The Lyre and the Sword
Art and Revolution
I conned the Book of History, and at the end, I asked myself, “Is this the chronicle of Man?” A river of blood, springing from rocks of misty past, And flowing on, down to our own day… Oh, do not think its well-heads ever slacken, For without pause, it rushes toward the sea, A surge of blood into a bloody ocean! I see approaching days of untold dread, Such as no human eye has ever seen, Will make this day’s peace seem the graveyard’s quiet, One moment between the lightning and the thunder’s roar. The veil of future lifts; I see before me A sight that rends my soul, yet thrills with joy: I see anew the God of War in armor, With sword in hand, coursing the wide world, Calling the people to arms in the last of wars; I see two nations arrayed against each other: Here stands the Good—there the Evil one, And ever-vanquished Good soon to be victor, A triumph won through seas of untold blood! No matter! The Day of Judgment’s here! Foretold of prophets in the name of God. Yes, Day of Judgment—dawn of Life and Bliss—When Man no longer needs to grasp for Heaven, For Heaven descends, embracing Man and Earth!
—Sándor Petöfi, “The Day of Judgment,” 1847
July 31, 1849. This was the day on which Sándor Petöfi, Hungary’s uncrowned poetlaureate, was last seen alive. He fell at the battle of Segesvár, a soldier in General Bem’s armies, during the disastrous defeat at the hands of the Russians. His body was never recovered. But his cenotaph, aside from the innumerable physical monuments erected to his memory, remains to this day in the indestructible body of his poetry. His life, his work, and his death at the age of twenty-six, enshrined, not only for Hungary but also for the world at large, the full meaning of the Revolutions of 1848 and 1849. It is indeed a strange paradox that the first Hungarian poet to breach the borders of his country and join his name to the great ones of European and world fame, should also have proved the most eloquent voice of those years, and the most vivid personal embodiment of the ideal of poet, citizen, and soldier of the revolution.
Petöfi’s participation in Hungary’s war of independence was not the result of a momentary whim or caprice. It was the culmination of a rapid maturation that began with the usual personal rebellion of a young boy and was later translated into profounder national and social terms during the intense upheavals of the 1840s. He was a Jacobin even before he was aware of the meaning of the French Revolution, and a republican almost by nature. His rapid intellectual and poetic growth is all the more astonishing considering the economic and political backwardness of Hungary, semifeudal in structure, predominantly agrarian, with only a very small proletarian class and a weak middle class. Yet, the liberalizing winds and storms that swept over the rest of the continent had not left Hungary immune; the intellectual and political structure was visibly shaken. The urgency for change was being manifested in the activities of the more liberal nobility and middle class, particularly in the persons of Count István Széchenyi, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, and the radical bourgeois lawyer Lajos Kossuth. In the literary field as well as in social and philosophical thought, the revolutionary romanticism of the rest of Europe, especially that of England, Scotland, Germany, and France, was also transforming the horizon. Not even the most stringent surveillance succeeded in keeping out the ideas of the Saint-Simonians and the other French and English utopian socialist thinkers.
Petöfi, too, was profoundly affected by these impulses. Storm was the element most persistent in his life—storms within him and without him. It was no accident that he was so intensely drawn to the life and poetry of Shelley, whose “Ode to the West Wind” might well epitomize the Hungarian poet’s feeling and being. His literary banner was also inscribed with the names of Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Heine, Victor Hugo, Burns, and Béranger, as well as Schiller. He too was the storm-bird of that second wave of Romanticism with its social and political manifestations and its tangible realization as words and deeds. Symbolically, one might say that his death on the battlefield in 1849 marks the death of both Romanticism, particularly its more utopian aspects, and the Revolutions of 1848–1849.
He came of humble parents. He was born Sándor Petrovics (he later Magyarized the name to Petöfi); in Kiskörös, county of Pest, the son of a butcher and a housemaid of the Protestant Evangelical faith. István Petrovics, the father, became comparatively prosperous, but suffered serious reverses in 1838 from which he never recovered. The parents’ ambitions for their gifted child knew no bounds; the father in particular promised himself a son who would rise to an honorable and remunerative bourgeois career, bolstered by a good education. Alas! he was to be sadly disenchanted; no school or gymnasium could keep the boy bound, whether at Pest or Aszód! How could his parents have known that they had bred a bird of passage—an eagle, in fact, who was never to find a true resting place?
The boy wanted to be a poet and an actor! An actor above all! While a student at Aszód—he was then only fifteen—the urge to join the theatre proved irresistible, as did a young local actress. Sándor Petöfi requested a release from the gymnasium director, who, as might have been foreseen, immediately notified the boy’s father. The poet later recalled the incident most graphically:
My teacher (God bless him!) felt it incumbent to report my plans directly, before they could be realized, and wrote to a man who possessed the praiseworthy quality, strangely enough, of hating the theatre. This remarkable person was none other than my father, who, like all good fathers, did not wait long before coming to the rescue of a son who was hell-bent for perdition. His paternal counsel, in evidence thereafter for weeks on my back and other portions of my mortal frame, actually dissuaded me from my godless project.1
For a time he was locked up in his room, and it was there and then, as he confessed in a poem written in 1847, that he made his first vow: He would have but one goal in life—to war on tyrannical power!2
During the rest of his life he was never to blunt the sharp edge of that decision, nor to betray his vow.
What could one make of such a character? He turned itinerant actor, vagabond, wandering scholar, and even soldier! And poet, too. His father gave him up, and after a while refused to come to his support. His mother grieved, loved him and forgave him.
His fascination with the theatre remained a lifelong obsession, one which those who have been close to the stage can easily understand. Here an imagined and imaginary world turns life into poetry and romance; The wizardry of stage lights, props, costume, makeup, actors, gossip and intrigues effects a magical transformation the moment the curtain rises. So it appeared to the heated imagination of Sándor Petöfi, even after he had observed and been the victim of its more drab and miserable aspects. Nothing would wean him from the illusion that he was born to be a great actor. Repeated failures rarely daunted him; he tried and tried again, failed and failed again. All this was a portion of that errant search to find himself; and he endured great hardships during the six years in which he wandered about, poor, too often disappointed, sometimes even desperate; finally even volunteering for army service as a private (in the Austrian army no less!), fitted neither spiritually nor physically to endure the torments and humiliations of that military establishment. Fortunately, he had within him another gift that he had begun to cherish, the gift of poetry. Reluctantly, he at last abandoned the Thespian fata morgana and, having succeeded in obtaining a discharge because of his physical condition, began seriously considering a career in literature.
Deeply shaken, desperate, and needy, even now he thought of acting as the only salvation. He was already twenty-one.
I stand on the brink of a frightful abyss [he wrote to his friend, Szeberényi], and I must cross it. In doing so, I may be breaking the hearts of two people (my parents). But I cannot help myself. Dear friend, I must be an actor! There is no other way out for me….To become an actor—and for the third time!…My parents cannot support me. But let us see what fate destines for me…I need hardly tell you that it is not my aim merely to try to earn my living…I have a much higher goal, of which I will never lose sight. I burn with the ambition of being an artist, a poet. For long ago it was predicted of me that I was not born to be a nobody. Aut Caesar aut nihil.3
He could not have been aware in those years of wandering, as he roamed the Hungarian backlands and towns, the pusztas, meeting gypsies and peasants, hobnobbing with impoverished actors and itinerant workmen, what a rich gold store he was mining for his future craft. He absorbed living and inanimate nature; time and again he returned to his homeland—the “Lowlands”—his native regions between the Danube and the Tisza. Meanwhile, even in his most miserable period of military service, he composed poetry.
Often he was despondent; sometimes despairing, but never for a moment did he lose the faith that he was destined for a glorious future. His poems had already begun to appear in various journals. He was making friends among writers and editors; he had established a close relationship with the future novelist (now still nourishing the hope of becoming a painter), Mór Jókai. He had become reconciled with his father, now an impoverished innkeeper, to whom he read his convivial drinking songs, and who still shook his head at the benighted professions his son was following—poetry and acting! His mother needed no greater persuasion than the return of her wandering boy. She had faith in him, no matter what! Had she not, as he was later to write in a beautiful poem, prophesied that a dream of his meant he was destined to a long life? And had he not in the same poem assured her, as he envisioned an early death for himself, that he was destined for the immortality of a poet?4
In the winter of 1843–1844 he was in Debrecen, once more engaged by an acting company, and once more achieving exemplary failure. He was ill; a poor woman, the theatre’s ticketseller, took care of the penniless actor. His only wealth consisted of sheafs of poems. When he was partially recovered, he made his way to the city of Pest on foot.
For six years [he wrote] I was abandoned by God and man, a vagabond. For six years I was pursued by two dark shadows, misery and spiritual torments—from the time I was sixteen, till I was twenty-two…It was my last chance. I was overcome with despair. I went to see one of Hungary’s greatest men, with all the trepidation of a gambler staking his last coin on a card—Life or Death! And this man, to whom I owe my life, to whom the fatherland must also be grateful if ever I have been or will be of use to it—this man was Vörösmarty.5
Mihály Vörösmarty was at that time Hungary’s foremost poet. Twenty-three years older than Petöfi, he was in many respects the Victor Hugo of the Hungarian romantic movement. The author of numerous epics and narrative poems, he had been fired, like so many of his European contemporaries, by the events of 1830 in France and elsewhere in Europe. He was revolted by the repressiveness of the atmosphere under the Austrian autocracy. In 1836 he had composed a poem, “The Summons”—“Szótat” —which became a second national anthem. In the cause of the Polish struggles he had written a fiery and celebrated ode, “The Living Statue,” “Az elö szobor.”
Vörösmarty had already before this taken note of Petöfi’s gifts, and now he generously bestirred himself in bringing about the publication of his first volume of verse. Petöfi versek—The Poems of Petöfi—appeared in 1844, and though they did not meet with immediate fanfare or acclaim, they were soon recognized as constituting a turning point in the history of Hungarian letters. The year also became a crucial one in Petöfi’s life and creation.
With this volume Petöfi was joining the company of the great Romantics, joining in that massive choral symphony of which Wordsworth and Coleridge, with their Lyrical Ballads, Heine with his Buch der Lieder, Byron, Leopardi, Shelley, and Robert Burns constituted the eloquent voices. He had many affinities with Burns. Like the Scottish poet he could be an excoriating satirist, at other times a delightful humorist. Like Burns, Petöfi had that ardent love of nature, animals, landscape, and simple people; feelings for the “outcasts” of society, the tippler, the beggar, the horse thief. Both harbored a passionate love of their country and hatred of clerical as well as political and social oppressors. Like Heine, from whom Petöfi had also learned, the Hungarian poet could sing sweetly, laugh bitterly, and compose love poems. Balladry and folk song were a part of him. Like Heine and the tragic Austrian poet Lenau, whose works he admired, he could also write of the soul’s self-division. Like Alfred de Musset he expressed something of the mal du siècle, but unlike the unhappy French poet, he knew how eventually to transcend it. He was able to fuse all these elements, the individual with the national, the national with the universal, so as indeed to become not only Hungary’s national poet, but also the poet of Europe and the world.
Physically he was a slender reed that could be bent but never broken. And his spirit was like that too. We see him as he appears in the painting by his friend Soma Orlai-Petrich in 1844, with that remarkable chiseled face, deep-set eyes, so penetrating and intense, a fine mouth—altogether a striking picture. From a contemporary Hungarian, who was to become one of his early translators into German, we obtain a somewhat heightened, but none the less vivid portrait, two years later. Here is how K. M. Kertbeny saw him in 1846:
One evening I sat once more in the elegant quarters of the poet Bakody, in the midst of a cloud of smoke through which it was impossible to descry my nearest neighbor. Casually I leafed through a pile of newly published books of our literature, and I chanced on a volume entitled, Versek. Irta Petöfi Sándor. Hastily I glanced at the poems, but soon my eyes became fixed on the pages…“His name is Petöfi?” I asked of a young man sitting near me, who had been introduced to me, but whose name had then escaped me. I was struck by his characteristically noble bearing. He might have been around twenty-three, with a clearly defined, bony, but healthy-looking face, somewhat bronzed, with black, curly hair; he was of slight stature, but of an elastic frame; his hands were fine, but muscular…He was scrupulously dressed in the national Hungarian style, with a jaunty cap topped by a full-blown rose! I repeated my question, and he spoke: “This little poet is the bad, dissipated son of a decent, honorable father, a master-butcher, in the Lowlands, and Petöfi never came to anything really, whether in trade, or as a young, roving actor, or as a common soldier. And here too, at the university, he will do no better, you may rest assured!” I grew heated, and began berating our Philistine generation for failing to know its true prophets. My interlocutor grew more and more amused as I proceeded, and when I asked scornfully, “Surely you don’t write this kind of poetry?”—he replied, “I? Unfortunately yes. As a matter of fact I wrote these! I am Sándor Petöfi.”6
He was like all young romantics; now on the heights of ecstasy; now in the depths of depression. When he exulted, his heart was ready to embrace the world. One winter day, he wrote,
If my cheer could bring forth seedlings,
I’d scatter them on snow-decked field,
And wintry snow-field soon would be
One single rose-bush.
And if my heart were the sun on high,
I’d stand it on the heaven’s expanse,
Its rays would surely spread their warmth
Over all the earth…7
He could not forget the theatrical world, he continued to mourn his departure from it. Bound to a journalistic desk, he remembered the “roses” of those days, which though plucked sometimes at the expense of pain, had no equal in the world—that romantic, beautiful heaven—now lost to him, but not, he prays, forever.8
He was also learning a great deal about politics. He became an abstractor of parliamentary debates and addresses in Pressburg, and had occasion to see and hear the outstanding statesmen and leaders of Hungary, including the brilliant and fiery Kossuth. His range of understanding widened; his sense of national humiliation and subjection was exacerbated. He, too, thought back on the heroic days of Hungary’s noble liberators, like Arpád and Lehel.
Oh, torpid age, in which I live,
What glories can the poet chant?
And were there such—what would it help?
When tongue-tied word can scarcely sigh?9
Often he turned to his beloved Lowlands, and like Wordsworth in the Lake Country, sought the “tranquillity” and restoration of Nature there. He recognized the turbulence within himself, and rejoiced in it. And how could he have expected, in times like his, to attain placidity of soul?
Reason proposes [he wrote], and the heart disposes. Just as God is so much more powerful than man, so is the heart mightier than the reason…It is frightful to observe how my heart ordains and rules over me. It is in truth a despot, or rather a devout, kindhearted father who can and will counsel, but will not command. I am overjoyed that it is so. A human being like that can be very unhappy, but only such a being can be truly happy.10
But now he had at last made his decision. He would live by the pen, no matter what might happen. No poet of Hungary could survive merely by writing poetry; journalism and hackwork would eke out the meager income that verse sometimes brought in. But the world was too full of stir and excitement; history was in the making; he would tolerate no compromises. He had so much to say, so much to give. He was at the full-tide of creation. He wished to thunder to his countrymen, and he did. He wished to sing. The enraged spirit within him lashed out against oppression and tyranny; the censorship inhibited him. Toward the end of 1844 he wrote a savage diatribe in verse against kings. Humanity, he cried, has now grown to maturity. It no longer needs the toys and baubles of kingship. Now is the time for the princelings to descend from their thrones and abjure their crowns. If not—then, the poet warns, we will do it for them! But let them beware that their heads do not accompany their crowns. The thunder that resounded in Paris will soon be heard here too, and then we will be like wild beasts, and with your blood we will write on the canopy of heaven that the world has really come of age!—Needless to say, the poem had to wait some years before seeing the light…
But he never lost his sense of humor and playfulness. He could caper and disport himself. No sooner was his first volume of poems out, than he set to work on a folk epic of a romantic and semi-comic nature, yet with that strain of seriousness that was always companion of his lighter moments. The poem was János Vitéz, a romantic pastoral of the love of shepherd János and the peasant girl Iluska, and their ill-fated separation brought about by the lover’s carelessness—for as he was kissing the delicious damsel, he lost a number of his sheep and was driven away by his master. Iluska too suffers from the malignity of a witch-like stepmother. Many are the strange things János encounters, many the strange feats he performs in his wanderings. He rescues the French king’s daughter from the Turks and nobly declines to marry her, for he has his own Iluska waiting for him at home. Alas! how should he know that while he was away, she had died? Brokenhearted on his return, he plucks a flower from her grave—and is off again. Finally he reaches the land of the fairies, and there—wonder of wonders!—he is reunited with his love; for as we learn, the flower he has carried with him, when cast into the magic lake, restores her to life! It is a tongue-in-cheek work, humorous and touching at the same time, a glorification of simple love and fidelity—a Hungarian pastoral eclogue.
Before finding his one great love, Petöfi had loved aplenty, and passionately. He had met with rebuffs because of his low estate, and had been thwarted by the death of the one who loved him. Like so many of the romantics, he too loved a very young girl who died (Novalis comes to mind), and whom he mourned in moving verses. At such times he fell into depression, raged at the world, saw its blackness, and regarded mankind as his enemy. He was sensitive almost to a pathological degree, reacted with extreme irritability to a slight or a criticism even from his closest friends, and was all too ready to explode. In one such mood he composed the poem of the “Madman”—“Az örult”—who addresses humanity as follows:
What’s this? Why do you bother me?
Away with you…
I’m set upon a great task,
I weave a scourge—
A scourge made of the sun’s rays,
To whip the world with—
And then I’ll laugh—when howl on howl
I hear—as once you laughed
When I howled…
When the fruit is ripe, it falls to the ground,
Earth! you are ripe and must fall—
I’ll wait till tomorrow.
And if by then no doomsday has come,
I’ll dig a hole deep into you,
And fill it up with gunpowder,
And wreck the world,
Till it flies into the air.
And then I’ll laugh! I’ll laugh!
He knew himself still self-divided, and compared his state to that of his world. His life, he mourned, was a “battlefield of sorrows and passions,” and his Muse sang “half-madly.” “And yet,” he wrote, “this self-division is not altogether my own fault, rather that of the century. Every nation, every family, yes, every human being, is divided within himself…Such is the century, and how can I be different?—I, the true son of my century!”11
But unlike many of his romantic contemporaries he did not long remain the child of sickly and frustrating despair. Aware of his own inner scissions—those that marked him the poet, the citizen, the lover—and the distinct claims each made with irresistible urgency, he sought to find the cement with which to bind them into a coherent and compact whole.
The times and his own life experiences were to come to his aid. He found the love he had been seeking, and the woman to love and love him, and he married her. And national and international events opened to him, and to his fellow-countrymen, new vistas, a new field of action, breaking the lethargy and the inertia and dejection that had prevailed for so long….
* * *
Júlia Szendrey was five years younger than Petöfi. He was then twenty-three. She was the daughter of a prosperous steward of the estates of Count Ludwig Károlyi. Petöfi was already a celebrated poet. They met in the fall of 1846—and fell in love. The poet’s distinction counted for little in her parents’ eyes: He was poor, his prospects uncertain. She had been brought up in comfort and was the center of an admiring group of well-to-do, upper-class wooers. Though not preeminently beautiful in the traditional sense, Júlia Szendrey was a very sensitive, high-strung and compelling person and, though young, of a determined character. She loved and wrote poetry, read greatly, and was a most passionate devotée of the novels of George Sand. She was equally excited by Petöfi’s poetry. The father objected to a son-in-law without a tangible future: though he liked the poet personally, marriage was something else. The girl, under domestic pressures, wavered for a while. Petöfi’s moods and feelings responded accordingly. He demanded of the father that he attend to the high claims of love. The girl was courageous, and she was deeply in love. She knew she was entering upon a perilous journey—upon life with a genius driven by extreme passions and impulses. The father would not say yes, but he did not stand in his daughter’s way. He refused to attend the wedding, however, which took place in September 1847. Szendrey and Petöfi remained enemies to the end…
The lovers were ecstatic. Petöfi’s poetry soared, along with his emotions. Only the poetry was controlled.
“Why, oh why, Lord, did you make the human breast so narrow?” he wrote. “It cannot contain all my bliss, and I am forced to waste the greater part of it in tears!…”12
Like the hero of his own folk tale, Mad Stephen—Bolond Istôk, a kind of Hungarian Till Eulenspiegel, the wanderer Petöfi found a home and love at last. Had he also found perfect serenity, he would not have been Sándor Petöfi. The happy couple settled in Pest, in quarters far removed from the spaciousness and luxuries that Júlia had enjoyed in Erdöd. Mór Jókai, the poet’s friend, has left us a picture of their home life:
We had an apartment in common, consisting of three rooms…one of them mine, the other our common dining room, the last that of the Petöfis—their writing-room, bedroom, and reception—all in one—Helicon and Vaucluse at the same time. The furnishings were simple, the most valuable portion consisting of the library, with precious, engraved editions of Béranger, Victor Hugo, Heine, the history of the Girondists, Shakespeare, Ossian, Byron, Shelley…On the walls were the outstanding figures of the French Revolution, among them not only Madame Roland, but also Charlotte Corday. That was their only luxury…Our sole amusement was the theatre. Petöfi and his wife never attended the opera, made almost no visits, nor received any. In their apartment there was no piano, no flowers, no singing bird.13
Petöfi’s revolutionary pantheon also included Cassius, William Tell, Camille Desmoulins—and he hoped that he might prove himself their worthy heir.14
His emotional life was now deepened; he was uplifted by his love and strengthened in his faith in himself as a person, a lover, and poet. He gained greater assurance, spoke more confidently as Hungary’s and humanity’s poet. The times were soon to provide him with another longed-for vocation—that of warrior.
In 1846, after having overcome a temporary depression, he composed a personal testament of faith, “Fate, Open for Me a Field,”—“Sors, nyiss nekem tért”—
Oh, Fate, grant me a field of action,
That human bliss I multiply,
That not in vain this sacred flame
Within my bosom unused die.
There burns the flame, God’s own gift,
Till every drop—a red-hot glow,
Oh grant that with each pulsing motion,
I joy, and hope, and love may sow.
How gladly would I speak in deeds!
Not with an empty word, that lulls!
Though my reward be a new cross
Upon an ever new Field of Skulls!
To perish for the weal of Man,
What blessed death! What blissful peace!
Better than all joyful life
That wilts, and dies in unused ease.
