Volume 1 — TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

A few words about Herzen’s parentage will make his narrative more intelligible to the English reader. Herzen’s father, Ivan Yakovlyev, was a very wealthy nobleman belonging to one of the most aristocratic families of Russia. In 1811, at the age of forty-two, he married (so Brückner tells us in his History of Russian Literature) at Stuttgart a girl of sixteen, whose name was Henriette Haag, though she was always in Russia called Luise Ivanovna, as easier to pronounce. As he neglected to repeat the marriage ceremony in Russia, their son was there illegitimate. Yakovlyev is said to have given him the surname Herzen, because he was the ‘child of his heart.’

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