Herzen as a "Chronic Illness"

Alexander Herzen: A Spiritual and Psychological Portrait

We are not doctors—we are the pain,
and what will become of our moans,
we do not know, but the pain has been declared.
— Alexander Herzen

I. The Fear of the Dead

There is a particular kind of fear—the fear of the dead. The living can be arrested, exiled, silenced. The dead are invulnerable. They have already become text, idea, precedent. And that is precisely why a power that feels insecure is forced to wage war even against the deceased.

Alexander Herzen died in 1870. But after the war in Ukraine began, Russian social media filled with attacks on him—as an enemy of the Fatherland. The reason is the same as one hundred and sixty years ago: in 1863, he condemned Russian aggression against Poland. Back then, the journalist Mikhail Katkov earned the Tsar's gratitude by "tearing out the tongue" of The Bell (Kolokol)—Herzen's main publication. Today, Katkov is resurrected as a patriot, and Herzen is reframed as a traitor. History repeats itself—not as farce, but as a diagnosis.

By May 2025, a judicial conference in St. Petersburg went further: Herzen was presented as a figure of foreign interference. A man who died a century and a half ago was officially declared a threat to state security. This might seem absurd—if it weren't so precisely to the point. Because the threat he posed then and poses now is entirely real. Only it is not political. It is psychological and spiritual.

He was called a "chronic illness" because he allowed people to think: one can love one's country and simultaneously despise the state. This distinction is not a rhetorical device or sophistry. It is a fundamental act of inner freedom. The state wants to be indistinguishable from the homeland, to merge with it so completely that criticism of the authorities is perceived as betrayal of the land, the language, the ancestors. Herzen destroyed this fusion—not by decrees, not by bombs, but by the very fact of his biography.

A chronic illness does not kill immediately. It lives alongside the organism—for decades, for centuries. It reminds itself in moments when the organism does something that contradicts its own health. This is how Herzen reminds us of himself today: not from the outside, not as a foreign agent, but from within—as a memory of what Russia could have been and, perhaps, still might become.

II. Double Exile

Psychoanalysts speak of two kinds of separation from one's homeland: external and internal. The external is the border, customs, a foreign language outside the window. The internal is the moment when a person realizes that the country of their childhood exists only in memory and will never return, regardless of where they are physically.

Herzen experienced both exiles. The first—in 1835, when he was sent into internal exile, to the east. The second—in 1847, when he left for the west, forever. He was arrested in his youth, went through a show trial, the formal announcement of a "death sentence," and years of exile. When he left Moscow in January 1847, he was seen off by close friends, many of whom he would never see again. But there was also a third exile—the deepest one: the gradual realization that the Russia he loved was a country he had largely created within himself.

His letters speak of this with piercing accuracy. Remembering how Moscow guests would wrap themselves in fur coats before leaving into the winter night, he wrote: "Sometimes you all stand before me with terrifying clarity, and I remember, and remember, and finally I become frightened." When the historian Granovsky—one of his closest youthful friends—died, Herzen wrote: "Inside, there is pain and a aching feeling, loneliness and the steppe." The steppe—not a landscape, but a state of the soul. It is what modern psychology calls ambiguous loss—a loss without a clear boundary, without a date after which one can begin to mourn and let go.

Shortly before his death in January 1870, he wrote that a Moscow visitor in Paris "filled the entire neighborhood with the aroma of Arbat and Prechistenka"—naming historic streets as if they were people's names. This is not sentimentality. It is an accurate description of how longing works: it lives in details, in smells, in proper names.

III. Longing (Toska) as a Spiritual Practice

The Russian language has the word toska—and it is untranslatable not because it is unique, but because it is too precise. Toska is not simply sadness and not simply anxiety. It is a yearning for something that either was and is gone, or never was but should have been. Herzen was a man of toska.

But he did something rare: he turned toska into work. In 1852, having settled in London, he initially hesitated: should he write down the life he had lived or avenge a personal betrayal? He feared that memoirs would "cover a moral defeat with literary success." But then he made a decision—to fight for the emancipation of the serfs, and within a few months, the Free Russian Press was established. Personal grief was forged into political action. This is not suppression, not denial of pain—it is its transformation.

Spiritual traditions relate to attachment in different ways. Buddhism advises letting go. Stoicism advises not depending. But there is another tradition—let's call it the tradition of prophets and poets—which says: do not let go. Cherish the pain. Pain is a compass. Precisely because it hurts you for this city, for these people, for this opportunity being missed—that is precisely why you have the right to speak. Herzen belonged to this tradition.

