Feiten en gedachten. Memoires 1838 - 1847

My Past and Thoughts #2

by Alexander Herzen, Charles B. Timmer (Translator)

Alexander Herzen's own brilliance and the extraordinary circumstances of his life combine to place his memoirs among the great testimonies of the modern era. Born in 1812, the illegitimate son of a wealthy Russian landowner, he became one of the most important revolutionary and intellectual figures of his time - as theorist, polemicist and political actor; and fifty years after his death Lenin pronounced him 'the father of Russian socialism'.

My Past and Thoughts uniquely assimilates the personal to the historical, and is both a classic of autobiography an an unparalleled record of his century's remarkable life. His account of a privileged childhood among the Russian aristocracy is illuminated with the insight of a great novelist; his friends and enemies - Marx, Wagner, Mill, Bakunin, Garibaldi, Kropotkin - are brought brilliantly to life; and as a sceptical and free-thinking observer, he unerringly traces the line of revolutionary development, from the earliest stirrings of Russian radicalism through the tumultuous ideological debates of the International.

'His power of observation is extraordinary. He tells a story with the economy of a great reporter. His gift is for knowing not only what people are, but how they are historically situated. Somewhere in the pages of this hard, honest observer of what movements do to men, we shall find ourselves.' - V. S. Pritchett

Genres: Russia, Memoir

466 pages, Paperback

First published September 18, 2008

About the author

Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (Russian: Александр Иванович Герцен) was a Russian pro-Western writer and thinker known as the "father of Russian socialism", and one of the main fathers of agrarian populism (being an ideological ancestor of the Narodniki, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Trudoviks and the agrarian American Populist Party). He is held responsible for creating a political climate leading to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. His autobiography My Past and Thoughts, written with grace, energy, and ease, is often considered the best specimen of that genre in Russian literature. He also published the important social novel Who is to Blame? (1845–46).

Reviews

[Brigid · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume has a mix of very slow sections - where he analyzes the character of various nationalities, for instance - with wonderful, intense parts. Even more in this volume, Herzen comes across as so likable, with flashes of glorious wit and an underlying good sense that is deeply appealing. This one contains his account of his wife's affair, many characterizations of his friends and comrades, and a lot of disillusionment over the grotesque aftermath of 1848.