BOOKS
ALEXANDER HERZEN
ALEXANDER HERZEN AND THE BIRTH OF RUSSIAN SOCIALISM,
1812-1855. By Mortin Molio. Horvord University Press. $10.00.
Alexander Herzen is certainly the most sympathetic and in–
teresting figure among the leaders of Russian radicalism in the early
nineteenth century, and the only one whose writings have more than a
local or historical interest in connection with the revolutionary move–
ment. Belinsky's literary criticism makes no important contribution to its
field, though his work had undeniable importance in stimulating concern
with intellectual and cultural problems in Russia; nor do Bakunin's
tirades and dialectical sleights of hand give us any new insights into
anything except the vagaries of his temperament. And the same is true of
the next succeeding generation of the Russian radicals of the 'sixties.
Their leaders Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov were incredibly hard–
working publicists who turned out an immense amount of copy (includ–
ing poetry and novels); but nothing that they wrote on a vast variety
of subjects transcends in value the propaganda limits of their time and
place. Herzen is the only true radical whose work is entitled to a place
alongside that of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists. And his
most important book, the autobiography
My Past and Thoughts,
is per–
haps the greatest work of its kind published anywhere in the nineteenth
century, ranking with Rousseau's
Confessions
and
~ethe's
Dichtung und
Wahrheit
as both the picture of a life and a time.
In view of Herzen's importance, and the growing interest in
Russian culture in general, the appearance of Professor Martin Malia's
solid, penetrating and extremely thoughtful book on Herzen can
only be welcomed with pleasure. There is a vast amount of literature on
Herzen in Russian and one very good book in French; but the only
previous work in English was E. H. Carr's
The Romantic Exiles–
primarily a depiction of the romantic imbroglios of Herzen's private
life in exile, which only lightly sketches in the intellectual and political
background. It is all the more to be regretted that Professor Malia did not
give us a full-length study of Herzen, but chose to cut off his account
with 1855 (actually he ends in 1848, and fills in the rest of the period
