Work · Socialism, Anarchism, Marxism & Critical Theory
My Past and Thoughts
Memoirs written from 1852 to 1868, at once autobiography, portrait of Russian and European intellectual life and political reflection.
Introduction
Herzen began “My Past and Thoughts” in London in 1852, after the death of his wife, and kept working on it until 1868. Parts appeared from 1855 in his almanac “The Polar Star” and in “The Bell”. The memoirs lead from his Moscow childhood and the oath with Ogarev through prison and exile and the circles of Westernisers and Slavophiles to the revolutions of 1848 and the world of political émigrés in Paris, Geneva and London. Portraits of contemporaries such as Chaadaev, Belinsky, Bakunin, Proudhon and Garibaldi stand beside political reflections and the account of his family tragedy. The work counts as a classic of Russian prose and is a main source for the intellectual history of the period; it also shapes most later images of Herzen, from Isaiah Berlin’s essays to Tom Stoppard’s trilogy “The Coast of Utopia” (2002).
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