Alexander Herzen’s Free Russian Press, London

Click on photos to enlarge.

If you ever plan to write about Russian cultural figures in London, get in line behind Sarah J. Young. She’s already written about it, no matter what you want to say. And there is also this guarantee: She has done it really well.
Today I pick on a topic she has fingerprints all over: the plaque honoring a location where Alexander Herzen ran his Free Russian Press for the years 1854 to 1856. You see, when the plaque was unveiled on June 26, 2013, at 61 Judd Place, Young was invited to aid in the ceremony. She had done much of the research leading to the choice of this address as the place where a plaque would be hung. It was a no-brainer (the choice, not the research) because previous and subsequent locations were no longer of use – they had long been torn down. Necessary fact: what is now 61 Judd Place was 82 Judd Place when the Free Press was there.
The Free Russian Press began its work, according to Russky London, “in the spring of 1853 on the premises of the already established Polish Democratic Press at 38 Regent Square (since demolished). In December 1856 the press moved to 2 Judd Street, directly opposite number 61 (since demolished and now the site of a dog-walking area).” Sarah J. Young, as always, offers clarification here in her exhaustive blog about the Press: she tells us that Herzen moved the Press from Regent Square to Judd St. in December 1854. Wikipedia misses the first address at Regent Square, but provides all the other various locations from which the Press worked in its London years of 1853-1865.

• Judd Street, 82; Brunswick Square
• Judd Street, 2; Brunswick Square
• Thornhill Place, 5; Caledonian Road
• Thornhill Place, 136 and 138; Caledonian Road
• Elmfield House, Teddington, Middlesex
• Jessamine Cottage, New Hampton, Middlesex

Herzen ultimately moved the Press to Geneva in April 1865, but turned the workings of it over to a colleague. It closed in August 1867, having spent time at two Geneva locations:  Pre l’Eveque, 40, and Place Bel-Air, Ancient Hotel des Postes.
The early years at the location shown here were important for Herzen and the Free Press. It was here in August 1855 that he began publishing his famous Polyarnaya Zvezda (The Polar Star) periodical. The second issue came out only in May 1856. The Press remained at the first Judd St. location until the middle of December, 1856.
During the two years at this address, Herzen was busy attempting to engage Russians all over the world in contributing to his brainchild. He understood that if only London-based Russians, or even, European-based Russians, were to support and contribute to his press, it would remain a marginal enterprise. His first two major undertakings after moving from this location to the one across the street were the ones that would fix his Press in history. In July 1856 he began publishing Voices from Russia, which did bring him the contributions he needed from his former homeland. A year later, on June 22, 1857, on the fourth anniversary of the founding of the Press, he began publishing The Bell (Kolokol), which would become one of the most important political publications in Russian history. Here is how Sarah J. Young describes it in one of her blogs:
“Thousands of copies were smuggled in to Russia through Herzen’s various contacts, and it was read not only by the intelligentsia or the radicals, but by everybody in authority, including the Tsar. In Herzen’s wonderful memoirs My Past and Thoughts, we read, ‘”The Bell is an authority,”‘ I was told in London in 1859 by, horrible dictu, Katkov’, referring to the arch-conservative journalist and publisher of Dostoevsky’s novels. If such a notoriously reactionary figure was prepared to admit this, it can only mean that The Bell was indeed highly significant.”

More proof of the importance of Herzen’s work is to be found at the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. They have a collection called the Free Russian Press, which includes much more than just publications issued by Herzen. But it is telling that they would use Herzen’s Press as the name for their entire collection of political, news and banned publications from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Here is the library’s own description of its holdings:
“The National Library possesses one of Russia’s most complete collections of 15,000 banned and illegal publications which were produced both at home and abroad between 1853 and 1917. They were originally stored in the holdings of the Secret Department which existed in the Library until the 1917 Revolution. Grouped together under the title ‘The Free Russian Press,’ this collection contains many books, newspapers and periodicals which have already become bibliographical rarities. Among them are such noted publications as Alexander Herzen’s Kolokol (The Bell) of the 1850s-60s and Lenin’s Iskra (The Spark) of 1900-03, as well as leaflets which caused a stir in their time…”
Young writes about the activities of the Press when it was at its first address: “It was at this address that the work of the Free Russian Press really took off. In 1855, Herzen published the first volume of Poliarnaia zvezda [Polar Star]. Much of the first volume was written by Herzen himself, although there were also letters by Michelet, Proudhon, Mazzini, and Hugo, and the correspondence between Belinsky and Gogol. In the following year, in addition to the second volume of Poliarnaia zvezda, the first volume of the collection Golosa iz Rossii [Voices from Russia], which featured articles by Konstantin Kavelin and Boris Chicherin, was also published at the same address…”
In addition to journalism, the Free Russian Press published numerous works banned in Russia, including poetry by Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and others. It reprinted Alexander Radishchev’s seminal Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.
Edith W. Clowes writes about the importance of Herzen and his publishing activities in an article in Encyclopedia of the Essay. First she quotes Herzen’s own description of what he intended The Bell to do: “The Bell will resound with whatever touches it – the absurd decree, or the senseless persecution of Old Believers, grandee’s thievery or the ignorance of the Senate. The comic and the criminal, the malicious and the crude – all will play to the sound of The Bell.” Clowes then adds: “Here for the first time in Russian history was a consistent, long-term assault on the internal politics of the tsarist regime. It is not by chance that Herzen became known as a ‘second government.’”
For the record, Françoise Kunka published a book in 2011 entitled Alexander Herzen and the Free Russian Press in London: 1852 to 1866. 

