The legend of Herzen's family life retold by Chernyshevsky, and the actual facts

It is amusing that as early as the 1860s Chernyshevsky was in the thrall of a tale told about Herzen.

Herzen married for great love and on the whole lived a happy family life. But the first years of his marriage to the girl he had loved since childhood, and with whom he had been brought up, were darkened by imprisonment. Herzen spent a whole year in the fortress. When the gendarmes took him, his wife was pregnant. From the fright, the child was born deaf and mute. And the wife's health remained undermined for the rest of her life. It was on account of the illness of his wife and son that Herzen was permitted to leave Russia. At some point Louis-Napoleon, before he ever became Napoleon III, resolves to do Nicholas I a service, seizes Herzen and dispatches him to Russia. On hearing of her husband's expulsion, the wife falls down dead.

This legend, to put it mildly, was not entirely truthful. It is astonishing that Nikolay Chernyshevsky could have retold it in all seriousness to his chosen one, lamenting the hardships that might await him too in the future, together with her, should she decide to link her life with his.

First. The girl whom Herzen had loved since childhood was his cousin Natalya Alexeyevna Zakharina. N.A. was the daughter of Yakovlev, a chamberlain and privy councillor, the elder brother of Herzen's father. Both Natalya Alexandrovna and Alexander Ivanovich were illegitimate children, and so did not bear their fathers' surnames. Natasha and Sasha were not brought up together; there were, after all, five years between them, and their acquaintance was superficial. They grew truly close only in correspondence, when Herzen was already in exile in Vyatka, and 17-year-old Natalya was brought by Herzen's mother to a meeting to say farewell to her cousin before his departure.

Herzen did indeed have a son, Nikolay, deaf from birth, who came into the world in 1843, when, as is well known, Herzen was not sitting in any fortress. Nikolay, alas, did not live long: at the age of eight he perished in the wreck of the steamer Ville de Grasse on its way from Marseille to Nice.

After leaving Russia in 1847, Alexander Herzen never returned to his homeland. Neither of the Napoleons ever caught him or handed him over.

The health of Herzen's wife was indeed undermined by severe stress, but she did not die in an instant: she died after a difficult premature labour, brought on by prolonged anguish over the tragic death of her son, little Kolya.