Political Literature Abroad: Herzen, Ogaryoff, Bakunin, Lavróff, Stepniak

One great drawback in Russia has been that no portion of the Slavonian countries has ever obtained political freedom, as did Switzerland or Belgium, so as to offer to Russian political refugees an asylum where they would not feel quite separated from their mother country. Russians, when they have fled from Russia, have had therefore to go to Switzerland or to England, where they have remained, until quite lately, absolute strangers. Even France, with which they had more points of contact, was only occasionally open to them; while the two countries nearest to Russia-Germany and Austria — not being themselves free, remained closed to all political refugees. In consequence, till quite lately political and religious emigration from Russia has been insignificant, and only for a few years in the nineteenth century has political literature published abroad ever exercised a real influence in Russia. This was during the times of Hérzen and his paper The Bell.

HÉRZEN (1812–1870) was born in a rich family at Moscow — his mother, however, being a German — and he was educated in the old-nobility quarter of the “Old Equerries.” A French emigrant, a German tutor, a Russian teacher who was a great lover of freedom, and the rich library of his father, composed of French and German eighteenth century philosophers — these were his education. The reading of the French encyclopaedists left a deep trace in his mind, so that even later on, when he paid, like all his young friends, a tribute to the study of German metaphysics, he never abandoned the concrete ways of thought and the naturalistic turn of mind which he had borrowed from the French eighteenth century philosophers.

He entered the Moscow university in its physical and mathematical department. The French Revolution of 1830 had just produced a deep impression on thinking minds all over Europe; and a circle of young men, which included Hérzen, his intimate friend, the poet Ogaryóff, Pássek, the future explorer of folklore, and several others, came to spend whole nights in reading and discussing political and social matters, especially Saint-Simonism. Under the impression of what they knew about the Decembrists, HÉrzen and Ogaryóff, when they were mere boys, had already taken “the Hannibal oath” of avenging the memory of these forerunners of liberty. The result of these youthful gatherings was that at one of them some song was sung in which there was disrespectful allusion to Nicholas I. This reached the ears of the State police. Night searchings were made at the lodgings of the young men, and all were arrested. Some were sent to Siberia, and the others would have been marched as soldiers to a battalion, like Polezháeff and Shevtchénko, had

it not been for the interference of certain persons in high places. Hérzen was sent to a small town in the Uráls, Vyátka, and remained full six years in exile.

When he was allowed to return to Moscow, in 1840, he found the literary circles entirely under the influence of German philosophy, losing themselves in metaphysical abstractions. “The absolute” of Hegel, his triad-scheme of human progress, and his assertion to the effect that “all that exists is reasonable” were eagerly discussed. This last had brought the Hegelians to maintain that even the despotism of Nicholas I. was “reasonable,” and even the great critic Byelinskly had been smitten with that recognition of the “historical necessity” of absolutism. Hérzen too had, of course, to study Hegel; but this study brought him, as well as his friend MIKHAIL BAKÚNIN (1824–1876), to quite different conclusions. They both acquired a great influence in the circles, and directed their studies toward the history of the struggles for liberty in Western Europe, and to a careful knowledge of the French Socialists, especially Fourier and Pierre Leroux. They then constituted the left wing of “the Westerners,” to which Turguéneff, Kavélin and so many of our writers belonged; while the Slavophiles constituted the right wing which has already been mentioned on a preceding page.

In 1842 Hérzen was exiled once more — this time to Nóvgorod, and only with great difficulties could he obtain permission to go abroad. He left Russia in 1847, never more to return. Bakúnin and Ogaryóff were already abroad, and after a journey to Italy, which was then making heroic efforts to free itself from the Austrian yoke, he soon joined his friends in Paris, which was then on the eve of the Revolution Of 1848.

He lived through the youthful enthusiasm of the movement which embraced all Europe in the spring of 1848, and he also lived through all the subsequent disappointments and the massacre of the Paris proletarians during the terrible days of June. The quarter where he and Turguéneff stayed at that time was surrounded by a chain of police-agents who knew them both personally, and they could only rage in their rooms as they heard the volleys of rifle-shots, announcing that the vanquished workingmen who had been taken prisoners were being shot in batches by the triumphing bourgeoisie. Both have left most striking descriptions of those days — Hérzen’s June Days being one of the best pieces of Russian literature.

Deep despair took hold of Hérzen when all the hopes raised by the revolution had so rapidly come to nought and a fearful reaction had spread all over Europe, re-establishing Austrian rule over Italy and Hungary, paving the way for Napoleon III. at Paris, and sweeping away everywhere the very traces of a wide-spread Socialistic movement. Hérzen then felt a deep despair as regards Western civilisation altogether, and expressed it in most moving pages, in his book From the other Shore. It is a cry of despair — the cry of a prophetic politician in the voice of a great poet.

