Alexander Herzen: Who Is To Blame?

Abstract

Sir Isaiah Berlin has commented: ‘At the heart of Herzen’s outlook (and of Turgenev’s too) is the notion of the complexity and insolubility of the central problems’.¹ In his major work of fiction, Who Is To Blame?² (1846), completed, appropriately enough, one year before he was to leave Russia forever,³ Alexander Herzen, the leading Russian philosopher of his generation,⁴ addressed himself to several of these ‘central problems’. Beltov, the principal male protagonist, is an heir of Onegin, Chatsky and Pechorin, yet another ‘superfluous man’; Lyubov Krutsiferskaya is yet another daughter of Tatyana and her character can be regarded as an investigation, ostensibly from a quasi-feminist perspective,⁵ of the fate of the so-called strong woman in the depths of the Russian provinces, ‘the kingdom of darkness’, to which the novel pays great attention. The central plot, the love triangle between Lyubov, her husband, Krutsifersky and Beltov, is one of the first investigations in Russian fiction of the theme of adulterous love.⁶ In many respects, then, Who Is To Blame? while being deeply flawed as an artistic whole, can be regarded both as a summation of the debates in literature in the 1820s and 1830s,⁷ and as an anticipation of the novels of Turgenev, a life-long associate and sometime friend of Herzen.⁸