Alexander Herzen- Ancestor in Defeat

“The whole bourgeois world blown up by gunpowder, when the smoke disperses and reveals the ruins, will start again with different variations—another bourgeois world.” It was these words of Alexander Herzen that occurred to me when I recently finished reading Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Thaw, that tenth-rate echo of Arnold Bennett. In Ehrenburg’s petty world of essentially middle-class relation. ships, of intrigues and ambitions and half-hearted rebellions hardly distinguishable from those of Levittown and Tooting, Herzen would certainly have detected the new bourgeois world which he prophesied as the result of a revolution misconceived and misapplied; he would have seen here, as he saw in Western Europe during the mid-nineteenth century, facile materialism spreading like “a syphilitic growth infecting the blood and bone of society.”

My first impulse, on comparing the shallow and timid perception which Ehrenburg directed upon his environment with the penetrating irony that characterized Herzen’s criticisms of the nineteenth-century world, was to draw the comparison between the vigor of the generation of Russian intellectuals that arose in defiance of Nicholas I, and the melancholy flutters of quasi-independence on the part of presentday Russian writers, to which western liberals are inclined to attach such exaggerated importance. The comparison is instructive, but it merely deepens what we already know in general terms: that the ...