Nikolay Chernyshevsky

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Lore & Background

Chernyshevsky was born in Saratov in 1828, the son of a priest. He graduated from the local seminary, where he learned English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Old Slavonic, and became an atheist. From 1853 to 1862, he lived in Saint Petersburg and became a leading contributor to Sovremennik, though Nekrasov remained its publisher and editor-in-chief; there he published his main literary reviews and essays on philosophy. In 1862, Chernyshevsky was arrested and confined in the Fortress of St. Peter and Paul, where he wrote his famous novel *What Is to Be Done?* He died at age 61.

A dominant intellectual figure of the 1860s revolutionary democratic movement, Chernyshevsky was a literary and social critic, journalist, novelist, democrat, and socialist philosopher. He is often identified as a utopian socialist and a leading theoretician of Russian nihilism and the Narodniks, founding Russian agrarian socialism and advocating for the revolutionary overthrow of the autocracy to create a socialist society based on the peasant commune. His materialist aesthetics argued that art should reproduce and explain reality for the good of mankind, a view he defended in his 1855 master's dissertation. While in prison, he opposed Darwinism, arguing that Darwin glorified poverty as a vehicle for natural selection. He praised American democracy, welcoming Abraham Lincoln’s election. His novel inspired later revolutionaries, including Lenin, who wrote a pamphlet of the same name, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called him a "great Russian scholar and critic."

Reader's Guide

Chernyshevsky was a founder of Narodism, the Russian agrarian socialist movement, and he actively called for the revolutionary overthrow of the autocracy to establish a socialist society built on the traditional peasant commune. His ideas exerted the greatest influence on the populist youth of the 1860s and 1870s. He saw class struggle as the engine of historical progress and championed the interests of working people, believing the masses themselves were the primary makers of history. While imprisoned in the Fortress of St. Peter and Paul, he wrote his famous novel *What Is to Be Done?*, which inspired many later revolutionaries to emulate the character Rakhmetov, an ascetic and ruthlessly disciplined figure wholly dedicated to the revolutionary cause. Vladimir Lenin later wrote a political pamphlet of the same name. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, enraged by what he saw as the novel’s simplistic political and psychological ideas, wrote *Notes from Underground* largely as a reaction against it. Chernyshevsky also contributed to materialist aesthetics, arguing in his master's dissertation that art should reproduce and explain reality for the good of mankind. He was outspoken in his opposition to Darwinism, interpreting Darwin as glorifying poverty as a vehicle for natural selection. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels studied his works and called him a great Russian scholar and critic.

Did You Know?

• Chernyshevsky learned English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Old Slavonic while at the local seminary.
• He wrote his famous novel What Is to Be Done? while confined in the Fortress of St. Peter and Paul in 1862.
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote Notes from Underground largely as a reaction against Chernyshevsky's novel.
• His work The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality was translated into Chinese by Zhou Yang in 1942 and influenced Chinese Communist cultural politics.

Classification Among Materialists and Nihilists

Nikolay Chernyshevsky (1828–1889) occupies a specific and distinct position within the taxonomy of Russian philosophical thought. He is catalogued among the materialists and nihilists, a grouping that also includes Dimitri Pisarev (1840–1868) and Ivan Sechenov (1829–1905). This classification places him in a tradition that emphasized materialist frameworks and a skeptical, even negating, stance toward established metaphysical or religious assumptions. The label "nihilist" in this context signals a philosophical orientation that challenged inherited certainties, while "materialist" anchors his thinking in the physical and empirical world rather than in transcendent or idealist abstractions. His lifespan, spanning the latter half of the nineteenth century, situates him squarely within the period when Russian philosophy was crystallizing as a distinct intellectual tradition, moving beyond the earlier Enlightenment figures like Tatishchev, Skovoroda, and Radishchev into a more complex and contested landscape of competing schools.

The 19th-Century Philosophical Landscape

Russian philosophy, as a coherent and self-aware tradition, only began to take shape during the nineteenth century, the very era in which Chernyshevsky lived and worked. The foundational tension that defined this emerging discipline was the opposition between Westernizers, who argued that Russia should adopt Western political and economic models, and Slavophiles, who insisted on developing Russia as a unique and irreducible civilization. Thinkers like Nikolai Danilevsky and Konstantin Leontiev, early figures in what would become eurasianism, represented the latter camp. Chernyshevsky's materialist and nihilist orientation, while distinct from both the Westernizer and Slavophile positions, emerged within this same fermenting intellectual environment. The question of Russia's place in the world became, and remains, the most characteristic feature of Russian philosophical discourse. For a thinker classified among the materialists, this question would have carried particular weight: how does a nation grounded in material conditions navigate its identity against the pull of Western models or the appeal of civilizational uniqueness?

Philosophy, Literature, and Social Concern

One of the most distinctive features of Russian philosophical culture is its deep and persistent connection to literature. The tradition does not draw a rigid boundary between the philosopher and the novelist; indeed, figures such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are recognized as philosophers in their own right, despite being primarily known as fiction writers. This permeability between creative writing and philosophical inquiry shaped the intellectual environment in which Chernyshevsky operated. Beyond literature, Russian philosophy displayed a pronounced interest in creativity, society, politics, and nationalism, with cosmos and religion serving as additional major subjects of contemplation. The materialist and nihilist strand to which Chernyshevsky belonged, alongside contemporaries like Pisarev and Sechenov, would have engaged these social and political themes from a grounded, empirically oriented perspective. The result was a philosophical culture in which abstract theorizing and concrete social concern were not separate endeavors but interwoven threads of a single intellectual fabric.

A Thread in Russia's Philosophical Tapestry

Chernyshevsky's intellectual legacy must be understood within the vast tapestry of Russian philosophical movements that spanned from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century and beyond. The tradition he helped shape in the mid-nineteenth century encompassed an extraordinary range: the Enlightenment figures of the eighteenth century, the Slavophiles and their successors, the Westernizers, the Russian Schellingians, the positivists and their Machist offshoots, the cosmists, the symbolists, the Christian philosophers, and the existentialists. Chernyshevsky's materialist and nihilist classification sits among this constellation of competing and overlapping schools. Decades after his death in 1889, the philosophical landscape shifted dramatically: from the early 1920s through the late 1980s, Marxism came to dominate Russian philosophical discourse. His earlier materialist commitments, while distinct from the Marxist tradition that would later prevail, nonetheless occupied a conceptual neighborhood that would prove historically consequential for the direction of Russian thought.