HERZEN, ALEKSANDR IVANOVIĆ (Gercen in Russian spelling). - Russian politician and writer, b. in Moscow on 25 March (6 Apr.) 1812, d. in Paris on 3 Feb. 1870. Influenced by Saint-Simon and other socialist currents, he sojourned in the West, from where he directed the struggle against Russian autocracy.
His journal Kolokol (which entered Russia clandestinely) and the almanac Poljarnaja Zvezda were famous. He was in contact with figures of the Italian Risorgimento, particularly Mazzini and Garibaldi. Of considerable literary merit, as well as of broad historical interest, is an autobiography entitled Past and Thoughts.
A typical nineteenth-century Russian “gentleman,” he felt drawn toward an individualistic socialism (closer to Proudhon and Bakunin than to Marx); his “anti-bourgeois” spirit was offended by the West (which he had exalted in his youth) and then took refuge in the idealization of the “Russia of the future,” which, because of primitive “pre-capitalist” survivals, seemed to him closer to collectivism than “bourgeois Europe.” A troubled spirit, he came under the influence of positivism and materialism, though these were contradicted by frequent doubts of an idealistic cast, and he was always dominated by a humanitarianism not devoid of a religious and national background.