen intended to write about the tragic events of his personal life. But “everything old, half-forgotten, was resurrected,” and the architecture of the concept 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 older children). At this time, Herzen moved away 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 the outer life more than they are liberated inside." These words are perceived as Herzen's spiritual testament.
Like most Russian Westernizers-radicals, Herzen went through a period of deep passion for Hegelianism in his spiritual development. Hegel's influence is clearly seen in the series of articles Dilettantism in Science (1842-1843). Their pathos lies in the approval and interpretation of Hegelian dialectics as a tool for cognition and revolutionary transformation of the world (“the algebra of revolution”). Herzen severely condemned abstract idealism in philosophy and science for being isolated from real life, for "apriorism" and "spiritualism." The future development of mankind, 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 the main philosophical work of Herzen - Letters on the Study of Nature (1845-1846). Continuing the criticism of philosophical idealism, Herzen defined nature as a "pedigree of thinking", and saw in the idea of pure being only an illusion. For a materialistic thinker, nature is an eternally living, "wandering substance", primary in relation to the dialectic of knowledge. In the Letters, Herzen, quite in the spirit of Hegelianism, substantiated consistent historiocentrism: “neither humanity nor nature can be understood without historical being,” and in understanding the meaning of history he adhered to the principles of historical determinism. However, in the reflections of the late Herzen, the former progressivism gives way to much more pessimistic and critical assessments.
First of all, this refers to his analysis of the process of formation in society of a new type of mass consciousness, exclusively consumer, based on completely materialistic individualism (egoism). Such a process, according to Herzen, leads to a 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, according to Herzen, 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, which he wrote about in an 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 Thoughts (1968). Translation by V. Sapov is based on the publication: Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind. An Anthology of Essays. Ed. by H. 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 orator: 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 Ackerman ** were near 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 a pejorative connotation peculiar to it in Russian. I. Berlin refers to the number of "amateurs" all non-professional philosophers in general 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 Jahanbegloо, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, New York, 1991, p. 28-29). Notes marked with an asterisk and additions to the author's notes enclosed in square brackets are by the translator.
** James Boswell - 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 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 heightened emotionality and exaggeration, characteristic of a born storyteller, unable to resist long digressions that automatically carry him into the maelstrom of colliding currents. memories and reflections, but always returning to the mainstream of his story or argument. But above all, his prose has a liveliness of colloquial speech - it seems that it owes nothing to either the impeccable form of the maxims of the French philosophical systems that he admired, or 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 lively voice is heard almost equally.
Being a comprehensively educated person, endowed with a rich imagination and self-criticism, Herzen was an unusually gifted social observer; the description of what he happened to see is unique even for the eloquent 19th century. He possessed 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 his works, all these qualities combined and strengthened each other. He was an extremely subtle and sensitive man, possessing great intellectual energy and caustic wit, an easily wounded self-esteem and polemical enthusiasm; he was prone to analysis, research and exposure, considering himself a "tearer of masks" from masks and conventions and playing out of himself a merciless exposer of their social and moral essence.
Leo Tolstoy, who did not share the views of Herzen and was not prone to excessive praise of 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 anyone " such a rare combination of depth and brilliance of thoughts. These merits make most of Herzen's essays, political and journalistic articles, occasional 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 have mostly receded into the past and are of interest mainly to historians.
Although a lot 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 - "Past and Thoughts", a work worthy of being on a par with the novels of his compatriots and contemporaries - Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky. Yes, and they, in general, were not mistaken in this regard. Turgenev, an old and close friend of Herzen (the conflicts of their personal relationships played a big role in the lives of both, this intricate 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 the outstanding literary talent of Herzen, when both of them were still young and relatively little known. Even the angry and suspicious Dostoevsky, who did not deprive Herzen of the vicious hatred with which he treated pro-Western Russian revolutionaries, recognized the poetic nature of his work and, until Herzen's death, treated him with sympathy. As for Tolstoy, he admired both 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 instillation that the reading of his prose delivers, most of which has not yet been translated, this is an unfortunate and irreparable loss.
* Jules Michelet (1798-1874) - French romantic historian and politician; Giuseppe Mazzini (Mazzini; 1805-1872) - Italian leader of 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 after the Battle of Borodino. His father, Ivan Aleksandrovich Yakovlev, came from an ancient noble family, who was distantly related to the Romanov dynasty. Like other representatives of the rich and well-born Russian nobility, he spent several years abroad and during one of his travels he met the daughter of a petty official from Württemberg, Louise Haag, a meek, submissive, unremarkable girl, much younger than he, whom he brought with him to Moscow. For some reason, perhaps because of the inequality of their social positions, he never married her according to church rites. Yakovlev belonged to the Orthodox Church; she remained a Lutheran.
Proud, independent, despising all people, he eventually turned into a gloomy misanthrope. Even before the war of 1812, he retired and during the French invasion in gloomy and capricious idleness lived in his house in Moscow. Here, during the occupation, he was recognized by Marshal Mortier, whom they 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 reckless act, he was sent back to his estates, from where he was allowed to return to Moscow only after some time. Here, in a large and gloomy house on the 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 acquired the status of a full wife, but the boy was given every attention. He received the usual education of a young Russian nobleman for those times, 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 quickly and easily. 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 early 1820s. Herzen's father was a broken and gloomy man, unable to communicate either with his family or, of course, with anyone else. Perceptive, honest, not at all heartless and not devoid of a sense of justice - a "heavy" person, like the old Prince Bolkonsky from Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace", Ivan Yakovlev appears from his son's memoirs as a gloomy, unsociable, half-frozen person, prone to " self-criticism" and terrorized the household with his whims and ridicule. He kept all the doors and windows locked, the curtains drawn at all times, and apart from a few old friends and siblings, he had virtually no contact with anyone. Subsequently, his son described him as the product of "the meeting of two things as far as opposite as the eighteenth century and Russian life" - the product of the 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 gladly fled from the oppressive and frightening intercourse with his father to 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, demolishing her almost Eastern position in the house with uncomplaining humility. As for the servants, who were serfs from the Yakovlevsky estates, they were accustomed to behave obsequiously towards the son and probable heir of their master. Herzen himself, in later years, attributed his deepest social feeling - the desire for freedom and dignity of the human person (so aptly defined by his friend, the critic Belinsky) - to the barbaric conditions that surrounded him in childhood. He was a beloved, very spoiled child, but from gossip 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: it may have become 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. French (and his father wrote in French more freely than in Russian), German (he spoke German with his mother) and European history Herzen knew better than Russian - his home teacher was one French emigrant who came to Russia after the French Revolution.
The Frenchman, according to Herzen, 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 the fatherland." Noticing the boy's sympathy for his ideas, he threw aside his reserve and spoke frankly with him about the freedom and equality of people.
Herzen grew up alone, being both spoiled and oppressed, alive and bored; he avidly read books from his father's large library, especially the writings of the French Enlightenment. He was fourteen years old when, by order of Emperor Nicholas I, the leaders of the Decembrist conspiracy were hanged. This event, he later claimed, was a critical turning point in his life; whether it was so or not, but the memory of these noble martyrs for the cause of constitutional freedom in Russia eventually turned for him, as well as for many other representatives of his estate and generation, into a sacred symbol that inspired him to the end of his days. He tells how, a few years after this event, he and his close friend Nick 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 came, and Herzen became a student at Moscow University. He had already gone through the period of infatuation with Schiller and Goethe; now he plunged into the study of German metaphysics - Kant and especially Schelling. Then taking on the French historians, representatives of the new school - Guizot, Thierry Apostin and, in addition to them, the French utopian socialists - Saint-Simon, Fourier, Leroux and other social prophets, whose writings were smuggled into Russia, bypassing censorship, he turned into staunch and passionate radical. He and Ogarev were members of a student circle in which forbidden books were read and dangerous ideas discussed; for this, he and most of the other "unreliable" students were eventually arrested, and Herzen, probably for the reason that he refused to recant the views that were imputed to him, was sentenced to imprisonment.
The father used all his influence to mitigate the sentence, but still could not save his son from being exiled to Vyatka, a provincial town near 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 discovered administrative ability and became a much more competent and perhaps even more zealous official than he later was ready to admit, and helped to expose the depraved 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 infatuation 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 domineering aunt. Thanks to his father's tireless 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 exile, Herzen was allowed to return to Moscow, and soon he was enrolled in a clerical position in St. Petersburg.