In psychology, there is the concept of negative capability—a term borrowed from Keats's poetry: the ability to remain in a state of uncertainty and anxiety without rushing toward comforting answers. Herzen possessed this ability to an extraordinary degree. Despite the confident tone of his essays from the early 1850s, his letters admitted: "I don't know what lies ahead," and his philosophy of history, in his own words, was "not a science, but an exposure, a curse on absurd theories and absurd liberal orators." For a public opposition figure, such an admission requires special courage. It is the courage not of a warrior, but of a witness.

IV. The Bell and Its Echo

The Bell (Kolokol)—the bilingual newspaper Herzen published in London—after a secret journey, regularly ended up on the dining table of Alexander II. It brought news of corruption, secret government meetings, the oppression of Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians. It was the first independent political journal in Russian history to reach its addressee despite all prohibitions.

The Bell supported the Polish liberation movement of 1863, calling on Russian officers not to carry out orders that, while perhaps not illegal, were clearly immoral. Herzen was dismayed by the support that prominent Petersburg and Moscow citizens gave to the massacre of Poles. He wrote to Turgenev—far more concerned with his own freedom of movement than with the fate of the Polish people—that only through protest could the "honor of the Russian name" be preserved.

The Bell also watched Ukrainian aspirations, believing that a reconstituted Poland should not include Ukrainian lands. After yet another death of a political activist in custody, the newspaper asked: what is it about Russian prisons that healthy young people die within a few years? As researchers bitterly note, these exposures are as relevant today as they were one hundred and sixty years ago.

Herzen engaged in lively discussions with Belinsky, Granovsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Bakunin, Proudhon, and Michelet. He participated in the grand intellectual debates of his time—and while doing so, he preserved what he himself called gut feelings: the ability to choose paths and people not only with his mind, but with his moral instinct.

V. The Temptation of the Axe

One of the most important spiritual-psychological knots in Herzen's fate is his attitude toward revolutionary violence. He wrote that "coercion can destroy and clear a space, but nothing more," and that those who sought to liberate Russia from Tsarist absolutism were themselves absolutists. He supported Alexander II until the backtracking and repression began, and he never called for "the axe" as long as there was a chance to solve problems peacefully.

This is not the cowardice of a reformer or the naivety of a liberal. It is an understanding of a deep psychological truth: violence committed in the name of liberation reproduces the very mechanism of power it is directed against. A revolutionary ready to sacrifice living people for the future happiness of an abstract humanity is not a liberator, but a new tyrant with a different slogan.

Herzen saw this in the example of the French Revolution and warned Bakunin in his farewell "Letters to an Old Comrade." Remarkably, after his death, Sergei Nechaev—a man who used revolutionary rhetoric to cloak ordinary criminal terror—threatened Herzen's heirs if they dared to publish this text. Evil always senses who sees through it.

Instead of violence, Herzen chose satire. He called himself "a metaphor-possessing satirist, weakening enemies by making them ridiculous." This too is a spiritual choice: laughter destroys the aura of inevitability with which power surrounds itself. A tyrant who has been mocked is no longer entirely a tyrant. Herzen insisted: accurate information, sound advice, and open discussion are the prerequisites for any successful political action. The press is not a conspiracy; it is a printing press.

VI. Love Without Merging

Herzen loved Russia—and it was a mature love, not a childish one. A childish love for one's homeland demands merging: either my country is right, or I am its traitor. A mature love allows for separation, disagreement, pain—and remains love.

Modern psychology would call this differentiation—the ability to maintain oneself in a relationship without breaking it off and without dissolving into it. Herzen loved Russia strongly enough not to need its reciprocal love right now. This is what made him unbearable to the authorities. He could not be bought into silence, nor persuaded into nihilism. Spies, slander in European newspapers, anonymous death threats—none of it worked, because his identity did not depend on the approval of those he criticized.

Herzen's love for Russia was based not on abstractions like "greatness," but on memories of Moscow University, summer estates, and a circle of friends. Having realized that returning home was impossible, he decided he was not in exile but on a mission. In twenty-three years abroad, Herzen became his country's first modern political émigré. He once advised his friend Ogaryov: "Wherever fate may cast you—there you must take up the work."

He was openly a snob about matters of style—insisting that people of advanced views should still read widely, write well, and know how to dance. He managed his inherited capital with aristocratic meticulousness, supporting his family, friends, and printing press. He called money a political weapon—and used it as such.

