the period
that Turgenev was so fond of depicting. Herzen was exiled on account
of his oral propaganda, first to Perm, and then to Vyatka. In 1847, he
left Russia for ever, and lived abroad for the rest of his life, at
first in Paris, and afterwards in London, where he edited a newspaper
called _The Bell_.

Herzen was a Socialist. Western Europe he considered to be played out.
He looked upon Socialism as a new religion and a new form of
Christianity, which would be to the new world what Christianity had
been to the old. The Russian peasants would play the part of the
Invasion of the Barbarians; and the functions of the State would be
taken over by the Russian Communes on a basis of voluntary and mutual
agreement--the principle of the Commune, of sharing all possessions in
common, being so near the fundamental principle of Christianity.

"A thinking Russian," he wrote, "is the most independent being in the
world. What can stop him? Consideration for the past? But what is the
starting-point of modern Russian history if it be not a total negation
of nationalism and tradition?... What do we care, disinherited minors
that we are, for the duties you have inherited? Can your worn-out
morality satisfy us? Your morality which is neither Christian nor
human, which is used only in copybooks and for the ritual of the
law?" Again: "We are free because we begin with our own liberation; we
are independent; we have nothing to lose or to honour. A Russian will
never be a protestant, or follow the _juste milieu_ ... our
civilization is external, our corrupt morals quite crude."

The great point Herzen was always making was that Russia had escaped
the baleful tradition of Western Europe, and the hereditary infection
of Western corruption. Thus, in his disenchantment with Western
society and his enthusiasm for the communal ownership of land, he was
at one with the Slavophiles; where he differed from them was in
accepting certain Western ideas, and in thinking that a new order of
things, a new heaven and earth, could be created by a social
revolution, which should be carried out by the Slavs. His
influence--he was one of the precursors of Nihilism, for the seed he
sowed, falling on the peculiar soil where it fell, produced the
whirlwind as a harvest--belongs to history. What belongs to literature
are his memoirs, _My Past and my Thoughts_ (_Byloe i Dumy_), which
were written between 1852 and 1855. These memoirs of everyday life
and enco