Herzen was the illegitimate son of the landowner Yakovlev, whom Napoleon in 1812 had sent from Moscow with a message to Alexander I. As a schoolboy he was profoundly impressed by the Decembrist tragedy, and tells in his memoirs how he and Ogaryov took a vow, standing on the Sparrow Hills overlooking Moscow, that they would complete the martyrs' work. At the university they became interested in the ideas of Saint-Simon and Fourier. Their discussion group of students was denounced to the police, and in 1834 Herzen was banished to the remote province of Vyatka, where he was given an official post in the governor's office. This experience gave him an insight into the works of the Russian bureaucracy, which he brilliantly described years later in his memoirs. In 1840 he was allowed to return to Moscow, where he came in contact with the second of the groups.
This was the Stankevich Circle, whose main intellectual interest in the late 1830's was the philosophy of Hegel. Stankevich himself, who died in 1840 at the age of twenty-seven, survives as an historical figure chiefly through the memory of his friends. He was clearly one of those people who deeply influence the characters and thought of others, who help them to develop their gifts and personality, yet leave no work of their own by which posterity can directly judge them. Something of the sort can be said of a second member of the group, T.N. Granovsky, one of the first of those sent abroad by the government to be trained as professors. Having completed his studies at St. Petersburg with great brilliance, he was offered in 1835 by Count Stoganov a chair of general history in Moscow after a period of study abroad. From 1836 to 1839 he was in Germany where he met Stankevich. He began his lectures in Moscow in September 1839, and for the next sixteen years exercised enormous influence on the intellectual youth. His great achievement lay not in any original contribution to historical knowledge, but in his ability to arouse interest in history and in Europe, among his audience, and in the enormous efforts which he expended in doing things for people, in helping his students with their personal problems and their careers, and in supplying information in reply to vast numbers of written and oral inquiries. The third leading member of the group was Michael Bakunin, who had also studied in Germany, and who until his departure from Russia in 1840 was the most effective and enthusiastic exponent of Hegel's doctrines. A man of great intellectual gifts, passionately interested in political ideas, vain and courageous, intolerantly possessive in his relationships with others, and with extraordinary gaps in his moral sense, he was later to make a flamboyant career as a revolutionary and as the founder of anarchism. In the 1830's his most important role was as a popularizer of Hegel, to whose ideas he introduced the fourth important member of the group, Vissarion Belinsky. Born in 1811, the son of a poor navy doctor and the grandson of a priest, Belinsky was the outstanding example of the early plebeian intelligentsia. He was expelled from the university for writing a story attacking serfdom in 1832, and began a career in journalism. He worked for Teleskop until its suppression in 1836, then for two years edited with Bakunin Moskovskii nablyudatel ('The Moscow Observer') until it closed for financial reasons. In 1839 he was invited to write articles of literary criticism for Otechestvennye zapiski ('Notes of the Fatherland'), a previously undistinguished journal which had been acquired in 1839 by the publisher Krayevsky. His articles, apart from their merits as criticism, were of enormous importance because they were the first expression, permitted by the censorship, of critical thought on social problems. Belinsky as first, as a disciple of Hegel, held the view that 'the real is rational', and so took a generally conservative attitude.
