The author of Herzen's biography - the permanent director of the A. I. Herzen House Museum, historian, translator and writer I. A. Zhelvakova - has set herself a difficult task - to tell about Herzen reliably, interestingly and objectively. After all, he himself created a brilliant autobiography, “The Past and Thoughts,” and the writer’s life and his literary work have long been the subject of research in numerous books and scientific treatises.I. A. Zhelvakova brought in new documents, visual materials, and family heirlooms that she received as a gift for the museum from the writer’s foreign descendants; compared concepts and facts, truthfully supplementing Herzen’s biography, and impartially, without ideological fog, examined his life and fate. As a result, before us is not a character from a textbook, but a lively, passionate and very beautiful person of phenomenal abilities, who surrounded himself with equally gifted, unconventionally thinking people. Throughout his life, Herzen carried the ideal of personal freedom, although he saw how “darkness turns into heavenly light” and... vice versa.