Later on Hérzen founded, at Paris, with Proudhon, a paper, L’Ami du Peuple, of which almost every number was confiscated by the police of Napoleon the Third. The paper could not live, and Hérzen himself was soon expelled from France. He was naturalised in Switzerland, and finally, after the tragic loss of his mother and his son in a shipwreck, he definitely settled at London in 1857. Here the first leaf of a free Russian Press was printed that same year, and very soon Hérzen became one of the strongest influences in Russia. He started first a review, the name of which, The Polar Star, was a remembrance of the almanack published under this name by Ryléeff (see Ch. 1.) ; and in this review he published, besides political articles and most valuable material concerning the recent history of Russia, his admirable memoirs — Past Facts and Thoughts.

Apart from the historical value of these memoirs — Hérzen knew all the historical personages of his time — they certainly are one of the best pieces of poetical literature in any language. The descriptions of men and events which they contain, beginning with Russia in the forties and ending with the years of exile, reveal at every step an extraordinary, philosophical intelligence; a profoundly sarcastic mind, combined with a great deal of good-natured humour; a deep hatred of oppressors and a deep personal love for the simple-hearted heroes of human emancipation. At the same time these memoirs contain such fine, poetical scenes from the author’s personal life, as his love of Nathalie — later his wife — or such deeply impressive chapters as Oceano Nox, where he tells about the loss of his son and mother. One chapter of these memoirs remains still unpublished, and from what Turguéneff told me about it, it must be of the highest beauty. “No one has ever written like him,” Turguéneff said: “it is all written in tears and blood.”

A paper, The Bell, soon followed the Polar Star, and it was through this paper that the influence of Hérzen became a real power in Russia. It appears now, from the lately published correspondence between Turguéneff and Hérzen, that the great novelist took a very lively part in The Bell. It was he who supplied his friend Hérzen with the most interesting material and gave him hints as to what attitude he should take upon this or that subject.

These were, of course, the years when Russia was on the eve of the abolition of serfdom and of a thorough reform of most of the antiquated institutions of Nicholas I., and when everyone took interest in public affairs. Numbers of memoirs upon the questions of the day were addressed to the Tsar by private persons, or simply circulated in private, in MS.; and Turguéneff would get hold of them, and they would be discussed in The Bell. At the same time The Bell was revealing such facts of mal-administration as it was impossible to bring to public knowledge in Russia itself, while the leading articles were written by Hérzen with a force, an inner warmth, and a beauty of form which are seldom found in political literature. I know of no West European writer with whom I should be able to compare Hérzen. The Bell was smuggled into Russia in large quantities and could be found everywhere. Even Alexander II. and the Empress Marie were among its regular readers.

Two years after serfdom had been abolished, and while all sorts of urgently needed reforms were still under discussion — that is, in 1863 — began, as is known, the uprising of Poland; and this uprising, crushed in blood and on the gallows, brought the liberation movement in Russia to a complete end. Reaction got the upper hand; and the popularity of Hérzen, who had supported the Poles, was necessarily gone. The Bell was read no more in Russia, and the efforts of Hérzen to continue it in French brought no results. A new generation came then to the front — the generation of Bazároff and of “the populists,” whom Hérzen did not understand from the outset, although they were his own intellectual sons and daughters, dressed now in a new, more democratic and realistic garb. He died in isolation in Switzerland, in 1870.

The works of Hérzen, even now, are not allowed to be circulated in Russia, and they are not sufficiently known to the younger generation. It is certain, however, that when the time comes for them to be read again Russians will discover in Hérzen a very profound thinker, whose sympathies were entirely with the working classes, who understood the forms of human development in all their complexity, and who wrote in a style of unequalled beauty — the best proof that his ideas had been thought out in detail and under a variety of aspects.

Before he had emigrated and founded a free press at London, Hérzen had written in Russian reviews under the name of ISKANDER, treating various subjects, such as Western politics, socialism, the philosophy of natural sciences, art, and so on. He also wrote a novel, Whose Fault is it? which is often spoken of in the history of the development of intellectual types in Russia. The hero of this novel, Béltoff, is a direct descendant from Lérmontoff’s Petchórin, and occupies an intermediate position between him and the heroes of Turguéneff.

The work of the poet OGARYÓFF (1813–1877) was not very large, and his intimate friend, Hérzen, who was a great master in personal characteristics, could say of him that his chief life-work was the working out of such an ideal personality as he was himself. His private life was most unhappy, but his influence upon his friends was very great. He was a thorough lover of freedom, who, before he left Russia, set free his ten thousand serfs, surrendering all the land to them, and who, throughout all his life abroad remained true to the ideals of equality and freedom which he had cherished in his youth. Personally, he was the gentlest imaginable of men, and a note of resignation, in the sense of Schiller’s, sounds throughout his poetry, amongst which fierce poems of revolt and of masculine energy are few.

