Books: The Lost Philosopher

FROM THE OTHER SHORE (208 pp.)—Alexander Herzen—George Brazlller ($3.75).

Among the valuable enterprises the Soviets destroyed when they began to liquidate the bourgeoisie in 1917 was the practice of philosophy. The simulated-wood face of a Khrushchev or Molotov presents itself to the world as the visage of modern Russia. But Russia was once represented by nobler faces, and Alexander Herzen was among them. Contemplating the ruins of the Roman Empire, he said: “The wisest of the Romans vanished from the scene … in the silent grandeur of their grief.” In Herzen himself, the West today can sense the not-so-silent grandeur of a lost philosopher and a lost era.

Born in Moscow a few months before Napoleon entered the Czar’s tinder capital (1812), Alexander Herzen grew up a bastard aristocrat in a land of serfs, hating the vast sloth of the barbarous empire. Like many another conscience-stricken property owner of his time, he became one of the wild geese of Russia who flapped about Europe hoping that their words would huff and puff down the Byzantine walls of the czardom.

Steppes of History. After two stretches of imprisonment and banishment (one sentence was for complaining in a letter to his father of the inefficiency of the police), Herzen was wondering whether a “human being with any sense of his own dignity could live in Russia.” Yet Herzen had the realism to understand, 75 years before Stalin, that an inefficient despotism is preferable to an efficient one. With a visionary eye he looked across the steppes of history and foresaw that the witless crudity of the Czar’s bureaucrats might be less evil than a regime speaking in the name of brotherly love. Herzen’s shrewd mind took the slogans of Europe’s libertarian movement and arrived at the wisdom of the American Negro spiritual—”Everybody talkin’ ’bout heaven—ain’t goin’ there.”

To the end of his days Herzen prayed for the hopes of revolution—and yet, in Paris, he was dismayed when the revolution of 1848 degenerated, with soldiers of a republic shooting down its own citizens. With almost lyrical sarcasm (“Long live chaos and destruction! Vive la mortl”) he recorded his disillusionment. But as far as his own Russia was concerned, he was convinced that its sturdy peasants would survive both their imperial oppressors and their would-be liberators.

Cruel Nouns. Introducing this first English translation of one of Herzen’s most famous works, From the Other Shore, a brilliant journalistic-philosophical assessment of Europe after the 1848 revolutions, Riga-born Oxford Don Isaiah Berlin has underlined Herzen’s teaching with some wry modern hindsight. As an observer of 19th century Europe, “only Marx and Tocqueville are comparable to him,” says Berlin. “For Herzen,” he says, the ” ‘collective nouns’ capable of stirring strong emotion, like Nationality, or Democracy, or Equality, or Humanity, or Progress . . . [were] modern versions of ancient religions which demanded human sacrifice . . . The dogmas of such religions declare that mere invocation of certain formulae, certain symbols, render what would normally be regarded as crimes or lunacies—murder, torture, the humiliation of defenseless human bodies—not only permissible but often laudable.”

In other words, Herzen knew the Animal Farm that Russia was to become. The astonishing thing is that this half-forgotten philosopher was as modern as an existentialist, and warned against “modern man, that melancholy Pontifex Maximus” i.e., every man his own pope. Herzen’s message, supported by brilliant observation of a Europe which was grandfather to today’s discontents, is the simple one that no man is fit to be the master of another, whether his rule is imposed in the name of privilege or brotherhood. Today Herzen makes clear what the world lost when Russia turned its face from the West and from its own best self.