Whatever his aspirations at this time, he retained his unshakable independence and devotion to radicalism. Due to a careless letter in which Herzen criticized the actions of the police and which was opened by the censors, he was again sentenced to serve his exile, this time in Novgorod. Two years later, in 1842, he was again allowed to return to Moscow. By the time he began publishing in the progressive magazines of the time, he was already considered a member of the new radical intelligentsia, who, moreover, had suffered for their 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 novice poet and writer Turgenev, the critic Belinsky, the future politicians Bakunin and Katkov (the first is a supporter of the revolution, the second is the reaction), the essay writer Annenkov and his closest friend Ogarev - Herzen, along with most of his educated contemporaries became interested in Hegelian philosophy. He wrote exciting historical and philosophical articles and stories that dealt with social issues; they were printed, 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 convictions 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 in social and economic terms - how much a direct response to the painful problems in his native country: the poverty of the population, serfdom and the lack of personal freedom at all levels, the arbitrariness and cruelty of the autocracy.
Added to this was the infringed national pride of a powerful and semi-barbarian society, whose leaders experienced a mixed feeling of admiration, envy and resentment towards the civilized West. The radicals believed in reforms that followed the Western model towards democratization and secularization; Slavophiles fell into mystical nationalism and advocated the need to 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 diligent and humiliating imitation of the soulless and, in in any case, the hopelessly decaying West. Herzen was an extreme "Westernizer", but he retained ties 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 a sense of humanity is still alive, in a single ranks of mass protest against the inhuman regime.
Ivan Yakovlev died in 1847. He bequeathed most of his fortune to Louise The Hague 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 whole generation), Herzen decided to emigrate from Russia. It is not known whether he guessed that he would have to stay abroad until the end of his days, and whether he wanted this, but it turned out that way. He left the same year with his wife, mother, two friends, and servants; the trip was accompanied by unrest, but, having passed 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 the 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 was engulfed in revolution, Herzen, together 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 the property of his mother, was declared confiscated. Thanks to the efforts of the banker James Rothschild, who sympathized with the Russian "baron" and was able to put pressure on the Russian government, Herzen managed to recover most of his funds, and since then he has not experienced financial difficulties, which provided him with a degree of independence, which at that time very few exiles possessed. At the same time, he received financial resources to support other emigrants and revolutionary processes.
Shortly after his arrival in Paris, but even before the revolution, he published a series of brilliant articles in a Moscow journal run by his friends, in which he gave a colorful and extremely critical description of the social and cultural life of Paris, and in which, in particular, he subjected to a merciless analysis the process of degradation of the French bourgeoisie, an indictment unsurpassed even in the writings of his contemporaries Marx and Heine. Herzen's Moscow friends, for the most part, reacted disapprovingly to these articles; they considered his analysis to be a typical flight of rhetorical fantasy, an irresponsible extremism hardly suited to the needs of a poorly governed and backward country, compared with which the progress of the middle classes in the West, whatever its shortcomings, appears to be a huge step towards general enlightenment.
In these early works of Herzen - "Letters from Avenue Marigny" and the Italian sketches that followed them - there are features that have become typical of all his works since then: a rapid flow of descriptions, fresh, bright, accurate, saturated with lively and always appropriate digressions, variations on the same topic, viewed from different angles, puns, neologisms, genuine and imaginary quotations, verbal finds, gallicisms that irritated his nationalist Russian friends, caustic personal observations and cascades of vivid images and incomparable epigrams that, by their virtuosity, do not bore the reader and do not take him away, but give the story charm and persuasiveness. One gets the impression of involuntary improvisation: a live scene painted by an intellectually bright, extremely intelligent and honest person, endowed with extraordinary powers of observation and expressiveness. The tone of passionate political radicalism is colored by a purely aristocratic (and even more purely Muscovite) contempt for everything limited, prudent, self-satisfied, mercantile, for every 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 most of Herzen's allies) in all general formulas as such, in all programs and slogans of all political parties, in 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 against people was committed and soon, undoubtedly, will be committed again, 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, from the mere sound of which people go berserk and commit senseless bloodshed - these, in his opinion, are new idols, on whose altars human blood is shed today just as recklessly and uselessly as it was shed yesterday or the day before in honor of the old deities - church or monarchy, feudal order or sacred customs - which are now debunked as obstacles to humanity's progress.
In addition to skepticism about the meaning and value of abstract ideas in general, opposed to the concrete, immediate, immediate goals of individual living people - real freedoms and fair pay for daily labor, Herzen expressed an even more disturbing idea about the steadily widening and insurmountable gulf between humanistic values of a relatively free and civilized minority. (of which he was aware of his own belonging) and the pressing needs, aspirations, and tastes of the vast, silent masses of the people, rather barbaric in the West, and wilder still in Russia or on the Asian plains beyond.
The old world was crumbling before our eyes and it deserved it. It was up to his victims to destroy it - slaves who did not at all regret either the art or the science of their masters; and why, asks Herzen, should they feel sorry for them? Was it not this art and this science that contributed to their suffering and savagery? The new barbarians, young and strong, full of hatred for the old world built on the bones of their fathers, will raze to the ground the buildings erected by their oppressors, and with them all that is most majestic and beautiful that is in Western civilization; and this cataclysm will, apparently, not only be inevitable, but also just, because the existing civilization, high and valuable in the eyes of those who use its fruits, can offer the vast majority of mankind nothing but suffering and a meaningless existence. Nevertheless, 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 have often argued that Herzen came to Paris as an ardent, even utopian idealist, and that it was only the failure of the 1848 revolution that caused his disillusionment and a new, more pessimistic realism. This point of view is not entirely true.
A skeptical note, in particular pessimism about the extent to which people can be changed, and even deeper doubt about whether such a change will lead if the fearless and intelligent revolutionaries or reformers, whose ideal images were drawn in the imagination of his Russian Western friends, he will be able to carry it out, to a more just and free order - this ominous note sounds from him even in 1847, even before the catastrophe.
The spectacle of the uprising of the workers and its brutal suppression in Italy and France haunted Herzen all 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. Such are his stories and reflections on the persons 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 his personal tragedy was added to the disasters of the revolution: Herzen's wife, whom he passionately loved, was seduced by the closest of his new friends, the German revolutionary poet Georg Herweg, who was friends with Marx and Wagner, the "iron lark" of the German revolution, as G. Heine semi-ironically called it. The progressive views of Hertz, somewhat reminiscent of those of Shelley, on love, friendship, gender equality and the irrationality of bourgeois morality, were tested and destroyed during this crisis. He almost lost his head with grief and jealousy: his love, self-love, the deepest concepts of the basis of all human relations, were dealt a severe blow from which he never fully recovered.
He did what almost no one had ever done before him: he described his grief in the smallest detail, traced in detail how his relationship with his wife, Herweg and Herweg's wife changed, recorded every meeting with them that took place, every outburst of anger, despair feelings of love, hope, hatred, contempt, and painfully self-destructive 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 flicker on the stage, where he himself plays the main role of the tragic, self-absorbed hero. The story is conducted with restraint - there are no obvious distortions in it - but it is absolutely self-centered.
Throughout his life, Herzen perceived the external world clearly, in due proportions, although through the prism of his romantic personality, in accordance with his impressionable, painfully organized I, located at the center of his universe. No matter how great his suffering, he, as an artist, retains complete control over the tragedy that he experiences, and at the same time also describes it. Perhaps the selfishness of the artist, which demonstrates all his work, is partly the reason for the suffocation that Natalie experienced, and the reason for the absence of any silence in his description of the events that took place: Herzen has no doubt 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. Natalie's letters and her desperate longing for Herweg show the extent of the increasingly destructive effect of Herzen's self-blindness on her fragile and exalted nature. We know comparatively little about Natalie's relationship with Herweg: it is quite possible that there was a physical intimacy between her and Herweg - 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 her lover to her. 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 generously, though impetuously, revealed himself to others; told them all his life, but with all his deep faith in the freedom and absolute value of the individual and human relations that never left him, he hardly assumed or allowed completely independent lives next to his own; he describes his sufferings in detail, precisely, eloquently, without hiding bitter details and without mercy towards himself, but without sentimentality and concentrating exclusively on himself. This is a heartbreaking document. During his lifetime, Herzen did not publish this story in full, but now it 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 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 émigrés, read a lot, took notes, developed ideas, argued, worked hard both as a publicist and as an active supporter of the cause of the 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 sailed from Marseille 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 ties of warm friendship, and went to England with his three surviving children. America was too far away, and besides, it seemed too provincial to him. England, although she was also quite removed from the arena in which he was defeated - both politically and personally - was still part of Europe. At that time, England was the most civilized and hospitable country in relation to political refugees, being 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 came to London in 1851.
