Love and Hate of Foreign Lands: The Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia

Abstract

Love and hate follow the same patterns among émigrés as among people in general. Among the several models of the love émigrés feel for a foreign land is pragmatic love, based not so much on real attachment as on interests. For an Orwellian Big Brother this love does not necessarily imply direct material benefits but could be an attempt to justify something that has already occurred—emigration, for example. Pragmatic love for a foreign land and people and a corresponding hatred for one's land of origin raises fewer problems than love for its own sake, which often leads to disappointment and a violent emotional response. Everything is reversed in one's mind: the distant motherland becomes desirable, almost an ideal, whereas the foreign land, the place of residence, is hated and despised. Such was often the case for Russian émigrés to the West from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. Two nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals—Vladimir Pecherin (1807–55) and Alexander Herzen (1812–70)—though different in many ways, came to a similar conclusion: that the West was not the embodiment of goodness but the dead end of history, and that Russia, which they never visited once they had left it, was the shining star of humanity.

Notes

Notes

1. Vladimir S. Pecherin, Zamogil’nye Zapiski (Moscow: Mir, 1932), 9; The First Russian Political Émigré: Notes from Beyond the Grave, or Apologia pro Vita Mia, trans. and ed. Michael R. Katz (Dublin: University College of Dublin Press, 2008), 165.

2. L. B. Kamenev, “Vvedenie” in Pecherin, Zamogil’nye Zapiski, 5, 6.

3. The tradition of killing defectors abroad was resurrected in 2006 when Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned by radioactive polonium in London, most likely by order of the Kremlin.

4. Aleksandr Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk, 1954–65), 5:141.

5. Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, the Memoirs of Alexander Herzen; The Authorised Translation, trans. Constance Garnett (London: Chatto & Windus, 1924).

6. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:203.

7. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:119.