Nikolay Chernyshevsky

Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) was a Russian revolutionary and socialist philosopher, often regarded as a utopian socialist and the leading figure of the Narodnik movement in the 1860s. His influence reached figures such as Lenin, Emma Goldman and Svetozar Marković, and his name is above all tied to the novel What Is to Be Done?, published in 1863, which inspired generations of Russian revolutionaries.

Born in Saratov to a priest, he lived there until 1846. He trained at the local seminary, where he mastered several languages and studied theology, but he also discovered his love of literature and, by most accounts, gave up religious belief there. He went on to the University of Saint Petersburg, graduating in 1850 with revolutionary, democratic and materialist convictions shaped by Feuerbach, Fourier, Hegel and the critics Belinsky and Herzen. After teaching Russian language and literature in Saratov, he moved to Saint Petersburg from 1853 to 1862 and edited the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary), where he published his literary criticism and philosophical essays.

In his master's dissertation of 1855 he argued that art should engage with real life and act as a kind of textbook for living, and that aesthetics should rest on a materialist footing. This led him to prefer realism to the idealist currents dominant in Russia. Arrested in 1862, he was held in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he wrote What Is to Be Done? The novel follows young people seeking a new life and collective devotion, and one of its characters, Rakhmetov, became a model of ascetic discipline for later revolutionaries.

His political thought called for the revolutionary overthrow of the autocracy and a socialist society built on the traditional peasant commune. He saw class struggle as the engine of progress and regarded the masses as the true makers of history. He also admired American democracy and welcomed Lincoln's election in 1860. While in prison he read Darwin and opposed what he took to be its justification of poverty as a route to natural selection.

Sentenced in 1864 to penal servitude, he was later exiled to Vilyuisk in Siberia, where he remained until 1883. He died in 1889 at the age of 61. His greatest impact was on the populist youth of the 1860s and 1870s and on the Russian Marxist tradition, which valued his work; Lenin wrote a political pamphlet with the same title as his novel. Dostoevsky, who was scornful of the book, wrote Notes from Underground partly in reaction to it.