'A Reserve Mixed With a Shade of Irony'

Occasionally I encounter a sentence or passage that strikes me as important, rich with insights and implications, but I’m not certain precisely what it means or even if I agree. In 2000, the Chicago Review dedicated an issue to recent Polish writing, mostly poetry, including such obvious names as Zbigniew Herbert and  Czesław Miłosz. I’ve written about Gustaw Herling-Grudziński before (here and here). Excerpted in the Chicago Review are passages from his “Diary Written at Night 1993-1996” (trans. Ela Kotkowska-Atkinson).

In a brief entry dated Christmas 1993, Grudziński writes about Alexander Herzen (1812-70), whom he rightly calls “one of Russia’s greatest writers.” His masterpiece, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, is a four-volume work translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgens, and with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin. Knopf published this edition in 1968. It's one of the nonfiction masterpieces of the nineteenth century, up there with Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor and Chekhov's Sakhalin Island.

 

I first encountered Herzen’s name in The Adventures of Augie March, where Saul Bellow’s title character works as a book thief in Chicago and steals volumes by the Russian memoirist. A few years later, after reading that Edward Dahlberg found him an essential writer, I read an edition of My Past and Thoughts abridged by Dwight Macdonald and published in 1973. I pegged him, wrongly, as a mere nonfiction addendum to Tolstoy and the other Russian fiction writers of his century. Years later I purchased and read the four-volume edition. Here’s the sentence by Grudziński that grabbed me:

 

“One quality elevates him above other contemporary masters of prose: he was a very intelligent writer (not so much a thinker as an intelligent writer).”

 

What a marvelous distinction. We have a surplus of thinkers, people for whom Big Ideas are a career or at least a hobby. Witness the so-called “public intellectual.” Grudziński writes:

 

“Herzen was not a philosopher and treated famous philosophical books with a reserve mixed with a shade of irony. How much could today’s Russia use a new Herzen! Solzhenitsyn is not enough. Russia needs a far-sighted writer who can traverse the borders of the increasingly frenzied political antics in the post-communist ‘cemetery of ideas’ (as [Władysław] Broniewski calls it in the foreword to his A Word on Stalin).”

 

Thirty years later, how prescient and almost optimistic that sounds.