Fate, please declare: “Yes, you shall die,
A blessed death!”—And I—
With my own hands will carve the Cross
On which to die!15
More than ever he was also filled with a love of the countryside and his familiar haunts. To his beloved river, Tisza, he dedicated one of his loveliest lyrics. Standing on the shore, he contemplates the winding waters. It is sunset, summer eve…
Nyári napnak alkonyulatánál
Megállék a kanyargó Tiszánál…
He stops at the point where the Tur rushes into the Tisza as on to a mother’s lap, and the dancing fairy rays on the water’s surface sound like the jingle of spurs; the cut swathes spread out like the lines of a book, and a peasant woman is dipping her pitcher in the stream. Motionless he stands, stunned by all this, in a “deep intoxication.” To his friends in a tavern he defends the river Tisza. It is so “meek”! But only two days later, storm signals ring out, and the “meek” Tisza has turned into a roaring torrent that threatens to swallow the whole world!16 For was he not himself like the Tisza—now seemingly subdued, but ever and anon ready to break out and overflow the banks and overwhelm all around him? Júlia knew that whoever bound himself to the poet was making a compact to live the unexpected, the storm-tossed, the ever restless…
She was also aware how deep was the tie that moored her husband to the fate of his country. Had he not already confessed, “Szabadság, szerelem!” “Liberty! Love!” It was his impassioned watchword. “These two I need, for my love I will sacrifice life, for liberty I will sacrifice my love.” She understood, and accepted the challenge. She did not know how soon she would be put to the test.
The smouldering fires of liberal opposition in the Hungarian parliament soon burst into flames. Like all the rest of Europe, Hungary too underwent a severe economic crisis and experienced serious agricultural failures. In the wake of such European youth movements as “Young Germany,” “Young Italy,” it was natural that there should also arise a “Young Hungary.” Petöfi and his associates organized in 1846 a “Society of Ten,” along with János Arany, Mór Jókai, Pál Vasvári, and many university students. In the pages of the journal Eletképek, they preached a radicalization of literature and political life more inclusive than that proposed by liberals. Oppositional elements in Parliament issued demands for reforms, such as equality before the law, taxation of the nobility, liberation of serfs, freedom of the press. It might be added that 1847 was the year in which Hungary built her first railroad. Two worlds clashed. Petöfi hailed the advent exultantly.
In January 1847 he addressed an impassioned invocation to his fellow poets to meet their responsibilities to the nation and themselves. Make an end, he pleaded, to personal laments. Do you not know that poets are the pillars of fire ordained by the Lord to lead the people into the promised land of Canaan?
Forward then, whosoever is a poet,
Through fire and water let him march,
And a curse upon him who with poltroon hand
Flings down the people’s banner, or hangs back,
To rest in coward sloth,
While others toil and struggle.
False prophets, they who lure and shout,
“The Promised Land is here!”
A lie!…
When all alike from the bourne of plenty
Share in the goods the world contains,
When equals at the table of justice
Take their place with equals, Then—
When through the windows of our homes
The light of Spirit shines on all,
Then—we can say,
“Halt! Here we stay, For Canaan’s here!”17
He had always been haunted by the idea of Death, and it is not surprising that in moments of highest exultation he should be shadowed by Death more than ever. A strange and pitiful cry is wrung from him as he contemplates Love and Death. Not long after his marriage he composed the poem “At the End of September”:
In the valley the garden flowers are still in bloom,
Before my window the poplar is still green,
But do you not see the winter-world approaching?
Snow has already covered mountaintops.
Yet in my heart young midsummer flames,
Lush spring is there with its scented flowers,
But see! Already autumn’s grey has tinged my hair,
And winter’s frost has already touched my brow….
He envisions his own death, and what might happen thereafter…
And if one day you cast aside the widow’s veil,
Then plant it a dark banner on my tomb,
And I’ll arise at midnight from the shadows,
And bear it with me down into the grave,
To dry my scalding tears of pain and sorrow,
For one forgetful of a deathless faith,
And bind the searing wounds of steadfast heart,
That loved, and loves, and will forever love.18
But he could not long remain couched in such sombre thoughts. Like his river Tisza, almost overnight all of Europe was swept by the floods of revolution. First, in Italy. It was in January 1848, and Petöfi, in a mood of incredulity and exultation, in a kind of Shelleyan paean, celebrates the passing of winter and the coming of spring—the death of tyranny and the coming of freedom. His heart was now full of Europe, as one by one the countries resounded with the clash of arms. Italy, which had seemed to be crawling in the mud, now witnessed the resurrection of Brutus and no longer bent the knee to “those dwarfs.” “Oh God of Freedom,” he chanted, “these are your warriors; come, help these men of glory in their need!”19
February 1848: Paris! March 1848: Vienna! Berlin! Suddenly, it seemed to him that the “dead letters” of French Revolutionary history had “come to life,” within him and in the world outside. “So I waited for the future,” he wrote, and,
It happened! Suddenly the heavens crashed down to earth, and the future became the present!…In Italy a revolution had broken out!….In Paris, Louis-Philippe was driven from the throne, like the money-changers out of the Temple of Jerusalem…France was a republic!… Vive la république! I cried out, and stood mute and frozen, yet burning like a pillar of fire…Trembling and out of breath I reached home…The flames of revolution were now licking Germany, shooting out all around, and finally touched Vienna, yes, Vienna!…Shall the Revolution begin without me?20
No, he could not conceive a Hungarian revolution without his participation! Soon he was in the midst of it. But he also found time for poetry.
Dear Overlords, Honorable Gentlemen!
How are you?
Are your necks twitching a bit?
Cravats of a new mode are being made for you…
Remember, how we prayed to you—
Look, we said, we are human beings—
Do not begrudge us the little sunlight—
So we prayed—but your ears were deaf…
We were beasts, you thought, and said,
And now the beast is having his day.
You millions in your huts awake!
Seize hayforks, spades, scythes! And away!
A thousand years now cry: “Revenge!”….
But no! We shall be nobler and better far
Than you. For “People” is a title high,
Noble as God—not made for mockery…
Come to us, you noble Lords,
And take our hands, and brothers all,
Abjure your rank and titles!
But do not shirk—the time is short—
And then—may the Lord God
Be gracious to you!21
And a portion of the upper classes did indeed participate in the early stages of the Hungarian movement for liberalization and partial independence. They represented an indispensable element in a country still so undeveloped economically and politically as Hungary, with an insufficiently strong or informed middle class, a depressed and degraded, though large, peasantry, and a small proletarian population. That such a coalition could not long continue, in view of the sharpening differences brought about by the momentum of revolution and the radicalization of the masses, was not obvious at first. But the speed of events soon carried Petöfi as well as many others far beyond the limitations, compromises and accommodations eventually proposed, and even achieved, by the more conservative elements.
Now, on March 15, he was in the van. He became one of the leaders of the student and popular movement. He was one of the signers of a proclamation prepared by the oppositional forces, setting forth demands for a free press, a responsible ministry in Budapest, a national guard, legal equality of religion and taxation, the freeing of political prisoners, and the abolition of feudal inequities. With Jókai and other leaders, he commandeered a press and saw to the printing of the Twelve Point Proclamation, as well as his own newly composed National Song. These were ready before thousands of demonstrators, before an assembly of the “people”—such as Petöfi had dreamed of and hoped for—amid thunders of approving shouts and hurrahs. The crowds heard the poet reciting his own lines: Talpra magyar, hí a haza!
Rise Hungarians, for your land
Calls to you, the hour’s at hand…
Brighter far than chains, the blade…
Where our gravestones stand one day,
Sons of sons shall kneel and pray….
What followed became history. The excited crowds betook themselves from their several gathering places to the city prison to free the courageous writer Táncsics. At last Hungarians had achieved freedom of speech and freedom of the press, both celebrated by Petöfi in appropriate poems.
Threatened on all sides, the panic-stricken Emperor Ferdinand of Austria, King of Hungary, soon yielded and granted in part the demands of the Hungarians. At the same time his camarilla and generals were preparing for a counteroffensive against the revolutions as soon as the time was ripe. In Hungary there was no lack of counterrevolutionary activity on the part of those who sought a compromise or feared the expansion of the revolutionary wave. Petöfi, ever alert and now a political figure, offered himself as a candidate in the parliamentary elections, but was defeated by adroit maneuvers and terrorist tactics of the conservative opposition.
But the world was in flames! “A Mighty Sea Has Risen”—“Föltámadott a tenger.” In masterly lines Petöfi celebrated the exhilarating upsurge which to many like him appeared irresistible. “The ocean of mankind,” he wrote in that poem, is dancing “a wild reel,” roaring out its music, for it is the people “at play!” Ships are driven hither and thither; many are crushed. “Know and write it on the heavens as lessons never to perish: Though the galleys ride the water, the water is master still!”22
He was a republican, and he wanted a republic. He viewed with trepidation the compromising activities of the Hungarian Parliament. The situation was becoming more critical every moment. On September 11, 1848, the Croatian leader General Jelačič began the invasion of Hungary. In the face of this threat, the conservativeliberal leader Count Batthyány gave way to the more radical Kossuth. A national army was formed. The murder of the Austrian imperial commissioner Lamberg in Budapest amounted to a declaration of war. The die was cast, and war with Austria was on. On September 29, 1848, Jelačič’s forces suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of the Hungarians and were driven back toward Vienna. On October 3, the Austrian government declared war on Hungary. In the same month, the October Revolution broke out in Vienna, soon to be crushed. On the 31st, Vienna surrendered to General Windischgrätz.
During those months of almost unsupportable tension, hopes, dejection, elation and despair, Petöfi never relaxed his activities, political or literary. During June and September 1848 he composed a rhapsodic epic, The Apostle, a confessio fidei that may well be considered both a culmination and a “recessional” coda to the republican revolutionary poetry of 1848 and 1849. There was something mystical about Petöfi’s republicanism, with its touches of Hegelianism.
I am a republican [he wrote] out of religious feelings. Monarchists do not believe in the development, the progress of the World Spirit, or they wish to stop its course. That is atheism. I, however, believe that the World Spirit unfolds from stage to stage. I see him develop. I see the path he follows. He moves slowly, one step may even take a hundred, sometimes a thousand years. Why should he hurry? He has time enough; eternity is his. And now once more, he is raising his foot, and is taking another step—from monarchy to republic. Shall I stand in his way that he may curse and annihilate me with his reproachful gaze? No! I fall down before him, as he utters his blessing over me. I rise. I take hold of his sacred robe, and I follow in his glorious footsteps.23
The Apostle of Petöfi’s poem is a modern Prisoner of Chillon—a tormented martyr of Freedom, a visionary whose immediate defeats and despairs never quench his ultimate hopes of salvation. While not autobiographical in its details, it is in its ideational content. Petöfi’s hatred of kings and emperors was almost pathological: regicide was close to his heart. Neither his own education, his extensive reading, his own history nor that of his country offered him the full possibilities of understanding the larger issues of social revolution, such as the liberation of the masses through their participation as masses, class-conscious and militant—theories which were then being formulated with greater precision in France, and particularly by German radicals.
But he had a keen, native sense of history and historic urgencies and needs. Where he might have fallen short intellectually, his feelings guided him aright. Through his poetic genius and insight, by virtue of his high notion of the poet’s vocation, he proved himself the spokesman for the nation, the people, and the age. He possessed the inestimable capacity of condensing the explosive emotions and thoughts of those around him—and of the “people”—into pregnant lyrical speech, in language at once poetical, pure, and accessible. In the best sense of the word he was Hungary’s folkpoet; and many of his poems became folksongs or national hymns. In addition, he stood before his people not only as a man of words (high honor indeed!), but also as a man of deeds, fulfilling like a number of his great contemporaries the role of poetthinker and poet-doer, the role of Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislator” of human history. The nineteenth century was the last of the centuries to raise and duly honor the literary figure as a great moral force, to deem the poet a “hero” of the age, and to furnish preeminent exemplars in writers such as Mickiewicz, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy and, not least, Petöfi.
The tragic-heroic protagonist of The Apostle is named Sylvester (that is, New Year’s Day)—the day, parenthetically, on which Petöfi himself was born. He is a foundling, a child of nowhere and nobody, raised in circumstances of wretchedness, crime, and beggary until he is “discovered” and set on the high road by a tutor of a genteel family where Sylvester worked as lackey to the young master. Sylvester is an Oliver Twist come to a profound self-consciousness of himself and his vocation. Enabled by the tutor’s kindness to go to school and educate himself, he gradually becomes aware of the world around him and the degradation, the oppression, that prevails all about. Like young Petöfi, he makes his vow of dedication to freedom and service, noting, also like his poetic creator, that the World Spirit needs time to come to a full realization of himself, to achieve what Marx was to call a “reform of consciousness” in mankind. Sylvester meditates:
World history! what wonders in that book!
Wherein each man may read his own vision.
One reads of surging Life, another of Death.
The one she arms with shining sword and says:
“Go, on to battle! No, it is not in vain
In battling so, you fight for all mankind!”
To the other: “It is in vain!
Doff your armor—and take your rest,
The world is doomed; misery is its lot.
It was ever so, and will be so forever.”
Sylvester comes to his own conclusion:
Look at the grape! See what a tiny growth!
And yet needs all the summer to ripen into fruit.
And is not our own Earth, a fruit like that,
Though larger far?
And what eternities shall suffice
For it to ripen?
Ten thousand years, nay, even a million,
But ripen it will and must in the end.
As the grape needs the sun to bring it to fruition, so
Our earth too ripens in the light of sun,
But all those rays are not of the sun,
But of the human soul.
Great souls are sunlight’s rays…
And he feels that he too is such a soul, such a ray of light, part of the infinity spreading before him, an iota, but a significant iota, in the advance of humanity.
Well, now to work!
My soul, go forth! in doing is your worth!
He pledges himself and will dedicate himself to the happiness and freedom of Humanity. He fulfils his vow. Disappointments beset him; hopes seeming for a moment about to be realized, are dashed. The people acclaim, then abjure him. He is pursued by misfortunes. The great light of his life, however, is the dedication and understanding of a woman—his wife. By means of a secret press he is finally enabled to disseminate his ideas. Apprehended, he is imprisoned for ten years. When finally liberated, he discovers that instead of having freed themselves, his countrymen are groveling before a king. In desperation he undertakes what he believes to be one last symbolic deed for his people—he attempts to kill the king. He fails, and is executed.
Had it all been in vain? No, says the poet:
The craven generation aged and vanished,
A new race rose, that blushed with shame
When speaking of their fathers…
A new heroic race that cried, “Revolt!”
And cast the chains, their parents’ shameful heirloom,
Upon the graves of those had made them theirs,
So that affrighted by the mighty clamor,
They too might feel their shame even in their grave!
In their triumph they hastened to recall
The Great and Saintly, who themselves enslaved,
Yet knew to pronounce the word of Freedom,
And for reward earned obloquy and death….
And with the wreath of names so high and sacred
They wove the coronals of joy and triumph,
And hastened their remains to bear
Into the Pantheon—for glory and for peace.
But where to seek, and where were they to find them?
Alas! at gallows’ foot their bones had long decayed!
Such is the end of the poem. Here romanticism mingles with realism—the romanticism of the Roman liberator who with his dagger asserts freedom (Sylvester was to use a pistol); the realism of the man who understands the pace of history. And above all, the unquenchable hope that masters despair and dejection.
But not all the poems of the time are solemn chorales or political invocations. Side by side with The Apostle, and the numerous paeans to the approaching republic, to revolution, Petöfi also created those extraordinary and beautiful hymeneals, celebrations of the woman he loved, of domestic felicity and the triumphs of love. These call to mind the best of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, and of Victor Hugo’s poems. Petöfi writes,
How shall I name thee,
When quiet, shadowed with thought,
My wondering eye perceives
Your eyes as the evening star,
As if never seen before…
The star,
Each ray a flood of light and love,
Streaming into my soul’s deep sea—
How shall I name thee?…
How shall I name thee?
When the glowing rubies of your lips
Touch mine,
And our souls mingle,
In flames of kisses,
As day and night within the morning light,
Dispersing time and place,
And floods of immortality
Bring blisses yet unknown—
How shall I name thee?24
Or, in a similar vein, he seeks to find the birds with which to compare his Júlia, discovering in her the qualities of a goldfinch, a nightingale, and an eagle. Or, when already a soldier in 1848, he allows himself a brief reunion with his wife, who is already with child. He has exchanged, he says, his “lyre” for the sword; the golden star of poetry for the reddening northern lights of war:
Scarcely had day dawned; and already night is here,
Scarcely arrived—and already I must part,
Scarcely “Welcome” had I said to you,
And parting words were already on my heart;
Farewell, my own, my soul, my life,
May God be with you, beloved wife!25
He was fortunate enough to live to see the first astounding victories of the Hungarians over the Austrians. He lived to see Hungary declared a republic, and the cities of Buda and Pest recaptured from the enemy. Unfortunately he was also destined to see Russian forces, sent by the Tsar at the frantic call of Emperor Franz Joseph, invade his country under the overall command of “butcher” General Haynau. It was apparent that his country was meeting an army twice its strength. He was fortunate, however, in dying before his country’s disaster, the shattering of his hopes, and the bloody aftermath of the Revolution.
In 1849, Hungary stood alone. Kossuth issued a call to national resistance. He asked for help of other nations. None came. Petöfi appealed to his own people in the name of the “Liberal Party.”
We have no brother-nation, from whom we can expect help. We stand like the lone tree of the puszta. We can only rely on our own strength and on God. This will suffice to insure the honor and the life of the Hungarian nation forever.26
How proud he was of his father, who, aged and weak, joined the forces as a standard-bearer; and in a touching poem the son proclaimed his admiration for the man, soon to precede him to his grave, who was defending not his possessions, for he had none, but his fatherland!
The son joined the army, and in the very month of October, 1848, when it seemed as if the Viennese would indeed triumph in their revolution, he became captain of a Honvéd battalion—the national army—at Debrecen. In December of that year, he put his wife and his newly born son into the safekeeping of close friends. In January 1849, he joined General Bem. This seasoned Polish soldier, veteran of Polish uprisings, of the Vienna revolt, was now on the battlefield once more, unshakable, immovable, as ever dedicated, an inspiration to his troops. Bem knew how to appreciate Petöfi’s worth—the worth of the fiery, volatile, temperamental poet and soldier—and Petöfi in turn found in the old soldier another father. Bem tried hard to keep the poet out of the range of guns, but did not always succeed. He employed him as courier and liaison officer with the ministry of war, but the poet’s pride and sensitiveness frequently resulted in disciplinary infractions that elicited reprimands from the higher authorities. But Petöfi was a true soldier.
On April 11, 1849, he reported from Mühlbach:
Yesterday Bem distributed the smaller decorations to the best men of his army. I too was honored to be among them. I was rewarded, beyond measure, not by reason of the distinction which I received, but by the manner in which it was conferred. With his own hand he fastened it to my chest, with his left hand, for his right hand was still in a sling. “I fasten this order with my left hand, which is the one nearest to my heart,” he said, as he embraced me. All the world knows that I am far from modest, but this, by God, I did not deserve! I replied with such deep feeling, that, in recalling it, my soul shudders: “My General, I owe you more than even to my father. My father gave me life, you have given me honor.”27
Three years before he had written:
One thought alone torments me—that I lie
Upon a featherbed to die!
Slowly wither, slowly waste away,
Flower-like; the furtive earth-worm’s prey;
Like a candle, slowly to be spent,
In an empty, lonely tenement.
No death like this, oh, Power Divine,
No death like this, be ever mine!
Let me be a tree through which the lightning flashes,
Or tempest plucks by roots and smashes,
Let me be a rock from mountain rent asunder,
Hurtled to the gorge, by sky-earth shaking thunder…
Grant that I may yield
Life on the battlefield,
There let the blood of my youth flow from my heart,
And when, from my lips, the last paeans start,
Let them be drowned in the clatter of steel,
In the roar of guns, in the trumpet’s peal;
And over my stilled corpse
Let horse after horse
Gallop ahead to the victory won,
And I shall lie to be trampled upon.
There let them gather my scattered bones,
When once the great day of burial comes,
With solemn, muffled drums for the dead,
With sable-shrouded banners ahead,
One grave for all! who died for thee,
O sacred name, World Liberty!28
On July 25, 1849, he was with Bem’s forces in the Transylvanian region. Bem had 4,200 men and eight cannons. The Russian general Lüders had 18,000 men and forty-six cannons. At first successful in their onslaughts on the enemy, Bem’s forces soon fell into a trap, as concealed Cossacks executed a pincer movement against him. Petöfi was last seen on July 31, 1849. He fell with hundreds of others in the battle of Segesvár. On August 13, the Hungarian armies surrendered at Világos. Days of terror succeeded. On August 15, Heinrich Heine received K. M. Kertbeny’s German versions of Petöfi’s poems. Petöfi was now speaking to the world.
Of his last days and movements he spoke in a letter to his wife. It was dated Maros Vásárhely, July 29, 1849:
My dearest, most beloved Julichka! I have just arrived here, after an uninterrupted journey of six days. I am tired. My hand shakes, so that I can hardly hold the pen…I will describe my journey. We learned that General Bem had advanced his troops toward the Vltava River. We followed…and found him at Bereck, on his return from the Vltava, where he had brought his fiery proclamation, and had thoroughly thrashed four thousand Russians with only one battalion. In Bereck he learned that our troops had been beaten at Szász-Régen, and frightfully scattered, so he galloped to restore order…I met him at Bereck. I stopped beside his coach, and greeted him. He looked up, recognized me, and cried out, stretching his arms toward me. I jumped up, and fell on his neck, and we embraced and kissed. “Mon fils, mon fils, mon fils,” the old man said with tears. Those who were around asked Gábor Egressy, “Is that the General’s son?” And now he is even kinder, more warm-hearted and fatherly toward me than ever. Today he told his other adjutant, “Please report to the Ministry of War, and be sure to use my exact words: ‘My adjutant, Major Petöfi, who has resigned because of the shameful conduct of General Klapka, is again restored to the service.’” On the way he told me that he would provide living quarters here, in Maros-Vásárhely, for you, and that I was to bring you here. This is my dearest wish. But I dare not do it so long as we have not secured our position visà-vis the Russians, who are in the vicinity. They’re only two miles away; our troops have driven them apart during the last couple of days like hens. But as soon as this place is more secure, it is the first thing I’ll do, you may be sure. How are you, my dear adored ones! If only I could hear from you! If you could somehow manage to write a word or two, my angel! I’ll let no chance go by to write you. Is my son still being breast-fed? Do wean him as soon as possible; teach him to talk, so that I may have a surprise. I kiss your souls, your hearts, a million times, numberless times, and remain your adoring husband, Sándor.29
On the last day he wrote what may well be called his own precious epitaph:
I hear the lark again singing,
Long forgotten song I hear,
Sing, oh sing, spring’s prophet,
Sing your song, spring’s herald!
