Detail of a portrait of Alexander Herzen, painted by Nikolai Ge
It wasn’t easy for me to be an anti-war activist in the 1960s when I was also, like most students of Russian culture, an anti-Marxist. I identified one kindred soul in George Orwell and another in Russia’s greatest autobiographer, Alexander Herzen (1812–70). Given to revolutionary rhetoric, Herzen was also a natural debunker. In Tom Stoppard’s drama about Russian intellectuals, The Coast of Utopia, Turgenev tells Herzen that in the bright new world to come “you could be Minister of Paradox, with special responsibility for Irony.” Ironic radicalism appeals to idealists unwilling, or not yet ready, to face unpleasant realities. Liberals who apologize for illiberal ideologues and socialists who still value individual dignity have found in Herzen a source of inspiration.
Often called “the first Russian socialist,” Herzen has been claimed by communists and anti-communists, radicals and liberals, passionate believers and extreme skeptics. On a visit to the Herzen Institute in Leningrad, the waggish professor who taught me Russian history teased the guide watching over him by expressing surprise that a Soviet academic establishment had been named for an imperial spy. When the guide fumed, “What capitalist pig defamed Herzen like that?,” he answered “Karl Marx,” and showed him the precise passage. Herzen and Marx utterly despised each other, personally as well as ideologically.
Oddly enough, the different camps praising Herzen as one of their own are all correct, if only partially so, in
