My Past and Thoughts

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ALTHOUGH THE INDEFATIGABLE Constance Garnett translated Herzen's memoirs fifty years ago, they have never caught on with American readers. Most people to whom I mention Herzen have either never heard of him or confuse him with another nineteenth-century founding father, Herzl, or with the physicist Hertz, he of the waves. In Russia, My Past and Thoughts has always been standard reading, like War and Peace;1 nor is Herzen unfamiliar to Western European readers. But like certain wines, he doesn't "travel" well. So far, he hasn't crossed the Atlantic.

This is strange because My Past and Thoughts is, when it's not great political writing, a classic of autobiography that stands with Rousseau, Stendhal, Gibbon, Tolstoy, and Henry Adams; one might add Trotsky and Churchill, who, like Herzen, knew how to assimilate the personal to the historical. It is also strange because, unlike some classics, Herzen is extremely readable.2

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