Literary Contexts of Triangular Desire: Natal'ja and Aleksandr Gercen as Readers of George Sand

This essay examines the importance of the novels of George Sand as literary models for Alexander and Natalie Herzen's accounts of their family drama. Kate Holland explores the multiple contexts of the Herzens' readings of Sand, demonstrating how her novels helped them to interpret the emotional, political, social and historical significance of their own experiences of triangular desire. Holland's close analysis of Natalie's letters to Herwegh during the period of their affair reveals how Natalie's experience of triangular desire was mediated by the social, political and hermeneutic structures of Sand's novels Consuelo (1842–1843), La Comtesse de Rudolstadt (1844) and La Petite Fadette (1848). Inspired by her reading of Sand, Natalie confers symbolic value on her relationship with Herwegh, recasting her affair as a fantasy of overcoming the social and political differences which have been revealed in the 1848 revolution. Holland's discussion of Herzen's work on Part Five of My Past and Thoughts (Byloe i dumy) and his letters of the time shows how his account of his wife's affair borrows from Sand's Horace (1834) as it seeks to represent Herwegh as a bourgeois historical villain, guilty both of the seduction of Natalie and the failure of the 1848 revolution.