The Discovery of Chance: the Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen

660 Pages·2016·4.81 MB·English

by  Aileen Kelly

The Discovery of Chance
The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen
Aileen M. Kelly
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS • LONDON, ENGLAND
2016
Copyright © 2016 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved
Jacket credit: Russian photographer (19th century)/Private Collection/© Look and Learn/Elgar
Collection/Bridgeman Images Jacket design: Annamarie McMahon Why 978-0-674-73711-2 (alk. paper)
978-0-674-96941-4 (EPUB)
978-0-674-96942-1 (MOBI)
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Kelly, Aileen, author.
Title: The discovery of chance : the life and thought of Alexander Herzen /
Aileen M. Kelly.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015038959
Subjects: LCSH: Herzen, Aleksandr, 1812–1870. |
Intellectuals—Russia—Biography. | Russia—Intellectual life—1801–1917.
Classification: LCC DK209.6.H4 K445 2016 | DDC 947/.07092—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038959
To the memory of Isaiah Berlin
О сколько нам открытий чудных
готовят просвещенья дух
И опыт, сын ошибок трудных, И гений, парадоксов друг
И случай, бог изобретатель.
O, how many and marvelous are the discoveries prepared for us by the spirit of
enlightenment, by Experiment, the child of painful error, by Genius, the friend of paradox,
and by the divine inventor, Chance.
PUSHKIN
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Who Was Herzen?
2. Russia and the Romantic Revolution
3. A Romantic Youth
4. A Revolution in Science
5. Science and History
6. An Education in Method
7. Science and Saint-Simonism
8. Prison and Exile
9. Awakening
10. The Discovery of Chance
11. From Bacon to Feuerbach: Nature and Time
12. Man in the Middle
13. A Conservative Revolution
14. A Glowing Footprint: Herzen and Proudhon
15. Toward Another Shore
16. View from the Other Shore
17. The Living Truth
18. In Defense of Inconsistency
19. What Is History?
20. The Polish Uprising
21. True Nihilism
22. The Last Years
Epilogue
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
Acknowledgments
I am greatly indebted to the Leverhulme Foundation for the award of a Major
Research Fellowship, which gave me the necessary freedom to study fully the
scientific background to Herzen’s thought while I was reconsidering and
reorganizing the contents and intellectual structure of the whole project. Without
this support, the book could never have taken its present form.
The initial inspiration for this book and its early evolution would have been
impossible without the example and influence of Isaiah Berlin, whose unique
empathy and generosity of spirit were always extended with equal prodigality to
past thinkers who resisted simple labeling and to the students, even those like me
with no claim on his time, who were fortunate enough to cross his path.
My work has benefited hugely from Professor John Campbell’s cultural
horizons—seemingly boundless—which embrace equally the sciences and the
arts, and from his encyclopedic memory in all the languages of the project and
others around its edges, together with his permanent skepticism about the virtues
of grand historical theories. He has added unexpected insights in many places,
and his ordered mind has had restraining and generally constructive effects on
any of my tendencies toward disorder. His sometimes indelicate but never
inappropriate humor has also been invaluable. Finally, I believe the book has
gained from one repeated piece of his advice, which I have always tried to
follow: “However serious the work is, don’t forget to have fun.”
Tracing my interest in Herzen back through a prior interest in Russian to the
origins of both interests, I should acknowledge the earliest help I received: from
the various nuns in my convent boarding school who never thought to inspect
what the students brought with them to the numerous services they were required
to attend. This made it possible for me to write lists of Russian vocabulary on
sheets of light airmail paper, insert them between the pages of my prayer book,
and then study the book intensively—one might almost say religiously—during
the services. It would have been a new kind of challenge to my undergraduate
teachers a few years later, to handle a student who had arrived with an excellent
Russian vocabulary but almost no grammar.
Although I was literally immersed in the Russian milieu during my two years
as a research student in Leningrad, my true immersion in the best of Russian
culture of all periods came from two individuals who became firm friends with
me there at that time: Valentina Dmitrievna and Anatolii Lvovich Guterman. I
owe more than I can say to them both, and regret that this book came far too late
for me to show them the ultimate result of their educational effects and their
friendship.
The last months of my efforts in the production of the book have been made
much easier by the professional efficiency of my editor, Ian Malcolm, and his
enthusiasm for the project. “Service well beyond the call of duty” comes to
mind.
Some of the detailed arguments made in Chapters 16, 18, and 19 of this book
were first presented in two books I had the privilege to publish with Yale
University Press. Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers between Necessity
and Chance was released in 1998 and Views from the Other Shore: Essays on
Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin appeared in 1999.
All translations in the present book are mine unless otherwise indicated.
[ CHAPTER ONE ]
Who Was Herzen?
Herzen awaits his readers in the future. Far above the heads of the present crowd, he
transmits his thoughts to those who will be able to comprehend them.
L. N. TOLSTOY, DIARY ENTRY OF 12 OCTOBER 1905
HE has been described more than once as a Russian Voltaire. Nietzsche wrote of
his readiness to credit “such a noble-spirited and tenacious soul” with “every gift
of distinction”; Tolstoy declared that he had never met anyone with “so rare a
combination of scintillating brilliance and depth.”1 On his death the historian
Jules Michelet wrote that the voice of millions had been silenced.2
Philosopher, novelist, essayist, publicist, and political agitator, Alexander
Ivanovich Herzen was one of the most talented and complex figures of his time.
The first socialist in Russian history, he played a crucial role in the assimilation
of Western ideas into Russian thought. As a political émigré in Europe, he is
acknowledged as having single-handedly created Russian public opinion by
providing his native country with its first uncensored news organ, smuggled into
Russia from his Free Russian Press in London: the celebrated periodical The
Bell. In the West, his fame rivaled that of the great Russian novelists who were
his contemporaries. An engaged observer of the 1848 revolution in France, he
was admired by some of the most eminent members of Europe’s progressive
elite. His friends and collaborators included Garibaldi, Mazzini, Michelet, Louis
Blanc, Proudhon, Victor Hugo, and Thomas Carlyle. His political writings,
infused with moral passion and a fiery imagination, have all the vitality of the
spoken word. His monumental memoirs, the work of an uncommonly perceptive