The Romantic Exiles

Translated from the English by Aleksei Volodin. – Moscow: Gaidar Institute Press, 2027. – 456 p.

ISBN 978-5-93255-733-4

In January 1847, Alexander Herzen left Moscow for good – and thus began the story of a circle of Russian émigrés whom the British historian E. H. Carr called “romantic exiles”. Their attempt to build a private life according to the tenets of Romanticism turned into a true tragedy for them.

At the center of the narrative are Herzen, his friend Nikolai Ogarev, and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. A complex web of friendship, infidelity, and betrayal forms around them: Herzen’s wife falls in love with his closest associate, the poet Georg Herwegh, and the couple attempts to put the ideal of free love into practice. The outcome of this experiment proves to be catastrophic.

Having gained access to his characters’ extensive private correspondence, Carr created a vivid chronicle, full of subtle irony, set against the backdrop of the European revolutions of 1848. It was this book that inspired Tom Stoppard to write the trilogy The Edge of Utopia: as the playwright himself acknowledged, the scope of his project took its final shape thanks to Carr’s text.