SOURCE: Introduction to My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgens, introduction by Isaiah Berlin, University of California Press, 1982, pp. xix-xliii.

Berlin is a noted twentieth-century critic of Russian literature. The essay that follows—written in 1968—presents an overview of Herzen 's biography, personality, and political commitment. Berlin stresses in particular Herzen 's talents as a writer and an intellectual.

Alexander Herzen, like Diderot, was an amateur of genius whose opinions and activities changed the direction of social thought in his country. Like Diderot, too, he was a brilliant and irrepressible talker: he talked equally well in Russian and in French to his intimate friends and in the Moscow salons—always in an overwhelming flow of ideas and images; the waste, from the point of view of posterity (just as with Diderot) is probably immense: he had no Boswell...