 Part 1, 1861 | |
| Author | Alexander Herzen |
|---|---|
| Original title | Былое и думы |
| Country | Great Britain |
| Language | Russian |
Publication date | 1870 |
| Media type | |
My Past and Thoughts (Russian: Былое и думы, romanized: Byloje i dumy) is an extensive autobiography by Alexander Herzen, which he started in the early 1850s and continued to expand and revise throughout his later life. Serialized in Polyarnaya Zvezda, the book in its full form came out as a separate edition after its author's death. In Herzen's lifetime the major parts of the book were translated into English (1855), German (1855) and French (1860-1862).[1] My Past and Thoughts gives a panoramic view on the social and political life in Russian Empire as well as the European West of the mid-19th century. It is considered to be the classic of Russian literature.[2][3]
Herzen's eloquence is easily translatable, for it is not based on the value of words and sounds, but on the unfolding of ideas and images... Though he cannot be regarded as a master of words, if "style is the man" Herzen is most undoubtedly a master of style. The same characteristics of his style, but in an even more un fettered and spontaneous form, still more like conversation and relatively free from rhetoric, recur in his autobiography, My Past and Thoughts. To the majority of readers it will ever remain his principal work. Its attraction lies above all in its freedom and obvious sincerity. Not that there is no pose in it - Herzen was too French and too romantic to do without a pose... The absence of self-conscious and exces sive sincerit, the superficiality, the somewhat matter-of-course theatricality of My Past and Thoughts is its essential charm to the open-minded reader. Apart from the tone of the voice there is little self in Herzen's memoirs and less introspection. The relative conventionality of his psychology makes it all the simpler and truer, for he speaks of himself in universal and accepted terms... But the greater part of the book is not subjective, and its most frequently memorable pages are those where he speaks of the outer world. Herzen is a great portrait-painter, an impressionist — and the impressions he left of his father and other relations, of the Moscow idealists, and of the leaders of the European Revolution are unforgettably vivid. His lightness of touch, which never insists and always moves on, gives them a wonderfully convincing mobility. Not the least remarkable passages of the book are those where he gives a wider historical background to the narrative: the first parts devoted to his life before his exile contain the broadest, truest, and most penetrating view of Russian social and cultural history in the first half of the nineteenth century. They are a great historical classic.
Soviet critic Y. Elsberg calls the book "the novel about a Russian revolutionary and thinker" "with all the contradictions of his inner world" and writes that by its form My Past and Thoughts is a complex combination of memoirs, historical chronicle novel, diary, letters and a biography.[5][6]