My Past and Thoughts (Russian: Былое и думы, romanized: Byloje i dumy) is an extensive autobiography by Alexander Herzen, which he started in the early 1850s and continued to expand and revise throughout his later life.

The same characteristics of his style, but in an even more un fettered and spontaneous form, still more like conversation and relatively free from rhetoric, recur in his autobiography, My Past and Thoughts.

The absence of self-conscious and exces sive sincerit, the superficiality, the somewhat matter-of-course theatricality of My Past and Thoughts is its essential charm to the open-minded reader.

Herzen is a great portrait-painter, an impressionist — and the impressions he left of his father and other relations, of the Moscow idealists, and of the leaders of the European Revolution are unforgettably vivid.

Not the least remarkable passages of the book are those where he gives a wider historical background to the narrative: the first parts devoted to his life before his exile contain the broadest, truest, and most penetrating view of Russian social and cultural history in the first half of the nineteenth century.