God! how my heart is eased by your song,
After the battle’s din—
Like a cool mountain brook
That bathes the searing wound.
Sing, oh sing, little bird,
Bring to mind that now a soldier,
A messenger of death,
I am a Poet too.
Memory and hope I see,
Rose trees blooming at the sound of your song,
Bending all their cool greenery,
Over my enraptured soul…
Sing, lark, sing,
Your sounds awaken flowers, And my soul and heart—now so bare,
Burst like your song into bloom.30
And at the same time, an epitaph for his country, abandoned to her agonies:
Europe is quiet again, quiet,
Stilled is the people’s thunder,
Europe is quiet—oh, shame!
And Freedom’s undone!….
My people: Raise up your head,
You are God’s torch to light
All through this darkened night,
While others sleep.
For, if not for our light,
Blazing thoughout the dark,
Heaven might indeed believe,
The world’s end had come.
Freedom, look down on us,
See how our people bleed,
Others scarce give their tears,
We—our life’s blood.
Say, what more can we give,
Your blessings to deserve?
Remnants, we are the last—
Faithful—in faithless days!31
One night I strolled along the Neva’s shore,
Lost in my thoughts. When suddenly I mused:
“If only slaves would scorn to bend the knee,
Then all these sorry palaces on Neva’s bank,
Would not be standing, and men would look
On other men as brothers. But alas!
Behold the ruler sits enthroned here!
No ruler! For neither God nor demi-God
Now rules this world.
But only kennel-keepers lord it over all.
While we, their politic nobodies, weep,
Lickspittles we, we weep and wail our fate.”
Such were my thoughts one night as I
Walked lost in musings along the Neva’s bank.
When suddenly I was ware of eyes—two lights
That glared at me from one of Neva’s isles!
The prison fortress of Saint Peter and Saint Paul!
Startled, I crossed myself and spat out thrice,
To drive the devil back. And I resumed my thoughts
Thus interrupted. And then went home.32
Thus Taras Shevchenko in 1860, three years after his return from a ten years’ exile. In 1847 he had gotten to know the inside of the prison of Peter and Paul, its interior even more forbidding than its outside. And if he shuddered now, again a free man, it was with good cause.
He had not changed. Exile had tempered the steel of his character, hardened him, in fact; but had also filed his insights to a greater sharpness and understanding. His body had suffered. Those who saw him now, like the Princess Repnin, were shocked by this forty-three year old man who had aged so prematurely, lost his hair, and walked with the gait of a decrepit ancient…
In his Journal for 1857, he had written in retrospect:
All this unspeakable grief, all kinds of humiliations and insults have passed, as if without touching me…No part of my inner self has changed…And from the depth of my heart I thank my Almighty Creator that He did not permit my terrible experience to touch with its iron claw my convictions, my shining child-like beliefs. Some things became brighter, more rounded, assumed more natural dimensions and appearance. But this is the result of the serenely circling old Saturn, and by no means the result of my bitter experience.33
Taras Shevchenko was no novice in misfortunes. Attending divinities that minister at the birth of serf-children are scarcely generous, and the privileges with which they endowed him were the normal ones: the doom of a life of suffering, oppression, humiliation, resentments. But fortunately, they made one exception: they also conferred upon him that unpredictable gift—not always the most grateful or happy one—of genius. It was his primal misfortune to be born a serf, the son and grandson of serfs, and to spend the first twenty-four years of his life in bondage. It was his happy fortune that in time his talent proved a juicy bait to tempt his master’s greed and thus bring salvation to the young man. As for his servitude, it was neither simple nor single. He was born a Ukrainian or “Little Russian,” of a subject nationality, almost a colony, ruled by Great Russia. He spoke Ukrainian, or Ruthenian, a vernacular belonging to the Slavic branch of languages but regarded by the dominant Russians as nothing more than a barbarous jargon. Even the enlightened Belinsky shared this prejudice. Like all oppressed minorities, the Ukrainians too, if they had not sworn total allegiance to the Russian ruler, boasted of an erstwhile independence as a state, boasted of ancient Cossack glories and victories until subjugated in turn by Poles and then Russians, and prayed and hoped for redemption. Now, as a result of numerous Polish and other partitions, one portion of the Ukraine belonged to Russia, the other to Austria. Gogol had romantically described the life of the Cossacks, but had given little thought to the national consciousness of the Ukrainians or their aspirations for independence. Those Ukrainians who were moved by national sentiments regarded “Greater Russia” as inferior in both culture and historic past as compared with their own former centers of civilization, such as Kiev.
Of course, these notions were as yet far from the consciousness of the little serf-boy born on the estates of Count Engelhardt in the tiny village of Morintsi, government of Kiev, two years after the Napoleonic invasion…
On his own body, in his spirit, he came to know the meaning of serfdom—of hard labor, beatings, degradations, hunger and sickness. His early “education” in such a school guarded him, in the future, from any illusions about the happiness and tranquility that surround the bucolic life. Of the so-called benefits that Nature confers upon her denizens he was a qualified witness. That extreme glorification of Nature and Nature’s blessings, of which the Romantics were such fervent apostles and which was also, in part, Wordsworth’s creed, Shevchenko would have scorned, had he known of it. He could scarcely have understood that poet’s lines,
One impulse from a vernal wood,
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can…
Wordsworth, of course, was saved from his own exaggerated naiveté by the corrective experiences of the French Revolution, so that he could also add the mournful reflection on “What man has made of man.”
If Shevchenko did have an analogue in British literature, it would have been Robert Burns, whose poetry he knew and admired, and whose hard life paralleled his own in many respects, save that Burns was a peasant-farmer, nominally a free man, and Shevchenko but a piece of chattel.
Whatever the secret impulses that Nature through her “vernal woods” dispenses to her inhabitants, impulses that “moralize” the human being, they were hidden from the little serf in Kirilivka, the village to which his family had soon removed. He did not need to “return to Nature” to find truth; he was there to witness it and later to report it. With little flourish he wrote finis to the bucolic myth.
In 1850 (still in exile), he composed, like so many romantics, his brief autobiography. It was not the autobiography of a “romantic.” Wordworth had his Prelude: The Growth of a Poet’s Mind, Coleridge his Biographia Literaria, Goethe his Dichtung und Wahrheit. Shevchenko’s Truth and Poetry were one:
If you but knew, fine gentlemen,
If you but knew where there are tears,
You would not write idyllic songs,
Nor praise the goodness of Heaven in vain,
Making a mock of our bitter dole.
How can you call that hut in the woods,
A tranquil paradise on earth?
Once in that cot I suffered griefs,
There it was I wept first tears,
I ask of God if there exist
In all this world an evil worse
Than in that hut—that Paradise!
No Paradise for me that village hut
Hard by the pond.
Here mother bore and swaddled me,
Sang to me, and wept for me,
And scalded me with her hot tears.
In that small wood, that Paradise,
I lived hell’s woes, a bondman’s child,
A slave to endless toiling, chained,
Not even time for prayers…
And there it was my mother died,
Died in her youth of penury and toil.
My father too, amid his brood
(All small and naked)
Could stand his bitter lot no more,
And died a serf; while we, the young,
Like tiny mice dispersed among strangers.
I went to school—a water-carrier;
My brothers too were to slavery yoked,
Until the time when with heads sheared,
They were sent for soldiers.
And sisters, sisters mine,
What unkind fate awaits you, doves?
For sake of whom do you draw breath?
In serfdom your black hair will whiten.
In serfdom you will die!34
Such was his school. Like other serfs, he might have lived out his life, gone for a soldier, and died worn out by work and sickness. Whatever he had of an education had been at the hands of ignorant and brutal priest-teachers, and of no value. But as a very little boy he had begun to display a talent for drawing and painting. One evening he was caught in the act of copying by candlelight, mercilessly thrashed by his young master (in fear of a fire). It was not his first beating, but none proved so providential. Young Engelhardt, as avaricious as any of his co-brother lords, saw a potential source of income in the young scamp, and set him to work with trained masters. Whatever poetic genius was stirring within him had not as yet become manifest. But there was no doubt he could draw and paint. From the little village of the Ukraine, young Vassily Engelhardt brought Shevchenko to Vilno, and then to Warsaw, to be taught. And then, in fear of the Polish uprising of 1830, the master fled to Saint Petersburg, taking his serf along with him.
For the first time Dame Fortune looked upon Shevchenko almost benignly. Here his talents impressed a number of prominent personalities, among them Karl Briullov, the most celebrated painter of the day, an academician famous for his giant picture of “The Last Days of Pompei,” other artists, as well as the poet Zhukovsky. Since serfs were excluded from entering the Academy of Arts, these and other patrons devised a scheme for raising the 2,500 rubles demanded by Engelhardt for his chattel. Briullov would paint a portrait of Zhukovsky, which would then be auctioned off for that amount. On April 22, 1838, seven years after his arrival in the capital, Taras Shevchenko was declared a free man, and qualified for entrance into the Academy. His master Engelhardt was thus enabled to achieve immortality by virtue of his serf and the rubles expended to liberate him. Shevchenko was then twenty-four.
At the Academy of Art, under Briullov, Shevchenko prospered. But even more important than the school was the city itself, its intellectual and moral atmosphere, and the personalities he was thus able to meet, the books he could now obtain, the régime he could observe at first hand. He became a skilful painter, was in demand for portraits, painted classical subjects in keeping with the demand of the times, but also swerved aside to paint things and persons closer to his heart.
In letters, he was his own teacher. His range of self-education was amazing. He knew no foreign languages, but his native intelligence, his penetrating genius, enabled him to absorb and understand whatever he read, even in translations. He read and read: Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Béranger, Schiller, Heine, the Polish poets Mickiewicz and Kraśinski, Byron, Burns, Dante, the Greek classics. The intellectual atmosphere around him, for all its inhibitions, was vibrant with innovation. The 1830s had brought forth Pushkin’s poetry and plays, Gogol’s “Taras Bulba” and The Government Inspector, the works of Lermontov. The following decade proved no less inspiring, but much freer now that the numerous “circles” were playing such an important role in the cultural and political life of Russia. The amazed and ignorant household serf who had arrived in St. Petersburg in 1831 became in time an intellectual, a member of the “intelligentsia”—a serf consorting with members of the nobility, the gentry, the upper middle classes, students and professors!
He never lost his spirit of independence, nor his sense of inner dignity. He never forgot what he had been, nor those with whom he had once lived in common unfreedom and drudgery. He never lost sight of the Ukraine and its people—and he longed to return there. We do not know whether he ever became acquainted with any member of the Petrashevsky group or other revolutionary circles. But the current of new ideas swirled around him, inescapable. If he was not yet a “son” of the Decembrists, he would soon become one. His observant eye noted Tsar and commoner, and his burgeoning poetic talents reserved these for future expression.
Though many knew him for his paintings, few knew that he had also been writing verse; fewer would have predicted that the poet would far outdistance the skilful painter and in time emerge as Ukraine’s first national singer.
In the poems he thought of himself as a Ukrainian “minstrel,” or kobzar, playing upon the kobza, the popular stringed instrument. Hence he entitled his first collection of verse The Kobzar. The small book was published with the assistance of a well-to-do patron in 1840. As kobzar Shevchenko commenced his poetic career, as kobzar he would end his life.
With the great Romantics he shared the fervor of nationalism that pervaded the Western world, and he too spoke the poetry of national history, national spirit, national pride. But he spoke from the purview of a former serf; hence he sang the sorrows of his people—the peasant, the serf; raged against lord and master, the oppressor; mourned the humiliations and low estate of the Ukraine. Like the great romantic national poets speaking to their own subject peoples, he too endeavored to rouse his countrymen from their sense of hopelessness, of debasement, by recalling their past history and the Cossack glories as revealed in their wars against oppressor Poles and Russians. But the past did not withhold him from the present, which he knew so well. He knew from his own experience the fate of the serf—if male and young, destined to hard labor or endless soldiery; if young woman, to toil, enforced subservience to a male master, seduction, shameful motherhood, and miserable end; if bastard child, to the ignominy and mockery of a whole village. Such occurrences were too common to be “romanticized,” and if the poet dwells on them time and again, it was because the sufferers appeared to have been forgotten by God.
His heart glowed with pride when he turned to the past history of the Ukraine, when he recounted, as in the epic poem The Haidamaks, the feats, often frightfully bloody, of Ukrainian heroes. Here he felt himself on native terrain. His imagination was fired at the recollection of the great Cossack and peasant uprising of 1768. He defied tradition by using his native Ukrainian, and boasted of it, throwing down the gauntlet to his Russian critics (as well as a number of his snobbish compatriots) who disdained such a barbarous “dialect” for literary uses…Here he spoke with the accents of Robert Burns.
He was a celebrity. In his poems, readers recognized not only their native tongue, used with mastery, but also their native and popular folk-song and folklore. The verse forms too he had adopted from popular tradition.
“Et ego in Arcadia fui.” “Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren.” He too could boast of having been born in Arcadia. He too was a poet. He longed to return to his Ukraine, though he knew that it was no romantic Arcadia. After fourteen years of absence, he did go back. His songs and poems were known to many already. And written in their own maligned tongue!
Nashcho mieni chorni brovi,
Nashcho kari ochi,
Nashcho lita molodyi,
Veseli, divochi?
Lita moyi molodyi
Marno propadayut,
Ochi plachut, chorni brovi
Od vitru liniayut…
Soon composers would set them, and the people would sing them.
What avail my coal-black brows,
What my coal-black eyes,
What avail my maiden years,
That so gay should be?
Years of youth will pass away,
Passing like the flowers,
Eyes are weeping, and the tresses,
With the winds will fade.
The heart aches.
It’s tired of life,
Like the captive bird.
What avails my beauty now,
If the joy’s all gone?…..35
He would sing of such forlorn maidens time and again, each time perhaps with greater tenderness, and later, along with the tenderness, anger and even savagery. Here in the Ukraine he was hailed. With the famous Ukrainian poet, ethnographer, and novelist Panteleimon Kulish, he would explore the historic sites, Cossack burial places and monuments. Here, too, he would be received by Prince Repnin, like himself a Ukrainian patriot, and his sister the Princess Varvara Repnin, somewhat older than himself, but not too old to fall in love. The Prince was once governor of Kiev, now in disfavor. The princess loved Shevchenko’s poems, and even the poet himself; had he been a nobleman she might have married him. As it was, she welcomed him to her salon and read his poems, wept over them, or exulted.
He was like Antaeus. He needed the earth to feel his true strength. And the Ukraine exalted him, fired him, and broadened him. More than ever he became aware of the horrors that lay concealed under the outward veneer of the commonplace, everyday life.
In his earlier works he had arraigned the Poles for their past oppression of his countrymen. But now he saw that it was not Poland that deserved his execration, but Tsarist Russia. Yet he had also observed his own Ukrainian landscape more closely, and with wiser eye, and he noted that here it was the Ukrainian landlords themselves who were the worst exploiters of their own people.
The Academy of Art conferred upon him in 1845 the title and diploma of “Free Artist of the Academy.” Once more he left St. Petersburg, to accept a commission to explore the ancient monuments of the Ukraine. More than ever he came into close association with men and women who were, like himself, deeply concerned for their country and eager for reform, especially of the condition of the serfs. If he was more fiery than most of his companions, and if, as was true, he was more effervescent, violent, and indiscreet in his onslaught on tsars and on Russia, they attributed it to his poetic temperament, and counseled moderation, at least in public. In private, they read with glee, often aloud, his manuscript poems, with occasional shudders at the poet’s temerity; many of them could not forbear cheering. At last their own poet! From hand to hand his poems passed, particularly those the censor, if his eyes ever fell on them, would be sure to suppress and probably call to the attention of the Third Section.
No fear held him back. The three years between 1844 and 1847 proved most productive; he had in fact matured rapidly. But his temper had not cooled, nor had his voice softened. He who had been whipped as a boy and young man was now ready in his turn to scourge. But not out of personal resentment. His view, now enlarged, encompassed a great portion of humanity. He spoke now not only of Ukrainians enslaved; but of Russians enslaved, exiled, silenced; he scourged the oppressors wherever they were. Popular figures derived from folklore and folk poetry—the witch, the gypsy, the village idiot, or the holy madman—become symbolic of the new fervor that penetrates the poet with respect to the trials of common life. But it is in such longer poems as “The Dream,” “The Caucasus,” and “The Heretic” that the full rhapsodic fury of the rebel-poet erupts in red-hot volcanic lava. Taking such traditional devices as a dream or a vision of mountains or a heroic figure of another day, Shevchenko adapts these to his novel purposes—the indictment of tyranny and evil-doing on the part of the masters of the world. A dream carries him on a flight over the Ukraine, over Siberia, and to St. Petersburg. He is overcome by the beauty of his native countryside, and yet, he asks himself,
My soul,
Why are you so sad?
My soul, in anguish,
Why do you weep so bitterly?
Dushe moya,
Chovo ti sumyesh?
Dushe moya ubogaya,
Chovo marno plachesh.36
Why do you grieve for things you do not see?
When you cannot hear the sound of human tears?
Then look and mark:
For I am flying high,
Above the swiftly-moving clouds.
No rulers there, nor any penalties condign.
No sound of laughter reaches, nor the cries of woe.
But see: in that
Eden you have now departed,
Patched garments are stripped from backs of cripples;
And so too their hides—for these the lord requires
To shoe his princelings.
And see yon widow on the rack,
To pay her poll-tax.
And her poor son, her only one,
Her only child—torn from her to be sent for a soldier!
And in bitterness:
Does God behind the clouds,
See our ancient tears and anguish?
Perhaps…But helps our ills,
Like the timeless giant mountains,
That flow with human blood….
Once more he pursues his flight. He sights Siberia, hears the clank of chains, and sees emerging from the belly of the earth the exiled prisoners confined to the gold mines. Then on to St. Petersburg…Looking on the busy and majestic city, the poet recalls the bloody sacrifices exacted by Peter the Great from the thousands of Cossacks brought by force to build the capital, who died of the cruel service. And now he sees the Tsar and the Tsaritsa, and their subjects and lackeys, courtiers, and petitioners, and the humiliations to which the latter are subjected. Here the poem lapses into painful burlesque. Here there is nothing less than lèse majesté. The Tsaritsa is a “dry mushroom,” a “heron,” and both she and her consort are “owls.” The Tsar is a “bear” when he is in the presence of his subjects; but his true nature is that of a “kitten.” But the full odium of tsarism is expressed in the obloquy heaped upon Peter the Great (and by analogy on all Tsardom) by the dead Cossacks:
You slaughtered us, you stripped our skins,
Of them made mantles; and sewed with our sinews
New robes for your city.
Gaze and wonder!
See your palaces and churches!
Savage hangman,
Accursed forever!
It is doubtful if any other Russian writer had spoken in these terms. Shevchenko was staking his head. His friends, who thrilled to his lines, feared for him, and with justice.
In like manner the majestic heights of the Caucasus elicit not merely wonder and exultation at the beauty of the landscape and the exoticism of its population, but immediately brings to the poet’s mind the image of Prometheus chained, of that glorious Titan whose figure had attracted innumerable poets of the age. Pushkin and Lermontov had rejoiced in the Caucasus, loved its strangeness, its otherworldliness, its wildness, its primitiveness. They saw it as a refuge from civilization. Byron had brought similar passion to the Alps, had seen in them an echo of his Promethean defiance of the world.
For Shevchenko, Prometheus, enchained on the Caucasus, gnawed by an insatiable vulture, was, as to Shelley, humanity itself, staunch, resolute, inflexible, suffering. But also humanity as the bearer of some impregnable “Truth” that would in the end be victorious. Shevchenko’s Prometheus, though pain-racked, smiles in his mortal agonies. The vital word of God and Truth that is his to utter is the promise of Freedom to mankind. Yet Shevchenko is troubled: Where is God? When will the word of Truth awaken? When will the Lord, the weary One, lie down to rest and give the human spirit leave to live?
For these fantastic Caucasian heights, beautiful as they are, are also blood-drenched. The Russian conqueror has penetrated here, and with fire and sword has subjugated the native populations.
Ognenne morie! Slava! Slava!
“A sea of fire! Glory! Glory! Glory to hounds, and harriers, and trainers!” The Russians say: All we want is “your high mountains—that is all. The rest we have—both land and ocean!”37
In the long poem “The Heretic,” the Promethean role is now filled by the celebrated historical figure of Jan Hus, the Bohemian reformer and martyr. Though he was burned at the stake, his word too, the word of “Truth” cannot be annihilated. For he too was destined to have a succession of “avenging angels.”
There were other fiery poems of similar character, each of which may be characterized as a segment of a Ukrainian Marseillaise. In the circles where they were read and recited, they were regarded as such.
There was no doubt now. He was the revolutionary spokesman for the Ukraine. His own “Testament,” composed in 1845, became a kind of national anthem.
Yak umru, to pokhovayet
Mene na mogli.
Sered stepu shirokov,
Na Vraini milyi…
When I am dead, pray place my bones
High on a mound to be my tomb—
Amid the vastness of the steppe,
In my beloved
Ukraine!
That I may look on endless fields,
The Dnieper and his craggy shores—
And hear his waters roar.
When far from my beloved land
The Dnieper bears the blood of foes,
I shall arise, leave hills and fields,
And soar to
God and pray to him.
And till that day of freedom comes,
I’ll own no
God!
Bury me thus.
And then arise!
Break at last your slavish chains,
And with the blood of enemies
Water the tree of liberty!
And when at last the day arrives,
When as brothers, free you meet,
Then with a gentle, peaceful word,
Recall that
I have been.38
But Shevchenko’s activities were not confined merely to poetry, to archaeological research, or to social gatherings. In 1846, when he settled in Kiev, he made the acquaintance of the prominent historian and Ukrainian nationalist, Mikola Kostomarov, author of the celebrated Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People. It was this book that formed the ideological basis for the establishment of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, which he founded along with P. Kulish. The society was to be the means of fostering and developing an understanding of the need for a Pan-Slavic Union of nations and nationalities in a federation founded on the principles of Christian morality and ethics. Each of the states was to have equal status, self-determination and self-rule, and would be republican in character, on the model of the United States of America. Its program included the emancipation of the serfs, a strong and popular educational movement, and special attention to the native language. The society was, of course, secret.
