by Rudolf BALANDIN, journalist "Life is a goal, means, cause, and action... it is an eternal worry of an active, strenuous substance, trying to find an equilibrium so as to lose it again..."--wrote Alexander Herzen in the mid-19th century. 2012 is a year of the 200th birth anniversary of this outstanding Russian writer, philosopher, and revolutionary. It may seem disputable today, but lessons of his creative work are rather topical for our time. Herzen was greatly esteemed in the USSR due to Vladimir Lenin, who, a hundred years ago, devoted to him an article, full of revolutionary goal. Herzen's books were published in big editions. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1952) wrote more about him than about Goethe. Moreover, the writer and philosopher Herzen--the founder of an ideology of populism--was in the focus of attention also of Russian thinkers, who did not share his views, in particular, for Konstantin Leontyev and Nikolai Berdyaev. In 1902, the philosopher and theologist Sergei Bulgakov (then only trying to blaze the trail from materialism to idealism) published a detailed essay "Herzen's Mental Drama". Another religious philosopher Vasily Zenkovsky in his History of Russian Philosophy (Paris, 1948) dedicated a whole chapter to Herzen. The famous naturalist and thinker Vladimir Vernadsky (full member of Petersburg AS from 1912) wrote in his diary in 1893 about a visit of Leo Tolstoi. In the course of the talk Vladimir Vernadsky mentioned Herzen as a realist and philosopher of science. Tolstoi, who had not read his works before, took two volumes of his memoirs My Past and Thoughts. Returning them, he noted that he was greatly impressed by him: "It is a third of the whole Russian Literature." Nevertheless, in the past two decades Herzen's works were almost not mentioned in the works of national authors. As if his heritage is not of interest. How to explain this fact? Let's discuss this problem. стр. 68 WORKS A ... Читать далее