Alexander Herzen

Alexander Herzen

Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (Russian: Алекса́ндр Ива́нович Ге́рцен) (April 6 1812 – January 21 1870) was a Russian pro-Western writer and thinker known as the "father of Russian socialism" and one of the main fathers of agrarian populism (being an ideological ancestor of the Narodniki, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Trudoviks and the agrarian American Populist Party). He is held responsible for creating a political climate leading to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. His autobiography My Past and Thoughts, written with grace, energy, and ease, is often considered the best specimen of that genre in Russian literature. He also published the important social novel Who is to Blame? (1845–46).

Famous quotes containing the words alexander herzen, alexander and/or herzen:

“This socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then once again a cry of denial will break from the titanic chest of the revolutionary minority and again a mortal struggle will begin, in which socialism will play the role of contemporary conservatism and will be overwhelmed in the subsequent revolution, as yet unknown to us.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)

“Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It’s in having taken an ethos ... where you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great.”
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“Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, “just in case” in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)