Shevchenko was at home with the ideas of the Brotherhood, and as a matter of fact went far beyond them. Kostomarov reported in his Autobiography:
When I told Shevchenko of the existence of the Brotherhood, he immediately expressed his readiness to join it, but he did carry the ideas of the Society to extremes, a circumstance that led to numerous differences of opinion between Shevchenko and myself. He read a number of his unpublished works to me, which held me spellbound. I was especially impressed by his poem, “The Dream,” that composition of Shevchenko’s which remained unpublished, because the censorship would never have passed it. With genuine enthusiasm I read and reread the poem throughout the night. During the summer evening we sat for hours…in our garden. There were endless conversations and discussions.39
Shevchenko was not really a member, and appeared at the Brotherhood gatherings infrequently; but his poetry and his sentiments were well known there. He was the Society’s lyrical inspiration. When away from Kiev, he propagandized with his customary fervor. Perhaps with too great fervor, for he did not altogether approve of the Brotherhood’s gentle Christian and peaceful programs for effecting the changes he and its members desired.
The Brotherhood met, talked, sang, and read poetry, and planned for a future confederation of Slavic states. Shevchenko’s lines were frequently on their lips. How were they to know that there was a spy, a student, Petrov, who made it his business to eavesdrop on their talk? The inevitable happened. The members of the Brotherhood were arrested. So was Shevchenko, on April 5, 1847. He was sent along with the others to St. Petersburg, and imprisoned in the Peter-Paul Fortress.
So it was that the poems of the “Three Years” (1844–1847) were found on him, to incriminate him, as well as some letters, and additional information lodged against him by another Kiev student, Andruzky.
The subsequent inquiry did not produce evidence of the poet’s membership. But the charges against him were heavy, not least that he had slandered the imperial house—so the ominous Count Orlov reported to the Tsar. In addition, he had lamented the enslavement of the Ukraine; insolently forgotten “his conscience and the fear of God,” and called for an independent Ukraine! On May 26, he was sentenced to exile, as a “private in the Orenburg Separate Corps.” And once again Tsar Nicholas’s penchant for graciousness took the form of another prohibition: “under the strictest supervision” he was to be forbidden to write or to sketch.40
The members of the Brotherhood were also given severe sentences, ranging from years of solitary confinement in the detested Schlüsselberg prison, to years of exile. Kostomarov, from his prison window, saw on May 30,
Shevchenko being brought into the courtyard in his soldier’s uniform. Smiling, he bade his friends farewell. I wept when I saw him. Smiling, he doffed his hat and entered the carriage. His face was peaceful and firm.41
The journey into exile was a long one. And finally prisoner and guards reached the distant city of Orsk and its fortress. Ten years of exile! “I was tortured, I was tormented,” he wrote later, “but I did not implore pardon.”42
Though forbidden to write or draw, he wrote and drew in secret. He made for himself tiny notebooks and slipped them into his boots. Here were to be found some of his most magnificent poems. His artistic talent procured him a minor respite from soldiery and torture. He was assigned to accompany an expedition to the distant Aral Sea region. He was to serve as draughtsman. So upon the hardships of the Orsk fortress and the solitude and brutality of the barracks, the attacks of rheumatism and scurvy, followed the no less arduous long journey, in parching heat and tormenting thirst. At least a change. When he returned to Orenburg, comparative relaxation alternated with new excesses of severity, transfer to other fortresses like that of Novopetrovsk on the Caspian Sea. His frequent appeals for relief, for remission of the sentence, addressed through a few of his friends at home, were all useless. Even the accession of the new Tsar Alexander II did not help. The general amnesty extended by the new Emperor omitted Shevchenko. The memory of his insults to majesty had not been extinguished.
When finally freed in 1858 he was already an old man. But he had not been crushed. In fact his indignation burned more fiercely than ever. His heart was heavy. He had been deeply hurt while in exile by the continued silence of his friends, who had not written to him in fear of recriminations. Chastened by his experiences, he was no longer ready to embrace hopes of an immediate political change, and his works now alternate between savage excoriations of tyranny, and rage at his countrymen’s apathy and inertness. But he never ceased from a call to arms. On his return to St. Petersburg he came into contact with a new generation of radicals like Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. His friendships grew in number. His reputation was never higher. He was particularly impressed by the theatrical genius of the American black actor, Ira Aldridge, whose interpretations of Shakespeare moved him profoundly. But he remained as indiscreet as ever. On a return journey to the Ukraine in 1859 he was arrested for having written and circulated certain allegedly blasphemous poems. He was ordered to return to the capital. Strangely enough, he was also appointed academician and professor at the Academy, and was allowed to publish his collected poems—with the exclusion of objectionable ones. This collection appeared in 1860, again under the title of The Kobzar. His personal life, however, remained empty. The Princess Repnin was estranged from him; she had turned into a religious fanatic. His numerous attempts to find a wife—he sought them not in the upper circles, but among young serf-girls—miscarried time and again. He was doomed to loneliness.
Yet the productions of his last years lose nothing of inspiration, imagination or force. There is no sign that his own physical debilitation, which became more and more deleterious and marked, and which without question resulted from his deprivations during exile, intrudes itself into his creations. Here his energies are at their fullest. Bitterness and exultation, love and hatred, anger and kindness, sympathy and rage are here. His religious fervor has been deepened, but has also grown more heretical. His Christianity has become revolutionary.
Shevchenko’s Christianity was anti-institutional; it harked back to earlier traditions of martyrdom and adherence to a militant, radically new ethic. He now speaks as it were with the voice of a Lamennais—but a Lamennais who understands the oppressiveness of a religion that is sister to secular authority, perhaps its handmaiden, and who has seen its baleful influence on the serf population of Russia and the Ukraine. He speaks—if one may carry the analogy farther—with the voice of the English Levellers and Diggers of the Puritan Revolution. Of Lamennais, we are sure, he knew little, if anything; of the Puritans, probably nothing.
Thus he identifies the early Christian martyrs of the days of Nero with the Decembrists of Russia, as prototypes of revolutionaries in the cause of Truth and Justice, as in the epic poem “The Neophytes.” In another poem, “Mary,” he recreates the story of Jesus and his mother in a naturalistic fashion, with beauty and tenderness, in the style of a folk epic, simply and graphically. The Mother of Christ emerges as a woman of the people, whose love for the angel of the annunciation is told in bucolic style, unconventionally startling in its naturalness and physical elements, with a naïveté that conceals its artistic sophistication.
The Prophets of the Old Testament are with him as he translates their words into corresponding arraignments of his own age and its rulers, and his identification with the lowly. The sacred strains of the original are retained, but heightened to speak the language of Shevchenko’s day. So in the poem based on Isaiah 35, the poet translates the Hebrew prophet into the speech and needs of his people. Thus Shevchenko:
And the weary hands are at rest, that have borne the chains,
And the feeble knees are at rest, that have borne the manacles.
Be comforted, ye of feeble hearts, and fear not the wonder,
Come ye who have been ground down, ye who have suffered.
Avenge ye on the evil ones!
Or,
Life now fills the steppes and lakes, and not endless highways.
Ways that are free, ways that are wide, through the land of holiness.
A highway not for masters.
No!
Here slaves shall wander freely,
Without clamor or cries they shall gather for joy and gladness.
And in the desert wastes once more shall cheerful villages flourish.43
Hours of despair are brightened only by a call to arms:
My heart waits.
Suffers….
It weeps, and cannot sleep,
Like a child that cries for food.
Heart, oh heart, you await
A time of grim disasters?
There is nothing good to hope for,
There is no
Freedom—that longed-for good.
She sleeps.
Tsar Nicholas
Has lulled her.
Believe me,
To waken the languid one,
We must together, one and all
Harden the axe-shaft, whet the blade,
And start to rouse her….44
He was equally incautious in the expression of his religious views. It was these that eventually brought upon him the wrath of the authorities. Such a poem as “Hymn of the Nuns” scandalized and outraged them. The virgin nuns inveigh against the Lord for having denied them the fruits of love and joy.
Strike thunder, strike this house today,
This holy mansion where we waste away,
Lord our
God, we lay the blame on thee,
And bear thee ill and malice, and we sing
Hallelujah!….45
Nor is another poem, “The Idiot,” more sparing of the Divinity:
Oh You,
All-seeing
Eye,
You who from on high
See fettered slaves herded to
Siberian wastes,
Slaves, blessed and just, chained, racked and hanged!
And crucified!
And You
All-unknowing?
Or have you seen, and yet not been blinded?
Oh Eye,
Great Eye that surveys all,
You do not gaze too closely.
You sleep in gilded tabernacles, while
Tsar on
Tsar…
But why speak of these?
May the
Evil One take them off!…46
And yet, “hope sprang eternal.” He was on a steamer on the Volga in 1860, shortly before his death. An emancipated serf was playing snatches of Chopin on his violin, and Shevchenko records his impression:
Under the impact of these plaintive, sorrow-laden tones of this poor emancipated serf, in the graveyard stillnes of the night, the steamer seemed like a gigantic monster, with its muffled roar, ready with gaping maw to swallow landowners and inquisitors. Oh great Fulton! And you, great Watt! Your child—as yet tender—but growing hourly—will before long gnaw at the cudgels, the thrones, and the crowns, and will swallow diplomats and landowners as an hors d’oeuvre! What the French Encyclopedists initiated, your colossal and magnificent offspring will complete on our entire planet. My prophecy will be fulfilled!47
Shevchenko died on March 10, 1861 in St. Petersburg. Some time later his body was transferred to the Ukraine, and his monument today overlooks the Dnieper—his Dnieper.
What Pushkin became for Russia, Mickiewicz for Poland, Petöfi for Hungary, and earlier, Robert Burns for Scotland, Taras Shevchenko became for the Ukraine—not only a national, but also an international poet. For his own and the succeeding generations, he is one link in that golden chain of fraternity that marks a grand community of interests and aspirations such as had never been witnessed before. Shelley in his “Ode to the West Wind” had hoped to send forth the sparks from his “unextinguished hearth”—his “thoughts” to “hasten a new birth.” So too Shevchenko—the former serf who had been tied to the soil of the Ukraine, the peasant, the poet, the painter, the voice of all lands and all peoples—sends forth his poems, “his blossoms,” as he called them, his thoughts, and like a ploughman prays for a good harvesting in due time. And he sings:
Be thou plowed in low and high lands,
Field so dear to me!
Embrace the seed, beloved meadow,
The seed of liberty!
Spread thy blessing far and wide,
Watered by fair fortune,
Stretch thy bold dimensions
—Rich and fertile meadow!
Be not sown with words alone
—Reason be your seedlings
—Men will come to reap the fruit,
In a joyful season!
Spread, unfold beloved field,
My poor, lowly meadow!48
Yes, the old world is in ruins, And a new world will arise. For the sublime goddess Revolution comes rushing on the wings of the storm…
—Richard Wagner, “Revolution,” 1849
All peoples and all men are full of presentiments. Everyone whose living organs are not paralyzed sees with trembling expectation the approach of the future which will utter the decisive word…The air is sultry; it is heavy with storms! And therefore we call to our blinded brothers: Repent! Repent! The Kingdom of God is nigh. Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source of all life. The passion for destruction is also a creative passion!
—Mikhail Bakunin, “Reaction in Germany,” 1842
In a world filled with amazing incongruities, not the least strange was the meeting and associated activities in Dresden, the capital of Saxony, of two antipodal characters: Richard Wagner, Leipzig-born Kapellmeister of the Royal Theatre of that city, and Mikhail Bakunin, apostle of anarchism, Russian-born son of landowning parentage in the province of Tver.
It was as if the irony, and what Hegel called the cunning, of Reason were at work. For while Tsarism was sending its military power to the aid of Austria and Prussia in order to suppress revolution, it was also unwittingly sending forth emissaries not only intent on abetting revolution, but also ardently dedicated to the overthrow of Russian absolutism.
But the internationalism of 1848 and 1849 brought about many astonishing conjunctures and coalesced many otherwise incompatible and dissimilar temperaments and energies. Both actors in the Dresden drama of 1849, shortly to be enacted, were in their thirties: Wagner was thirty-six, Bakunin one year younger. Physically they were as unlike as they were intellectually. Richard Wagner was undersized, still somewhat undernourished; Bakunin was a towering, bearded giant. They were alike however in the possession of supercharged stores of energies, in the explosiveness of their feelings and their passion for change. Their careers were to be spectacularly dissimilar. But both had already attained a measure of ascendency in their respective vocations. Neither of them recognized any obstacles as being insurmountable in the attainment of their objectives, though they had encountered them all too frequently.
In their moral composition they were also far apart. Wagner knew only the “self” which demanded fulfilment at whatever cost; he possessed an overpowering “ego” that needed to make all around him subservient to himself and his goals—the creation of music, of a new art form of such dimensions as to require a revolution in the theatre and the opera. At the age of thirty, in 1843, when he was appointed Royal Kapellmeister at Dresden by King Friedrich August II of Saxony, Wagner already had an impressive though stormy career behind him. He was already known as an extraordinarily daring interpreter of the musical works of other composers, unorthodox but compelling; but he had also composed a surprising number of works in his own right, orchestral, operatic, and dramatic.
When he was not quite eighteen, his Concert Overture in B flat was performed by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; when he was twenty, his Symphony in C major, by the same distinguished group. At twenty-one he had completed the opera, Die Feen—The Fairies—and was already the conductor of an opera company in Magdeburg. Another opera, Das Liebesverbot—Love Prohibited, based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, was performed in Magdeburg when he was twenty-three. It was in that year, 1836, that he married the lovely actress Minna Planer. By the time he was appointed to Dresden in 1843, Wagner had scored a triumph with the historical opera Rienzi, but he failed of success with the subsequent Flying Dutchman.In 1845 he completed the score of Tannhäuser, and in the fateful month of March 1848, finished scoring Lohengrin. He was himself the poet of his operatic texts.
Years before, during his somewhat irregular student days in Leipzig, he too had been swept by the news of the Paris July Revolution of 1830, and had given way to moderate manifestations of enthusiasm. In the following year he became excited by the stream of Polish refugees who were arriving in Saxony after the revolutionary débacle in their country. He saw with his own eyes the heroic generals Bem and Count Tyszkiewicz. He celebrated these events in a “Political Overture,” now lost; and in 1836 in another overture, “Polonia.” The July days and their repercussions in Leipzig and Dresden were to remain vivid for him. “From this day,” he confessed in his autobiography, My Life, “the world of history had its commencement for me.”49
The German literary movement of revolt, the so-called “Young Germany,” inspired him to celebrate one of its tenets—the “rehabilitation of the flesh” and “free sensuality”—and to scourge Puritan hypocrisy in Das Liebesverbot, an opera which failed dismally when performed in Magdeburg.
He was resilient, irrepressible and self-confident, and even under the most trying circumstances, undefeatable. Toward the end of 1839 he went to Paris, hoping to capture that city, or at least obtain a performance of the hapless Liebesverbot. Paris was, after all, the city of opera. He was overwhelmed by the magnificence of the performances, especially of the works of Meyerbeer; he was thrilled by the excellence of Parisian orchestras, and for the first time heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony performed in a way that brought the work home to him in its profound greatness. He attended concerts of the works of Berlioz, with whom he was to develop a lifelong rivalry; he met Franz Liszt, not yet aware of the importance that generous and great man was to have for his future career. But he did not succeed in getting his own opera produced. Despite this disappointment, however, he managed to complete the score of Rienzi, to write the text of The Flying Dutchman, commence its musical setting, and complete the unorchestrated version in seven weeks. He was ever in need of money, borrowed freely, and eked out a desperate existence by doing hackwork for the Gazette musicale.
He was never to forgive Paris for neglecting him; and though time and again it drew him like a magnet, that city, and France herself, were forever to remain bitter reminders of defeat.
But he had much to look forward to in his own country: the prospect of a production of The Flying Dutchman in Berlin, and even more certainly that of Rienzi in Dresden.
The lifetime appointment of Wagner as Kapellmeister in Dresden, in 1843, promised a secure haven. But his was a restless, tumult-ridden spirit. In addition, he was a spendthrift and had sybaritic tastes. He was self-indulgent. He possessed the self-consciousness of a genius to whom the world was always in debt. His was a prehensile temperament, intellectually and physically. He possessed an extraordinary absorptive capacity and powers of assimilation. He had a magnetic personality, and drew to himself passionate admirers among men and women. But he could also make enemies—all too easily. He was unsparing of his own energies in the fulfilment of his artistic objectives, and equally demanding of others who worked with or under him. He was not easily satisfied with the quality of performance or repertory at the Dresden theatre. Nor could his associates, superiors, or audiences at the time fully understand his goals, his radical dreams of reorganizing the entire dramatic and musical domain in an environment that was still strictly bound to older traditions. How could they keep pace with his headlong ideas, and particularly with his lightning development as creator? Hence, their reception of his works alternated between a wild, hectic enthusiasm for Rienzi, and a dismal coldness toward The Flying Dutchman. And already he was transcending even these creations! But he won farsighted votaries and worshippers—admirers like Franz Liszt, who had come to Dresden for the Rienzi production; and among the young, the brilliant conductor Hans von Bülow, in whose later life he was to play so dramatic, even tragic, a role.
His prestige in circumscribed Dresden was mounting; if only he were not so arrogant, so insistent on change, so contemptuous of the court personnel and their interference in matters they understood so little! They had little sympathy for his ideas of reorganization—the creation of a national theatre, of the cooperation and collaboration of dramatist and composer, of a school of theatrical arts—in fact, a theatre that would be equal to and worthy of performing the Wagnerian works he had in mind! They also looked askance upon the spendthrift, whom the Court again and again graciously rescued from the pressure of creditors.
Had they been able to look into that head of his, with its schemes of such vast proportions, ideas of such magnitude and novelty, they would have been even more outraged. How could they understand his projects for a new opera that would no longer be opera in the Meyerbeerian sense, but a recreation in modern terms of what he believed to have been the character of Greek tragedy? or his ambition to restore drama, to coalesce speech, sound, and dance into a unitary creation? How could they understand his dream of bringing back into the theatre the modern equivalents of “myth,” which he believed to be the basic elements of human or “folk” experience, enlarged into cosmic meanings? The Tannhäuser production of October 1845 failed, not merely because of the public’s inability to understand the meaning and intent of the musical drama, but also because of the inadequacies of the two stars, the notable Schröder-Devrient, and the Tannhäuser of the evening, Tichatschek.
Yet it was true that theatre—drama and opera—were sadly in need of revolution. They had sunk to a pathetically low estate. In the German principalities, where it had been kept alive by the various courts, the theatre was tradition-bound and senescent. This was no less true of the theatres of Vienna. England licensed only two theatres in London, where, aside from the classical fare like Shakespeare and Sheridan, the repertory was dismally shallow. Nor was France an exception. Romanticism was dying on its theatrical boards, but was kept spuriously alive in the opera. Theatrical taste was perhaps best exemplified in the highly successful combination of the sensational and cliché-ridden librettos of Eugène Scribe as set to music by the grandiloquent Meyerbeer. In all these instances, it must also be remembered that the theatre was subjected to the tightest control on the part of the state authorities, such as could never be exercised with respect to journalism and the novel. Here and there exceptional dramatic talent, even genius appeared, though doomed to tragic frustration. In Germany, for example, there were Christian Grabbe and Georg Büchner, of the preceding decade; in Vienna, contemporaries like Franz Grillparzer and Friedrich Hebbel were forced to compromise their original gifts in deference to imperial authority. The tragic history of Hector Berlioz, complicated as it was, represents but another instance of original genius at war with ironbound tradition, political and personal machinations, and invidious suspicion of radical artistic innovation.
What is perhaps most paradoxical about the prospective revolution that Wagner was advocating in drama and music is the fact that it begins, continues, and ends as a kind of belated Romanticism. In the very year, 1843, in which he assumed the conductorship at the Dresden theatre, Romanticism may be said to have died in superannuation in France, as it was dying in the rest of Europe. The failure of Victor Hugo’s drama Les Burgraves in Paris marks its death-knell. It will never fully die out, but like a surviving ghost will appear and reappear throughout the century, devoid of blood and bone but still exercising its own necrophilic magnetism. Even when somewhat later the scope of Wagner’s theorizing and practice is enlarged to include social and political—aside from purely aesthetic—elements, it marches under the bondage of Romanticism. And it will continue to do so until the very end. Within the first stages of his theorizing are contained most of the seeds that will determine his life and work, up to his achievement of consummate mastery.
As with other European Romantics, a preoccupation with medievalism was at the root of Wagner’s creations. Romanticism, in its many varieties and tendencies, had uncovered vast treasures of literature, art, and thought of the Middle Ages. The “Gothic,” once an object of derision and abuse, equated with “barbarism,” now acquired a radiance and glory, as fresh understanding and enthusiasm gazed upon the splendors of the Gothic cathedrals, scanned the rediscovered literary treasures of the medieval poets, and conned the myths and folklore of nations. The “romances” of chivalry composed by such poets as Chrétien de Troyes, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, the poetry of the troubadours, trouvères, and minnesingers, opened vast worlds of fantasy and dream. The rich storehouses of Arthurian legend, the Round Table and the Holy Grail renewed the poetic imagination of the new age. But there was also another trove that was uncovered, little known till then. This was the Nordic mythology and legend contained in the Icelandic sagas. The rich tapestry of Arthurian lore was now rivaled by the dour, imposing, sombre tales of Odin, Sigurd the Volsung, Balder, and the doom of the world and of the gods.
It was in these treasures that Wagner’s imagination reveled. Here were to be found Tristan and Iseult, Parsifal, Siegfried, Wotan, and in a strange commixture, also the medieval Frederick Barbarossa, the long-awaited Emperor-Redeemer of Germany. The mythic world was now enlarged in Wagner’s purview to include Jesus of Nazareth.
Wagner came upon Jacob Grimm’s epochal Deutsche Mythologie in 1843, some eight years after its publication. “A new birth took place within me,” he wrote many years later in his autobiography.50 In these confused, fragmentary Nordic narratives he felt as if he had rediscovered “a long forgotten, long sought-for consciousness.”
David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus, containing a mythical interpretation of the life of Christ, had appeared almost at the same time as Grimm’s seminal work. The concurrent studies of comparative religions, mythology, and folklore, the historic researches in the Old and New Testaments, the explorations in the Near and Far East, were laying the foundations for a comparative study of many cultures, particularly as to their similarities and dissimilarities.
