Forerunners of the Russian Revolution
(III) ČERNYŠEVSKI
[We are glad to be able to announce that an English translation of Professor Masaryk’s epoch-making book on Russia is in preparation by Messrs. Allen and Unwin, and will be published in due course. For the moment the only available edition is in German, 2 vols., pp. 371 and 511. The third volume, which treats of Dostoievski as the key to Russian psychology and philosophy, was still in MS. when war broke out, and has probably been sequestrated by the Austrian Government with the rest of the author’s library in Prague. The Russian edition was not allowed to appear under the old régime.]
Černyševski, the third figure in this series, was originally intended for the priesthood, but owing to his literary promise was sent to Petrograd University and adopted the teaching profession. From 1854 to 1862 he was editor of Nekrasov’s review Sovremennik. He was thrown into prison in 1863, and two years later was sent to Siberia. In 1883 he was released, and died in 1889. His critical work was saturated with revolutionary feeling, which also found expression in a social novel, “What is to be done?” in which he advocated a radical land programme for the Russian peasantry.
Černyševski’s mental development early showed the influence of philosophical study: he parted company with Herzen and Bakunin in preferring Feuerbach to Hegel: but, like the two émigrés, he assimilated the teaching of Comte, Louis Blanc, Fourier and Proudhon.
In the philosophers, economists and socialists of England he found deep and welcome sources of instruction. Bentham and Mill strengthened him in Positivism, and brought him to Utilitarianism; he knew Owen and always recognised the authority of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and Buckle. Thus his spiritual physiognomy was quite different from that of Herzen and Bakunin; the influence of native Russian literature (Byelinski, Herzen, Gogol), the English tinge and the fact that he derives less from Hegel than from Feuerbach, gave him a philosophical stamp of his own. He was far more of a positivist in the sense of Comte—a Realist, in the Russian phrase; he carried Herzen’s theory of disillusionment to its logical conclusions and turned from German ideas to Russian facts. With Byelinski, he treated Realism as the opposite of Romanticism, and opposed
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