Nikolai Gavrilovieh Chernyshevsky (1828-1889)

Russian outstanding revolutionary democrat, philosopher, writer and critic; a representative of humanism. He was born to a priest’s family in Saratov on July 24, 1828. In 1853, he entered the “Faculty of History and Philology” of the University of Petersburg. Influenced by materialism and utopian socialism, he began to study Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s philosophy, loved humanism and gradually became an atheist. In 1856, Chernyshevsky took over from Nekrasov and presided over the magazine Sovremennik, which became a forum for spreading revolutionary ideas. During this period, he wrote many essays on philosophy, history and economics, such as the Critique of the Philosophical Prejudices against Communal Ownership, Capital and Labor, The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy, and others. These works are basically based on the theory of universal human nature, but they have admitted that “each man is a member in a certain class” and “philosopher is the representative of a certain political party”. In 1859, he secretly went to London, England, to discuss the issue of opposing Tsar’s rule with Herzen, who lived there. In 1861, Polemical Beauties was published, criticizing the liberal scholars’ attack on The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy.

In 1862, Chernychevsky was arrested by the Tsar government. During his imprisonment, he wrote a novel What Is to Be Done? which aroused strong social repercussions. In 1864, the Tsar government, tough unable to find any criminal evidence, forced him to serve 7 years of hard labor by perjury. After that, he continued to be exiled for 21 years. During the long period of exile, he continued to write many novels and articles, of which only the long political novel Prologue (1867-1869) survived. The book depicts the struggle between revolutionary democrats, liberals and conservatives on the eve of “Serf’s Emancipation Reform” which was brilliantly criticized by Lenin. In 1883, Chernychevsky was allowed to return to Astrakhan due to health reasons and wrote articles such as “Recalling the relationship between Turgenev and Dobroliubov” and “The Nature of Human Knowledge”. He was allowed to return to his hometown of Saratov in June 1889, and died of cerebral hemorrhage on October 1929.

Chernychevsky was the leader of Russian progressive thought and literature in the 1850s-1860s.

He made outstanding contributions in philosophy, political economy, aesthetics, literary criticism and literary creation, and of course, there are many limitations. In philosophy, he adheres to the basic position of materialism, solves the problems of the relationship between thinking and existence, spirit and material according to Feuerbach’s philosophy and opposes dualism; he criticizes Immanuel Kant’s agnosticism and subjectivism, and argued that human beings have the ability to know the world, and that all objects and attributes of nature can be recognized; he holds that practice is the most important criterion for judging all the arguments in science; he pays attention to dialectics and explains some natural phenomena and historical events from the viewpoint of dialectics. However, he failed to clarify the relationship between the development of human consciousness and the practice of human social history, and could not explain the social essence of human scientifically; his understanding of practice has not completely got rid of the limitations of the old materialism, and dialectics were not thoroughly carried out in economic research. Lenin’s assessment is that Chernychevsky couldn’t reach to the level of dialectical materialism because of Russia’s backward life. In the theory of literature and art, it inherits and develops Belinsky’s viewpoint of literature and art, criticizes the idealistic essence of Hegel’s theory of “beauty is the sensuous appearing of the idea”; he puts forward the important proposition that “beauty is life”. He insists that reality stands higher than dreams and the first purpose of art is to reproduce nature and life. Politically, he profoundly exposed the predatory nature of the so-called “Serfdom Reform” carried out by Alexander II in order to save the feudal landlord rule, resolutely opposed the compromise and surrender of the bourgeois liberals to the Tsar system, advocated that the peasant masses overthrow the Tsar rule and the decadent serfdom, and seized the land free of charge by revolutionary means; he criticized the capitalist system deeply and advocated the implementation of socialism on the basis of large-scale machine production. “I hope that through the transition from the old peasant village community to socialism, I believe that the special path of Russian development can avoid capitalism.” What he preached was utopian socialism and confused the democratic revolution of peasants with the socialist revolution, which makes him one of the founders of the Russian thought of Narodnism. Chernychevsky’s works and thoughts had a great influence on the Russian revolutionary movement.

Lenin called him “the young helmsman in the future storm” and Plekhanov compared him to “Prometheus of Russia”.