Together with the children, Herzen changed several houses in London and its suburbs, when, after the death of Nicholas I, as soon as the opportunity arose to leave Russia, his closest friend Nikolai Ogarev joined him. Together they set up a printing house and began publishing a Russian-language magazine called Polarnaya Zvezda, the first printed organ devoted entirely 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 captured Herzen's thoughts and deprived him of peace of mind: he felt an urgent psychological need to find salvation by telling about his bitter story. Thus was written the first part of his future memoirs. Working on them became a remedy for the terrible loneliness in which he found himself living among an indifferent foreign people, while the political reaction seemed to sweep the whole world, leaving not the slightest hope. Imperceptibly, he found himself immersed in the past. He went further and further into it and found in this a source of freedom and strength.
Here is how work went on this book, which Herzen considered an analogy for "David Copperfield". He began to write 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, an excerpt "Prison and exile" was published in England, the title of which was inspired, perhaps, by the famous memoirs of Silvio Pellico "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 these years. This was followed by a seven-year suspension.
Separate 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, though 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 - but one chapter of this part, entitled "Oceano nox" **, was published during his lifetime. He also omitted the history of his relationship with Medvedeva in Vyatka and the episode with the serf girl Katerina in Moscow - his confession of this to Natalie cast the first shadow on their relationship, a shadow that never disappeared; the thought of seeing these memoirs printed during his lifetime was unbearable to him. He also retained the chapter on "Germans in Emigration," which contains his unflattering remarks about Marx and his supporters, and several literary portraits, written in Herzen's characteristic lively and ironic manner, of some of his old Russian radical friends. He strongly condemned the practice of publicly washing the revolutionaries' dirty linen and made it clear that he did not intend to ridicule his comrades-in-arms to the delight of a 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 a few years after it. Then it was corrected in subsequent Soviet editions. The most complete version is published in a comprehensive edition of Herzen's writings, an outstanding monument of Soviet philological science.
The memoirs paint a lively, unadorned panorama against 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" "The 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; around her united all who were not intimidated, not only in Russia and Russian circles abroad, but also among the Poles and other oppressed nations.
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 extensive information about the 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 numerous visitors who crowded around Herzen - some out of curiosity, others - to shake his hand, express a feeling of sympathy or admiration, there were generals, high officials and other loyal subjects of the empire. He reached the pinnacle 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 calling for the release of the peasants and the start of broad radical reforms "from above" and his panegyric to Alexander II, after in 1858 the first concrete steps were taken in this direction, ending with the words "You won, Galilean!", gave rise to the illusion on this and that side of the Russian border that a new liberal era had finally begun, when between the tsarist government and its opponents could a certain understanding, and possibly real cooperation, can be reached. This state of mind did not last long. But Herzen's authority was extremely high - higher than that of any Russian in the West: in the late 1850s - early 1860s. he was the recognized leader of all healthy, enlightened, cultured and humane forces in Russia.
More than Bakunin and even Turgenev, whose novels were the West's main source of knowledge about Russia, Herzen contributed to the debunking of the legend, rooted in the minds of progressive Europeans (of which Michelet was perhaps the most typical) that there is nothing in Russia but government over the knee boots. , on the one hand, and a 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 of Poland. Some of the Polish exiles unwittingly agreed that in this case the truth was on the side of Herzen, 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 the liberation 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, Herzen's greatest love 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 writings; Felice Orsini (1819-1858) - Italian revolutionary, member of the secret patriotic organization "Young Italy", executed in Paris for the attempt on the life of Emperor Napoleon III.
Although he supported any liberal undertaking in France, his attitude towards it was highly ambiguous. There were many reasons for this. Like Tocqueville (whom he personally did not like), Herzen had an aversion to all centralization, bureaucracy, hierarchy, submission to rigid forms or rules; France was for him the embodiment of order, discipline, worship of the state, unity and coercive, abstract formulas that reduced all things to one and the same rule and pattern, which was a generic property of the great feudal states - Prussia, Austria, Russia; to all of them, he constantly opposes decentralized, unconstrained, unruly, "truly democratic" Italians, who, in his opinion, have a deep kinship with the spirit of the 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 prudent France: with these sentiments, Herzen is close to his romantic 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 the radical politicians 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; Alexander 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 deal with the life and behavior of French exiles in England, are masterpieces of a fascinating, half-sympathetic, half-contemptuous description of the grotesque and sterile sides 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 the performance. 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 appreciated Louis Blanc as an honest and fearless democrat, was on good terms with Victor Hugo, loved and admired Michelet. In later years, he visited at least one Parisian political salon - it is believed that the salon belonged to one Pole - and with obvious pleasure: the Goncourt brothers met him there and left a vivid description of his appearance and manner of conversation in their diary.
Although Herzen himself was half German, and perhaps for this very reason, he, like his friend Bakunin, had a strong disgust for 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 and public recriminations, more pronounced than among other emigrants. It is possible that his hatred of Herweg, 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, a 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 acrimony in his account of the German emigrants, quite different from the subtle humor with which he describes the characteristics of other foreign colonies that gathered in the 1850s and 1860s. in London, a city which, according to Herzen, treated both their eccentricities and their torments 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 the revolutionaries on the mainland, as well as helping and illegally deliver Herzen publications to Russia) and a few 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 appendix to the third chapter of the sixth part of "Past and Thoughts"; in the ninth chapter of the same part, he recounts in detail 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; ).
Herzen admired England: her system, the spontaneously formed and intricate jungle of her unwritten laws and traditions, provided abundant food for his romantically inclined imagination. Interesting passages 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, devoid of 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 intelligent and sometimes penetrating, are rather restrained and resemble traditional ideas about them. The description of the trial that took place in London over 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 the Germans, not to mention the Poles, are more close to him. Herzen is unable to establish any genuine personal relationship with the British. When he thinks of humanity, he is not thinking of them.
In addition to his main occupations, Herzen paid much attention to the education of his children, which he partially entrusted to the idealistic German woman Malwiede von Meisenbug*, who later became friends with Nietzsche and Romain Rolland. His personal fate was closely intertwined with the fate of his close friend Ogarev and the latter's wife, who later became the wife of Herzen; but, despite this, the mutual devotion of the two friends remained unchanged - Herzen's memoirs contain few interesting emotional details of these vicissitudes.
* Malvida Amalia von Meisenbug (1816-1908) - German writer who emigrated to London in 1852; in 1853-1856 was the teacher of the daughters of Herzen, 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 devoted to Herzen.
In all other respects, Herzen led the life of a wealthy noble Russian - rather, even a purely Moscow one - a writer, a nobleman, cut off from his native soil, unable to create an established life, or at least the appearance of an inner or outer world - a life filled with random moments of hope and even triumph, which were replaced by long periods of despair, corroding self-criticism and, above all, oppressive, all-devouring, woeful nostalgia.
Perhaps this, along with arguments of an objective nature, 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 the oppressors and the oppressed - lies in the preservation of the Russian peasant community. He saw in it the germs of a future non-industrial, semi-anarchist socialism. Only such a decision, which he came to clearly under the influence of the views of Fourier, Proudhon and George Sand, seemed to him free both from the overwhelming barracks discipline insisted on by the Western Communists from Cabet to Marx, and from the equally deadly and, as it seemed to him, much more primitive and petty-bourgeois ideals put forward by moderate, "semi-socialist" doctrines 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 the historical significance of organized urban workers. But on the whole, he maintained 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 activity and responsibility. He retained to the end a romantic view of the inevitable advent of a new, just, all-changing social order.
Herzen is neither strict nor systematic. In his later years, his style has lost the touch of self-confidence that he had in his youth, and reflects the nostalgia that gripped him, which never left him. He is seized by a sense of absurd chance, although his faith in the value of life remains unshaken. Almost all traces of Hegelian influence disappear.
