A Child of his Times

...As a result, the gentry sought justification for its existence, escape from its intellectual and social confinement, and hope for its future in romantic idealism, moral indignation, and esthetic and "historiosophic" speculation...

...Such has largely been the fate of Alexander Herzen (1812-70), whose masterful autobiography, My Past and Thoughts, published and translated innumerable times, has acted as a barrier to an objective understanding of his life and contribution to Russian thought...

...Malia's work could very well serve as a model to all historians of ideas, and I hope some enterprising paperback publisher will repair the wrong done to both the author and to Alexander Herzen by making this volume available to a larger audience...

...The gentry, according to Malia, held a special position in 19th century Russia: It was caught between serfdom and autocracy, alienated from the people by its Western education and prevented by the imperial regime from playing any active and constructive role...

...Theoretical propositions were refashioned to serve as guideposts for action—although action always took the negative form of protests and denunciations...

...The portrait Herzen drew of himself, his friends and their milieu was so vivid and convincing that additional study of the man, his ideas and the ideological ferment he helped to initiate seemed unnecessary...

...It is not enough, therefore, to say that Herzen was a follower of German romantic idealism or to point out his debt to pre-Marxist Socialist thought...

...Professor Malia argues that Herzen's spiritual and ideological development was only a more striking —and in some ways more radical— expression of the psychological and social factors that went into the making of the Russian intelligentsia of the time...

...The same comment could easily be applied to Herzen's nationalism and his search for a socialist solution to Russia's ills in the peasant commune...

...He came to play this historical role largely because he reflected and expressed the moral and political strivings of the Russian intelligentsia in the first half of the 19th century...

...Read like a novel and viewed as a full confession, the autobiography satisfies the curiosity of the general reader and often so captivates the historian that it becomes the sole source of information about its author and his times...

...Not only were these conditions harmful to the Russian people—of whom the gentry knew very little—but they prevented the intellectuals from becoming the full individuals they aspired to be and forced them to live a life of humiliating and demoralizing social uselessness...

...Have our university presses so low an opinion of both authors and reading public that they expect only a handful of specialists to buy or read even the best of their books...

...But he subjected Western concepts and ideas to a process of emotional and intellectual "russification...

...Reviewed by MARC RAEFF Associate Professor of History, Russian Institute, Columbia University An interesting and successful autobiography hinders as much as it furthers knowledge...

...One final word: The price set by the Harvard University Press for Malta's brilliant study is outrageous and should be strongly protested...

...This is a lesson we should remember today when the same sense of moral indignation and psychological frustration activates the leadership of the underdeveloped nations...

...They used esthetic concepts and idealistic metaphysics as a means of overcoming their alienation and re-establishing contact with reality...

...Malia sometimes oversimplifies the situation of the Russian gentry...

...He gives too little stress to institutional factors which had been at work for over a century, and which help account for the gentry's alienation and radicalism as much as does the despotism of Nicholas I. Moreover, in discussing the historical role of idealistic philosophy, the parallels the author draws with 18th century Germany are not always convincing...

...As Malia rightly points out, "the democratic [and Socialist] ideal arose in Russia not by direct reflection on the plight of the masses, but through the introspection of relatively privileged individuals who, out of frustration, generalized from a sense of their own dignity to the ideal of the dignity of all men...

...The intelligentsia was always motivated by a sense of moral indignation at the conditions prevailing in Russia...

...and second, in what manner Western concepts were transformed into a peculiarly Russian Utopian and radical dynamic ideology...

...Herzen was the father and prophet of Russian revolutionary Socialism, in particular of its "populist" (narodnik) variety...

...With Herzen, as with Marx, it was not material circumstances but a primary moral reaction that determined the appeal of a dynamic ideology...

...Herzen's family situation and early upbringing served to heighten the elements of romantic exhaltation and personal alienation that were characteristic of the Russian gentry as a class...

...For this reason, he calls his book an essay in the "social psychology of ideas" and limits it to the first 40 years of Herzen's life (the remaining years, 1855-70, were fully taken up by futile and by and large inconclusive efforts at outright political action...

...The actual conditions only served to confirm and validate the initial moral response...

...Important differences, particularly the historical and institutional conditions, are slighted...

...Moral indignation, Malia argues, coupled with individual and social frustration, served as the most powerful stimulus in developing and spreading the ideas and hopes of Socialism, whether populist (peasant) or proletarian...

...Except for some polemical literature, which used Herzen's life and ideas to promote partisan aims, and a few very specialized investigations of limited aspects of his career, Herzen has been a figure known only from his own words...

...One has to explain two things: first, why these particular ideas proved so attractive to Herzen and his fellow "intelligenty...

...This book was subsidized by a foundation, contains no illustrations, was printed on rather inferior paper and was produced without any distinction...

...The Russians elaborated, and frequently transformed, the "valence" these ideas had originally possessed in German and French thought...

...Like all members of this group, Herzen drew his philosophical nourishment and ideological inspiration from Western Europe...

...Malia properly stresses the fact that Herzen and his friends constructed their social Utopias not from any elements of Russian reality but from abstract values learned from their European teachers...

...Yet Malta's analysis is the first thorough attempt—and it is a most successful one—to point up the exact nature of those Western ideas adopted by the Russian intelligentsia, and of the special dynamic force they developed after they had been transplanted to Eastern soil...

...The aim of Martin Malia's admirable study is to answer such questions in terms of the personalities and the society involved...