Along with the emergence of national conscience had come an investigation into what might be called the “spirit” of nations, races, and peoples that found its distinctive expression in its culture, particularly poetry and myth. This was the Volksgeist. In the manifestations of this “folk-spirit,” presumed to create instinctively, spontaneously, even unconsciously, were to be found the true meaning and essence of a people, its thinking and feeling. These “unconscious” creators poured their dreams, visions, images of the world, their understanding of the universe, into their “myths.” History presented the sheer facts of a people’s existence; “myth” gave its picture in a totality, in an “idealized” form. To understand the spirit of a people it was necessary to dig deeply into the recesses of its mythical life—its true life. Within the triad of “folk,” “myth,” and the “unconscious,” was enclosed the secret of a people—its essence.
Political romanticism wove into that conception of a “folk” and its “mythic life” a fantasy and dream that would somehow succeed in rehabilitating the past to counter a disturbing, distraught, ever-changing and challenging present. Modern psychology would fix medieval “mythic” life permanently into what it calls the “collective unconscious.”
The great synthesis Richard Wagner was proposing, to correspond to that in the Greek tragedy and its myths, he believed he could establish through its Germanic counterpart. It would be a discovery of the “mythic element” in an Urgermanentum —the primal Germanic soul. Having completed Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, he was now ready to bring ur-Germanic gods and heroes upon his stage. Soon he was at work on the first of these dramas, Siegfrieds Tod—Siegfried’s Death, completed in 1848. Hindsight may find some symbolism in the fact that the great subject of lust for gold and the doom it carried should have been projected in that fateful period when it seemed, in fact, that an old world was crashing and a new world was in birth…
Richard Wagner was in the midst of conducting a rehearsal of Flotow’s Martha when his musical associate and friend August Röckel brought him the electrifying news that King Louis-Philippe had fled Paris and that a republic had been proclaimed in France!51
Wagner could understand Röckel’s delirium. For as a boy, Röckel had been in Paris at the outbreak of the Revolution of 1830; he had lived in England; he was a fervent democrat and radical. At this time he was editor of the local Volksblätter, which was agitating for social and political reforms. Like Wagner, he hated court and courtiers, bureaucrats, and absolutism. Both were at one in their hopes and wishes for the regeneration of the arts.
Wagner shared Röckel’s excitement. Such a grand upheaval boded well for his plans and his projects. When news arrived of the uprisings in Berlin and Vienna, when a German parliament, convened in Frankfurt, began working on what promised to be a new democratic constitution for the entire country, his enthusiasm knew no bounds. Always ready with counsel, he now hastened to offer advice to that body through the local delegate. He proposed that the parliament assume sole constitutive authority, introduce immediate “folk-arming,” and form an offensive and defensive alliance with France.52
In honor of the Viennese uprising of March 1848, Wagner wrote highly inflammatory verses in which he assured the insurgents that that city’s example would soon be followed by the rest of Germany, and that Germany in her turn would fall on her enemies, aristocrats and others, and do what the French had done. Vienna, he concluded, has taught us that if “anyone should now command us, to our everlasting shame, to return to our past slavery, we will retort with the vow, ‘We’ll do as they did in Vienna’.”53 He even undertook a visit to that embattled city to persuade the citizens of Vienna to consider a renovation of the theatre according to his plans.
With typical ardor he proclaimed, “There is a movement sweeping the world—the storm of European revolution. All have a part in it; whoever does not abet it and forward it, strengthens it by opposing it.”54
In a vehement poem, which does more credit to his sentiments than to his poetical talents, he scourges “egoists” who had closed their eyes to human misery and had thus violated the dignity of nature, of man and woman, even of the Lord God himself. “Need” (also the title of the poem) is addressed as a divinity, whose torch “now burning brightly, proclaims to all villains the end of human suffering…and the emergence out of the human wreckage of a new humanity that will join Nature, and thus make a unity of the two.”55
He was not the only musician of distinction swept by the exultation of the day. Franz Liszt recast a revolutionary symphony of 1830, a daring act considering that he was attached to the court of Weimar; Robert Schumann composed a so-called “Barricades March” in 1849; Ludwig Spohr, at the age of seventy, added a note to his completed Sextet, op. 140: “Written in March and April, at the time of the glorious revolution of the peoples for liberty, unity, and the grandeur of Germany.” Peter Cornelius fought on the Berlin barricades, for he was an irrepressible republican. Schumann too had declared himself a republican.56
The execution of Robert Blum by the Austrian government aroused feelings of horror and exasperation among Saxon citizens. Blum had been the secretary of the Leipzig Theatre, and one of the most outspoken and courageous democratic leaders of the state. An outpouring of thousands of citizens in a memorial service testified to the regard of his fellows as well as to the critical tensions prevailing. The roar and thunder of revolution in other regions finally reached the ears of the King of Saxony; and like the other German autocrats he bowed to these persuasive exigencies—at least for the time being. He dismissed a particularly obnoxious and reactionary minister. A new election sent a predominantly liberal representation to the House of Deputies, among them August Röckel. When the atmosphere became more heated, Röckel was dismissed from his theatrical post.
Plunged into the whirlpool of political agitation and action in 1848,Wagner developed—if that term may be used—a bizarre assortment of political and social ideas. He foresaw the new utopia: a republic, but, amazingly enough, headed by the King of Saxony, “the first and truest republican of all.” All aristocratic privileges would of course be abolished. The King would proclaim a republic, and the royal house of Wettin would be established as the heads of state forever. The published article was signed merely, “A Member of the Vaterlandsverein” (a notoriously radical organization); but its authorship was not in doubt, for Wagner had delivered it as a speech before an audience of almost three thousand the day before its publication on June 16. Was he shocked, startled, surprised when he was informed that an announced performance of Rienzi had been canceled as a result? Or was he too deeply involved in political agitation, or perhaps in the Nibelungen gold-hoard and his sun-god Siegfried? For no matter what the external circumstances around him in which he might be involved, his mind worked and worked—always germinating new plans for new creations.
Was it any wonder that his superiors at the Theatre like the Baron von Lüttichau, and members of that organization, were asking questions about the unpredictable Kapellmeister? Even the Court and the King were looking askance. It was a strong wind that was driving Wagner’s imperiled skiff on to tumultuous waters, and it would need a skilful pilot to bring it to safety….
He was intoxicated. The ominous reports of revolutionary setbacks emanating from Prague, from Austria and Italy—the triumphs of Generals Windischgrätz and Haynau—these did not sober him. The world was still aflame, and the Hungarians were still resisting. In Germany, there were outbreaks in many states. Fire-music danced in his brain, as he wrote:
Die
Fackel, ha! sie brenne helle, sie brenne tief un breit, zu
Asche brenn’sie
Statt und
Stelle, dem
Mammondienst geweiht!…
Denn über allen
Trümmerstätten blüht auf des
Lebens Glück:
es blieb die Menschheit frei von Ketten,
und die Natur zurück.
Natur und
Mensch—ein
Elemente! vernichtet ist, was je sie trennte!
Der Freiheit
Morgenrot—entzündet hat’s—die
Not!
“Lo, let the torch of Want burn bright, burn far and wide, and reduce to ashes all that has been dedicated to the God Mammon…And above all these ruins, human happiness now flowers, and liberated Humanity rejoins Nature, and Freedom’s dawn is lit by the God of Want.”57
So he sang, and so he believed, as the year 1848 neared its end. He was there at the meetings of the Vaterlandsverein, if not a principal mover, very much to the fore. He was like a charge of dynamite ready to explode. Time and the incendiary torch were near….
In Wagner’s celebrated autobiography, My Life, the incidents of the years 1848 and 1849 stand out with special vividness, warmth, and a truthfulness not always sustained on other pages. Though not altogether free of a certain attenuation of his own part in the hectic days of May 1849, they breathe a spirit of contemporaneity. One event and one person Wagner recalled with particular vivacity. On Palm Sunday, April 1, 1849,he was conducting a public rehearsal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. A strange figure was present.
Michael Bakunin [Wagner writes] attended this dress rehearsal in secret, unknown to the police. At the end, without hesitating, he came up to me and called out for all to hear, that if all of music were to be destroyed in the long-awaited world-conflagration, it would be our duty to get together, even at the risk of our lives, in order to save this symphony.58
He had known Mikhail Bakunin personally for only a brief period, but he had heard and read a great deal about him before that. The above incident remained in his mind probably because Bakunin, though a lover of music, rated this and the other arts as altogether secondary to the realization of world revolution.
Police surveillance, hiding, sudden emergence, had become a part of Bakunin’s way of life since he had left Russia and begun engaging in revolutionary activity. Now he was in Dresden, having come from Leipzig, where he was exploring the prospects for an uprising of Slavs. August Röckel housed him for a time, and Bakunin went by the name of “Dr. Schwarz.”
In Bakunin, Wagner found that rare phenomenon, a counterpart, an equal, a force to which he, usually so domineering in his own right, was willing to yield sway. Wagner, the very epitome and embodiment of the “self,” was confronted by a personality which, if anything, had cast all “self” aside and was ever identifying with that which he was planning or doing, or with those who were so involved—that is, the upheaval of the existing order. And now, in the presence of such a monolithic being, it seemed as if, for the moment, the Wagnerian “self” was abated, and another nature—that of self-giving—was coming to the surface.
This “strange, altogether imposing personality,” as Wagner described him in eloquent lines, was “in the full flowering of his thirty-odd years.” About him “everything was colossal, yet imprinted with the mark of primitive spontaneity.” He overwhelmed not only the young, but all those with whom he came in contact. There were few who were able to contend with his sharp yet persuasive arguments. They reminded one of the “Socratic method.” They were the arguments of a Hegelian who had whetted the sharp blade of dialectic to its finest cutting edge. Here was the giant who preached world destruction as preliminary to the emergence of a new birth, and yet was himself a “kind-hearted and affectionate person.” Having given up class, rank and possession, he often lived from hand to mouth, yet accepted this as a normal way of living. Wagner confessed that he was torn between “involuntary terror” and “irresistible attraction” in Bakunin’s presence. We may be sure that August Röckel, no less a passionate republican and revolutionary, was taken by Bakunin with the same force. There seemed to be no reservations, no self-interest or self-regard, no equivocations, in the man’s character. This was Wagner’s judgment, and the tribute he paid to Bakunin was such as few others were destined to receive from him.59
It must have been with particular entrancement that the company that gathered at Röckel’s listened to Bakunin’s remarkable life story.
He had left family, country, and a promising army career to go to Berlin in order to study philosophy with Professor Werder, like his countryman Stankievich and so many others of his generation. He immersed himself in Hegel; he had heard and been impressed by the lectures of the philosopher Schelling and the historian Ranke. He had rapidly gone over to the Left Hegelians and had thereupon begun his “vocation of revolt.” In Dresden he had met the brilliant journalist Arnold Ruge, who later described that moment in Bakunin’s history:
Bakunin threw himself headlong into the German intellectual movement of the thirties and the forties, after becoming acquainted in Berlin not only with Hegelianism, but also after having appropriated the living dialectic, that creative soul of the universe. He visited me in Dresden, where I was publishing the Deutsche Jahrbücher, and concurred with me on the transformation of abstract theory into practice, and on the imminence of the revolution.60
For Ruge’s Jahrbücher Bakunin had written an article signed “Jules Elisard” (a protection against Russian spies and informers), which aroused a great deal of attention. It was entitled “Reaction in Germany,” and transformed the Hegelian dialectic with typical Bakunian sang-froid. Hegel’s thesis and antithesis now represented the warfare of the positive and the negative; but in this case, the positive was the old, the reactionary (say, Schelling’s philosophy of revelation), while the negative was the emergent new, in this instance the democratic party and its ideas, still in their incompleteness. In the clash of the two, the negative, in destroying the positive, also destroys itself. Both perish. That which emerges is altogether new—the total transformation of the world. Negation has thus become the necessary self-destroying destroyer of the positive. The whole being of the negative, “its content, [is]…found in its opposition to the positive, and its vital energy consists in the destruction of the positive.”61
Such is the way in which the Hegelian dialectic is “transformed” into a warfare in which both contestants are superseded. For Hegel the higher historic form developed out of the conflict of thesis and antithesis, and was contained within them. For Bakunin the two theses annulled each other, and gave way to the totally new being. The principle of destruction is thus made supreme. “The desire for destruction,” Bakunin wrote, “is also a creative desire.”
The positive is negated by the negative; and conversely, the negative by the positive. What then is the common element which transcends both of them? It is the fact of negation, the fact of destruction, the fact of the passionate devouring of the positive.62
And in tones of a biblical prophet, Bakunin thundered his admonitions:
All the peoples, all men, are filled with a certain presentiment, and everyone looks with a certain terrible apprehension toward the future which will pronounce the saving word…The air is heavy, it forebodes storms. That is why we adjure our bewildered brothers: “Do penance! Do penance! The Kingdom of God is near!”63
Such was Bakunin’s apocalyptic vision. Destruction was in the nature of things. Do not fear, he was saying, to destroy. Suspected of being the author of the inflammatory appeal, Bakunin fled to Switzerland, where he came in contact with the proletarian socialist Weitling, by whose personality and socialist views he was deeply affected. His notions were further enlarged by the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach and other Left Hegelians, who were concerned with translating theory into action. Paris completed this stage of his education. For here, in the smithy of revolutions, he met the outstanding figures of Karl Marx and Proudhon. Toward Marx he developed an ambivalent relation that was to persist for the rest of his life—profound admiration and bitter antagonism, the latter of which was to produce a sharp split in the socialist movement. To Proudhon he remained faithful throughout.
Like Marx, he was expelled from France, and like the former he returned to Paris on the outbreak of the February Revolution. He was not one to look on passively. He was on the barricades, hobnobbing with the workers, talking interminably, proselytizing. He was also projecting what was to be his central commitment, the organization of a Pan-Slavic congress that would, he hoped, eventuate in a union of the Slavs and overthrow tsardom. The French government was only too glad to help him on that mission (he had been a thorn in their side!), and Bakunin had gone to Prague, where his project went aground in the internecine rivalries of the Slav groups themselves. When the ill-planned, ill-starred insurrection broke out in the Czech capital, he was once more embattled; when it was easily expunged by the Austrian Windischgrätz, he escaped to Leipzig. Once again, eye-witnesses testified to his coolheadedness, his courage, and his organizational capacities amidst the Prague insurrectionists…
He never gave up hope. The overthrow of tsardom was his ever-present dream. To him it was imminent. All revolutions anywhere were its presages; but the Slavs would bring it about. German absolutism too would soon meet its doom….
He did not boast. If he exaggerated, it was only hopes and prospects. He had a monomaniacal integrity of purpose and character. It was this monolithic force that imposed itself upon and impressed Wagner, whose moral nature was of a more vacillating fibre.
After years of imprisonment August Röckel could still recall the image of Bakunin with warmth. He remembered how, in 1849, Bakunin
had come secretly from Leipzig, and remained with me in concealment for a number of days. A man of extraordinary intellectual powers and strength of character, combined with an imposing personality and overpowering eloquence, it had been easy for him not only to inspire youth everywhere, but also to attract more mature persons, particularly since his outlook was free of national limitations and characterized by the noblest, all-embracing humanism.64
The anarch in Wagner responded to Bakunin’s explosive sentiments, such as
The age of parliamentary life…is over. I do not believe in constitutions and in laws; not even the best constitution could ever satisfy me. We need something different: Storm and Life. A new, law-free land—that is, a free land—hence a free world.65
Into the rooms of Röckel Bakunin must have brought all his fiery eloquence to bear upon those visions of a united Slav republic, and one could almost hear the crash as Moscow and St. Petersburg collapsed, and “European slavery” was buried “among its ruins.” He brought with him the hopes of all those humanitarians whom he had met and seen, Béranger, Louis Blanc, Michelet, Proudhon, George Sand, the Paris societies of the Ouvriers; the history of Decembrists gone and still alive; experiences with Belgian radicals, English Chartists, Marx and others; augurs of a future that was bound to break on the morrow….
Soon, perhaps in less than a year, the monstrous Austrian Empire will be destroyed. The liberated Italians will proclaim an Italian republic. The Germans, united into a single great nation, will proclaim a German republic. The Polish democrats after seventeen years in exile will return to their homes. The revolutionary movement will stop only when Europe, the whole of Europe, not excluding Russia, is turned into a federal democratic republic.66
In no less emphatic but more realistic terms, Bakunin sketched the decadence of Western Europe, its lack of any true convictions, particularly in the privileged and ruling elements. Egoism was God. Only among the raw, uncultivated masses was there any vigor, freshness, striving, though still inchoate and vague. These manifested themselves as a communism that was “invisible, impalpable, ubiquitous, living in one form or another in all beings without exception…”67
Thus he spoke, and was to speak again and again. Undeterred by setbacks, he was destined ever to come back hopefully, a virtuoso of failure, living this side of greatness—a kind of mythical greatness devoid of success, a tragic Antaeus…
“We are called upon to destroy, not to build. Others will build, who are better, wiser, and fresher than we are.”68
* * *
Assured that the tide of revolution in Prussia and in Vienna had been stemmed, certain of Prussian aid when called for, King Friedrich August II of Saxony took steps to reassert absolute authority. Early in February 1849 he dismissed the liberal minister Oberländer and appointed the conservative Count von Beust in his place. Toward the end of April he dissolved the Saxon Diet, which had approved the democratic constitution of the Frankfurt Assembly and had organized a Communal Guard. Parliamentary immunity of the elected delegates was lifted. August Röckel, feeling himself most threatened for his forthright speech and activities, fled to Bohemia. The long-expected moment had arrived for Dresden. King and city faced each other in open enmity.
Days before the planned uprising, which had been set by the Vaterlandsverein for May 9, Richard Wagner had been in conferences and meetings with Röckel, the architect Semper, and other members of the Verein. Though not as yet taking a leading part, Bakunin was present at some of these gatherings. Arms were being stored, and it is certain that Wagner himself had a hand in ordering hand grenades, some of them destined for an anticipated rising in Prague.
Wagner was never in the background of these activities. His political ideas were a welter of confusion. Declaring himself an enemy of the State, he advocated a republic ruled by a king; he objurgated the Court and its hirelings while at the same time addressing a poem “To the Princes,” in which he implored them to rescue the beleaguered Arts from the hands of “Mercury, the god of the market-place,” that is, the benighted bourgeois philistines!69
In another poem of March 22, 1849, Wagner instructed the Public Prosecutor in the meaning of the “new life” that was burgeoning, to which, obviously, that official was still blind; blinded “by the State—that great egoist, that eternal devourer of all true life.”
Death is dead; and you will never bring it back,
And what is living, you will never undo;
Nor can you ever weave the golden threads of life,
From what is dead and mute.
And if from
Death you cannot wring a pittance,
Say, what is your guerdon for your diurnal dying?70
Wagner was never content with half measures. To feel was to act. Revolution was in the air, and Revolution would bring him and mankind not only a better life, but what was even more important, a new Art, a new Theatre.
An article appeared in the Volksblätter of April 8, 1849, entitled “Die Revolution.” It was unsigned, but everyone knew the author. Wagner had not been listening to Bakunin in vain. The words are Wagner’s; the spirit, Bakunin’s.
The old world is in ruins. And a new world will arise. For the sublime goddess Revolution comes rushing on the wings of the storm, her august head radiant with lightnings, a sword in her right hand, a torch in her left; her eyes are dark and punitive, and cold; yet what warmth of the purest love, what fullness of happiness flow from them toward him who dares face her steadily! Rushing on she comes, the ever-rejuvenating mother of mankind; destroying and blessing, she sweeps across the earth; before her the storm is howling; man’s handiwork is shaken so violently, that vast clouds of dust darken the air; where her mighty foot steps, all that has been built up for the ages in idle vanity crashes in ruins, and the hem of her robe sweeps away the last remnants….
Into the mouth of Revolution, he places these words:
I am the ever-rejuvenating, ever-creative Life! Where I am not, is Death! I am the dream, the balm, the hope of the suffering. I annihilate that which exists, and wherever I walk, there new life wells forth from the dead rock. I come to you to break all the fetters that oppress you, to redeem you from the embrace of Death, and to pour young life into your veins. Whatever is must pass away, for such is the eternal law of Nature, such is the condition of Life, and I, the eternal destroyer, fulfil the law and create eternal young Life. I will destroy the order of things from its roots, under which you are living, for it has sprung from sin, and its flower is misery and its fruit is crime. The harvest is ripe and I am the reaper. I will destroy every illusion that has power over men. I will destroy the rule of the one over the many, the dead over the living, matter over spirit. I will break the power of the mighty, of law and of property. Only man’s own will shall be master of man, his own desire shall be his only law, his own power shall be his total possession, for only free man is that which is holy, and there is nothing higher than he….
I will destroy the present order of things that divides what shall be one mankind into hostile nations, into the powerful and the weak, into the privileged and the outlawed, into rich and poor…I will destroy the order of things that makes millions the slaves of the few, and makes of these few the slaves of their own power, of their own riches. I will destroy this order of things that saps enjoyment from labor, making labor a burden, and enjoyment a vice, that makes one man miserable through want and another through superfluity….that compels hundreds of thousands to devote their vigorous youth in the busy idleness of soldiers, officials, speculators, and money-makers, and to the maintenance of these vile conditions, while the other half must support the whole shameful edifice at the cost of the immeasurable exhaustion of their powers and the sacrifice of all the joys of life….
So up, ye peoples of the earth! Up ye mourners, ye oppressed, ye poor!…Up and follow my steps in all your varied multitudes, for I know no distinction among those who follow me. Two peoples only are there henceforth: the one that follows me, the other that withstands me. The one I lead to happiness; over the other I tread, crushing it under foot, for I am Revolution, I am the ever-creative Life, I am the one God whom all beings acknowledge, who comprises, animates and makes happy all that is!71
Such is Wagner’s manifesto of 1849. Had he seen that other manifesto of Marx and Engels of 1848? Had Bakunin brought it along with him, perhaps? Or had he recited it from memory? Wagner’s highstrung appeal is compounded of many elements: there is Feuerbach in it, for does it not conclude with the impassioned words that “I am a Man,” also means “Man is become God”? There is the hedonistic socialism of the St.Simonians and the utopian socialists. And not least, the hurricane fury of Bakunin….