“As if someone (except ourselves) promised that everything in the world would be elegant, fair and go like clockwork. We were quite surprised at the abstract wisdom of nature and historical development; it’s time to guess that in nature and history there is a lot of random, stupid, failed, confused".
This is very characteristic of his mood in the 1860s; and it is not at all accidental that his narrative loses its strict order and breaks up into a series of fragments, episodes, separate sketches, in which Dichtung is intertwined with Wahrheit *, facts - with poetic fiction.
* Dichtung und Wahrheit (German) - fiction and reality; the title of an autobiographical work by Goethe, posthumously remade by the publishers into "Wahrheit und Dichtung" (in Russian, translated: "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 on the character of a barbarian invasion and destroys all the values \u200b\u200bthat 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 was striving to make a revolution as soon as possible, for not understanding that dwellings for free people cannot be built from prison stones; that the average European of the nineteenth century is too deeply marked by the slavery of the old order to be able to lay the foundations of true freedom, that it is not freed slaves who will create a new order, but new people brought up in freedom.
History has its own pace. Only patience and gradualness - and not the haste and violence of Peter the Great - can contribute to permanent transformation.
At such moments, Herzen asks himself the question: who owns the future - a free, anarchist peasant or a self-confident and ruthless projector; Or perhaps the industrial proletarian is destined to inherit the new, inevitable, collectivist social order? He then reverts back to his former moods of frustration and wonders if all people really yearn for freedom; perhaps only a few in every generation aspire to it, while the majority want only good government, no matter in whose hands it is. Herzen anticipates Emile 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 it eats grass everywhere" *. Herzen uses the same technique of reductio ad absurdum. People want freedom no more than a fish wants to fly. The fact that flying fish exist does not prove that fish were created to fly at all, or that they absolutely do not like being underwater forever, away from the sun and light. After that, he once again returns to his earlier optimism and to the idea that somewhere out there - in Russia - lives an uncorrupted person, a peasant who has not yet exhausted abilities and is not infected with 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. Ten.)
But this faith, which Russo breathed into Herzen, as he grows older, becomes less and less firm. 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, asotpschism and doubt in his own skepticism, and finds moral salvation only in his hatred of all injustice, all arbitrariness, all mediocrity - and especially in his inability to make even the slightest compromise with the bestiality of the reactionaries or the hypocrisy of the bourgeois liberals. . He is saved by this, supported by the belief that such evil forces will destroy themselves, by love for children and devoted friends, and by his admiration for the diversity of life and the comedy of human characters.
In general, he became more pessimistic.
He began with an ideal view of human life and did not notice at all the abyss that lies between the ideal and reality, whether it be Nicholas Russia or rotten Western constitutionalism. As a young man he praised the radicalism of the Jacobins and denounced their opponents in Russia—stubborn conservatism, Slavophile nostalgia, the cautious gradualism of his friends Granovsky and Turgenev, as well as the Hegelian appeals 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.
Abroad came - no, not a change in worldview, but a cooling, a tendency to a more sober and critical view of things. Any real change, he began to think in 1847, must necessarily be slow; the power of tradition (which he mocks and admires at the same time in England) is exceedingly great; people are less malleable than it was believed in the eighteenth century, and do not strive at all for freedom, but only for security and contentment; communism is nothing but tsarism in reverse, the replacement of one yoke by another; political ideals and slogans in fact turn out to be empty formulas, in the name of which orthodox fanatics joyfully make hecatombs from their neighbors.
He no longer feels certain that the gulf 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 unchanging psychological or sociological reasons, despise and deny gifts. civilization, which is of no importance to them. But if all this is at least partly true, then is a radical transformation possible, is it desirable? That 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 allegedly began to independently approach the Marxist recognition of the immutable 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 following half century after his death interpreted his views differently. Whether they are 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 had grown up in Russia, and the backward country was taking the very first, uncertain and not always correct steps towards the painful process of industrialization. They were raznochintsy, who scorned the powerless compromises of 1848, who had no illusions about the prospects for freedom in the West; those who advocate the most resolute methods of struggle; accepting as truth only what has been proven by science, and ready to take extreme, and if necessary, immoral and cruel measures, in order 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 obsolete amateur aristocrat in on the whole, they are in no way different from the contempt with which he himself in his youth treated the refined and incompetent reformers of the reign of Alexander I; but this did not make his situation any easier.
What the determined revolutionaries had a negative attitude to, impressed Leo Tolstoy, who repeated more than once that the censorship of Herzen's works in Russia was sheer 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 before they see this swamp, when they are still walking on a level road; Herzen went this very way, 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 studies 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 wrote further, was both a 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 writings with a mixed feeling of admiration and irritation: "Herzen - a scattered mind - a sick pride," he wrote in his diary, "but [his] breadth, dexterity and kindness, grace - Russians ". From time to time, various correspondents point out 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 the people of the 1840s. could not express everything that they would like to say, because of the ferocity of Russian censorship, - about Herzen he noted: "... despite his enormous talent, what did he say that was new, necessary?" . After all, he wrote in Paris in complete freedom, and yet he could not say anything useful.
What irritated Tolstoy most of all was Herzenian socialism. In a letter to his aunt Alexandra Tolstaya, he writes that he despises Herzen's proclamations, of which he was suspected by the Russian police. The fact that Herzen believed in politics as a tool was reprehensible enough in Tolstoy's eyes. Beginning in 1862, Tolstoy openly declared that he did not believe in liberal reforms and in the possibility of improving people's lives by changing legislation or social institutions. Herzen fell into a common category with those whom Tolstoy condemned. Moreover, Tolstoy apparently felt some personal antipathy towards Herzen and his public position - even something like jealousy. When, in a moment of aching anguish and intense irritation, Tolstoy wrote (perhaps not quite 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 the revolutionary temperament and flair of Herzen. No matter how skeptical Herzen was about individual revolutionary doctrines or revolutionary plans for Russia - and he was skeptical like no one else - he believed until the end of his life in the moral and social necessity and inevitability of the revolution in Russia, in the fact that sooner or later Russia would radically a just, that is, a socialist, system will be transformed and come.
True, he did not turn a blind eye to the possibility, even the possibility, that a great rebellion would destroy the values \u200b\u200bthat he personally held dear - in particular, freedom, without which he and his kind could not breathe. Nevertheless, he recognized not only the inevitability, but also the historical justice of the coming cataclysm. His moral instinct, his respect for humanistic values, his whole style of life repelled him from the younger die-hard radicals of the sixties, but despite all his disgust for political fanaticism, whether right or left, Herzen did not turn into a cautious liberal reformist constitutionalist . Even at the stage of "graduation" he remained an agitator, an egalitarian and a socialist to the end. This is precisely what the Russian Narodniks and the Russian Marxists, both Mikhailovsky and Lenin, recognized for him and credited him with.
Not distinguished by caution or prudence, 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 Bells" has decreased. The new, "solid" revolutionaries needed his money, but they made it clear that they looked upon him as a liberal dinosaur, a preacher of obsolete humanistic ideas, useless when there is a fierce social struggle.
At the end of the 1860s. Herzen left London and tried to set up a French edition of The Bells in Geneva. When this failed, he visited his friends in Florence and returned to Paris early in 1870, before the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Here he died of pleurisy, broken morally and physically, but not disappointed, writing to the end, straining all his mind and all his strength. His body was transported to Nice, where he is buried next to the grave of his wife. A full-length monument marks his grave to this day.
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 wonderful letters and an unusual amalgam of memories, observations, moral pathos, psychological analysis and political notes. combined with a great literary talent, which immortalized his name. What remains above all is his passionate and unfading temperament, the 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 express it completely.
He believed that the main goal of life is life itself, that every day and every hour are goals for themselves, and not the means of another day or another experience. He believed that distant goals are 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, then 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 cognition, individual action, empirically discovered truths, but he always suspected that belief in general formulas, laws, predestination in human affairs is an attempt, sometimes catastrophic and always reckless, to turn away from the inexhaustible and unpredictable diversity of life and find peace in our own fantasies, in which we ourselves are reflected. He was fully aware of what he believed in. He acquired this knowledge through painful, sometimes unintentional introspection and described what he saw in amazingly vivid, precise and poetic language. His purely personal creed remained unchanged from the earliest days. "Art ... together with the lightning of personal happiness, is our only, undoubted blessing ..." * - he declared in one autobiographical passage, which deeply outraged the young and stern 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, v. 2, M., 1986, p. 352.
