My Past and Thoughts: Memoirs Volume 1

Alexander Herzen's own brilliance and the extraordinary circumstances of his life combine to place his memoirs among the great testimonies of the modern era.Born in 1812, the illegitimate son of a wealthy Russian landowner, he became one of the most important revolutionary and intellectual figures of his time - as theorist, polemicist and political actor; and fifty years after his death Lenin pronounced him 'the father of Russian socialism'.My Past and Thoughts uniquely assimilates the personal to the historical, and is both a classic of autobiography an an unparalleled record of his century's remarkable life.His account of a privileged childhood among the Russian aristocracy is illuminated with the insight of a great novelist; his friends and enemies - Marx, Wagner, Mill, Bakunin, Garibaldi, Kropotkin - are brought brilliantly to life; and as a sceptical and free-thinking observer, he unerringly traces the line of revolutionary development, from the earliest stirrings of Russian radic