VII. Legacy: The Pain That Does Not Die

Herzen foresaw the nature of his legacy. "The idea will not perish," he wrote to Ogaryov in 1868. To his son, he said: our opposition "will trouble the hearts of the young generation." This is not self-consolation—it is an accurate understanding of how spiritual continuity works. Not through institutions, not through monuments, but through the pain that one person dared to declare aloud and which another, in another century, recognizes as their own.

Soviet dissidents protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia resurrected his slogan: "For your freedom and ours." A hundred years after his death, he spoke through others' lips. This is what spiritual traditions call living presence: a person is gone, but the principle they embodied continues to seek embodiment in other people and other eras.

Anna Akhmatova loved to quote his verdict on the reactionary Aksakov, who "could not even manage to remain silent" when political prisoners were sentenced to hard labor. This too is a kind of spiritual judgment: sometimes the highest form of dignity is to remain silent. But those incapable even of that—expose themselves.

The current wave of Russians who have gone abroad can learn from Herzen an understanding of both the serious cost and the immense value of a life lived in opposition. He warned of the danger of an émigré existence that combines "the greatest inactivity with tragic interests." This is not the gratitude of the nation, not recognition during one's lifetime. But it is keeping alive that which is truly great in Russia.

Official 21st-century Russia, by calling Herzen a "chronic illness," unintentionally confirmed the accuracy of his own image. A chronic illness—meaning incurable. Meaning no Katkov can finally tear out this tongue.

The pain that has been declared is no longer mere suffering. It is testimony. And testimony is the first act of justice. Herzen did not heal Russia. He did not claim to. He only declared the pain—loudly, precisely, with names and dates, with irony and tenderness, from a London that did not smell of the Arbat.

That was enough to be feared a century and a half later.

This essay is based on the article "The Dangerous Legacy of Alexander Herzen" by Kathleen Parthé, published by the Kennan Institute (Washington, February 2026).

The Dangerous Legacy of Alexander Herzen

The Russia File

Feb 16

Written By Kathleen Parthé

After Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine began four years ago, negative comments about the nineteenth-century writer and opposition figure Alexander Herzen intensified across Russian social media. Herzen, who famously criticized Russian aggression towards Poland in 1863, was recast as an enemy of his homeland, while his contemporary Mikhail Katkov, a conservative journalist, was resurrected as the patriot who earned the Tsar’s thanks by “tearing the tongue out of The Bell,” Herzen’s signature publication.

By May 2025, a judicial conference in St. Petersburg had framed Herzen as a figure of foreign interference, foregrounding the enduring political role of a man who died in 1870. He was also labelled a “chronic affliction,” someone who allowed people to think they could love their country (strana) while despising the state (gosudarstvo). Herzen himself used medical metaphors to explain that his generation could not fix all of Russia’s problems. “We are not the doctors, we are the pain, and what will become of our moans and groans we do not know, but the pain has been declared.” In the eyes of official Russia, he is evidently still a pain.

The guide to Herzen has always been Past and Thoughts, but it can obscure other sources for his biography and politics. Isaiah Berlin complained that more of his hero’s prose had to be translated to appreciate this extraordinary life. A Herzen Reader (2012) made available editorials and exposés from The Bell, which – after a clandestine journey from London - regularly showed up on Tsar Alexander II’s dining table, delivering a bracing dose of news about corruption, secret government deliberations, and the oppression of Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians. Further layers of Herzen’s life will be revealed in a new biography (Herzen’s Letters. A Life in Opposition) due out this spring.

Herzen’s personal letters comprise more than a dozen volumes of his collected works, along with “open letters” to friends and foes. Letters make a substantial contribution to his life story, with their range of emotions, their testing of theories in real time, and their details of the age in which he lived and the people around him. In a single message Herzen may ask for updates, argue principles or tactics, describe works in progress, celebrate a victory or mourn a defeat, and wax nostalgic about Moscow. The reader is never in doubt as to the writer’s mood, whether confrontational, inquisitive, or affectionate.

Herzen engaged in spirited debates with many famous intellectuals of the period, including: Vissarion Belinsky, Timofey Granovsky, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Jules Michelet. For him, “everything is clinched and noted down in letters without rouge or embellishment, and it all stays there and is preserved, like a mollusk enclosed in flint, as though to testify at the Last Judgment.” Less monumental than the memoir, his correspondence records daily skirmishes rather than epic battles, offering a refreshingly honest portrait of how difficult it was to become – and remain - the hero of Past and Thoughts. What follows is just a sampling.

