A Herzen Reader

5. A Letter to Emperor Alexander the Second [1855]

An Announcement About The Polestar 41 We have already secured these two articles for our first volume. Besides these we will print excerpts from Past and Thoughts, an analysis of Michelet ’s La Renaissance, and tutti frutti—all and sundry. Richmond (Surrey) March 25 (April 6), 1855 Notes Source: “Ob”iavlenie o ‘Poliarnoi zvezde’ 1855,” 1855; 12:265–71, 536–38. 1. Prince Ivan F. Paskevich-Yerevansky (1782–1856), a general and field marshal who commanded the Russian army in campaign against Hungarian revolutionaries in 1848. 2. The Petrashevsky circle, organized by Mikhail V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky (1821– 1866), read and discussed progressive literature, especially the French utopian socialists , and evidently included a secret inner core of proto-revolutionaries. Its members were arrested in 1849, in the wake of the European revolutionary activities, and a number of them, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, received sentences of prison and exile in Siberia. 3. Vladimir F. Adlerberg (1791–1859) was a general and minister at court, enjoying the special confidence of Nicholas I and Alexander II; Alexander A. Suvorov (1804–1882) was a grandson of the great general and close to Decembrist circles, as a result of which he was sent to the Caucasus, later serving as governor-general in the Baltic provinces. 4. Herzen has in mind work carried out for Alexander I by Mikhail Speransky. The relevant political essays by N. M. Karamzin were written on his own initiative. 5. Minin, a commoner, and Pozharsky, an aristocrat, are credited with leading the forces that liberated Russia in 1612.  5  The Polestar, Bk. I, 1855. Exiled to the Russian interior, Herzen met Alexander Nikolaevich Romanov when the heir to the throne traveled throughout the empire to get to know more about his future subjects. A few years later, still under the spell of this meeting , Herzen admitted that his idée fixe was to serve in the grand duke’s suite, even if it were as a lowly librarian, preferring that to a much higher-ranking ministerial position (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 22:85). This is the first of Herzen’s open letters to the new tsar. The verses come from Ryleev’s poem “The Vision: An Ode on the Name-Day of His Imperial Highness Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich, August 30, 1823.” Herzen refers to the fact that when Ryleev wrote this poem, it was believed that the next tsar would likely be Konstantin Pavlovich and not his younger brother Nicholas. As heir, Alexander II’s tutor was the poet Vasily Zhukovsky. Herzen was mistaken about the easing of the conditions of the Decembrists’ exile, which took place three years later, in 1837. The liberals Kavelin and Chicherin found this letter more reasonable than many of Herzen’s statements, and others went so far as to call it a noble deed (podvig), but the act 42 A Herzen Reader of writing to the tsar was controversial across the political spectrum. Always willing to entertain other opinions, Herzen later published the objections he received to this document (Ulam, Ideologies and Illusions, 37). A member of the State Senate, K. N. Lebedev, wrote in his diary that the letter brought to mind the early stages of the French Revolution , when the National Assembly received impertinent letters from those who suddenly felt themselves equal in dignity to the government. Lebedev wondered whether the socialist Herzen knew what he really wanted, and whether he had active partners to help realize his agenda (Let 2:237, 268–73). Adam Ulam noted the “fantastic” quality of Russian politics in the late 1850s and early 1860s, when “the most radical people were never very far from petitioning or eulogizing the Tsar for this or that reform” (Ideologies and Illusions, 36). Shortly after Herzen’s death in 1870, an anonymous pamphlet (“A Few Words from a Russian to Other Russians”), possibly by V. A. Zaitsev, appeared abroad. Its author stressed the restraint and tact employed by Herzen in addressing those in whose hands lay the fate of the Russian people. “He did not disdain writing to the inhabitants of the Winter Palace, and there was a time when he was read even there—if only because it was the ‘fashion’—and his words did not go to waste.” But, the author laments, it was not yet an age when people like Herzen, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov could exercise a sustained influence. “In our North these are bright meteors, and the Polestar, which hid behind the clouds during the reign of Nicholas...