 

 

Alla Nazimova grave site, Glendale, CA

Click on photos to enlarge.

If you’re in the know, the name Alla Nazimova makes the blood rush a bit hotter and quicker. She was a fascinating and fabulous celebrity, a great actress, and an icon of both film and theater. I wrote a little about her already in this space when I published photos of a house she lived in late in the 1930s. (Thanks to a response to the blog from Jon Ponder of the wonderful Alla Nazimova Society website, many of my speculative claims there were put into a firmer factual context.) Nazimova (1879-1945) studied under Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater, and became one of the great luminaries of early Hollywood.
Nazimova was born into a Jewish family that fell apart when she was still a young girl. She bounced around among relatives and friends in the Crimea until she made her way to Moscow. She was a restless, rebellious spirit, and, despite her success in Moscow and St. Petersburg, she headed off looking for more in the United States in 1905, long before the famed wave of Russian emigres who would have such an impact on Hollywood. With her companion, actor Pavel Orlyonov, she founded a Russian theater in New York. It quickly went bust and Orlyonov headed back to Moscow. Nazimova stayed and hit it big thanks to her tour de force performance of Hedda Gabler in 1906. It made her a star in New York. She made her film debut in 1916, and the next year she signed a deal in Hollywood for $13,000 a week. According to Saving.org, that would be over a quarter of a million dollars per week today.
We have moved on terribly far from the world that Nazimova inhabited. Who sees her films today? And yet, the lure is still strong. Actress Chloë Sevigny acknowledged both the plus and minus sides of what I just suggested in an interview, “I’d love to do a film about Alla Nazimova, the Russian silent film star.” However, she then immediately added, “but I doubt people would want to see it.”
In 2016 and 2017 New York actress Romy Nordlinger wrote, mounted and performed a piece called Places, which told the story of Nazimova, as the promo material claims, the “most famous star you never heard of.”
A recent article in Italian (thank you Google translator) discusses the story of Salome on screen and stage and adds this interesting tidbit that was new to me: “[Salome] is a character you hate. It is she, in fact, at the center of Oscar Wilde’s homonymous drama, which in 1923 Charles Bryant brought to the big screen with the striking Alla Nazimova, in what – legend has it – was one of the first films with a cast entirely composed of homosexual or bisexual actors.”
Nazimova was a lesbian in an age when it was relatively easy and desirable to hide one’s sexual preference behind a marriage of convenience. She did that, in fact, by marrying the actor Sergei Golovin at the end of the 19th century and – although they soon parted – she never divorced him. In the 1920s, her sprawling Garden of Alla home, later the Garden of Alla Hotel, was – if legends are to believed – the site of wild, semi-public sexual shenanigans involving half of Hollywood’s A-list of the time. The sexual stuff naturally continues to feed Nazimova’s fame, usually, if not always, to the detriment of her art.

 

Nazimova was enthusiastic about the new form of cinematic art that she became involved in. A wonderful site called Bizarre Los Angeles posts a myriad of quotes, in which, over and over again, Nazimova extols the importance of film and her excitement about it.
“If the actor or actress hopes to live beyond the little span of years in which they appear on the stage, they must place their art upon the screen. It is the only way that we can be saved from oblivion” (1916).
“[French actress Gabrielle} Rejane, too, has glimpsed the future, and several of her most famous impersonations have been preserved to posterity by the celluloid films” (1912).
“It will not be long until the individual Moving Picture machine will be found in as many home as the phonograph is today” (1912).
She had plenty to say about the art of acting as well. One of my favorite comments is this one, undated and copied from Brainy Quotes:
“The actor should not play a part. Like the Aeolian harps that used to be hung in the trees to be played only by the breeze, the actor should be an instrument played upon by the character he depicts.”
Nazimova died at her home on Sunset Boulevard in 1945, slightly less than two months after the end of World War II. She was buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale. Even with the added aid of my sister Margie and a helpful administrative staff, I had a hell of a time finding the grave marker. It was the first grave we went looking for that day, but was the last we found, almost on a lark, as we were already on our way out and decided to give it one more try. But we did finally come upon it. As were so many of the great Russian actresses in Hollywood, she is honored on this plate as Madame Alla Nazimova. For some reason she was given two plots adjacent to each other: 1689-4 and 3. One of them, as you can see in the photos, remains empty to this day. The grave is located on the western downslope of a hill that rises gently on the northern section of the cemetery’s Whispering Pines section.