Despite the confident tone of essays written in the early 1850s, Herzen’s letters admitted that “I don’t know what lies ahead,” and that his philosophy of history “is not science, but an exposé, a curse on absurd theories and absurd liberal orators.” Since a return to Russia would inevitably involve arrest, he explained that he remained abroad “to be your uncensored voice.” By fall 1852, newly settled in London, Herzen wondered whether to record his life to date, or to avenge himself on his late wife’s lover. He was carried back to his Moscow childhood, “this strange world, patriarchal and Voltairean,” but worried that a memoir would “cover moral defeat with literary success.” He soon resolved to also campaign for the emancipation of the serfs, and, within a few months, the Free Russian Press was up and running. Fifteen years later, weary from attacks on his work as a publisher, he insisted that “this wasn’t a conspiracy, but a printing press.”

Correspondence from Herzen’s final year tracks the genesis of his valedictory “Letters to an Old Friend.” The senseless destruction caused by revolutionaries in 1790s France was meant to be a cautionary tale for Bakunin and his circle. “With coercion one can destroy and clear a place, but nothing more,” and those intent on ridding Russia of tsarist absolutism were themselves absolutists. So powerful was Herzen’s message that, after his death in 1870, Sergei Nechaev, a fake revolutionary but a genuine murderer, threatened retribution against Herzen’s heirs if the essay were ever published.

Whether the subject was Europe in 1848 or Russia in the 1860s, Herzen opposed any nation or group seeing the masses as “cannon fodder.” He supported Alexander II until retrenchment and repression set in and wrote that he would never call for “the axe” while there was a chance to solve Russia’s problems peacefully. Critical of anarchists and bomb-throwing revolutionaries, Herzen saw himself as a metaphor-wielding satirist, who weakened his enemies by making them look ridiculous. As the 1860s advanced, and progressives turned radical, Herzen insisted that accurate information, sound advice, and discussion were prerequisites to successful political action. To liberals, afraid that supporting Poland could endanger their reform-era privileges, he said that Russia still had “a great many policemen, but very few rights.”

By calling himself a “Russian socialist” Herzen highlighted the stability and equity of the peasant commune. Correspondence underscores his rejection of political violence, all-embracing ideologies, and “librettos” offering blueprints for the future. Gut feelings (chut’ë) and firm principles helped Herzen choose paths to follow and people to trust, and he saw himself more a bogatyr (a Russian knight), pausing at a crossroads, than a Pugachev, destroying everything in his path. He never made it look easy to forge a new life far from home but was confident that his efforts were honest and worthwhile.

Herzen’s book Letters from France and Italy contains disparaging comments about a French bourgeoisie obsessed with fencing off their property, and a broadened electorate that voted for mediocrities, but it is more accurate to call Herzen a snob than a radical. He was drawn to key historical actors and events, improbably describing himself as a witness (age six months) to the 1812 French occupation of Moscow, when Parisian friends recognized his father Ivan Yakovlev in the street. After that encounter, Napoleon sent Yakovlev to Petersburg with a message for Alexander I. Herzen was close in age to Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolai Gogol, and in ideas and style to Griboyedov, Chaadaev, and aristocratic Decembrists, and illegitimacy mattered less to him than his father’s noble background.

Herzen inherited a substantial income. Despite the Tsar’s best efforts, was able to transfer most of it abroad, where he carefully managed his capital in order to support family, friends, and the Free Russian Press. Although he often described money as a political weapon, he also had the gentry’s taste for elegance in clothing and living quarters, and insisted that people of advanced views should still read widely, write well, and know how to dance. His definition of nihilism is somewhat idiosyncratic, involving a rejection of prejudices and receptivity to new ideas, while he saw his younger countrymen merely wearing a “nihilist costume,” as they imagined “that socialism consists of people giving them money.” As a correspondent, Herzen was neither a repentant landowner, an ascetic intelligent, nor a superfluous man, and could not be shamed into funding causes for which he lacked sympathy and respect.

