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Russia

Author · Russia

Alexander Herzen

Died in 1870

Alexander Herzen (1812-1870) was the natural son of a wealthy Muscovite landowner, Ivan Yakovlev, and a young German woman from Stuttgart; his father made up a surname for him from the German word for the heart. Arrested in 1834 with his friend Nikolai Ogarev, he was exiled to Vyatka, then to Vladimir. He left Russia in 1847 and never returned. Settled in London, he founded a free Russian press there in 1853, then published the newspaper Kolokol with Ogarev. His memoirs rank among the great books of the genre in Russian. He died in Paris.

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