Herzen was not and did not aspire to be an impassive observer. Along with the poets and writers of his country, he created a direction, a perspective and, according to Gorky 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 by everyone, in which things, sensations, feelings, people, ideas, private and public events, institutions and entire cultures take shape and live through his rich and logically consistent imagination and resisted the forces of oblivion in that reliable world that is restored and transformed by his memory, his mind and artistic genius. "The Past and Thoughts" is Noah's ark, on which he saved himself, and not only himself, from the deadly flood in which many radical idealists of the 1840s sunk.
The true work of art outlives and transcends its immediate task. 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 mostly 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 had a very vivid memory of his visit to Herzen in his London house in March 1861.
“He struck Lev Nikolaevich with his appearance as a small, plump man and with the internal electricity emanating from him.
Lively, sympathetic, intelligent, interesting, - Lev Nikolayevich explained, 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 not met more such charming people like him. He is immeasurably higher than all political figures of that and that time" (P. A. Sergeenko, Tolstoy and his contemporaries, pp. 13-14).
3. There is evidence, which, however, does not inspire confidence, that she married him according to the Lutheran rite, which the Orthodox Church did not recognize.
4. A. I. Herzen, Sobr. op. in 30 volumes, M., 1954-1966, v. 8, p. 86; in subsequent references, this edition is referred to as: Collected Works.
5. Collected works, v. 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 (not translated into English) have been written on this subject. The most detailed and original study of this topic to date is the book: M. MaIia, 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. The clearest expression of this trivial and almost universally shared opinion was found in E. G. Kappa's fascinating and well-documented monograph "The Romantic Exiles" (London, 1933). Malia avoids this error in the book cited above.
9. In the essay "Georg Herweg" (1841).
10. Herzen had no 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, thick, in recent years plump, with a large head, long brown hair and beard, small bright eyes and a rather ruddy complexion. Soft and courteous in communication, but extremely ironic and witty ... clear, short 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 with pleasant 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, enthusiasm, "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 so much as to dispel the myth of the mysterious "Slavic soul", which took a long time to die; perhaps he is not fully debunked to this day.
11. "[Copperfield] is Dickens' Past and Thoughts," 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 among his virtues.
12. See above note. 1 on p. 117.
13. A fragment of the inscription on the bell of the cathedral in Schaffhausen, which Schiller chose as an epigraph to his poem "Das Lied von der Glocke" (1799).
14. "Letter to Emperor Alexander II" (Collected Works, vol. 12, pp. 272-274).
"Dinner at Charles Edmond [Khoetsky] ...
A Socratic skull and a soft, stout body from a painting by Rubens, a red mark between the eyebrows, made as if by a brand, a beard and hair with gray hair.
When he speaks, an 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, melancholic, musical, ideas - sublime, deep, sharp, sometimes subtle and always definite, colored with words, to find which he needs some that time, but who always have the fortunate qualities of the French language spoken by educated and witty foreigners.
He tells about Bakunin, about the eleven months he spent in prison, where he was chained to the wall, about his escape from Siberia, sailing along the Amur, about his return journey through California and arrival in London, where his first words [to Herzen] , after tears and stormy 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, stepping with the heavy inhuman steps of the stone statue of the Commander from Don Juan. Then followed anecdotes about the traditions and customs of England - "the country he loves as a country of freedom" - ridiculing her absurd, class-conscious, staunch traditionalism, especially noticeable in relations between masters and servants. The Goncourts cite an epigram composed by Herzen and showing the difference between French and English characters. They correctly convey the story of how James Rothschild helped save Herzen's property in Russia.
17. Collected works, v. 10, p. 120.
18. On the basis of 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, v. 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 dated May 17, 1896. But on October 12, 1905, he writes in his diary that he is reading Herzen's From the Other Shore, and adds: "Our intelligentsia has sunk so low that they are 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 at Moscow University. Council decision
On June 30, 1833, Herzen University, on the basis of the Regulations on Production in Academic Degrees and "for excellent achievements and behavior" (All dates in the article are given according to the old style), was approved as a candidate of the Department of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. He was also awarded a silver medal for his dissertation "An Analytical Exposition of the Copernican Solar System". The path to a successful scientific career opened before the young graduate, but Herzen's fate was different. A year after graduating from 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.
After returning from exile to Moscow, Herzen resumes the study of the theoretical foundations, methodology and modern achievements of natural science, begun in his student years. He studies the works of foreign and domestic scientists in physics, chemistry, zoology and physiology, attends 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 Professor Roulier"
In these works, which were widely known among students and the metropolitan 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 endure police chicanery, Herzen left Russia forever and, while abroad, no longer engaged in science, concentrating his forces on revolutionary journalistic activities and the creation of an independent Russian press.
And yet the reactionary atmosphere of the Nikolaev political regime was not the only reason for the transformation of Herzen from a promising scientist into a revolutionary. The fact is that both he himself and the circle of his like-minded Westerners initially saw science not only as a powerful factor in social development and renewal, but also as an alternative to attempts at a purely violent transformation of society, which young people of the late 30s and early 40s . the Decembrist uprising and some other revolutionary uprisings in Europe in the first third of the 19th century were imagined. But what, then, made Herzen prefer revolution to science?
(A member of the Herzen university circle, N. I. Sazonov, recalled in this connection: “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 getting acquainted with contemporary Western science and which led him to the conviction that this science is in a state of deep crisis, mired in trifles and needs to be saved from outside. bold and broad-minded "people of life" who are able to overcome the disunity of scientific disciplines and achieve the organic unity of science, philosophy and practice.
It seems to me that the main role in Herzen's disappointment was played, first of all, by his lack of understanding of the specifics of the work of professional scientists engaged in solving their highly specialized tasks, the meaning of which can be understood only by being in constant creative contacts with teams of researchers from advanced laboratories. At the same time, as modern experience shows, a 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 a qualitatively new science of the future and striving to prepare the Russian youth for the creation of such a science, Herzen could not notice those truly revolutionary changes that contained the everyday work of Western and domestic professionals. 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.
At the same time, 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 his final exams and was 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 getting a sufficiently high score in the exams were necessary for those who wanted to become a university candidate in order to continue their scientific work and then defend their master's and doctoral dissertations.
Judging by the 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
"I cut off at Perevoshchikov in mechanics, this greatly shocked my ambition, I was sick the next day; but in all other subjects I answered well, in some excellently, and I am a candidate; now it remains to get a medal (gold), and I am satisfied with the university"
(Exams were held on June 22, 1833. To obtain a candidate's degree, it was required 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. Another student of Perevoshchikov, A. N. Drashusov, who was left at the university observatory and in 1851 became her 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. Bio and stretched out on the sheets of the formula.
Perhaps Passek was right, and after not entirely successful passing of exams in the physical sciences, Perevoshchikov could be wary of Herzen's too philosophized work. At the same time, Perevoshchikov categorically refused to accept Drashusov as an assistant at the observatory.
Moreover, Perevoshchikov kept this position free for almost a month and agreed to hire Drashusov only under pressure from the latter's high patrons.
It is possible that Perevoshchikov kept the vacancy for Herzen (at that time he simply had no other candidates). But Herzen, instead of showing at least some initiative, ridiculed his teachers and the university in his letters and informed his friends that he was eating, sleeping, bathing all day long and was going to seriously engage in social philosophy and political science.
What these studies led to is known. Exactly one year later, Herzen was arrested for organizing a circle of a revolutionary direction (rather harmless even by the standards of that time). Then there were 9 months in prison and exile with compulsory service as a junior official in the office, where Herzen was able to see enough of all the "charms" of Russian life.
It is not surprising, therefore, that shortly after returning from exile to Moscow
(1842) Herzen began to fuss about a foreign passport and in 1847 went abroad with his family. There he became close with 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 has lost an outstanding scientist with the departure of Herzen, but one can only regret that it has lost a talented and widely educated popularizer and publicist, as well as an excellent organizer. Did Herzen himself regret his failed scientific career? In the autobiographical book 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 the microscope even during the years of emigration. At the same time, Herzen was especially admired by 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.
