Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/412

386 induced a hostile mood towards the aristocracy. He had a number of French teachers whose work of tuition was very ill performed, and in his father's library he made early acquaintance with the writings of Voltaire and other French authors (Beaumarchais, le Mariage de Figaro!). The French revolution and the republic became the boy's ideals. At the age of thirteen he entered into a life-and-death alliance with Ogarev, whilst the decabrists and above all Pestel were canonized by the boys. It is true that the decabrist program as they conceived it smacked rather of Schiller's Don Carlos than of historical reality. Throughout life Schiller was one of Herzen's favourite authors. His religious education exercised a notable influence on Herzen. His mother brought him up in the spirit of her own Lutheran faith, but simultaneously the lad practised the ritual of the Orthodox church; to the grown man the gospels remained a holy book. French and German influences were reinforced by those of Russian literature, by the reading at Puškin, Rylěev, etc. A cousin somewhat older than himself, the legitimate son of one of his uncles, led him to conceive profound and enduring respect for chemistry and the natural sciences. At the university Herzen studied physics and mathematics, and on graduating in 1833 presented a thesis on Copernicus. Pavlov initiated the university student into the mysteries of Schelling and Oken; but more important to Herzen than the university was the circle of friends among whom his philosophical and political development proceeded during the thirties and forties. in 1834 he was imprisoned in connection with the doings of this circle, and in 1835 was sent to Viatka. While in prison and at Viatka, Herzen became affected with an intense religious and artistic mysticism, reading Eckartshausen, Swedenborg, and the work of occultist writers like Eschenmayer; a few years earlier he had studied the writings of Čaadaev with whom he was personally acquainted. In 1838 he was transferred from Viatka to Vladimir on the river Klyazma, where he was in military service, contracting here a romantic marriage with Natalia Aleksandrovna Zahar'ina, whom he had loved for several years. In 1839 he returned to Moscow, and in 1840 removed to St. Petersburg. At this time for a brief period he was estranged from Bělinskii. The years 1841 and 1842 were spent in Novgorod, and from thence till 1847 he lived in Moscow. To this epoch belong his study of Hegel and Feuerbach, his friendship with the slavophils, his subsequent detachment from them (1845), and his breach with the liberals (with Granovskii in 1846). He turned to German materialism (Vogt), and to French and English positivism (Comte, Littré and Mill). Herzen was now much occupied with the ideas of the French socialists, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Louis Blanc, Considérant, and Proudhon; he was interested, too, in the philosophers of history, Vico, Herder, Michelet, etc.; and it need hardly be said that he studied such political writers as Montesquieu and Bentham. Leopardi and Byron became his favourite poets. His father died in 1846, leaving him a considerable fortune, amounting to half a million roubles. He quitted Russia An incomplete edition of Herzen's works has been published in Geneva in the Russian tongue. They cannot even yet [1913] be freely published in Russia. The first Russian edition appeared in St. Petersburg in 1905, but there had been many excisions.

In philosophical matters Herzen, like his friends in Moscow, was nourished on Hegel and Feuerbach. Bělinskii played the part of John the Baptist to Herzen, and Herzen provided the organic continuation of Bělinskii's work. Just as Hegel and the Hegelian left attacked romanticism from the positivist