Wagner had taken over the management of the Volksblätter while Röckel was away in Prague. The latter was soon to discover that the revolution in Bohemia so eloquently anticipated by Bakunin, who had armed the German emissary with letters, was even less than a figment. It was nonexistent. So he must have received Wagner’s note of May 2, the day before the Dresden uprising, with some relief.
Everything is in a state of unrest here. All the associations, this afternoon the Communal Guard, and even the Prince Albert regiment, which is stationed here, have declared in the most energetic terms for the German Constitution. So has the Town Council. A decisive conflict is in the offing, if not with the King, at any rate with the Prussian troops. Only one thing is feared—a revolution may break out too soon….72
The uprising broke out the next day, and upon hearing the news Röckel returned immediately.
May 3, 1849. The King rejected the demands of the democratic party for the Constitution, and proceeded to order the Communal Guard dissolved. Wagner had been attending a meeting of the Vaterlandsverein, merely, as he made sure to state later in his autobiography, as a “guest-listener.” As he was making his way home,
Suddenly from the nearby Tower of St. Anne’s Church I heard the clang of the storm signal—a sign that the outbreak had begun….. The sound of the bell so close by had a very decided impact on me…The entire square before me appeared bathed in a dark-yellowish, almost brown light, something I had once experienced in Magdeburg during an eclipse of the sun. At the same time I had the sensation of a vast, indeed extravagant, delight.
The struggle had commenced. A crowd of citizens had attacked the arsenal. Soldiers had fired upon them, and there were numerous casualties.
The sight excited me beyond measure, and I understood the cries that came from all sides. “To the barricades! To the barricades!” Mechanically I was swept along with the stream toward the City Hall.73
He hurried to the printer Römpler and asked him to print a number of placards with the inscription directed to the Saxon troops: “Are you with us against the foreign troops?” For along with others, he had heard that in the Württemberg insurrection, the revolutionaries had been able to win over the army to their side. Had there been better organization and leadership at the beginning of the Dresden uprising, a similar coup might have been achieved. But alas! while there was no lack of courage, daring, and will among the population—where were the leaders?
On the night of May 3–4 the King of Saxony fled to the city of Königstein, and in Dresden a provisional government took over. Spirits ran high, for news from other parts of Germany spoke of uprisings in Baden, the Palatinate, and Breslau. In Saxony, a student corps was already on its way to join their brothers in Dresden.
Both Wagner and Bakunin are in general agreement as to the role the latter played at a critical moment of the uprising. His own role Wagner minimized, in keeping with his retrospective revisionary tendency. Bakunin’s schooled eye saw at once the dangers and the possibilities in the uprising—the hazards of a disorganized and inexperienced leadership, especially on the military side; the divisions within the ranks of the provisional government consisting of conflicting political factions; the weakness of the opposition due to the paucity of Saxon troops in the city; the possibility of winning the city in an immediate, organized, and unified attack. In the end, Bakunin overcame the national suspicion of some of the leaders and prevailed upon them to engage experienced Polish military men who were available. It was in a moment of crisis that Bakunin always proved most coolheaded and firm. Others in these tense moments might vacillate—as they did; some of the leaders, already weakened, absented themselves from the city or fled to safety. The rank and file of insurrectionists, abandoned by the more conservative elements, fought stubbornly. Reinforcements from surrounding localities kept arriving. Unfortunately, on May 5, the first Prussian troops appeared in Dresden. The critical point had been reached. Recalling those hours, Bakunin wrote:
I spoke a great deal, I gave advice and commands, and became, so to speak, the entire “Provisional Government.” I did everything in my power to save the lost and apparently dying Revolution. I did not sleep, eat or drink; I was utterly exhausted, and yet could not for a moment leave the council room of the government, for fear Tzschirner [one of the members of that government] might once more take flight, and leave my dear friend Heubner alone. Several times I convoked the leaders of the barricades, and strove to restore order and to concentrate forces for the imminent attacks.74
Concerning Otto Leonhard Heubner, city councillor of Dresden and a member of the provisional government, Bakunin could not speak enough. A moderate republican and democrat, he gave all his energies and spirit to the revolutionary movement, shirking no tasks, firm and dedicated to the last. As Wagner reported,
Heubner recognized the necessity of the most energetic measures, and no longer shrank from any of Bakunin’s proposals…Bakunin never left the city hall and Heubner in order to issue counsel and information everywhere, doing so with remarkable coolness and self-possession.75
Wagner himself, though not in any official or near-official capacity, was no less active. With the arrival of Prussian troops, he was enjoined to serve as lookout, and his point of observation was the Kreuzkirche, the Church of the Holy Cross. His observations he communicated on papers wrapped around stones thrown to sentries below. He was there, and he was everywhere; moving from the church to the town hall, escorting additional reinforcements to the proper mustering places. At night, in the tower, he discussed philosophy and music, and undoubtedly his own artistic plans for the future. He moved around freely, and took occasion to visit his home and reassure Minna as to his safety, and, it seems certain, also to plan possible routes of escape should there be an ultimate collapse….But he remained courageous and undaunted, even though the tower of the church soon came under fire from the opposing soldiery.
The issue was not long in being resolved. By May 9, the combined Prussian and Saxon troops began closing in on the Town Hall.
When it became apparent [Bakunin reported] that Dresden could not hold out much longer, I proposed to the “Provisional Government” to blow us all up along with the Town Hall, for I had accumulated plenty of ammunition there. But I was overruled…76
Tragedy is winged. Retreat was proclaimed toward Freiberg and Chemnitz, where it was hoped that the forces could be regrouped and strengthened with reinforcements. For safety, Wagner had gone ahead and deposited Minna in Chemnitz, where his brother-in-law and sister resided. Volunteers streaming toward beleaguered Dresden forced him to return to that city. Here he learned that Röckel had already been captured by the enemy. Wagner was commissioned to set out and rally troops from adjacent districts, and on the way he learned that almost all hope was gone.
Was Richard Wagner the unwitting angel of the doom that fell upon the leaders Bakunin, Heubner, and Martin? Ernest Newman believes he was, and that in the account Wagner gives of these incidents in his autobiography, he
refrains from adding, that, as we learn from Bakunin himself, he too counselled Heubner to keep up the struggle; he described the promising state of affairs in Chemnitz, on the strength of which he advised a march thither, where a call should be made for a Constituent Assembly for all Saxony…Wagner, in fact, had once more managed to persuade himself that all was not yet lost; Chemnitz and the whole of the Vogtland, he assured his associates, were strong for revolution. Bakunin, at his trial, deposed that “it was Wagner’s account of the state of affairs in Chemnitz that determined us to make for there.” In a sense, then, the subsequent capture of the other leaders at Chemnitz was the direct result of Wagner’s harangues. He was the one man who, in virtue of his recent visit to the town, could presumably speak with assurance of the hopefulness of the conditions there. The others listened to him, and as a consequence went to their doom.77
Whatever the ultimate truth, the tragic fact remains that while Wagner was away visiting his wife and relatives in one part of Chemnitz, in another, in a hotel, Bakunin, Heubner, and Martin were seized by the police and arrested.
Richard Wagner escaped. Helped along by friends and relatives and leaving Minna in Chemnitz, he made his way to Weimar, where his friend Liszt was preparing a performance of Tannhäuser. Hidden from general view, the political fugitive attended a rehearsal and was overwhelmed by Liszt’s production. Stay in the Duchy of Weimar was, however, hazardous. It was not likely that the ruling house of Weimar would grant him asylum.
In the Dresden Anzeiger of May 19, 1849, six days after Wagner’s arrival in Weimar, appeared a notice:
The Royal Kapellmeister Richard Wagner, of this place, who is more particularly described below, is wanted for examination on account of his active participation in the recent rising here, but as yet has not been found. The police are therefore instructed to look out for him, and, if he is found, to arrest him and communicate at once with me.
Dresden, the 16th of May, 1849. Von Oppell, Deputy Town Police.78
With a warrant out for him, Wagner managed to make his way to Zurich. Here he obtained a passport for Paris, and thence returned to Zurich once more around June 26, where he was joined by Minna, who had gone back to Dresden…
* * *
There were no triumphant horn-calls to announce his arrivals now. Relieved that he had not been caught in the widening police net spread out for him and others, his conscience slightly tormented by the fate that awaited his imprisoned associates, there was little of the heroic Siegfried about him. What would he not have given to possess that hero’s magic cloak of invisibility, the Tarnkappe? For the time being he was comparatively safe. In his traveling bags were numerous finished and unfinished works; in his head innumerable projects, some of vast dimension. Had he not, even under fire in the Kreuzkirche, planned the composition of a dramatic work on the subject of Achilles, with a strongly Feuerbachian ingredient?
He also carried with him—in his mind, of course—Siegfried’s sword, Baldung, a dangerously double-edged weapon. It scintillated with the lightnings of “myth,” “folk,” and “the unconscious.” One edge still sparkled Revolution, Feuerbach, Bakunin, and world-reform. When in time this edge dulled, the other was sharpened, and shed strange, new lights…
For the time being Siegfried is his sun god, victorious over the dark dragon guarding the gold-hoard, and thus possessor of cosmic powers over creation. But already there is an incumbent darkness, for as day succeeds night, so Siegfried too will be doomed. In the eternal iteration, the dragon’s heirs will bring about his downfall.
The golden hoard is the metallic entrails of the earth. It is power, it is weaponry, it is the ring that commands. Above all, it is Gold—the fulcrum for dominating the world.79
For the children of light as well as of darkness covet it greatly….
* * *
It is a strange, conglomerate mythology that Wagner is creating. It associates Siegfried, Jesus Christ and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in a common enterprise, and endows the primitive Germans with a special mission. As Wagner saw it through Frederick’s eyes,
The most ancient, legitimate race of kings is preserved in the German people. It derives from a Son of God, who is known as Siegfried by his immediate racial succession; but among other peoples of the earth he is known as Christ. For the salvation and happiness of his race, and its succession, the peoples of the earth, he performed the most glorious feat, and suffered death therefor.80
Siegfried and Jesus are sun gods, and Frederick Barbarossa was originally the High Priest, King and Guardian of the Hoard, which, as Wagner now states, and thereby previsions things to come, was later transformed into the Holy Grail!
After the destruction of the race of the Nibelungs, the great myth of Siegfried and the Hoard became the property of poetry. The gold itself settled like a precipitate, and was turned into the idea of “real possession or property.”
Though in the most ancient religious representations the hoard appears as the magnificence of the earth disclosed in the light of day, we, of a later generation, see in its poetic formulation, the might-giving booty of the hero, a reward for the most valiant and marvelous deed over a vanquished and terrible foe.81
Once upon a time, under the institution of feudalism, in its original purity, the hoard was the guerdon given for services, for deeds performed.
But from the moment that a fief became hereditary, man, and along with him personal proficiency, his activity and deeds, lost their worth, which was now transferred to possessions. Hereditary possessions, and not the soundness of the individual, endowed heirs with their importance. The ever deeper devaluation of man, compared with the ever-rising valuation of possessions which followed, became ultimately embodied in the most anti-human institutions, like that of primogeniture, from whose perverted nature the later nobles sucked in all sorts of obscurantism and pride, without considering that in deriving their worth only from family possessions, that had grown rigid, they were openly denying human nobility, and rejecting it….
Possession became right, and it was so preserved because thereafter, under more developed systems, all that existed and was deemed valid, was derived from it. Whoever participated in possessions, and knew how to obtain them, was thenceforth considered a natural prop of public power….
The “poor people” sang, read, and in time printed the Songs of the Nibelungs, the only heirloom remaining to them of the hoard; their faith in it never ceased; they only knew that it was not to be found in this world, but was once more hidden away in a mountain-side, whence Siegfried once wrested it from the Nibelungs….82
He believed that “the way from desire to satisfaction is Activity,”83 and he practised what he believed. In the theoretical essays of 1849 to 1852, Wagner set forth the programmatic background for his own dramatic and operatic work that was to culminate in the Ring der Nibelungen, as well as a general formulation of the role and nature of Artist, and Man, in particular, as he foresaw him in the future he was delineating.
An incandescent white flame of rebellion against the tendencies of his own time, especially as reflected in Art, fuses these essays into a unity. Entitled “Art and Revolution,” “The Artistic Genius of the Future,” “Artistic Creation of the Future,” “Opera and Drama,” they attempt a historic summation of the history of art, most particularly of the drama, in its relation to the historic changes within their times. Sketchy, and frequently faulty in historical accuracy or in matters of interpretation, they nevertheless contain, on the whole, a number of profound statements, acute insights, and valid demands for the restoration of the artist and his art to what Wagner believes to be his rightful place in the world.
The underlying metaphysic, if such it may be called, upon which Wagner relies, is that of Feuerbach and the Young Hegelians, particularly in his rejection of traditional “idealism,” whether of the philosophical schools or of Christianity—although the figure of Christ remains ever luminous as humanity’s Savior. Nature and the natural world are the bases upon which man builds his world of art and thought, and the highest products of art are achieved in a harmonious understanding between man and nature.
The free Greek,…created art out of the joy of man; the Christian, who rejected both Nature and himself, could bring his offerings to his God solely on the altar of renunciation; he could not bring his actions, his labors as an offering; only through abstention from all independent, vigorous creation could he, so he believed, bind himself to God. Art is the loftiest activity of Man, who is sensuously developed, and is in harmony both with himself and with Nature.84
As for the human art of the future, that is rooted in the soil of nature, from which it rises to “unapprehended heights.”
Its growth is from that which is below to that which is above; like that of a tree, it rises from the earth to the sky, from man’s nature into the farthest spiritual reaches of humanity.85
The Greeks could portray and embody their ideal in “the beautiful, strong and free man,” because within them the spirit of community was active and powerful. Hence, in the highest achievement of Greek poetry, that is, Tragedy, man could recognize himself in “the noblest part of his being,” as “united with the noblest part of the communal being of the whole nation.”86
With the dissolution of the Attic state, the communal spirit splintered in a thousand directions. With Rome came “materialism,” slavery, and the loss of human dignity. And the fullest expression of this condition could no longer be found in Art, but in Christianity, which, rejecting Man and his Nature, could only make its offerings on the “altar of renunciation.” But that too degenerated, and remains degenerate in our own day, for Christianity today has tied itself to political absolutism. Art became subservient to the “ruler.” And worst of all, now an even more degraded master, Industry, has come to rule the arts, and his god is Mercury.
Such then is the art now filling the entire civilized world! Its true nature is Industry, its moral goal and purpose, Money; its aesthetic object, the entertainment of the bored.87
Art has become a mechanical handicraft; industry knows no love or purpose and neither does the slave of industry, dishonored in his dignity as a human being. Today, we are all slaves. Greed and egoism are the watchwords of our civilization. That which was once one is now disparate, atomized. Tragedy, which combined the elements of dance, word, and song, has likewise become fragmented. We have forgotten what the Greeks taught us, that “beauty and strength, as the basis of public life, can only achieve a felicitous permanence when they are the property of all human beings.”88
It was necessary to free Art from the tentacles of Mammon.
Only the great human Revolution…can win for us this form of art. The artistic work of the future must embrace the spirit of man free of all national limitation…We must love all mankind, in order to love ourselves…We must rise up from the dishonoring yoke of slavery, the universal mechanization, with its pallid Mammon-soul, toward a free artistic humanity with its radiant world soul.89
For Art and Revolution have this common goal: “the beautiful Man.” Revolution will give him strength, and Art, beauty.
Hitherto Man has thought himself merely an instrument in the achievement of a purpose lying outside himself. But once Man sees himself as the ultimate end of Man, and understands that he can achieve this goal only in community with other men…then Social Reason will have become the Holy Father of Humanity.90
The splintered communal spirit will thus be integrated into a whole; and Egoism, that bane of mankind, will be annihilated, through the fullest satisfaction of Ego’s needs on a universal basis.
The fullest satisfaction of egoism is reached in Communism—i.e., through the complete negation, annulment of egoism; for a need is satisfied only when it is no longer present.91
And addressing himself to sceptical contemporaries:
Do you believe that with the decline of our present conditions and with the commencement of the new, communistic world-order history and the historic life of man will cease? On the contrary, only then will the true, lucid historic life begin when traditional, so-called historic consistency ceases, founded on fable, tradition, myth and religion, custom and institutions, justification and assumptions which at their utmost rested not upon a historic consciousness, but, for the most part, on mythical, fantastic invention. Take monarchy and hereditary possession as examples.92
The State must be destroyed, for it exists solely as a result of the vices of society. Whatever virtues society possesses are the gifts of human individuality. The destruction of the State means “the self-realization of the religious consciousness of society in its purely human essence.”93 Only in a freely self-determined individuality can we find the basis for the social religion of the future.
What of Art? It too must transcend prevalent egoism, which is the essence of its contemporary expression, centering as it does on the “individual” genius. Such transcendence of individuality in the future will make of genius a participant in the “communal genius.” For the true “inventor” is always the People, which attains to full consciousness of itself not so much in Science as in Art.94
Who will be the Artist of the Future? The poet, the actor, the musician, the sculptor? Let us put it succinctly: The People. The same People to whom we owe Art in general, the only true art form, that which lives in our memory, and has been subjected by us to imitation and distortion, through our deleterious obsession with possessions and property, and the preservation of what is.
Not the “people” as we see it today, a monstrous distortion of our present civilization, a product of an unnatural culture, in no wise different from those who think only of a profitable gain of five per cent,95 that which today is called “rabble.”
Thus a mystical Volksgeist—“folk-spirit”—is tied to a concrete Revolution, both to find their most articulate embodiment in the new synthesis: the Drama of the Future, the “true drama,” conceivable only out of the “common impulse of all the arts toward a direct communication with a common public.”96
For the Theatre is the “most comprehensive, the most influential of cultural institutions,” and must be made a public art, freed of the idea of gain. All people must have free entry to the theatre. It is their communal expression, by way of the artist. Drama must become “universal drama,” the fullest embodiment of the artistic desire for communication, and demanding communal participation.97
Beethoven has paved the way, and his Ninth Symphony is the “salvation of Music from its particularity into the generality of Art.” In breaking down the separateness of the various constituents of art, he already anticipates the synthesis of the future.
But not only will the artist be freed from the quotidian concerns of the market, but Man in general, also thus liberated and enabled to gain the greatest joys out of life—he too will be dedicated to making Man an Artist.
Jesus Christ will have shown us that we are all brothers and equal; Apollo, however, will have set the stamp of strength and beauty upon this great brotherhood; he will have conducted humanity out of doubt as to her own worth to a consciousness of her own highest powers…So let us build the altar of the future, in life as well as in living Art, to the two sublimest teachers of mankind: Jesus, who suffered for humanity’s sake, and Apollo, who raised her to her joyous dignity.98
In rhapsodic terms, Wagner apostrophizes “the people,” comparing them to the mythical Wieland, the Nordic smith, who though captured and maimed by the evil King Neiding, succeeds in forging his own wings and escapes to his beloved Swanhilde. It is “the people” who are the true creators of this very legend.
Oh sole, magnificent Folk. You yourselves are Wieland! Forge your own wings, and swing aloft!99
As for the Artist, of all human beings he is the one who is capable of seeing a still unformed world as if already formed. He is
the begetter of the art-work of the future…, who anticipates the life of the future, and desires to be contained within it. Whoever nourishes this longing born of his own capacities is already living in the better life. Only one being is capable of this—the Artist.100
It is sad to reflect that as he grew older and more successful, Wagner became inclined to forget his debts to those he had borrowed from, as if to obliterate their memories. Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft—“Artistic Creation of the Future,” one of his most inspired manifestos of this time, he dedicated in 1850 to Ludwig Feuerbach, from whom he had drawn so many of his philosophical notions. In later republications of that work, he retained the borrowings but omitted the dedication to his creditor, whom he had addressed in “grateful reverence” and to whom he had declared in the dedication that in this particular work he was only returning Feuerbach’s property to him. “This work owes its existence to the impression your writings made on me…”101
His own “artistic creation of the future” was maturing. In 1851 he wrote:
I propose to present my myth in three complete operas, preceded by a prologue…In a festival dedicated to this end, I propose to present these three dramas and prologue in the course of three days and an evening before. I will have attained the purposes of this presentation fully, if I and my artistic collaborators, the actual performers, succeed in communicating them to the audience there gathered, so that they experience a truly emotional (not critical) understanding.102
Thus, during the stormy years between 1848 and 1852 he conceived and carried out the idea of a series of connected dramas that were to form The Ring of the Nibelungs. To what extent historical events of which he had been a part in Dresden, the fate of his associates and friends, his own flight, the debacle of the German Revolution—and similar disasters in other countries, particularly France—and finally the Napoleonic coup d’état, affected the work in progress, is hard to determine precisely. Eventually he combined the theme of the first completed drama, The Death of Siegfried, for which he had already sketched the music in 1850, with that of Wotan and the Doom of the Gods. What had begun as a triumphant paean to a Germano-Hellenic hero, a poem of affirmation, terminated in the grim debacle of Valhalla and the universe. Hero and gods alike perish, direct and indirect victims of the curse on the hoard of gold—a crime that can never be exorcised or atoned for. The redemptive hero cannot save the world through his self-sacrifice, or the tainted gods through a return of the gold.
It might almost seem that the contemporary events of history had at first brightened and then darkened Wagner’s horizon, and that Schopenhauer had replaced Feuerbach. Cosmic change—growth, decay and death—were to become world-processes, and the height of wisdom demanded that the will acquiesce in this process. Wotan, in Wagner’s words, was to rise to the tragic height of willing his own doom. The curse of the gold stolen from Nature had proved fatal to love, and even its restoration cannot annul the decree of Fatality….
For the moment, in addition to projecting the Art Forms of the future, he had also defined the Woman of the Future. Actually she was, and was to remain, the idealized vision and image of the women of his own present, in the course of years intensified in an erotic crescendo, to burst into an orgiastic fortissimo in Tristan and Isolde. That woman had already appeared in The Flying Dutchman and in Tannhäuser, as well as in Lohengrin.
As an element of the Artistic Creation of the Future, however,
Music is Woman. The nature of woman is Love; but this very love is a receptive one; and in its receptivity an unreserved self-yielding love. Only at the moment of her surrender does woman achieve full individuality….Woman loves unconditionally, because she must love.
