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in one concluding chapter). Professor Malia, as his title indicates, is
interested in the birth of "Russian Socialism" of which HeIozen was the
progenitor; and he terminates his book at the point where Herzen's basic
ideas on this issue were essentially hammered out.
Nonetheless, nothing can give us more insight into the tragic
antinomies of Russian culture than Herzen's conflict with the radicals
of the next generation, as reflected in parts of
My
Past and Thoughts
and in later writings like
L etters to an Old Comrade
(Bakunin). This
conflict forms the background for such a work as Dostoevsky's
The Devils,
which was inspired by exactly the same events-the Nechaev conspiracy–
as
Letters to an Old Comrade;
and Professor Malia would have per–
formed a great service by undertaking as dense an account of Herzen's
intellectual evolution in his later years as he does of the earlier. How–
ever that may
be,
one certainly cannot complain of the quality of the
fare offered in the period that Professor Malia has chosen to cover. He
is admirably versed not only in the Russian material, but also in the
early history of Socialism, the rise of nationalism, and, what is rarer,
in the speculative intricacies of German idealism. He writes vigorously
and well, and sometimes with genuine eloquence. His book is certainly
one of the fullest and most reliable pictures available in English of
Russian cultural history during the crucial first half of the nineteenth
century.
The intellectual evolution of Herzen, with some slight variations, is
essentially that of the whole generation of the 'forties in Russia. Born
the illegitimate son of a wealthy Russian aristocrat, Herzen was nourish–
ed on the dramas of Schiller, with their pathos of freedom, and on the
cry for liberty that rings out in some of the poetry of Pushkin as well
as in that of the Decembrists who unsuccessfully tried to wrest a con–
stitution from Nicholas I when he ascended the throne in 1825. Herzen
and his friend Nicholas Ogarev swore their famous oath on the Sparrow
Hills outside Moscow in 1827 or 1828, when they were still in their early
teens; they pledged to dedicate their lives to fighting tyranny and to
sacrifice their existence for the good of mankind. All this was very
juvenile, romantic,
exalte;
but they remained true to their word, and
this adolescent oath turned out to be a crucial moment in Russian history.
At Moscow University, then a little oasis of light and learning in
the midst of the general desolation, Herzen imbibed the prevalent
Schellingian idealism smuggled in by professors in the faculty of science.
Even at this early period, however, Herzen was the center of a circle
interested in the new French Socialism of Saint-Simon and his school.
Herzen's socio-political interests were temporarily submerged by a period