Petersburg officials, realizing that Herzen’s silence could not be bought, repeatedly attempted to frighten him with spies, slander planted in European papers, and anonymous death threats. As a young man, he had survived arrest, jail, a sham trial, the perfunctory announcement of a “death sentence,” and internal exile, so he was battle-hardened. Not afraid to hold others to his strong moral code, he called liberal support of the government shameful, and conservative journalists’ diatribes against Poland as crossing “a moral boundary, beyond which there is neither insult nor offense.” In the Soviet era, Anna Akhmatova liked to cite his indictment of reactionary Slavophile Ivan Aksakov, who “couldn’t even manage to remain silent” when political prisoners were sentenced to hard labor. Herzen also set standards for the Tsar’s critics: get your facts straight, do not spread misinformation or sacrifice others to poorly planned schemes. He was nostalgic for the old nobility’s sense of personal honor and lamented that his generation of superfluous men were succeeded by an ill-tempered, restless cohort, whose tone “could drive an angel to fight and a saint to curse.”

As his press graduated from pamphlets to almanacs (The Polestar) and a biweekly newspaper (The Bell), Herzen heard that his investigative journalism and irreverent humor worried liberals, who wanted to give reforms a chance, and progressives, who opposed propping up a rotten regime. Herzen had faith in his approach, writing that not everything he aimed for would be accomplished in his lifetime, but “we can see the goal, and we see that fanatics interfere with the matter at hand more than assist it.” He wrote to Ogaryov in 1868 that “the idea will not perish” and told his son that “our opposition can no longer be left out of historical accounts, and it will stir the hearts of the younger generation.” This prediction was validated a century later when Soviet dissidents, opposed to the invasion of Czechoslovakia, resurrected Herzen’s mantra “For Your Freedom and Ours.”

The Bell supported the 1863 Polish fight for freedom, encouraging Russian officers not to follow orders that, if not illegal, were certainly immoral. Herzen was disheartened by support voiced by prominent citizens of Petersburg and Moscow for the slaughter of Poles. He wrote to Ivan Turgenev, who was more concerned with his own freedom to travel than that for the Polish nation’s survival, that only through protest could “the honor of the Russian name” be preserved. The Bell followed Ukraine’s aspirations as well, believing that a reconstituted Poland must not include Ukrainian land. After the death of yet another incarcerated political activist, The Bell asked what it was about Russian prisons that caused healthy young men to die within a few years, and the paper denounced the official lies, hypocrisy, and criminal negligence surrounding such cases. Sadly, these exposés of the Russian penal system are as relevant today as they were a hundred and sixty years ago.

Herzen was open about his enduring love for Russia, often recalling the day he departed in January 1847, when he and his family were accompanied to the first posthouse by close friends, many of whom he never saw again. Poignant passages in his letters describe the sheer physicality of his yearning for Moscow, which he had to leave twice, traveling eastward in 1835 for an undetermined period of internal exile, and westward in 1847 for an equally undetermined period of time in Europe. Remembering how his evening guests got bundled up before venturing out into a wintry Moscow night, he wrote that “at times you all stand in front of me with a terrible clarity, and I remember, and remember, and finally am frightened.” When news came of historian Timofey Granovsky’s death, Herzen described how “inside there is pain and an aching feeling, loneliness, and the steppe.” Shortly before his own death in January 1870, he wrote how a Moscow visitor to Paris “filled the entire neighborhood with the fragrance of the Arbat and Prechistenka,” invoking the names of Moscow’s historic streets.

Herzen’s love of Russia was not based on abstractions like velichie (greatness in size and power), but on memories of Moscow University, summers in the countryside, and a circle of friends. Once it was clear that he could not return home, he decided, like some who left after 1917, that he was not in exile, but on a mission, and, during twenty-three years abroad, Herzen became his country’s first modern political émigré. Despite criticism then and now that he used his riches to spread hatred of Russia, Herzen was a hard-working journalist who wanted Europe to respect Russians, and Russians to respect themselves. He once advised his friend Nikolai Ogaryov that “wherever fate has cast you is where you should get down to work,” and saw the peril of the expat life, which combines “the greatest inactivity with tragic interests.” The latest wave of Russians to move abroad can learn from Herzen both the serious costs and the immense value of a life in opposition. It has never been easy, does not guarantee the thanks of a grateful nation, but keeps alive what is truly great and good about Russia.

Kathleen Parthé, Emeritus Professor of Russian at the University of Rochester, is the author of Russia’s Dangerous Texts and editor of A Herzen Reader. A former fellow of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, her latest publications Herzen’s Letters. A Life in Opposition (NIU/Cornell) and a new translation (with Robert N. Harris) of Past and Thoughts (Harvard) will be published in spring 2026.

The Russia File