The New Europe/Volume 6/Number 67/Forerunners of the Russian Revolution (3)

by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk

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 sentimentality in all its forms, by pressing for a real interpretation of men’s motives. Besides, he remained in Russia, and so had to deal with native friends and foes. Russian problems and conditions always had the first claim upon his mind.

Černyševski himself professed Materialism, and as such his outlook is regarded both by friend and foe. In his own words “philosophy sees in man what medicine, physiology and chemistry see in him; these sciences prove that no dualism is noticeable in man, but philosophy adds, that if man, outside his real nature, had a second nature, this latter would certainly manifest itself in something; and as it shows itself in nothing, and as all that happens and manifests itself in man takes place according to his real nature, there is no such thing as a second nature in him.” He is a materialist sans phrase, and so above all, denies the immortality of the soul. . . . Psychology is for him a part of physiology. As a consequence of his materialism, he teaches egoism as the real motive of every action, however noble. . . . His outlook upon the world and upon life is the foundation of the Realism of the sixties, to which Turgenev gave the name of Nihilism, and which was opposed, not only by the Conservatives, but also by the Liberals.

Černyševski’s philosophy and literary activity have altogether the character of the philosophy of enlightenment, in its aggressive form before the French Revolution. He knows that he is revolutionising his fellow men; for he wants to continue and deepen the revolution of Peter the Great. To him Peter is the ideal for Russia. If French enlightenment and its materialism offer him the philosophical and political example, he finds in Lessing his literary teacher.

It was his ambition to become a modern Aristotle, a teacher not only for Russia but for all mankind. He planned, quite in the sense of the French school, several encyclopædic works, intended to sum up the material and intellectual development of mankind as in a codex or bible. In his view enlightenment was above all necessary for Russia, who had, it is true, an army of a million and a half soldiers, and could some day conquer Europe like the Huns or Mongols, but could do nothing further. Thus, according to Peter’s example, true patriotism consists in the task of enlightenment and hence Černyševski called himself a publicist, for to him “a 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 Marxism and Social Democracy, but it is a mistake for certain Marxists to claim him as a Russian Marx or semi-Marx. It is also wrong to describe him as the founder or even father of the Narodničestvo [revolutionary agrarian socialism]. He had a more realistic conception of the Mužik and the Mir than had Bakunin and Herzen, and thus strengthened the more political and practical tendency in the Narodničestvo. But he looked upon the Mir as an association in the sense of European socialism, and did not ascribe to it such exclusive importance as did the later National Radicals (Narodniki). Unlike the Slavophils, he did not look upon Europe as rotten; in his opinion the European masses had still not come into action.

Thomas G. Masaryk.

⁂ The first two articles in the above series [(I) Bakunin, (II) Bakunin and Marx] appeared in Nos. 63 and 64 respectively.—Editor.