THE MEMOIRS OF ALEXANDER HERZEN I NOTE This translation has been made by arrangement from the sole complete and copyright edition of _My Past and Thoughts_, that published in the original Russian at Berlin, 1921. _MY PAST AND THOUGHTS_ THE MEMOIRS OF ALEXANDER HERZEN _THE AUTHORISED TRANSLATION_ _TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY CONSTANCE GARNETT_ VOLUME I [Illustration: [Logo]] NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY T. & A. CONSTABLE LTD. EDINBURGH * ALL RIGHTS RESERVED FIRST PUBLISHED 1924 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE A few words about Herzen’s parentage will make his narrative more intelligible to the English reader. Herzen’s father, Ivan Yakovlyev, was a very wealthy nobleman belonging to one of the most aristocratic families of Russia. In 1811, at the age of forty-two, he married (so Brückner tells us in his _History of Russian Literature_) at Stuttgart a girl of sixteen, whose name was Henriette Haag, though she was always in Russia called Luise Ivanovna, as easier to pronounce. As he neglected to repeat the marriage ceremony in Russia, their son was there illegitimate. Yakovlyev is said to have given him the surname Herzen, because he was the ‘child of his heart.’ CONTENTS PART I NURSERY & UNIVERSITY (1812–1835) CHAPTER I:—My Nurse and the _Grande Armée_—The Fire of Moscow—My Father with Napoleon—General Ilovaisky—Travelling with the French Prisoners—The Patriotism of C. Calot—The Common Management of the Property—Dividing it—The Senator _page 1_ CHAPTER II:—The Talk of Nurses and of Generals—False Position—Russian Encyclopaedists—Boredom—The Maids’ Room and the Servants’ Hall—Two Germans—Lessons and Reading—The Catechism and the Gospel _page 24_ CHAPTER III:—The Death of Alexander I. and the Fourteenth of December—Moral Awakening—The Terrorist Bouchot—My Kortcheva Cousin _page 55_ CHAPTER IV:—Nick and the Sparrow Hills _page 82_ CHAPTER V:—Details of Home Life—Eighteenth-Century People in Russia—A Day in our House—Visitors and _Habitués_—Sonnenberg—The Valet and Others _page 93_