My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander HerzenAlexander Herzen's own brilliance and the extraordinary circumstances of his life combine to place his memoirs among the greatest works 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, propagandist, and political actor. Fifty years after his death, Lenin revered him as the father of Russian revolutionary socialism. Tolstoy said he had never met another man "with so rare a combination of scintillating brilliance and depth." His monumental autobiography is an unparalleled record of his--and his century's--remarkable life. Herzen's story of his privileged childhood among the Russian aristocracy is lit with the insight of a great novelist. With a trained historian's sense of the interaction of people and events, he limns the grand line of revolutionary development from the earliest stirrings of Russian radicalism throughthe tumultuous ideological debates of the international. His close friends and enemies--Marx, Wagner, Mill, Bakunin, Garibaldi, Kropotkin--are brought brilliantly alive. Dwight Macdonald's knowledgeable and fluent abridgment makes this great work readily available to the modern reader. |
Contents
PREFACE by Dwight Macdonald | xi |
DEDICATION to Nicholay Platonovich Ogarëv | xlv |
Youth | 19 |
Political Awakening | 39 |
Nick and the Sparrow Hills | 58 |
The University | 79 |
After the University | 107 |
PRISON AND EXILE | 123 |
The Revolution of 1848 in France | 340 |
In Geneva with the Exiles of 1848 | 358 |
Western European Arabesques II | 384 |
Money and the Police | 398 |
P J Proudhon | 414 |
Second Thoughts on the Woman | 431 |
ENGLAND 18521858 | 445 |
John Stuart Mill and His Book on Liberty | 458 |
Imprisonment | 137 |
Investigation and Sentence | 152 |
Perm | 166 |
Misgovernment in Siberia | 185 |
Alexander Lavrentevich Vitberg | 199 |
The Beginning of My Life at Vladimir | 219 |
Return to Moscow and Intellectual Debate | 229 |
Petersburg and the Second Banishment | 253 |
Councillor at Novgorod | 269 |
Our Friends | 284 |
To Petersburg for a Passport | 305 |
PARISITALYPARIS | 317 |
The Honeymoon of the Republic | 324 |
Western European Arabesques I | 330 |
German Emigrants | 467 |
Robert Owen | 485 |
THE FREE RUSSIAN PRESS | 527 |
The Common Fund | 554 |
Bakunin and the Cause of Poland | 565 |
THE LATER YEARS 18601868 | 589 |
of the Mohican Squaws | 599 |
The Superfluous and the Jaundiced 1860 | 619 |
Bazarov Once More 1868 | 628 |
A Relevant Chrestomathy from the Later Years | 643 |
Marx v Herzen | 677 |
INDEX OF PERSONS follows page | 684 |
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Common terms and phrases
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