FORERUNNERS OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
publicist is not a professor but a tribune or advocate.” Enlightenment is in his view not the propagation of culture taken over from the West, but the abandonment of a false outlook on the world. It is a new civilisation based on materialism. The German, it is true (i.e., Feuerbach), founded this materialism, but the Russian will be its universal Aristotle. In short, with all his realism, we find in him a kind of popularising Messianic vein, even though merely in the sense of Hegel or Feuerbach, each of whom proclaimed his philosophy as the last chapter of human thought.
The ethical consequences of his “Anthropological Principle” are firstly the recognition of determinism for the life of the individual, for society and for history, and secondly the proclamation of egoism as the foundation of ethics. Both doctrines were certainly nothing new in philosophy and ethics in 1860, but with them he none the less stirred up his Russian contemporaries. . . . His ethics are not only social, but socialistic: he conceives of practical, active love from a communistic point of view, because he starts from the natural equality of all men—that is, for him, of all human organisms. From its ethical and social-political side materialism is communism, the recognition of equal rights among men organised in society as the result of a natural law. The love of neighbour and of self, which is innate in man, leads, on a materialistic basis, to equality of rights but Černyševski treats this equality logically and applies it in a socialistic and communistic sense to all spheres of social life. This communism does not even stop short of family life and marriage. “My clothes, thy clothes; my pipe stem, thy pipe stem; my wife, thy wife” says Rahmetov in” What is to be done?”
Černyševski’s influence in the late fifties and early sixties was very great, and for this very reason the Government banished him. This influence was political, and hence his exile had powerful political effects. . . . The revolutionaries of those days held more closely to his example than to his teachings. Černyševski in Siberia was a living memory to them, but also to the Government and the reactionaries, who according to Bakunin’s not inaccurate diagnosis had the privilege of political blindness. At any rate they failed to realise that, in the words of Poerio, the King of Sicily’s persecuted minister, “il patire è anche operare.”
With his realistic tendencies Černyševski also prepared
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