His Life and Thoughts

Alexander Herzen had a gift for illuminating the universal by minutely observing and describing the provincial. Born in Czarist Russia, dead 137 years ago last Sunday, he chronicles people and events I have witnessed this week. In Chapter 14 (“Vyatka”) of My Past and Thoughts (Vol. I, pp. 236-237), he begins by describing the temperamental shenanigans of Tyufyayev, a provincial governor:

“I must observe that I had done absolutely nothing to deserve first his attention and invitations, and afterwards his anger and disfavour. He could not endure to see in me a man who behaved independently, though not in the least insolently; I was always en règle with him, and he demanded obsequiousness.

“He loved his power jealously. He had earned it the hard way, and he exacted not only obedience but and appearance of absolute submission. In this, unhappily, he was typically native.

“A landowner says to his servant, `Hold your tongue; I won’t put up with your answering me back!’

“The head of a department, turning pale with anger, observes to a clerk who has made some objection, `You forget yourself; do you know to whom you are speaking?’

“The Tsar sends men to Siberia `for opinions’, does them to death in dungeons for a poem – and all these three are readier to forgive stealing and bribe-taking, murder and robbery, than the impudence of human dignity and the insolence of a plain-spoken word.”

The people and scenes Herzen cites here feel distinctly Russian, and we recall similar events in the fiction of Saltykov and Chekhov, but all of us have been plagued by pathological power-mongers, whether in our families or on the job. It’s a critical cliché to observe that certain nonfiction writers possess the sensibility of novelists. Usually, the critic is referring to the writer’s gift for characterization or drama. As I read Herzen and forget myself within a few sentences, I find I am in a place I associate with my first reading of Dostoevsky as a teenager, when I entered a new realm of truth known as fiction.

My enjoyment of Herzen is probably eccentric and self-centered in the extreme. I read his memoir not so much for its documentary worth, as a reflection of Russian liberal thought in Czarist times (though that is certainly interesting), nor as the observations of a humane man enduring an inhumane era, but for the joy of Herzen’s storytelling. He is an enlightened raconteur of narrative, with an instinct for revealing the personal in the seemingly alien.