All this, writes Herzen, the moral connection of generations, the positive example of the fathers, the right upbringing, I was deprived of, being forced from childhood to fight with everything around me. Therefore, leaving the nursery, Herzen concludes his comparison, “rushed into another battle and, having just finished his university course, was already in prison, then in exile. dirty - on the other."
Herzen and the problems of the formation of science in Russia
And yet, was it only the circumstances and conditions of life that prevented Herzen from becoming a scientist? Of course, the atmosphere of Nikolaev Russia in the 30s - 40s. was not very favorable for scientific research. Nevertheless, an increasing number of people began to engage in science, and some of them did it at the world level. Enough to remember the names
Lobachevsky, Ostrogradsky, Struve, Pirogov, Lenz, Zinin and other prominent 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
Pulkovo observatory was in the 30s. a colossal amount of 1.5 million silver rubles was allocated.
In the first third of the XIX century. Universities were added to Moscow University in
Derpt (Tartu), Vilna, Kazan, Kharkov, St. Petersburg and Kyiv. Of course, this number of universities was completely insufficient for a giant
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 suffocated from overwhelming workload, which, of course, 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, one should not be surprised that reforms vital 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 forces and caused a steady disgust at all attempts at official education. However, being disappointed in the government's ability to "equip Russia" and not wanting to cooperate with the mediocre 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 the Russian bureaucracy was interested.
Of course, it is difficult to imagine Herzen or Ogarev voluntarily serving in the Nikolaev administration. However, in the development of science 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 travel freely abroad, being the most educated part of society, it had the opportunity not only to significantly accelerate the development of domestic science, but also, having taken a leading position in it, to take revenge for its ousting by bureaucracy, which has sharply increased after the defeat of the Decembrists.
Undoubtedly, the creation of a national science is a monstrously difficult task. But after all, the Russian nobility created great literature, which was hardly easier
(organization of publishing, overcoming censorship obstacles, assimilation of art forms belonging to a different culture, etc.) than, for example, the development of universities. Nevertheless, the formation of literature in Russia, in fact, on a voluntary basis, went much more successfully than science supported by the state.
Speaking about the possible role of Herzen in the “scientization” of Russia, it is also 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, the most powerful means of material and spiritual transformation of society.
But why, then, did Herzen and other radical intellectuals not engage in scientific research themselves, did not teach at universities, but preferred to turn into "repentant nobles", socialists and revolutionaries? Why did the same Herzen, disillusioned with Moscow University, not 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 a philosophical and journalistic work
Herzen "Amateurism in Science", which in 1843 was published in parts in the journal "Domestic Notes". It is also possible that Perevoshchikov could be familiar, at least by hearsay, with the first articles of the 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 he began to publish in the same journal. Since 1840, Perevoshchikov also actively collaborated with Otechestvennye Zapiski, publishing in them a number of very interesting popular articles on astronomy, its history and methodology. Thus, during this period, Herzen and his teacher, at first glance, were engaged in the same business - the popularization and propaganda of science in Russia. What, then, again irritated Perevoshchikov?
"Amateurism in Science" by A. I. Herzen
Herzen's work "Amateurism in Science" is a unique work in many respects, 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 a person. Herzen himself characterized his work as propaedeutic, intended primarily for those who are just starting to study science. At the same time, its main goal is to protect beginners from that dangerous disillusionment in science that is spreading in Russian society. (Of course, that part of it with which Herzen was in contact.) He writes that, having encountered the first difficulties and not going beyond prefaces, domestic amateurs are now moaning louder and louder that science does not correspond to the lofty aspirations of the spirit and "instead of bread it offers stones "that she is too complicated, uninteresting and, moreover, uses unfamiliar words. But most importantly, since modern science is just a "materials development", an intermediate stage, there is no point in poring over it, since a new, more advanced and more accessible science will soon appear anyway. 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, not sparing sarcasm and indignation, writes that these romantics and false friends of science actually need not science itself, but their own vague ideas about it, the opportunity to philosophize at ease about various problems, without bothering to check their own judgments with experience or calculations. And especially defenseless before such "amateurs" of science is philosophy, where most often they undertake to judge any things without bothering even with a superficial acquaintance with the subject.
Herzen quite reasonably explained this attitude to science by the fact that Russia got it ready-made, without pain and labor. Hence that wild mixture of piety 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 passes from criticism of amateurs to criticism of modern scientists for excessive specialization, formalism, isolation from life and other "sins". With some striking inconsistency, he brings them all the same accusations and claims for which he just ridiculed dilettantes. 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 hindered by the 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 the profane."
Herzen writes that modern scientists have finally turned into medieval craftsmen who have lost a broad view of the world and do not understand anything except their narrow topic. Of course, Herzen condescendingly remarks, 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, about which scientists "know in advance that they are not true."
It is important to emphasize that, criticizing the guild scientists, Herzen has in mind primarily Germany, in whose science, as he believes, "pedantry, disintegration with life, worthless occupations, artificial constructions and unapplied theories, ignorance of practice and arrogant self-satisfaction", etc. But what, in fact, gives
Herzen the right to judge the state of science in Germany? Did he study at her 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 petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness.)
It is clear that Herzen could judge with such confidence the insignificance of German science precisely because he based himself on the criticism that could be found in abundance in the articles and books of prominent German writers, scientists and publicists, who painfully experienced the humiliated position of their homeland, its economic backwardness, fragmentation, political dependence and dreaming of the revival of Germany, which science, philosophy and art would bring to it. However, to fulfill such a mission, these areas of spiritual activity had to reach heights never seen before, and the colossal successes of the Germans in the development of philosophy gave hope that this achievement was quite possible. This is the first.
Second. For European science 30 - 40-ies. The 19th century, and especially for German science, was characterized by a sharp conflict with philosophy. Closely related in the 17th century, at the origins of modern science, in the 19th century. the two disciplines quickly drifted 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 useful process, enabling both of them to acquire their own subjects and methods of research and thereby accelerate their development. However, in order to see positive results behind mutual criticism and, in particular, to understand the peculiarities of the philosophical criticism of science
(Constituting itself as an analysis of the theoretical thinking of the culture of the New Age ("pure reason") and groping for the contours of some other logics, philosophy could not help but criticize the science in which this thinking was most consistently embodied. 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 fell into 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, nor about the context in which it makes sense.
Of course, one can say that Herzen used the example of the West to warn domestic science against possible dangers. But was such a warning helpful? While Russian science was taking its first steps towards professionalism, Herzen mocked the specialists, calling them modern troglodytes and Hottentots. After this, is it any wonder that Russian literature, in search of a positive hero, turned to anyone, but not to a scientist?
Equally serious consequences were the spread in society of views on the need to create a new, simpler and more understandable science for the people, which, thanks to the use of the dialectical method, will be able to organically combine philosophy and science, theoretical and empirical, etc. Moreover, the main role in the creation of such a science is Herzen in his next work, Letters on the Study of Nature, he naturally referred to Russia, drawing parallels between the European Renaissance, which began after the Western perception of 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 the backlog of Russia for the good and at once overcome all the difficulties and contradictions in which the West became entangled.
(At the same time, Herzen resorts to an actual apology for Russian dilettantism, comparing it with the naive, but aesthetically bright, rich in potencies of 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 carriers of a new, revolutionary worldview that could save the world. Thus, trying to help the spread of science in the country,
Herzen only hurt her. With his articles, he actually disoriented the youth, instilling in them inadequate, and even simply false ideas about the world of scientists.
A fundamental role in this disorientation (primarily of himself) was played by Herzen's fascination with philosophy, the critical pathos of which presupposed the existence of a sufficiently developed scientific community in the country. But why, in fact, Herzen, trying to save science from dilettantism, 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 quite respectable information from scientific and popular science journals could lead to similar, disorienting results.
In 1829 - 1830. D. M. Perevoshchikov, in order to disseminate modern scientific ideas among students, translated and published in the journal "New Store of Natural History" about a hundred articles from foreign scientific periodicals, devoted mainly to studies of the relationship between various classes of phenomena, including living and inanimate matter , as well as ideas about the fundamental role of electrical forces in nature.