As to MIKHAIL BAKÚNIN (1824–1876), the other great friend of Hérzen, his work belongs chiefly to the International Working Men’s Association, and hardly can find a place in a sketch of Russian literature; but his personal influence on some of the prominent writers of Russia was very great. Suffice it to say that Byelínskiy distinctly acknowledged in his letters that Bakúnin was his “intellectual father,” and that it was in fact he who infused the Moscow circle, of which I have just spoken, and the St. Petersburg literary circles with socialistic ideas. He was the typical revolutionist, whom nobody could approach without being inspired by a revolutionary fire. Besides, if advanced thought in Russia has always remained true to the cause of the different nationalities — Polish, Finnish, Little Russian, Caucasian — oppressed by Russian tsardom, or by Austria, it owes this to a very great extent to Ogaryóff and Bakúnin. In the international labour movement Bakúnin became the soul of the left wing of the great Working Men’s Association, and he was the founder of modern Anarchism, or anti-State Socialism, of which he laid down the foundations upon his wide historical and philosophical knowledge.

Finally I must mention among the Russian political writers abroad, PETER LAVRÓFF (1823–1901). He was a mathematician and a philosopher who represented, under the name of “anthropologism,” a reconciliation of modern natural science materialism with Kantianism. He was a colonel of artillery, a professor of mathematics, and a member of the St. Petersburg newly-formed municipal government, when he was arrested and exiled to a small town in the Uráls. One of the young Socialist circles kidnapped him from there and shipped him off to London, where he began to publish in the year 1874 the Socialist review Forward. Lavró was an extremely learned encyclopaedist who made his reputation by his Mechanical Theory of the Universe and by the first chapters of a very exhaustive history of mathematical sciences. His later work, History of Modern Thought, of which unfortunately only the four or five introductory volumes have been published, would certainly have been an important contribution to evolutionist philosophy, if it had been completed. In the socialist movement he belonged to the social-democratic wing, but was too widely learned and too much of a philosopher to join the German social-democrats in their ideals of a centralised communistic State, or in their narrow interpretation of history, However, the work of Lavróff which gave him the greatest notoriety and best expressed his own personality was a small work, Historical Letters, which he published in Russia under the pseudonym of MÍRTOFF and which can now be read in a French translation. This little work appeared at the right moment — just when our youth, in the years 1870–73, were endeavouring to find a new programme of action amongst the people. Lavróff stands out in it as a preacher of activity amongst the people, speaking to the educated youth of their indebtedness to the people, and of their duty to repay the debt which they had contracted towards the poorer classes during the years they had passed in the universities — all this, developed with a profusion of historical hints, of philosophical deductions, and of practical advice. These letters had a deep influence upon our youth. The ideas which Lavróff preached in 1870 he confirmed by all his subsequent life. He lived to the age of 82, and passed all his life in strict conformity with his ideal, occupying at Paris two small rooms, limiting his daily expenses for food to a ridiculously small amount, earning his living by his pen, and giving all his time to the spreading of the ideas which were so dear to him.

NICHOLAS TURGUÉNEFF (1789–1871) was a remarkable political writer, who belonged to two different epochs. In 1818 he published in Russia a Theory of Taxation — a book, quite striking for its time and country, as it contained the development of the liberal economical ideas of Adam Smith; and he was already beginning to work for the abolition of serfdom. He made a practical attempt by partly freeing his own serfs, and wrote on this subject several memoirs for the use of Emperor Alexander I. He also worked for constitutional rule, and soon became one of the most influential members of the secret society of the Decembrists; but he was abroad in December, 1825, and therefore escaped being executed with his friends. After that time N. Turguéneff remained in exile, chiefly at Paris, and in 1857, when an amnesty was granted to the Decembrists, and he was allowed to return to Russia, he did so for a few weeks only.

He took, however, a lively part in the emancipation of the serfs, which he had preached since 1818 and which he had discussed also in his large work, La Russie et les Russes, published in Paris in 1847. Now he devoted to this subject several papers in The Bell and several pamphlets. He continued at the same time to advocate the convocation of a General Representative Assembly, the development of provincial self-government, and other urgent reforms. He died at Paris in 1871, after having had the happiness which had come to few Decembrists — that of taking, towards the end of his days, a practical part in the realisation of one of the dreams of his youth, for which so many of our noblest men had given their lives.

I pass over in silence several other writers, like PRINCE DOLGORÚKIY, and especially a number of Polish writers, who emigrated from Russia for the sake of free speech.

I omit also quite a number of socialistic and constitutional papers and reviews which have been published in Switzerland or in England during the last twenty years, and will only mention, and that only in a few words, my friend STEPNIAK (1852–1897). His writings were chiefly in English, but now that they are translated into Russian they will certainly win for him an honourable place in the history of Russian literature. His two novels, The Career of a Nihilist (Andréi Kozhuhóff in Russian) and The Stundist Pável Rudénko, as also his earlier sketches, Underground Russia, revealed his remarkable literary talent, but a stupid railway accident put an end to his young life, so rich in vigour and thought and so full of promises. It must also be mentioned that the greatest Russian writer of our own time, LEO TOLSTÓY, cannot have many of his works printed in Russia, and that therefore his friend, V. TCHERTKÓFF, has started in England a regular publishing office, both for publishing Tolstóy’s works and for bringing to light the religious movements which are going on now in Russia, and the prosecutions directed against them by the Government.