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22. VERY DANGEROUS!!! [1859]
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90 A Herzen Reader 22 The Bell, No. 44, June 1, 1859. The title of the article below was written in capital letters and in English. This is the first detailed polemic against attempts made between 1857 and 1859 in The Contemporary and other Russian journals to discredit—in coded language —the journalism of exposure and denunciation, and to reevaluate the historical and socio-literary significance of the Nicholaevan era’s “superfluous people,” signaling that the time had come for action (Walicki, Slavophile Controversy, 452, 460). Herzen believed that the attacks on his journalism “served the interest of the most reactionary part of the tsarist bureaucracy, and that the young radicals might live to be decorated by the government” (Ulam, Ideologies and Illusions, 25). Natan Eidelman devoted many pages of analysis to this “family” quarrel, which pitched a more radical message inserted between the lines against a more moderate, but openly expressed, stance (Eidel’man, Svobodnoe slovo, 258–59, 271, 295, 308–15). In several issues of The Contemporary, both before and after the appearance of “VERY DANGEROUS!!!” Dobrolyubov attacked pustozvonstvo (“idle talk,” literally “empty ringing ,” a reference to The Bell), and claimed that unmasking particular abuses without criticizing the entire structure simply deflected attention from the main battle; he intimated that only the younger generation could effectively serve humanity (Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:48–112). In answer to this article, “Last Year’s Literary Trifles,” and to criticism from conservative literary figures in The Library for Reading (where Herzen had read Pisemsky’s A Thousand Souls) and Fatherland Notes (where he read Goncharov’s Oblomov), Herzen boldly reaffirmed the power of his targeted laughter. After Nekrasov heard in his St. Petersburg club of the attacks contained in “VERY DANGEROUS!!!” and its inference that The Contemporary had been “bought,” he and Dobrolyubov considered traveling to London to demand that Herzen retract his remarks, and, in Nekrasov’s case, to possibly challenge him to a duel (Let 3:48). In the end it was Chernyshevsky who made the trip, meeting with Herzen in late June–early July 1859. He commented afterward that while the trip was not made in vain, it would have been tedious to prolong the debate (Let 3:55). Letters and reminiscences from that period indicate that there was great curiosity about what the two men said to each other (Let 3:58). According to a prison memoir by S. G. Stakhevich, in 1869 Chernyshevsky claimed that his message to Herzen was that the accusations in The Bell helped the government better exercise control over local officials, while leaving the state structure intact. “But the essence of the matter is in the state structure, and not in the agents” (Evgen’ev-Maksimov, Sovremennik, 388–91; Woehrlin, Chernyshevskii, 254). In his 1860 article “The Superfluous and the Jaundiced” (included in the four-volume version of My Past and Thoughts), Herzen to some extent agreed with this criticism of expository journalism. VERY DANGEROUS!!! [1859] Recently a pernicious current has begun to waft through our journalism, some kind of corrupted thinking which we do not accept as an expression VERY DANGEROUS!!! 91 of public opinion but as something inspired by the censorship’s ruling and edifying triumvirate.1 Pure men of letters, people of sound and form, are tired of the civic direction in our literature; it has begun to offend them that so much is written about bribes and open discussion and there are so few Oblomovs and anthologized poems. If only the Oblomov that exists were not so completely boring one could forgive them their opinion. People are not to blame when they have no sympathy for the life around them that is breaking through and rushing ahead, and, realizing their frightening position, begin, let us say, to speak about it, however incoherently. In Germany we saw all sorts of Jean-Pauls, who, in light of the revolution and reaction, were overwhelmed, and composed lexicons or tales of the fantastic.2 Here, however, things have taken a further turn. The journals that have built a pedestal of their noble indignation and almost a profession of their gloomy sympathy with those who suffer, split their sides laughing at investigative journalism and at unsuccessful attempts at open discussion. And this did not happen by accident; they set up a big booth to hiss at the first attempts of free speech in a literature whose hair has not yet grown back since its recent imprisonment...