As you know, discoveries at the beginning of the 19th century. chemical, thermal, physiological and magnetic effects of electric current had a fundamental impact on the development of natural science. These discoveries confirmed earlier guesses about the universal interconnection of various forces of nature and prompted scientists to assume and look for other connections of this type. Unfortunately, the unusual nature of new phenomena, their discrepancy with existing theoretical concepts, as well as the element of chance in many discoveries, have given rise, especially in the near-scientific environment, to the idea that scientific discoveries do not require any serious theoretical preparation and only bold hypotheses and perseverance are enough. . The collections and reviews of Perevoshchikov suffered from the same shortcoming, creating (contrary to the convictions of the author himself, who soon abandoned this form of popularization of science) among students a dangerous image of light science, fluttering from discovery to discovery, which then led them to disappointment and dilettantism.
Thus, Perevoshchikov's attempt to form an adequate image of modern science among students, to bring them to the forefront of research ongoing in Europe, failed. But was this problem solvable at all?
Problems of creating scientific communities of the Western type
Russia was the first developing country to try to introduce Western science. Since then, such attempts have been and are being made in many states. Therefore, it is possible that we will be able to better understand the 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 the Indian astrophysicist A. R. Chowdhury, devoted to the analysis of the problems of adaptation of trainees from Asian countries to the Western scientific community.
Chowdhury's article, published in the American journal Social Research in Science, nevertheless bears little resemblance to traditional sociological research and is rather an essay on 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 widely known fact that a full-fledged science capable of working at the highest European or American level has not yet been created even in countries with a 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 be backward and provincial.
In order to clarify what he understands by the advanced scientific community,
Chowdhury introduces the following criteria:
1. There are members of the community who are knowledgeable in the securely established scientific knowledge of the past.
2. There are members of the community who constantly keep themselves well acquainted with the current achievements of world science.
3. There are members of the community who constantly make a significant contribution to the development of science.
Good results on all three points give, according to Chowdhury, complete (total), and on separate - partial (partial) science. Thus, the author characterizes Indian physics as partial, with a high "score" on the first point, and low on the third. As a consequence, he writes, physics in India is developing along only a few well-established lines, which gives students a completely distorted idea of the nature of modern science.
Let's try to look at Russian science in the 1930s and 1940s from the point of view of the proposed classification. 19th century Of course, this is a "partial" science, whose representatives made truly heroic efforts to develop it in all three areas identified by Chowdhury: teaching the basics of science and popularizing its achievements, maintaining stable contacts with the European scientific community, conducting independent research at the appropriate level.
It is important to emphasize that domestic scientists have achieved the greatest results in the third direction of activity. As a result, in Russia in the first half
19th century there was a paradoxical situation when there were already first-class scientists in the country, but in fact there was no scientific community,
(Apparently, this situation was a consequence of the Petrine approach to the development of science in Russia, when the research center (Academy of Sciences) was created much earlier than the universities. Due to this, scientists for a long time represented an enclave with extremely little connection 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 be foreigners in their own 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 of this seemingly quite real task, both in the time of Perevoshchikov and in the time of Choudhury, ran into some incomprehensible and practically insurmountable difficulties.
Problems of perception of Western science
Analyzing the reasons why in India it is not possible to create a complete science,
Chowdhury first refers to the lack of funds, the poor development of scientific communications, etc. However, he further emphasizes that this is not the main reason. In the leading Indian universities, students have the necessary equipment, study according to the best foreign programs, often with the involvement of highly qualified Western teachers. As a result, students receive an excellent education that is in no way inferior to Western education, successfully participate in various international competitions, but, as a rule, do not know how to apply their knowledge independently and creatively.
Such students, according to Chowdhury, lack the appropriate mindset, the proper psychological gestalt, without which they can only copy Western science by doing fairly routine research. At the same time, such a gestalt can be formed in 1 - 2 years of internships in the leading scientific centers of the West, when students are completely immersed in the atmosphere of the research teams of these centers. However, returning home, the interns cannot create an appropriate psychological climate in their universities and, deprived of their usual intellectual communication, either leave for the West or begin to move along the path of a teaching or administrative career.
But what is this mysterious gestalt, without which a full-fledged perception of Western science is impossible, and are only non-Western scientists experiencing 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 in India.
Returning home after studying or internship 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 acquires self-sufficient significance. In addition, the need to constantly supplement the courses he reads with new products gradually forms in him the habit of superficiality.
(An example of the formation of such superficiality is given by the surveys mentioned above
Perevoshchikov, who, moreover, was far from always able to separate the correct results in them 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 be a full-fledged scientist, it is necessary to constantly maintain intensive, direct contacts with the teams of advanced research centers. But what, in fact, can be learned in the course of such contacts? After all, Western science is not an esoteric teaching, and all its results and methods for obtaining them are published in full in articles, monographs, various textbooks, etc.
Chowdhury writes that when Indian students find themselves in modern Western laboratories, they are literally shocked by the fact that science in these centers turns out to be little similar to the image that they formed in the course of studying Western scientific literature or classes, often conducted by foreigners or past foreign training by teachers. First of all, it turns out that real science is much cruder, more utilitarian and even more primitive than students imagined before. It turns out, for example, that an ordinary physicist is not at all a person striving to know the laws of nature. He is not at all interested in global issues.
In any case, in his own field of activity - and he is busy solving his narrowly professional tasks that do not make any sense outside the corresponding paradigms shared by the community of specialists like him.
(In this regard, let us recall Herzen's indignation at narrow specialists who turn into some kind of monsters, or his bewilderment at the fact that K. Vogt, so respected by him, is not at all interested in philosophical disputes and other global problems.)
And so, Chowdhury recalls, “at some point I suddenly realized that my work as a physicist had nothing to do with the knowledge of nature in the usual sense of the word for me, that I was more and more 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 in relation to nature. Such curiosity, he believes, all civilizations have, but they have not created anything similar to the Western European natural science of modern times. "Science is one of the deepest forms of creative expression of the human mind. As long as we do not have human minds properly prepared to create science, it is absurd to expect it to pour out of buildings, libraries and laboratories, however well equipped they may be. satisfied.")
It is important to emphasize that the world of shadows that Chowdhury speaks of is not the world of mathematics at all. It would surprise the physicist least of all. Here the point is in some kind of a breakdown in thinking, which allows the scientist in the course of research to forget about the universal (although he cognizes precisely the universal) and concentrate on particular and, it would seem, 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 as the formation of the very ability to engage in science.
(This feature of the leading scientific centers was very well explained by P.L.
Kapitsa. He wrote that the specifics of leadership in science can be compared with 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 ships is small, but the meaning and value of the work of the leading vessel is entirely different." In fact, we can say that the leading science is a different science, primarily concerned with substantiating its own possibility. )
Moreover, as can be seen from the memoirs of many scientists, an extremely important role in the preparation of scientific thinking is played by the atmosphere of informal communication: from quite serious discussions at conferences to completely frivolous
"scientific chatter", cultivating a playful attitude towards science and, thanks to this, making it possible to better realize its "made", and, consequently, the possibility of renewal.
In the leading centers, scientists get used to looking at science as a workshop, where both the simplest devices and the most complex theories play the role of tools. This is what allows Western scientists to deal with their 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 actually given.
(as a certain picture of the world, requiring only some specification), but potentially, as a space of possible applications of their tools-methods.
This fundamental shift of attention from global to methodological problems took place in European science in the 17th century.
(Thus, 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 dispute can be carried on indefinitely), but “only” about how various tools 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, in the period when its cognitive and institutional foundations were already laid and science passed into the stage of evolutionary development. This science, which began to function actively, could be relatively easily copied, but it was extremely difficult to assimilate creatively. As rightly noted
Herzen, Russia had to study European science at a time 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 hindered to a great extent by the fact that its evolutionary nature was often apparent. Very serious changes were constantly going on in it, but unlike, for example, the revolution of Bohr and Einstein, such changes can be noticed (and, more importantly, correctly assessed) only in the course of 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. No less favorable in its potentialities was the surge of empiricism in the natural sciences of the first half of the 19th century, ridiculed by Herzen. Despite the obvious and quite rightly criticized shortcomings not only by philosophers, but also by scientists (an 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 stand out as an independent line of research, which predetermined the rapid development of theoretical physics in the second half of the 19th century.
(Singling out experimental physics (apparent ignorance 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 it was precisely in the course of such discussions used implicit, often unconscious, forms of theoretical analysis..)
