2 - Alexander Herzen

Summary

RUSSIAN WESTERNISM AND THE CONCEPT OF PERSONHOOD

“Because they like symmetry,” Richard Pipes observed long ago, “historians have created a foil for the Slavophiles, a party they call ‘Westerners,’ but it is difficult to perceive among the opponents of Slavophile theories any unity except that of a negative kind.” And indeed it is true that the Westernizers, as I shall call them, held few beliefs that they shared for very long save that the Slavophiles' claims about the peculiarly Christian spirit and peaceable character of the Russian people, and about the organic nature of the people's pre-Petrine community, were mistaken and utopian. For Westernism was a broad church in the 1840s and 1850s. On the one hand, it embraced moderate, relatively dispassionate men who might be classified as in some sense liberal, liberal-conservative, or even Tory. In this category we find the historian Timofei Granovskii, the jurist Konstantin Kavelin, the maturing imaginative writer Ivan Turgenev, and also like-minded dilettanti and aesthetes such as Pavel Annenkov and Vasilii Botkin. On the other hand, Westernism also embraced more impassioned spirits who came to be attracted to radical, even revolutionary ideas. Among these men we should include the literary critic Vissarion Belinskii (“furious Vissarion”), the instinctive rebel and revolutionary agitator Mikhail Bakunin, and the subject of this chapter, the novelist, social and political thinker, and eventual political exile, journalist and autobiographer, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812–1870).