Monday, June 20, 2011

Our congratulations to Professor Kathleen Parthé

Our congratulations to Professor Kathleen Parthé whose translation of Alexander Herzen's politically influential essays has been accepted for publication by Northwestern University Press. We look forward to seeing it in print! 


A HERZEN READER is the first translation into English of some of the most politically influential essays in Russian history by a writer known and admired far beyond his homeland. The one hundred documents were selected by the book’s editor from the thirty-three volume collected works of Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), translated from French (Doc. 1) and Russian, and fully annotated. An Introduction draws the reader into the historical, social, and literary world of these articles and discusses the impact they had in the mid-19th century and since that time. Finally, an essay by Oxford University academic Robert Harris presents in greater depth approaches taken to Herzen by biographers and other scholars in Russia and abroad.
Translations of Herzen to date include: From the Other Shore and The Russian People and Socialism, Who is to Blame?, Letters from France and Italy, 1847-1851, and My Past and Thoughts. The latter was issued in four volumes (1924-7, later revised), and in an abridged version, both editions including a selection of longer essays (e. g. “The Superfluous and the Jaundiced,” “Bazarov Once More”). Selected Philosophical Works, a Soviet publication later reprinted in the US, contains writings on science and materialism, From the Other Shore, and open letters “To an Opponent” and “To an Old Comrade.” This is a fraction of what Herzen wrote, and even these volumes are not all in print. This came to light most recently in long and enthusiastic review articles about Tom Stoppard’s three-part play The Coast of Utopia, which attracted a new generation to Herzen’s compelling voice without adding to the accessibility of his work.
Most of the essays, editorials, and investigative journalism in A Herzen Reader first appeared in his newspaper The Bell, whose 245 issues (1857-67) were edited and printed in London and Switzerland, then smuggled back into Russia where they became required reading for everyone who took an interest in public affairs, from high school students experiencing their first whiff of rebellion to the highest officials in the land, even the imperial family. Herzen’s broad concerns and his fluid style, along with the practical requirement of saying a great deal in a limited space, make this provocative and intense reading. Going against the grain of Russian thought, Herzen does not see his homeland as an enigma giving rise to cursed questions. He does not believe that sending a political message between the lines is anything more than a limitation on serious discussion. In an age in which the telegraph had become a factor in the spread of information, Herzen fulfilled the function of a ‘blogger’ who felt deeply his moral responsibility to convey accurate information in the cause of nonviolent change, and his ideas have served as a polestar for a century and a half.
There is an audience for A Herzen Reader in courses devoted to Russian and European history, politics, philosophy, and literature. Outside the classroom, a broader readership will know his name from My Past and Thoughts, and The Coast of Utopia, and the many references to Herzen in books and articles on the turbulence that engulfed Europe from 1848 until 1989. The issues raised in these translations (official corruption, the failure of liberalism, the endurance of the authoritarian model and the secret police, and the dangers of investigative reporting) have lost none of their relevance in contemporary Russia and other formerly Communist states. Two centuries after Herzen’s birth in the tumultuous Moscow of 1812, his voice still rings true.