serfs to fashions and hairdos, everything was subject to debate. Suddenly, there was talk of the “new man.”
While Russia was backward, the Russian elite was in the avant-garde when it came to navel gazing and sophisticated emotions. While millions of Russian serfs lived under medieval laws, a handful of refined minds experimented with new relations between the sexes and the “emancipation of the flesh.”
Russia had no real bourgeoisie, but the radical intellectuals were already rejecting bourgeois views of morality. The American cultural historian Marshall Berman dubbed this “the modernism of underdevelopment,” when culturally innovative models were debated in a bubble, based on social fantasies and dreams.2
One of those isolated dreamers was the great Russian dissident and social philosopher Alexander Herzen, born in the fateful year of confrontation with Napoleon, 1812 (he was saved from a burning house as an infant during the fire of Moscow), to the family of Moscow millionaire Ivan Yakovlev, who named his illegitimate but beloved son (his mother was a poor German woman) Herzen, from the German
Brilliantly educated, Herzen grew up a rebel; reading Pushkin, Schiller, and Rousseau (he knew German and French fluently from childhood and then added Italian and English) awakened in him, as he later recalled, “an insuperable hatred of all slavery and all tyranny.” Inevitably, Herzen was sent by Nicholas I into exile in the provinces. In 1847, Herzen and his family fled to Europe: “I was beckoned by distant vistas, open struggle and free speech.”
Herzen was a short, plump gentleman, clean shaven, with long hair combed straight back in the Moscow manner, very mobile, and his constant inner agitation made him speak standing, quickly, in a loud voice. When he settled in Paris, Herzen transformed himself: he grew a stylish beard, cut his hair, and traded the clumsy Moscow long frock coat for a fashionable Parisian jacket.
Cosmopolitan at heart, Herzen quickly plunged headlong into the turbulent life in Paris—political, cultural, and social—that was in such sharp contrast with his Moscow existence, swallowing up all the latest books and splashing happily in the “sparkling sea,” as he called it, of the European press. He entered Parisian democratic and socialist circles, and leftists of every rank, stripe, and nationality delighted in Herzen’s heartfelt speeches denouncing serfdom and other horrors of the autocratic Russia they all hated.
It was difficult to make such an impression on this brilliant group of ambitious and confident activists who lived in a dizzying world of bold ideas and pitiless polemics, and Herzen would not have been able to do it, had he not arrived in Paris a very wealthy man.
In Moscow, Herzen inherited a lot of money from his father, but that just alienated him from his old friends there. Herzen recalled that “the appearance of some silver tray and candelabra in his new household stunned his friends into silence: sincerity and fun vanished as soon as they encountered ready comfort.”3
On the contrary, in the West Herzen’s money not only made him accepted even in the democratic milieu, but it also allowed him to launch his revolutionary activity: he founded the Free Russian Press in London, which printed antigovernment leaflets, brochures, and books, and subsequently the dissident almanac
The tumultuous cosmopolitan life in the West transformed Herzen’s wife, Natalie, too, and it led to a family drama. In an ordinary family it would probably have remained a private affair, but it prompted Herzen to write a masterpiece of the Russian memoir genre, his magnum opus,
Natalie was his cousin. Like Herzen, she was illegitimate, and she was brought up by a wealthy aunt, which created psychological issues. Beautiful and intelligent, she imagined that everyone was mocking her, humiliating her, keeping her illiterate, while her calling was to astonish the world: “My cheeks burned, I was hurrying somewhere, I could see my paintings, my students—but they wouldn’t give me a piece of paper or a pencil … My desire to get out into a different world grew stronger and stronger and along with it grew my scorn for my prison and its cruel sentry.”5
When she married Herzen, he and his friends put her on a romantic pedestal: they all tried “to prove to her that she was immaculate in every action.” One friend kept telling Herzen, “You are a pig before your wife.”6
Belonging to the “fasting girl” type, fashionable in mid-nineteenth-century Europe—thin, small, and introverted creatures, whom many found to be incredibly spiritual—Natalie Herzen made it a habit to lecture her female friends in a smooth, quiet voice on the lofty purpose of women, annoying them no end.
It was his wife who pushed Herzen out into Europe once he got his inheritance. In Paris, Natalie Herzen, according to friends, changed from a “quiet, thoughtful romantic lady” into a “brilliant tourist.”7
Among the new admirers of the Herzen family were the German emigre poet Georg Herwegh and his wife. Herwegh was famous for his passionate political poems and pamphlets, which received the approval of Karl Marx himself. The great Heinrich Heine called Herwegh the “iron lark” of the revolution. He was very attractive, with a dusky face and fiery eyes, soft, long hair, and a silky beard.
At first relations between the Herzens and the Herweghs were idyllic: the men called each other “my double,” “my twin,” and the women discussed the possibility of communal living, both families with their children. The inspiring works of Rousseau and George Sand were reread and discussed. It ended with Herwegh and Natalie becoming lovers, although she did not want to leave Herzen.
Feeling a “revulsion for bourgeois virtues,” as an observer put it, Natalie Herzen imagined that this situation would work out well and that they would create a great new model of family relations (as some now assume, on a bisexual basis) before which “one day people will prostrate themselves, blinded by our love, as if by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.”8
But the progressive Herzen, who readily recognized the right of every woman to enjoy free love in theory, somehow recoiled from this prospect. The duality of his position was later described ironically by Dostoevsky: “He rejected the foundations of the previous society, denied family, and still was, I believe, a good father and husband. He denied private property, and while waiting for its abolition managed to arrange his affairs and enjoyed his prosperity abroad. He fomented revolutions and incited others but at the same time loved comfort and family peace.”
Dostoevsky was unduly sarcastic. It is easy to accuse Herzen of inconsistency or even hypocrisy, but the letters and diaries of the couple show how sincerely and strongly they believed in new, elevated forms of family life and how terribly they suffered when their fantasies were shattered.
