Alexander Herzen

Alexander Ivanovich Herzen lived from 6 April 1812 to 21 January 1870 and was a Russian writer and thinker known as the precursor of Russian socialism and one of the main precursors of agrarian populism, an ideological ancestor of the Narodniki, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Trudoviks and the agrarian American Populist Party. With his writings, many composed while exiled in London, he attempted to influence the situation in Russia, contributing to a political climate that led to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861; he published the social novel Who is to Blame? in 1845 to 1846, and his autobiography My Past and Thoughts, written between 1852 and 1870, is often considered one of the best examples of that genre in Russian literature.