Already we hear anticipations of Isolde, as her dedication becomes equivalent to a “self-annulment”—for “in order to do, a woman need only to be what she is,” a spontaneous creature, who “must not will, for she can only will one thing—to be Woman!”103
In The Death of Siegfried, Wagner had already developed the verse form he was to use for his heroic cycle, approximating, as he believed, the prosody of the Icelandic Eddas. The lines are generally brief, and emphatically alliterated. This is the celebrated Stabreim.
Here is Brünnhilde, anticipating Siegfried’s approach:
Siegfried! Siegfried ist nah’!
Seinen Gruss sendet er her!
—Verglimme, machtlose Glut!
Ich steh’ in stärk’ rem Schutz!
A modern German rendering of the Icelandic Song of Sigurd, which approximates the original alliterations, goes as follows (Sigurd is addressing Brynhild):
Dräue mir Tod auch, ich denk’ nicht an Flucht,
als Zager nicht ward ich erzeugt;
Mein Gluck wird’s sein, dich ganz zu besitzen,
solange das
Leben mir währt.104
* * *
From the heights of Valhalla and its gods and heroes, we return to terrestrial matters and other grim dooms—those of the participants in the Dresden uprising of 1849.
The leaders were condemned to death, but their sentences were commuted to long-term or life imprisonment. Among those, August Röckel and Mikhail Bakunin were confined to the Saxon fortress-prison of Königstein. Röckel was to remain imprisoned till 1862, adamant and intractable in his refusal to repent and recant. Bakunin’s incarcerations were more sensational and international, for he was moved from Saxony to Bohemia and then to Russia.
In the early part of 1850 Wagner was staying in Bordeaux, before returning to and settling in Switzerland. He had not heard of the commutations, and the news of the imminent execution of Röckel and Bakunin circulating in French journals moved him to address a letter to his friends in March 1850, which he hoped would be transmitted to the prisoners by Frau von Lüttichau.
My dear Friends, Never would I have written to you in order to console you, for I knew you needed no such consolation. Now I am informed that the King of Saxony has confirmed your death-sentences….Whether I was awake or asleep, you were always near me; in your strength and in your suffering, you who were both enviable and to be commiserated with. And now, I am writing you when you are preparing to receive the stroke from the hand of that same executioner, for whose humanization you had been fighting….We see two heroes before us, who driven by the holy need to love mankind, have grown into joyful heroes. I greet you, my dear ones! You show us what all of us could be. Die then, gladly, in the bliss of your high worth!…I look freely and calmly toward the future, and thus with renewed and winged strength to do my part and work with all my abilities for that for which you are now giving up your lives. You will live on! Like an ever-widening circle in a pool, your memory will swell and be a gladdening and loving remembrance to coming generations. Die then, envied, admired, and beloved.!105
The letter never reached the prisoners. Whether its rhetoric would have heartened is doubtful, or whether they would have rejoiced with him in his invitation to die “gladly.” At the moment of writing, Wagner no doubt felt that he was actually making a commitment to continue the work of his friends. But he was beset by moral and psychological ambiguities. In June 1849 he had written his friend Liszt, giving him his assurance that he had “learned” his lesson from the Dresden rising.
It is out of the question that I should ever again take part in a political upheaval. What rejoices me, and what I can swear to, is that I have become entirely an artist.106
But to Uhlig he was writing as late as 1851, speaking of the Ring, that he could imagine a performance of that work “only after the revolution.”
For the revolution alone can provide me with my artists and my audience. The next revolution must of necessity make an end of the whole of this theatre business of ours; it must and will all come crashing down; that is inevitable. Then I will throw up a theatre on the Rhine and send out invitations to a great dramatic festival. After a year of preparation, I then produce my whole work in the course of four days; and with it I make clear to the men and women the meaning of this revolution in the noblest sense of the word. The public will understand me. The present cannot.107
While he was thus communing and communicating, Mikhail Bakunin was undergoing strange experiences. On June 6, 1850, the King of Saxony commuted his death sentence (along with that of two others) to lifelong imprisonment. On the demand of Austria, he was soon yielded up, lodged in the Bohemian prisons of Hradčin and Olomouc. On May 15, 1851, he was found guilty of high treason and condemned to death; but on that same day as a result of Tsarist pressure, he was conveyed to Russia, imprisoned in the Peter-Paul Fortress of ignominious celebrity, and condemned to solitary confinement. In 1854 he was transferred to the other dreaded prison, Schlüsselberg, on Lake Ladoga. Tsar Nicholas time and again rejected Bakunin’s pleas to be sent to hard labor in Siberia. Nicholas died in 1855, and Alexander II came to the throne. Many prisoners and exiles were then amnestied, but not Bakunin. Once more Bakunin’s appeal fell on deaf ears. Bakunin’s old mother pleaded with the new Tsar, but all she received was the answer, “Sachez, Madame, que tant que votre fils vivra, il ne pourra jamais être libre.”108 So it seemed that her son was destined to remain in solitary and die in prison. The Tsar was proved wrong, not because of his graciousness, but because he did not know Bakunin….
It was during his confinement in the Peter-Paul Fortress that Bakunin composed the notorious Confession. It was not published until after the Bolshevik Revolution, and remained totally unknown, except to the authorities, until 1921. But it was a document that would haunt its author for the rest of his life. Tsar Nicholas transmitted through Count Orlov of the Third Division his request—as, in his words, a “spiritual father” addressing his “spiritual son”—to write out a full account of his life, his activities, and his errors. For was the Tsar not the head both of state and church, and in truth the Father of his people?
With the ominous prospect of a life within four walls, with no one to speak to, and worse, no prospect of any activity; with prevision of mind and body deteriorating, Bakunin composed an abject “recantation.” “Mea culpa, mea culpa,” he cried. It is a shocking, striking, utterly distressing document. Was it designed as a shrewd piece of strategy, a show of sincerity to cover up a skilful piece of insincerity? For the document is not all of one piece. Alongside the breast-beatings, there are many brilliant and perceptive arguments in justification of his past behavior. He did not altogether abjure his moral being. He did not, as he put it, name those who might be endangered by his confession and who might be within reach of the Tsar or the Third Division or their West-European allies. He gave an astonishingly vivid picture of his own life and the conditions that brought him to revolutionary activity. He presented a graphic image of what he believed to be the decadence of the West and the emergence of Communism. At times one is surprised at his warm candor, as for example in his description of the bearing of French workers during the 1848 Revolution.
At that time I lived [Bakunin writes] for over a week in a barrack, in the company of workers, two paces from the Luxemburg Palace….. Majesty! I assure your Majesty, within no other class, nowhere else, and at no other time did I find such noble self-sacrifice, such moving and true honesty, so much warm feeling and joy along with such great heroism, as among these kindly, uncultured people, a thousand times better than their leaders!109
As for his anti-Russian activities,
Your Majesty, I confess that I proposed to the Slav-Congress the project—the total destruction of the Austrian Monarchy…My second and principal aim was to discover in the union of the Slavs a point of departure for a broadly planned, revolutionary propaganda in Russia, in order to launch a struggle against You, Your Majesty!110
In astonishingly frank words, Bakunin went on to depict conditions in Russia, the corruption of officials, the degraded state of the peasants, the reign of fear that prompted him to envision salvation in a revolution—and in a republic. But now, he wrote,
I believe that in Russia more than anywhere else what is needed is a strong dictatorship, exclusively devoted to the improvement and enlightenment of the masses…but one without parliamentary forms…, a strong power thoroughly uncircumscribed or delimited…111
And then the apology.
In a word, my crimes against your sacred powers knew no measure or bounds…I confess out of my deepest soul, that I have committed crimes again You, Your Majesty, against Russia, and that they deserve the severest punishment!112
I am a great criminal and do not deserve mercy. I beg of Your Majesty…do not allow me to rot in eternal bondage…Were the severest punishment of hard labor to be my lot, I would accept it gladly…In solitary confinement one is tormented by uninterrupted, useless memories. Thinking and remembering become unspeakable torture; one lives for a long time, against one’s will, and without dying, one dies daily in inactivity and grief…If I had to choose, I believe I would prefer not only death, but even corporal punishment to lifelong imprisonment in the fortress.113
The terrifying Confession concludes with a request once more to see his family.
Not the least fascinating elements of the Confession are the notations from the pen of the Tsar himself, glossing Bakunin’s remarks. They range from exclamations of approval of such statements as “the fruit of German Protestantism is Anarchy,” to an ironic comment on Bakunin’s hope that the Tsar of Russia would place himself at the head of a great revolutionary movement that would unite all the Slavs, as well as to paternal, forgiving sentiments, such as, “the repentance of any sinner can bring him salvation, but only when he speaks with his heart,” and to sarcastic and angry ones, as when Bakunin pleads not to be forced to involve others in his Confession, “not to confess the sins of others,” as he put it, and Nicholas comments, “With these words he destroys all confidence!”
The Tsar read the Confession very carefully. In the end, he agreed with Count Orlov. “He is not to be trusted. I believe he can continue to stay where he is now.”
The plea Bakunin addressed to Alexander II in February 1857 was even more self-abasing and sycophantic.
Your Majesty! With what name shall I call my past life? Squandered in chimerical and fruitless efforts, it ended in criminality. But I myself was neither self-seeking nor evil. I harbored a deep love of the good and the true, and was ready to sacrifice myself for it. But false principles, a false attitude and sinful self-love misled me into criminal entanglements, and once I had entered upon a false trail, I believed it to be my duty and honor to persist to the end. I plunged into the abyss from which only the all-powerful and saving hand of Your Majesty can free me….114
This time he succeeded. He was ordered deported to Siberia. Four years later, he did the unforeseeable—he managed to escape. He made his way to Japan, then the U.S.A., and then to England. And one day, toward the end of 1861, he knocked on Alexander Herzen’s door in London….
This is as Herzen saw him:
Bakunin was just the same; he had grown older in body only, his spirit was as young and enthusiastic as in the days of the all-night argument with Khomyakov in Moscow. He was just as devoted to one idea, just as capable of being carried away by it, and seeing in everything the fulfilment of his desires and ideals, and even more ready for every experience, every sacrifice, feeling that he had not so much life before him…As soon as Bakunin had looked about him and settled down in London, that is, had made the acquaintance of all the Poles and Russians who were there, he set to work…His nature was a heroic one, left out of work by the course of history…Is it not in itself a sign of greatness that, wherever he was cast up by fate, as soon as he grasped two or three features of his surroundings, he singled out the revolutionary current and at once set to work it farther, to expand it, making it the burning question of life?115
An amazing man, this Mikhail Bakunin! Of course, Herzen knew nothing about the Confession, nor of the slavish appeal to Alexander II. But was not all of this a successful stratagem? He had traveled two-thirds of the way around the world to return to his beloved scenes of action. Wherever there was to be revolution, there he must be. In this respect he had not changed.
And soon there would indeed be an insurrection in Poland. He was waiting for that moment….
When August Röckel emerged from his long imprisonment, Wagner, then at his height, came to his aid. There is no evidence that he ever met or saw Bakunin again….
“And so farewell, my friends, for a long while….Give me your hands, your support. For I need both. After that…who knows? What have we not seen of late! It may not be so far away as it may seem, that day when we shall meet in Moscow as of old and shall fearlessly raise our glasses to the toast: ‘For Russia and freedom.’…My heart refuses to believe that that day will not come; it sinks at the thought of a parting for ever….It cannot be! And yet, if it is—then I bequeath my toast to my children, and dying on alien soil, I shall preserve my faith in the future of the Russian people and bless it from the distant land of my voluntary exile.”
Thus Alexander Herzen on leaving Russia in 1847.
And his cousin, lifelong friend, and future associate in exile as well as in his political publications, the poet Nikolay Ogarev, voices his feelings on his departure:
Rejoice with me, for I am free at last!
Free to set forth to foreign land at will.
But is it not a dream, deceiving me?
Not so! Tomorrow come the post-horses,
And then “von Ort zu Ort” I’ll gallop on,
Paying for passports what the price may be…
With fear and doubt I stand before the gate
Of Europe. And my heart is full
Of hope, and troubled shadowy dreams….116
Such, indeed, must have been the sentiments of hundreds of other Russians, but few of them were enabled to make their way west unless aided by personal or family affluence or political influence, their efforts being made extremely difficult if they were suspected of a past liberalism. Alexander Herzen and Ogarev had already passed their apprenticeship in Russian exile; while others, like Mikhail Bakunin, were to pay their tribute of imprisonment and exile at a future time. And still another, the novelist Ivan Turgenev, was to wander back and forth between Russia and Western Europe, until he finally settled for good in the West.
Herzen, Bakunin, and Turgenev became the most celebrated of these Russian self-exiles, and their diverse influence was to play an important role in the diffusion of Russian ideas and knowledge of Russian life in Western Europe; in turn they were to act as important agents in the stir and turmoil of the post-1848 reaction in their mother country.
Alexander Herzen was already thirty-five years old when he saw Paris for the first time (Western Europe in fact) in March 1847. This was the moment he and his wife Natalie had long been waiting for.
In Paris!…Of that minute I had been dreaming since my childhood. If I might only see the Hôtel de Ville, the Café Foy in the Palais Royal, where Camille Desmoulins picked a green leaf, stuck it on his hat for a cockade and shouted “à la Bastille!”
I could not stay indoors; I dressed and went out to stroll about at random….Here was the Rue St-Honoré, the Champs-Elysées—all those names to which I had felt akin for long years…and here was Bakunin himself…I met him at a street corner; he was walking with three friends and, just as in Moscow, discoursing to them, continually stopping and waving his cigarette….I was beside myself with happiness!117
Who has not felt the same way on first seeing Paris? Who has not followed its streets, dazzled and dazed at the same time by the familiar names, wondering if this were not really a dream? And now to meet Mikhail Bakunin, an old friend, and one who, having come to Western Europe seven years before, was as familiar with it as with his own Moscow?…That long-interrupted dialogue of seven years earlier, could it not now be resumed, to continue in the Russian way, unintermittently? ….
Yet how far away Russia seemed in those days!
This was the world that epitomized one half of Herzen’s education. The other half—the harsher one—was Russian. It had begun with his birth in the fateful year of 1812, almost under French gunfire and within the very presence of the great Napoleon. Alexander Herzen was the illegitimate son of the well-to-do landowner Ivan Yakovlev and his German “mistress,” an unacknowledged “wife” in fact, but one who, with her son, was kept apart as if alien, though allowed every advantage the father’s wealth could offer. The father was a removed, moody, and hypochondriacal personality, with cultural sympathies of an eighteenth-century Frenchman. The mother remained in the background, a shadowy character, no doubt a long-suffering one, confined to another part of the house, to another world. She is hardly mentioned in her son’s Memoirs. “Herzen” was the name given the boy, no doubt in remembrance of his German antecedence; and Alexander was brought up trilingually in German, French, and Russian. He was precocious and quick, the spoiled center of the household; he learned easily. But the most drastic lesson he learned when, at age ten or twelve, he discovered his “false position.” It was no accident that somewhat later he was to be drawn so intensely to his cousin Natalie, whom he was to marry, and who, like himself, was an illegitimate offspring.
Alexander Herzen’s political education commenced upon his first acquaintance with the history of the Decembrist uprising against the Tsar in 1825. It may be said that for him, as for his distant relative and close friend Ogarev, the martyrdom of its five hanged leaders and the exile of the others became enshrined as an ineradicable portion of his life experience. Especially was this true of the young, ill-fated poet Kondraty Ryleev and the political ideologue Pavel Pestel. Herzen and Ogarev’s future London periodicals in Russian, composed for Russia, The Polar Star and The Bell, may be said to have been the “godchildren” of these heroes, just as both writers had always considered themselves “sons of the Decembrists.” Both had become fervent admirers of the works of Friedrich Schiller as young men, and remained such to the end. As youngsters they found in him full aesthetic and political gratification; the cult of the schöne Seele, “the beautiful soul,” and its idealism. Schiller was the poet of Liberty, the creator of the libertarian figure of Don Carlos. At Moscow University, the brilliant philosopher-scientist Prof. Pavlov, a chemist, brought them a sense of the importance of science and scientific thought, along with the philosophy of Schelling and Oken. And of course there were the discussion groups and dinners, the exuberance of which, tinged with political radicalism, led to government recriminations.
Schelling’s philosophy was very much in the air, and the young adherents of the Herzen-Ogarev circle revelled in the pantheistic idealism of that thinker. But for the admirers of Decembrism, such an aloof system would scarcely satisfy. The year 1830 and the Revolution in France, and subsequently the insurrection in Warsaw and its suppression, offered the more concrete elements of a reorientation. The process was such as we have seen in other instances. Saint-Simon became superimposed upon philosophic idealism; the march of history as envisioned in that thinker’s program brought enthusiasts to a study of French historians such as Guizot, Thierry, and Michelet. The dialectic of ideas received a hastening momentum from history. Thence to action—even if, at the time, such action would be limited to blazing discussions and argumentation. Lamennais hove into Ogarev’s ken; he was taken with the Frenchman’s vision of a regenerated Christianity, of a God who is humanity and a humanity which could be Godlike. While Herzen wavered for a time between absolute idealism and scientific materialism, eventually he came over to the latter. It was under the influence of his cousin the “Chemist” (Aleksey Aleksandrovich Yakovlev) that he had chosen the faculty of Physics and Mathematics, and he became convinced that
Without the natural sciences there is no salvation for modern man. Without that wholesome food, without that strict training of the mind by facts, without that closeness to the life surrounding us, without humility before its independence, the monastic cell remains hidden somewhere in the soul, and in the drop of mysticism which might have flooded the whole understanding with its dark waters.118
There was, of course, danger in such thoughts and their expression. A jittery government and its agents were quite aware of them and their propounders. It needed but one or two heedless or overt acts, perhaps innocent in themselves but none the less sufficiently provocative, for the authorities to bear down with all their oppressive might. Suspected even while at the university of one or two anti-government pranks, their authors were now under closer surveillance. An earlier university dereliction, such as, for example, coming to the financial aid of the recently exiled Sungurov, brought down a severe reprimand on Ogarev and his friends. But in 1834 it needed but a spy, a provocateur, and a few suspicious fires in Moscow (how often such fires proved useful to the government!) to bring about a tightening of the net. For example, a drinking party, some rather free singing, an informer; and though neither Herzen nor Ogarev was present, accusing fingers pointed to Ogarev as the prime culprit. He was the author of unpublished political songs; other fingers pointed to Herzen’s “incriminating” letters to Ogarev. Benckendorff and his Third Section were ever vigilant; arrests followed. The charges were trivial enough: principally of “freethinking” on the part of the alleged culprits. Had they been willing to plead guilty and ask for mercy, they would have gotten off easily. But they refused, and so they were punished—Herzen with a ten months’ imprisonment and five years’ exile, first to Viatka, then to Vladimir (the first of these on the fringes of Siberia); Ogarev, with exile to his native province of Penza. Others, like Sokolovsky, were sentenced to confinement in the dreaded Schlüsselberg fortress.
In 1834, Herzen was twenty-two years old, Ogarev twenty-one. When they returned from their exile six years later, they were both matured and better educated, though certainly not in the way the Government could have wished or hoped.
They were both “noblemen,” and in prison and in exile they learned how differently those of the upper classes were treated from those below them. If they were both to be classed with the “repentant noblemen,” those who “repented” of their class status and abdicated from it, they remained “unrepentant” in what they thought and in what they would henceforth do.
The stages of their further education would proceed even more rapidly.
Alexander Herzen and his wife Natalie (they had been married in 1838) returned to metropolitan life in 1840, ready once more to plunge into the stream of ideas and actions. Herzen had seen much by this time that made for a greater readiness of accessibility. Exile had shown him the full extent of that corruption of authority and administration which Gogol had laughingly held up to his fellow-men, and which now manifested itself to Herzen in all its base and degenerate sordidness. He had seen how the superficial crust of “progress” that the regime of Nicholas had tried to impose upon the provinces concealed a vast enslavement and degradation of the human personality. Gogol might laugh, with his broad near-Rabelaisian laughter; Herzen could not. He was later to summarize his impression of the Russia of Nicholas:
The serf-owner says to his servant: “Shut up, I won’t stand for you to answer me.” The head of the department remarks, growing pale, to the functionary who dared a rejoinder: “You forget, you know, with whom you are speaking!” The Emperor for opinions exiles men to Siberia, for verses starves others to death in dungeons, and all three are sooner ready to forgive thievery, bribery, murder and brigandage than the insolence of a sense of human dignity and the audacity of independent speech.119
And now the intellectual atmosphere in Moscow and Petersburg was alive with Hegel and Hegelianism. What a contrast to the moral barbarism to which he had so recently been exposed! At first sceptical of the easy verbiage with which Hegel was being expounded, he soon plunged into his own, deeper study of the philosopher. Here were Mikhail Bakunin and Vissarion Belinsky, making strange applications of Hegelian doctrine. There was a quarrel with Belinsky—a momentary one, it is true. Bakunin, though, was beginning to see the true meaning of Hegel. Herzen proceeded on his own:
In the midst of this intestine strife I saw the necessity ex ipso fonte bibere and began studying Hegel in earnest. I even think that a man who has not lived through Hegel’s Phenomenology and Proudhon’s Contradictions of Political Economy, who has not passed through that furnace and been tempered by it, is not complete, not modern….The philosophy of Hegel is the algebra of revolution; it emancipates a man in an unusual way and leaves not one stone upon another of the Christian world, of the world of tradition that has outlived itself…120
This was, of course, written much later than the period of the early 1840s, but it represents Herzen’s profound insights even at that period. In June 1842 Ogarev returned from Germany, where he had been studying political economy and medicine, while also imbibing philosophy. He brought with him a copy of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity. Herzen recounts the impact of that book:
After reading the first pages I leapt up with joy. Down with the trapping of masquerade; away with the stammering allegory! We are free men and not the slaves of Xanthos; there is no need for us to wrap the truth in myth.121
This was a far cry from those mystical and religious ruminations and daydreams that Herzen and Natalie had indulged in when corresponding with each other when he was in exile, or in the first year of their marriage.
But Herzen’s personal ordeals were not by any means over. Once more he was subjected to one of those incredible acts of the Tsar that combined horror with ludicrousness. Toward the end of 1840, Alexander Herzen in one of his letters to his father had made a slighting remark about the St. Petersburg police. The “slur” came to the attention of the authorities, and although both Benckendorff and Dubelt did their best to intervene, the Tsar himself decided on a more or less severe punishment—a term of exile. Herzen was then working for the Ministry of the Interior, and through the good graces of his superior he was transferred in an official capacity to Novgorod, not far removed from Moscow. It was exile nevertheless, but another stage in his education.
