The Family Drama as an Interpretive Pattern in Aleksandr Gercen's Byloe i Dumy

In his autobiography, Alexander Herzen tried to come to terms with the problematic relationship between history and private life. Herzen's views changed considerably while he was writing Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts). In his essay, Ulrich Schmid argues that four different modes can be discerned in his conception of the history-private life relationship. This essay shows that each conception is related to a private catastrophe which Herzen interprets against a specific philosophical background. Herzen starts with a Hegelian conception: the illegitimate son of a Russian aristocrat, he encodes Russian society as a family tyrannized by a patriarchal Czar. After the failed revolutions of 1848 and the Herwegh affair, Herzen modifies his views: history is not propelled by rationalism, but by human action. In this second conception Herzen relies on the Polish thinker August von Cieszkowski. Later Herzen turns to Proudhon and his ironical affirmation of opposites: he covers up his own affair with Natalie Tuchkova-Ogareva by keeping the Herwegh affair in a half-public, half-secret status. Finally, in the 1860s Herzen witnesses the decay of his own family and interprets his alienation from his children in a Darwinian key.