Finally, Herzen's calls for science to get out of cramped classrooms "to freedom" and to approach the practical needs of society were fundamentally wrong.
In fact, practitioners should rather have been invited to universities, where research was being carried out at that time, which later made it possible to create electrical engineering, electrochemical and other fundamentally new areas of industry that radically changed the world.
In his essay "Intolerance", the critic A. A. Lebedev wrote that the tragedy of the Narodnaya Volya terrorists consisted primarily in their complete misunderstanding
(and unwillingness to understand) the logic of those profound, 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 did not understand that history was actually eluding them, and they were sliding into by the wayside of the social development of the country they are saving, turning in fact into reactionaries.
Unfortunately, about the same thing that Lebedev said about Andrei Zhelyabov, a half-educated student and somewhat narrow-minded person, can also be said about the well-educated, talented Alexander Herzen. Dreaming of a radical renewal of science and the transformation of society with its help, Herzen could not 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, representing not so much the "seasoned and deep work" of individual researchers, but 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 Narodnaya Volya. These calls only disoriented the youth going into science, forcing them to turn from specialists into "people of life"
(Herzen), "critically thinking personalities" (Lavrov), etc., that is, again and again to go from studying the Copernican revolution to creating revolutionary newspapers.
In memory of Herzen
(ballad about historical lack of sleep)
cruel romance based on the work of the same name by V.I. Lenin
Poems by Naum Korzhavin
Love for the Good to the sons of the nobles burned the heart in dreams,
And Herzen slept, unaware of evil...
But the Decembrists woke up Herzen.
He didn't sleep. That's where everything started.
And, stunned by their bold act,
He raised a terrible peal for the whole world.
What accidentally woke up Chernyshevsky,
Not knowing what he did.
And that one from sleep, having weak nerves,
He began to call Russia to the ax -
What disturbed Zhelyabov's sound sleep,
And that Perovskaya did not let him sleep to his heart's content.
And I immediately wanted to fight with someone,
Go to the people and do not be afraid of raising.
This is how the conspiracy was born in Russia:
A big deal is a long lack of sleep.
The king was killed, but the world did not heal anew.
Zhelyabov fell, fell asleep unsweetened sleep.
But before that he prompted Plekhanov,
To go in a completely different direction.
Everything could be done with time.
Russian life could be drawn into order ...
What bitch woke up Lenin?
Who cares if the baby is sleeping?
There is no exact answer to that question.
Which year we are looking for him in vain ...
Three components - three sources
Nothing is clear to us here.
He began to look for the guilty - but will there be? -
And being awake terribly angry,
He immediately made a revolution for everyone,
So that not a single one escapes punishment.
And with a song they went to Calvary under the banners
Fathers behind him - as in a sweet life ...
May our half-asleep muzzles be forgiven,
We are the children of those who did not sleep their own.
We want to sleep... And we can't get away
From the thirst for sleep and the thirst to judge everyone ...
Ah, the Decembrists!.. Don't wake Herzen!..
You can't wake anyone up in Russia.
GERTSEN 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. In 1834 he was arrested and spent 6 years in exile. Published from 1836 under the pseudonym Iskander. Since 1842 in Moscow, the head of the left wing of the Westerners. In the philosophical works "Amateurism in Science" (1843), "Letters on the Study of Nature" (1845-46), etc., he affirmed the union of philosophy with the natural sciences. He sharply criticized the feudal system in the novel "Who is to blame?" (1841-46), the stories “Doctor Krupov” (1847) and “The Thieving Magpie” (1848). From 1847 in exile. After the defeat of the European revolutions of 1848-49, 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 1853 he founded the Free Russian Printing House in London. In the newspaper "Kolokol" he denounced the Russian autocracy, conducted revolutionary propaganda, demanded the release of the peasants from the 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 "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 // Priroda. 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 the Universe. 1988. No. 4.
3. V. P. A. I. Gur’yanov, “Student of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University,” Tr. IIE. 1953. V. 5. S. 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.
(pseudonym - Iskander) (1812-1870) Russian prose writer and publicist
Herzen's father was I.A. Yakovlev, who belonged to a noble family, his mother was G.L. Haag, the daughter of a petty official from Stuttgart. But the marriage of the parents was not formalized, and the child received a fictitious surname. In the future, Herzen was considered a pupil of Yakovlev.
At the age of 14, Alexander swore to avenge the executed Decembrists. A year later, he repeated this oath with his friend N.P. Ogarev on Sparrow Hills. They dreamed of continuing the work of the Decembrists.
In 1829, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen became a student at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at Moscow University. At that time, the university was distinguished by the spirit of freethinking. Around Herzen and Ogarev like-minded people with pronounced political interests gather.
In 1833, Herzen graduated from the university with a Ph.D. and a silver medal for his essay Analytical Exposition of the Solar System of Copernicus. A year later, Herzen, Ogarev and their friends were arrested. After being imprisoned, "as a bold freethinker, very dangerous to society," he was exiled first to Perm, then to Vyatka, and after the petition of Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky, to Vladimir. Just six months after returning from exile to Moscow and a short service in St. Petersburg, Alexander Herzen was assigned to serve in Novgorod, but in fact it was another exile. These years played an important role in Herzen's spiritual life and tempered his character.
In January 1847, he and his family went abroad, not thinking that he was leaving Russia forever. Alexander Herzen believed in his own strength, in the future, and hoped that the approaching revolution would liberate not only the peoples of Europe, but also his country.
The events of the French Revolution of 1848 and its defeat were reflected by Herzen in the famous book Letters from France and Italy (1847-1852), where the author acts as one of the most witty and profound critics of bourgeois society.
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen became disillusioned with the revolution, lost faith in the revolutionary West, he painfully parted with his illusions and tried to find a way forward. He was sure of only one thing for sure: that man is “not an autocratic master” in history; "the laws of historical development ... do not coincide in their ways with the ways of thought"; it is necessary to deal seriously with history "as a truly objective science."
Ideological disappointment coincided with a family tragedy. In November 1851, Herzen's mother and youngest son died during a shipwreck, and in May 1852, the writer's wife died. "Everything collapsed - the general and the particular, the European revolution and domestic shelter, the freedom of the world and personal happiness", he later wrote. Only faith in his people, in the future of his country saves him from despair. One of the ways of spiritual revival was the work on the book of memoirs "The Past and Thoughts" (1852-1868). Herzen began work on it in London, where he moved after the death of his wife.
The idea of this book and its creative embodiment was subordinated to one of the main tasks - "to conclude an account with personal life ... the rest of the thoughts - to work, the rest of the strength - to fight." In order to understand everything, it was necessary to return to childhood, repeat the “past” in “thoughts” and try to figure out what is true and what is false. In this work, the author combines all types of prose: confession, artistic portraits, diaries, letters, theoretical and journalistic articles. All previous experience of Herzen as a philosopher, novelist and publicist is embodied in this book.
In 1853, Alexander Herzen opened the Free Printing House in London. In 1855, the almanac "Polar Star" began to appear. The writer repeats the name of the edition of K.F. Ryleeva and A.A. Bestuzhev and places profiles of five executed Decembrists on the cover. Radishchev's Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, the forbidden poems of Pushkin, Ryleev, Lermontov, Chaadaev's first Philosophical Letter, Belinsky's letter to Gogol were published here, the works of Herzen and Ogarev and many other materials were printed.
Since 1857, the Kolokol newspaper began to appear, the main task of which was the struggle for the liberation of the peasants. The newspaper existed for almost ten years, Alexander Herzen believed that the "Bell" played a role in the history of the liberation movement in Russia and now it is necessary to develop a revolutionary theory.
In addition to numerous revolutionary, philosophical, theoretical and journalistic works, Herzen created remarkable works of art: the novel “Who is to blame?” (1841-1846), the story "The Thieving Magpie" (1846), the novel "Doctor Krupov" (1847).
In the spring of 1869, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen moved to Paris, but a month later he died. He was buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery, and later his ashes were transferred to Nice and buried next to the grave of his wife.
The significance of Alexander Herzen's work for the development of Russian literature is significantly reflected in the review of the French translation of the book "The Past and Thoughts": "Everything that he does and creates for Russia, at the same time becomes the property of the rest of Europe, and all of Europe with great interest and sympathy looks at the ever-increasing energy of his activity.