It was here that Ogarev visited him, having returned from Germany, and presented him with a copy of Feuerbach. Many are the unpredictable ways in which a man’s mind unfolds. After Feuerbach, Herzen followed with a close study of Hegel’s Phenomenology. The intoxication of new ideas was upon him; the draught was inebriating but at the same time fortifying. Feuerbach delivered him from a religious mythology, brought him back to Man as the maker of his gods, Man the transplanter of his best ideals onto the divinities of his own creation. About Hegel’s work he now wrote to editor Kraevsky:
Tell Belinsky that I have at last read through, and read well, the Phenomenology and that henceforth he should berate only the followers…but that he should not touch the great shade himself. Towards the end of the book it is as if one were entering a great sea: depth, transparence, and the breath of the spirit carries one along—lasciate ogni speranza—the shores disappear, one’s sole salvation is within one’s breast, but suddenly the cry is heard: Quid timeas? Caesarem vehis, fear vanishes, the shore is there before you, the wonderful leaves of fantasy are gone, but the succulent fruits of reality are there…122
A number of philosophical currents now seemed to converge: the Feuerbachian vision of man’s self-alienation and its transcendence; the Hegelian dialectic—the cosmos as in eternal motion; the universe in constant struggle and in constant resolution; the preeminence of science as one of the highest manifestations of the march of Reason; and finally, activity as the full realization of life itself. Philosophy and science now were seen not as opponents, but as complementary, one incomplete without the other, like “two Magdeburg hemispheres which seek each other and which, once they are joined, cannot be pulled apart by all the king’s horses.”123
Two essays, “Dilettantism in Science,” published in Notes of the Fatherland in 1843, and “Letters on the Study of Nature,” in the same publication in 1845–1846, constitute paeans to Science, Reason and Man. The latter essay in particular played a very significant part in the philosophic development of Russia. Science, Herzen contended,
…has understood, cognized and evolved the truth of reason as underlying reality: it has liberated the thought of the world from the phenomenon of the world, all things that exist, from the fortuitous. It has dissolved everything solid and immobile, made transparent everything that is obscure, brought light into darkness; it has revealed the eternal in the transient, the infinite in the finite, and recognized their necessary existence. Finally, it has destroyed the Chinese wall separating the absolute, the true, from man and has hoisted the banner of the autonomy of reason over the ruins.124
And as if to underscore this lofty claim, Herzen recounts the achievements of science within his own day:
What one could hardly dream of at the end of the last century has been accomplished before our very eyes. The small buds of organic chemistry, geology, paleontology, comparative anatomy have grown in our century into huge branches and borne fruit exceeding our wildest hopes. The world of the past, obedient to the mighty voice of science, has left the tomb to bear witness to the upheavals which accompany the evolution of the surface of the globe; the soil on which we live, this tombstone of the past life, is growing transparent, as it were; the stone vaults have opened, the interior of the rocks could not retain their secrets. Not only do the half-decayed, half-petrified vestiges again assume flesh, paleontology also strives to discover the law of the relation between geologic epochs and their complete flora and fauna. Then everything that ever lived will be resurrected in the human mind, will be saved from the sad fate of utter oblivion, and those whose bones have been completely decayed, whose phenomenal existence has been utterly obliterated, will be restored in the bright sanctuary of science where the temporal finds its repose and is perpetuated.
This is poetically beautiful and true. But it is not all. In the realm of biology, and of chemistry, scientists have already begun to investigate life itself, the secrets of organic bodies. But it is not only in the theoretical aspects that astounding progress has been achieved. They have reached outside their studies and laboratories to contribute “to a solution of the most important social problems by the use of machines, by bringing into play unemployed and wasted forces….They give us the means for freeing the hands of man from endless backbreaking toil.”125
The realm of the possible seems infinite. Impossibility disappears.
Impossible for whom [Herzen asks]? When? Why? What is the criterion? Napoleon held that steamships were an impossibility.126
And in his diary, he entered, quoting the Deutsche Jahrbücher:
“It is necessary to decide once and for all: ‘either Christianity and monarchy or science and the republic!’.”127
What the Tsar, Schelling, and the German idealists had begun, the French now completed. Fourier, Louis Blanc, Proudhon, and again, not least, George Sand—property and capital, the organization of labor, the phalanstery, love and marriage, the role of woman—“socialism” in all its variations—now stood arrayed against the Germans. For Herzen, Proudhon loomed as the equal of Hegel. Only he was more concretely, more fiercely and persistently destructive—of religion, of institutions, of the state.
Herzen ranged himself with other “repentant noblemen.” “When I look at the poor peasants,” he wrote in 1844 in his diary, “the blood rushes to my heart. I am ashamed of my rights; I am ashamed that I am partly responsible for the misery of their life.”128
The “repentant noble” was to play a significant role in the thinking both of Russians and of West Europeans; his figure spans the entire century and beyond, from the Decembrists down to Tolstoy and Prince Kropotkin.
The process of emancipation did not stop merely at the renunciation of class privileges, or in an acceptance of “socialism” theoretically, but turned also to the problem of home, love, and marriage. For Belinsky and for Herzen, the novels of George Sand became the new declarations of independence so far as woman and domestic life was concerned. The Saint-Simonian doctrine of the “rehabilitation of the flesh”—the freedom to love—and the liberation from the traditional views of the sanctity of marriage not based on a free union, became crucial elements in the libertarian thinking and reformatory efforts of the Russian liberal intelligentsia. It is out of these currents and the effect of George Sand’s own personality and life, that Herzen composed a novel, Kto vinovat?—Who Is To Blame?—into which he could now place his own maturing thoughts on the profound social interrelations of personal morality.
Inferior as a work of art, Herzen’s novel is still one of the signal contributions of the generation of the forties in its daring and forthright enunciation of radical ideas. Because he was here enabled to weave a great many threads of his own personal experiences and those of his wife, Natalya Alexandrovna Zakharin, Herzen fashioned a formidable subjective and objective projection of a crucial problem. Begun while he was in his second “exile” in Novgorod, the book was completed in 1846 and published in the Notes of the Fatherland.
Is it right, Herzen asks, that a human being sacrifice her life in deference to the mandates of a “formal” marriage, as against the claims of passion and love? Such is the case of Lyubov, the heroine of the novel—in many ways a projection of Herzen himself, for she is the illegitimate daughter of General Negrov and a serf woman—a passionate girl living in “two worlds,” a product of a decayed social system. Having married her tutor Krutsifersky, a well-meaning but colorless person, she is withering away in the aridity of provincialism. She meets Beltov, like herself a product of two classes, an attractive, worldly figure, a dilettante of culture, a wayward personality without anchor, stability, or goal in life, living in the moment and for the moment. They fall in love, but renounce it….He goes abroad, her husband takes to drink, and she falls a prey to a fatal disease.
Who is to blame? Obviously, none of the principal characters. They are destroyed, but are guiltless. They are the innocent products of a gentry background, so far as Lyubov and Beltov are concerned; the more “plebeian” tutor Krutsifersky is its victim. In the drabness and humiliations of provincial life, each suffers in his human dignity, in his or her loss of purpose in life, in some appropriate self-realization. The only exception is the doctor, Krupov, a “scientist,” even something of a “materialist,” whose clear vision is never blurred by what is around him, and who finds his life fulfilment in service to human beings. Beltov is a “superfluous man,” Dr. Krupov is not.
The “superfluous man” is a wraith that wanders through the course of Russian letters in manifold avatars. He is the anti-hero or non-hero of literature, as of life. He is given poetic form in the figures of Eugene Onegin and Lenski in Pushkin’s epic poem; he emerges as a demoniac, destructive, and self-destructive element in Lermontov’s Pechorin, the “hero” of A Hero of our Time, a series of haunting and horrifying episodes. He is a Byron without Greece. Such figures had many descendants, becoming more prosaic, perhaps, and less romantic, but none the less acquiring greater and greater realism and veracity, finally culminating in the classic “anti-heroes” of Turgenev’s novels and, consummately, in Goncharov’s Oblomov. They are the alienated waifs—mostly of the landed classes—who know something of many things, have picked up smatterings of Western letters and philosophy, dabble in science, have little care for their estates, are bored by their dreary neighbors, brood a great deal, and do little. In their mind’s eye they see vast plans for this or that reform, but they bring about nothing. Beltov is an exemplification of such a phenomenon, and in that personality Herzen was depicting his own friend Ogarev (only too accurately destined to fulfil Herzen’s prediction), as well as Herzen himself at that moment. The danger was there; to escape it was an immediate necessity.129
Would he ever really escape it?
In his description of Beltov, T. G. Masaryk has given a masterly epitome of not only this character, but the whole type:
The Russian, who has received a thoroughly European education at the hands of Genevese Frenchmen, astonished the German specialists by his versatility and astonished the French by his profundity, but whereas the Germans and the Frenchmen achieve much, he achieves nothing. He has a positively morbid love of work, but he is unable to secure a practical position in relation to life, incompetent to make contact with an environment wholly foreign to him. He lives only in thoughts and passions, a frigid dreamer, eternally a child. Half his life is spent upon the choice of a profession, and again and again he begins a new career, for he has inherited neither culture nor traditions from his father, nothing but property he does not know how to manage. Thus Beltov’s life is the Russian active inactivity, and Beltov is only a generalised human being, a moral Caspar Hauser as it were….130
To his diary, Herzen confided his more intimate and more daring thoughts:
Marriage is not the natural result of love, but its Christian result; it brings with it the terrible responsibility of the education of the children, of life in an organized family, etc….In the future there will be no marriage; the wife will be freed from slavery; and what sort of word is wife anyway? Woman is so humiliated that, like an animal, she is called by the name of her master. Free relations between the sexes, the public education of children and the organization of property; morality, conscience, public opinion, and not least the police—all this will define the details of relationships….. Why is it that in general woman is rarely able to give herself to living, social interests, but instead leads a purely private life?…What changes will socialism bring in this respect?….In communal life, developed on broad foundations, woman will be more involved in general interests; she will be strengthened morally by education, she will not be so one-sidedly attached to the family….131
Herzen’s dissatisfaction with the Russia of Tsar Nicholas now knew no bounds. What he was later to describe as the “pestilential zone that extended from 1825 to 1855,” closed in upon him too. He fought against the constant incompatibility of living in “outward slavery and inward freedom,” knowing that such a life meant ultimate disaster. In addition, he was coming into conflict not only with the so-called “Slavophiles,” who looked upon all Western thought and movements as destructive of Russia’s future, and who would shrink in horror from “socialist” doctrines, but also with his own group of friends, like the historian Granovsky, who were all too ready to compromise, and thought it might be possible to come to terms with autocracy, although they too espoused Western ideas. Herzen was deeply Russian, and Russia was to be the center of his thoughts for the rest of his life. But he could stay no longer. The death of his father in 1846 left him a considerable fortune, and the moment favored departure. He could not have foreseen that had he tarried another two years, his chances of leaving would have disappeared.
So here he was, in 1847, with his wife and children in Western Europe. And here were his Russian countrymen, like Sazanov and Mikhail Bakunin. With the French he found it harder to make friends. He hated hero worship, and resented what he believed to be a certain French superciliousness toward other nationalities, particularly Russians. The Germans in Paris seemed much closer, friendlier, and more communicative. There was Adolf Reichel, the musician; there was Karl Vogt, the biologist, later to be elected to the Frankfurt Parliament; there was the gifted German poet Georg Herwegh. With the last of these (oh, could he but have foreseen!) Herzen’s life was to be bound up in tragic convolutions…
But Paris was astir. This was 1847. Electric currents passed back and forth: forebodings, rumors, talk, publications, meetings, the city itself never resting, never sleeping. It was not only Russians who loved to argue. There was, for example, the talking session between Bakunin and Proudhon, as Herzen describes it:
…Until then I had seen very little of Proudhon; I had met him twice at the lodgings of Bakunin, with whom he was very intimate. Bakunin was living at the other side of the Seine in the Rue de Bourgogne. Proudhon often went there to listen to Reichel’s Beethoven and Bakunin’s Hegel; the philosophical discussions lasted longer than the symphonies….In 1847 Karl Vogt, who also lived in the Rue de Bourgogne, and often visited Reichel and Bakunin, was bored one evening with listening to the endless discussions of phenomenology, and went home to bed. Next morning he went round for Reichel, for they were to go to the Jardin des Plantes together; he was surprised to hear conversation in Bakunin’s study at that early hour. He opened the door—Proudhon and Bakunin were sitting in the same place before the burnt-out embers in the fireplace, finishing in a brief summing-up the argument begun overnight.132
Very soon it was not to be only talk. The season was pregnant with new fruit; the current of history was swelling. Where would these waters bear them? In many and unpredictable ways, in many strange fashions, lives that had seemed to dwell apart were to be intertwined for good and evil, joy and sorrow, hope and despair, for comradeship and enmity. Disparate and farflung destinies were to be conjoined and severed.
Herzen would never return to his Russia, but remained here in Western Europe to become the bold spokesman for his country, the liberal voice that would resound all over and the writer of one the great memoirs of the century. But his life too will be twisted and interwoven with that of others in tragic ways. And Mikhail Bakunin, the Hegelian? Who would ever have imagined that when the hour struck he would be beside Richard Wagner, his boon-companion and comrade in arms?…
Herzen and his wife were in Italy in February 1848 when the Revolution broke out in France. In May he was in Paris. In June he witnessed the uprisings there, sparked by the closing of the government workshops and the crushing blows administered by the counterrevolutionary forces under Cavaignac, which marked the end of the Revolution and ushered in the days of bitter reaction, recrimination, executions, and deportations. In his Memoirs Herzen recalled:
On the evening of the 26th of June…we heard salvos at short intervals…We glanced at one another and all our faces were green…‘They are shooting people,’ we said with one voice, and turned away from one another. I pressed my forehead against the window-pane. Such moments provoke ten years of hatred, a lifetime of thirst for vengeance; woe to him who forgives at such moments!
He, at any rate, would never forget. He regretted the moment when in one of the barricaded streets a revolutionary, a young man, had offered him a musket. Why had he not mounted the barricade? And now, “I did not die, but it aged me; I am recovering after the days of June as if after a serious illness.”133
He recovered. To his thinking, the “revolution” was far from over. It would come in the form of an indescribable cataclysm. He, Herzen, was himself a member of the “aristocracy”—he was, after all, a “repentant nobleman,” one who had deliberately abjured titles and rights, who recognized, as Herzen wrote in October 1848, that “aristocracy is really a more or less civilized form of cannibalism,” as was also true of the “manufacturer who grows rich at the expense of his workmen; a landowner who draws an enormous rent from his estate.” “Once the workers no longer want to work for another—that’s the end of cannibalism, the point where aristocracy stops.” But let the workers and peasants begin to realize their strength and join forces, “then you may bid farewell to your leisure” (Herzen is addressing both aristocrat and bourgeois) “your luxury, your civilization; then the majority can no longer be expended in order to produce a brilliant luxurious life for the minority.” And he concluded, “in the realm of ideas, the exploitation of man by man is over, because no one any longer considers the relation to be just.”134
The upheaval, when it comes, will be violent, terrifying. But such is, and has been, Nature’s course. The bitterness within him from the defeated revolution he had just witnessed rankles, and in almost biblical terms he predicts this new “revolution,” comparing it to a volcano, or to the march of the early Christians, or to the invasion of the “barbarians”: “This lava, these barbarians, this new world, these Nazarenes, who are coming to finish all that is old and impotent and clear the path for the fresh and the new—they are nearer than you think. For it is they, none other, who are dying of hunger, of cold; it is they whose muttering we hear above us, in garrets and in cellars….”135
He, at least, was not frightened. Time and again he was to be tested. His personal life was not immune from tragic blows (his mother and son would drown in a ship accident); his domestic life was to be marked by agonizing crises—yet he never collapsed. Was he not one of the “sons of the Decembrists”?
And in Paris, he was a marked man. He was known to have collaborated with the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz in the founding of the radical periodical, Tribune des peuples. Foreign emigrés were being constantly watched, and more and more intensely, as the country moved toward a monarchial restoration. In November 1850 he was expelled from Paris, set for another period of wanderings. In 1852 his wife Natalie died, and in that year he finally arrived in England, to begin what was to be another, probably his most fruitful career, as a publicist. His friendships extended far and wide, and in his catalogue of the heroic, he could now join to the names of the Decembrists, contemporaries like Proudhon, Mazzini, Blanqui, and Bakunin, and many, many others. In 1849 he had turned down the Russian government’s order to return to that country. The break was final; he was never to return.
There was no denying that Herzen was a deeply wounded spirit. Revolution in Western Europe had been crushed. France, lodestar of revolutions, was now a monarchy, and another “Napoleon”—Louis-Napoleon by name—sat on her throne. And Russia? Herself a most formidable agent in the great debacle, she was entering upon a period of incomparable repression. The period 1848 to 1856, in the words of a Russian historian, “is the darkest hour in the night of Russian obscurantism.”136 Of these dark years, a contemporary wrote as follows:
One could not move, one could not even dream; it was dangerous to give any sign of thought—of the fact that you were not afraid; on the contrary, you were required to show that you were scared, even when there was no real ground for it—that is what those years have created in the Russian masses.137
It was most important to break through this curtain of terror. Tsarist Russia must be apprised that there were forces outside of Russia aware of these conditions, forces of liberalism and hope, to hearten whatever liberal thought was still alive. Tsar Nicholas must not be allowed an absolute triumph. Russia had her own creative forces of resistance: among the peasants, among the middle classes and landowners, even among the aristocracy. And so, in 1853 Herzen established the “Free Russian Press in London,” to follow two years later with the Russian Journal Polnaya zvezda (The Polar Star)—the name borrowed from the publication edited by the Decembrist Ryleev—and later by a supplement, the Kolokol (The Bell). The papers were immensely successful, and their circulation grew. Smuggled across what might seem impenetrable frontiers and guards, they reached and influenced readers who, Herzen hoped, might in turn influence others, even the peasants. Herzen regarded the peasant-communes of Russia (the obshchina) as potential cradles of future revolutionary activity. The abolition of serfdom became a major battle cry; so did the abolition of the Russian censorship. The outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853, and its catastrophic termination for Russia in 1856, were to add additional fuel in Herzen’s campaign for reforms. He even appealed to the Russian soldiers stationed in Poland to mutiny. “You are defending the Tsar and the people…By defending him, you will defend all the evils of Russia.”138
In 1855, while the war was still going on, Tsar Nicholas I died. He was succeeded by Alexander II. And Herzen cried out, “We are drunk, we have gone mad, we have become young again!”139
The first issue of the Polar Star, edited by Herzen and Ogarev in 1855, carried at its head a poem of the Decembrist Ryleev, written some thirty-two years before and addressed to the then five-year-old grand duke:
Bit mozhet, otrok moee, korona
Tebye eeznachena tvortsom…,
enjoining him to love the people and honor the rule of Law; learn how to be a good Tsar…and destroy the ignoble spirit of slavery and injustice. Herzen himself addressed the new ruler, recalling for him the Decembrists, “these stout-hearted warriors for peace, these martyrs for their convictions.”140
In extremely bold words, Herzen addressed the new Tsar: “I am an incorrigible socialist, you are an autocratic emperor; but between your flag and mine there can be one thing in common—love for the people.” He asked for free speech, emancipation of the serfs with land.141
February 19, 1861 Tsar Alexander II issued his Manifesto freeing the serfs. Herzen celebrated the Manifesto with a banquet. Unfortunately a few days later he learned of fearful and bloody repressions in Poland at Russian hands. Herzen had reached the apogee of his influence by 1863. The Polish revolt of that year, and its repression, the political divisions in Russia and the emergence there of a more radical opposition such as that of “Young Russia” and the revolutionary association, “Land and Freedom”; the opposition of even the older radicals, the intrusion of Marxist socialist ideas, and not least, Herzen’s own futile conviction that he could appeal persuasively for reforms by addressing himself to the Tsar and the gentry, and that such reform could emanate from “above”—to which might be added the growing impact of “nihilist” activity—all these succeeded in blunting the effectiveness of Herzen’s program. Not least disenchanting for Herzen, no less than for all other Russian liberals and radicals, was the failure of the government to implement the Emancipation Manifesto of 1861, and Ogarev’s futile scheme to petition for a national assembly. To many Russians it appeared that Herzen’s hopes for a nonviolent revolution in Russia were utterly utopian, like his hope for a revolution arising out of the peasant communes. Herzen was of the generation of the Forties, and the differences between that generation and the more radical one of the Sixties is best epitomized by the reproach addressed to him by the author of “Young Russia”:
His hopes of a gift from Alexander or some other member of the imperial family; his short-sighted reply to the letter of a man who said that the time had come to begin to sound the alarm and summon the people to rise, and not to play the liberal; his complete failure to understand the contemporary situation in Russia, his hope of a peaceful revolution; his aversion from bloody deeds, from extreme measures, the only way by which anything can be achieved—has finally discredited the journal in the eyes of the republican party.142
Whatever justice there may be in this indictment, Herzen could never be impugned for lack of irrefragable honesty, unwavering courage, and deep sympathies for the oppressed of the world. His glowing Memoirs, touching, illuminating and eloquent, are a masterpiece of Russian prose and an illuminating chronicle of a Russian noble’s “education” into world-citizenship. The revolution he was waiting for did come—in 1905—thirty years after he death. It too was suppressed in blood. Another far greater one would follow some thirteen years later, with worldwide repercussions. As a staunch defender of democratic rights, rights for the least privileged members of humanity, Herzen will always be remembered. He left a testament to his son, in a preface to a later edition of his book, From the Other Shore, which may well be quoted as a living memorial to himself:
I do not wish to delude you; I desire that you should know the truth as I know it. This truth shall be yours as a birthright, so that you need not discover it through painful errors, through murderous disillusionments….The man of to-day…does no more than build the bridge, which will be crossed by an unknown in the unknown future. You, perhaps, will catch a glimpse of that unknown…Do not stay on the old shore….It is better to perish than to remain safe in the madhouse of reaction. The religion of the coming social reconstruction is the only religion I bequeath you. In that religion there is no paradise, no recompense, outside the individual consciousness, the personal conscience. When the right hour comes, make your way homeward to our own people to preach to them this gospel; there men once liked to hear me and perchance will recall my name. .
My blessings upon you in the name of human reason, personal liberty, and brotherly love.