Realism

Abstract

A voluntary exile from his native Russia, Alexander Herzen arrived in Paris as an ardent young liberal tinged with romantic enthusiasms, just in time to witness the European revolutions of 1848. He was a man of great literary talent and one of the leading intellectuals of his day. Later, between 1857 and 1865, his magazine The Bell was smuggled into Russia where it had enormous influence; Herzen was the idol of this generation of Russian reformers. The failure of the 1848 revolutions did not crush his revolutionary spirit, but it sobered him considerably, and thereafter he was always suspicious of large abstractions and intellectual systems—a revolutionary without fanaticism, as Isaiah Berlin calls him. “Do not search for any solutions in this book,” he wrote to his son concerning From the Other Shore. “Only in the distant future will we be able to perceive the good society. For the time being we can only fight against the specific falsehoods that we encounter.” The following selection includes the words wrung from him in the bitter hour of defeat when so many of his generous illusions came crashing down. Countless others felt something similar.