A Nation Astray: Nomadism and National Identity in Russian Literature

Chapter Five: A Radical at Large: Alexander Herzen and the Autobiography of a Russian Wanderer

C H A P T e R F I v e A Radical at Large Alexander Herzen and the Autobiography of a Russian wanderer In the month of July, 1834, I finished the student years of my life and began my years of wandering. —Alexander Herzen He became in fact what in spirit he had been since the great trek from Moscow in January 1847—a wanderer on the face of the earth. —e. H. Carr The Bedouin has his own soil, his own tent, he has his own way of life.… The Russian is poorer than the Bedouin… he has nothing with which he might be reconciled, which would comfort him. Perhaps the germ of his revolutionary calling lies here. —Alexander Herzen Prevented by his liberal political views and critical attitude toward the government from being “at home” in the repressive Russia of Nicholas I, the noted Russian socialist thinker and writer Alexander Herzen spent most of his adult life abroad. From 1847 until his death twenty-three years later, he moved A Radical at Large 145 between switzerland, France, Italy, and england without making a permanent home in any country. Although he lived in London for the longest period (1852–1865), england never acquired the status of home: Herzen famously described the english as an “alien race,” and he and various family members lived in fifteen different houses in and around London during the twelve years he spent there.1 Given the unusually peripatetic nature of Herzen’s adult life, it is hardly surprising that his great autobiographical work My Past and Thoughts (Byloe i dumy, 1852–1867) reflects the itinerancy of his life as a Russian exile in midnineteenth century europe. Herzen’s identification as a Russian wanderer and his engagement with the complex discourse of nomadic Russian wandering is, however, a crucial, yet underexplored, component of his literary legacy, and it is one that plays a central role in My Past and Thoughts. Herzen’s life encompassed both internal exile and voluntary exile to the west; in part because of this, he has been received as a representative, even emblematic, figure for the generation of rootless, radicalized Russian intellectuals of the 1830s and 40s, men and women who were defined by their opposition to tsarist autocracy and by their disaffection, or disinheritance, from the Russian state. This disaffection was played out in terms of real and symbolic displacement, topoi of the nineteenthcentury Russian intelligentsia experience that were given voice perhaps most strikingly in My Past and Thoughts. In this chapter, I examine the centrality of the metaphor of nomadic wandering to My Past and Thoughts and consider how the discourse of Russian nomadism is developed in new and powerful ways in this text and elsewhere in Herzen’s work. As this chapter will show, “Herzen,” the central character of My Past and Thoughts, embodies the image of a homeless and rootless Russian wanderer, driven astray by the politically restrictive and culturally alienating forces of his own society in a special way. The essentially Romantic interpretation of Russian national identity as nomadic, key to the work of Pushkin, Chaadaev, Goncharov, and Dostoevsky, forms the organizing principle of Herzen’s explicit self-presentation in My Past and Thoughts as a radical wanderer. This principle shapes the text on a structural level, where it forms the basis for meta-concerns with the character of memory and consciousness as themselves phenomena of indeterminacy and digression, and with the question of the nature of history and history’s trajectory. on the narrative level, motifs of wandering, homelessness, travel, and exile are manifested in Herzen’s portrayal of his family circumstances and in the representation of his life as a series of journeys. Yet, in an important divergence from the authors discussed in earlier chapters, the discourse of Russian nomadism in Herzen’s work is significantly redirected. Russians’ perceived lack of history and of attachment to national space is now configured as the source 146 A N A T I o N A s T R A Y of political radicalism and revolutionary potential, rather than as the markers of profound lacunae in the Russian national psyche. In My Past and Thoughts and other key texts, notably From the Other Shore (1850) and Letters from France and Italy (1852), the image of an eternal Russian wanderer or nomad comes to embody, in positive terms, the notions of change, upheaval, and...