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From the Other Shore: Aleksandr Herzen on James Buchanan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

David Shengold
David Shengold*
Affiliation:
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

On 21 February 1854 Aleksandr Herzen met the future fifteenth president, James Buchanan, at a dinner given by the American consul in London for notable European revolutionary exiles. As Herzen's careerlong interest in the United States never led him to visit its shores and but rarely encompassed face-to-face meetings with its citizens, his published version of the encounter, in Part VI of Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts), provides an intriguing testing ground for his theories about and images of the “Trans-Atlantic Republic,” theories and images that received wide currency among the Russian intellegentsia of the midnineteenth century.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , Winter 1992 , pp. 758 - 766
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1992

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References

I would like to acknowledge the assistance and suggestions of William Comer, Hugh McLean, Robin Feuer Miller, Eric Naiman, Irina Paperno, Dale E. Peterson, Cathy Popkin, Nancy Ruttenburg and Deborah Steinberger and thank those who commented on earlier versions of this paper presented at the 1991 MLA "Russia and America" panel and at Ohio State University.

1. For overviews of Herzen's attitude towards the United States, see Boden, Dieter, Das Amerikabild im russichen Schrifttum bis zum Ende des 19.Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Cram, De Gruyter, 1968), 133–40Google Scholar; and Hecht, David, Russian Radicals Look to America, 1825-1894 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Chapter 2.

2. Gertsen, A. I., Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1954-64), XI: 161 Google Scholar. All citations from Byloe i dumy are from this edition and volume and page numbers have been included in the text in parentheses. The English translations are my reworkings of those in Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, abridged and ed. Dwight Macdonald, “translation by Humphrey Higgins based on that of Constance Garnett” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). This scene forms part of Chapter VII, “Nemtsy v emigratsii,” first published in Sbornik posmertnykh statei A. I. Gertsena (Geneva, 1870), the year of Herzen's death.

3. Ivan Kireevskii, “Obozrenie russkoi slovesnosti 1829 goda,” in Dennitsa, al'manakh na 1830 god (Moscow: M. Maksimovich, 1830), IX-LXXXIV. Titled there “Obozrenie russkoi slovesnosti za 1829 god,” in I. V. Kireevskii, Kritika i estetika, ed. Iu. V. Mann (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979), 55-79.

4. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique (Brussels: 1835), II, 430-31. De Tocqueville's comparison of the two nations was highlighted by its textual prominence: it concluded the second of his four volumes and thus ended the work as it appeared initially in 1835. See J. Thomas Shaw, “Puskin on America: His ‘John Tanner',” in Orbis Scriptus: Festschrift fur Dmitri] Tschizewskij zum 70. Geburtstag (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966), 747-54, on Pushkin's seminal reception of de Tocqueville.

5. Originally in “K nashim.” Poliarnaia zvezda na 1855 g.

6. Malia, Martin, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism 1812-1855 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Iu. M. Lotman, “The Poetics of Everyday Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture,” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, eds. Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, trans. Andrea Beesing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 75.

8. Ibid., 81-82.

9. The extent to which “simplicity” can be a function of the seemingly incompatible activity of self-fashioning is shown clearly in the figure of Benjamin Franklin. “Citizen” Franklin's carefully crafted persona in France provides general parallels to the image Herzen evokes of Buchanan at the coronation. Franklin's humble origins and dress were often invoked in early Russian writings about him. Karamzin wrote in the December 1791 Moskovskii zhurnal: Franklin, who strolled around Philadelphia's streets in a poor frock [v khudom kaftane], without money, without acquaintances, knowing nothing but the English language and the lowly printer's craft—this Franklin in several years made himself known and respected in two parts of the world, humbled British pride, gave liberty to almost all of America and enriched the sciences with great discoveries. (N. M. Karamzin, Izbrannye sochineniia [Moscow: 1964], 2: 116-17). Note that this description also encompasses the functions of the “simple republican” as challenger of royalty and freedom-giver.

10. Malia, 36-37. Not only radicals read and internalized Plutarch; Lotman asserts (84) that Suvorov modeled himself on Plutarch's heroes, particularly on Julius Caesar.

11. For a brief history of the Greek and Roman metaphors as applied to the United States in the early nineteenth century, see C. Vann Woodward, The Old World's New World (New York: The New York Public Library and Oxford University Press, 1991), 63-70.

12. Gertsen, I: 277. My translation, reworked from that of Malia, 37.

13. “He was handsome, but his handsomeness emanated coldness: no face could have so unmercifully displayed a person's character the way his did. The sharply retreating forehead and the lower jaw developed at the expense of the skull expressed inflexible will and feeble intellegence, more cruelty than sensuality. But the main thing were the eyes, without any tenderness, without any mercy, wintry eyes.” (On byl krasiv, no krasota ego obdavala kholodom; net litsa, kotoroe by tak besploshchadno oblichalo kharakter cheloveka, kak ego litso. Lob, bystro begushchii nazad, nizhniaia cheliust', razvitaia na schet cherepa, vyrazhali nepreklonnuiu voliu i slabuiu mysl1, bol'she zhestokosti, nezheli chuvstvennosti. No glavnoe-glaza, bez vsiakoi teploty, bez vsiakogo miloserdiia, zimnie glaza; Gertsen, VIII: 62).

14. Sovremennik, 1836, III: 52.

15. Plutarch, Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), IX: 610.

16. Ibid., 407-11.

17. See Iu. M. Lotman, “Dekrabrist v povsednevnoi zhizni (Bytovoe povedenie kak istoriko-psikhologicheskaia kategoriia)” Literaturnoe nasledie dekabristov, eds. V. G. Bazanov and V. E. Vatsuro (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), 43-47; in English translation as “The Decembrist in Daily Life,” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, 115-19.

18. Buchanan, James, The Works of James Buchanan, ed. Moore, John Bassett (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1908), II: 1830–1836 Google Scholar, Letter of 1-13 October, 239. Further citations from Buchanan are from this volume and page numbers have been included in the text in parentheses.

19. Letter of 14/26 January 1833.

20. Letter of 14/26 January 1833. Italics mine.

21. 2 August (N. S.) 1832. The capitalized “R” does not connote a political affiliation. Buchanan was a Democrat; his capitalization of “Republican” along with “Nation,” “Country,” “Liberty” and other such terms bespeaks one schooled in the heightened rhetoric of the post-Revolutionary period.

22. Letter of 1/13/October 1832.

23. Letter of 31 July 1833.

24. In her comparative study-in-progress of the development of Russian and American “national” literatures, Nancy Ruttenburg notes a common concern with “visible character” in the early nineteenth century and posits a valorization of “inarticulate” simplicity in Active embodiments of national identity.