Ringing the Bell: Editor-Reader Dialogue in Alexander Herzen's Kolokol

The first Russian-language press in exile was established by Alexander Herzen. ¹ A later émigré journalist, V. I. Lenin, while rejecting Herzen's aristocratic background and political views, managed a degree of approbation on the centenary of his birth, noting that the establishment of the Vol'noe russkoe tipografii, or Free Russian Press, in 1855 broke the "slavish silence" of the Russian press. ² Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was born in 1812, the illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, Ivan Iakovlev, and was evacuated from Moscow during the French occupation at the age of six months. Although he was given the usual upbringing for boys of his estate, he was to some extent an "outsider" from birth, and later claimed that he had harbored revolutionary convictions from boyhood: the company of his father's domestic serfs "awakened in me from my earliest years an invincible hatred for every form of slavery and every form of tyranny." ³ The Decembrist revolt of 1825 aroused his interest in politics, strength- ened by his friendship with his distant cousin Nikolai Ogarev: together they swore "to devote our lives to the struggle we had undertaken." ⁴ As a student, Herzen participated in the academic and intellectual life of Moscow, and the discussion circle of which he and Ogarev were members drew up detailed but abortive plans for their own journal. ⁵ Herzen and other members of the circle were arrested in 1834, and it was another eight years, after two periods of internal exile, before he participated again in Moscow's intellectual life, then dominated by the increasingly acrimonious debates between the so-called Slavophiles, with their messianic view of the destiny of Russia, and the "Westernizers," who looked to western Europe for inspiration. Although not completely divorced from the former, he became a leading figure in the latter group. ⁶

Herzen soon retired from compulsory government service, and a few months after his father's death in 1846 he and his wife, Natalie, obtained permission to travel abroad for six months, together with their children and his mother, ostensibly for the sake of Natalie's health. They left Russia in January 1847 and never returned. They traveled through Germany to Paris, and later on into Italy, enthusiastic witnesses of the uprisings of 1848, before returning to Paris. Although disillusioned with Europe in the wake of the failure of the 1848 revolutions, in September 1850 Herzen burned his boats by rejecting a formal request to return to Russia immediately and became a Swiss citizen attached to the canton of Fribourg the following year. ⁷ Unlike many political émigrés, he managed to avoid impoverish-ment: with the help of his bankers, the Paris branch of the Rothschild family, he was able to transfer the bulk of his considerable assets out of the Russian Empire. Later in 1850, while living in Nice, his mother, his second son, and the son's tutor died when a ferry sank. Early in 1852 Natalie, after the revelation of her passionate affair with the German radical poet Georg Herwegh, died after giving birth to a child who only survived a few hours.

It was in the wake of this series of personal blows that Herzen moved to London in August 1852, planning only a short stay; "but little by little I began to perceive that I had absolutely nowhere to go and no reason to go anywhere." He wrote: "I was so completely cut off in a foreign land; I had at all costs to get into communication with my own people; I wanted to tell them of the weight that lay on my heart. Letters were not allowed in, but books would get through of themselves; writing letters was impossible: I would print." ⁸ As early as May 1849 while he was in Paris, Herzen had written that he considered "free Russian speech" necessary: "however weak it might be at the first attempt, it will have...