No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Philosophic Outlook of Chernyshevski: Materialism and Utilitarianism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2017
Extract
One Might say of Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevski that he was the architect of the ideological structure of Russian radicalism in the 1860s. “Chernyshevski was the founder of the new period, the preceptor of the younger generation.” This is not to imply that he was a bloodless ratiocinator. Though a more balanced individual in many ways, he was a worthy successor to the passionate Belinski as leader of the intelligentsia. But Chernyshevski was both erudite and systematic. More than the other radicals of this period, except for Lavrov, Chernyshevski was a thinker. Not a thinker of the Kantian type, but one who realized the necessity for popularization and practical application of ideas in his backward Russia. To a large degree, the other leading “nihilists,” Pisarev and Dobroliubov, owed their significance to the fact that they popularized Chernyshevski's outlook. It is to them, with their superior stylistic gifts, that we must turn for the warmth and color and atmosphere of the movement; in Pisarev, of course, there are very significant differences from Chernyshevski; but one could certainly not understand Pisarev without a considerable acquaintance with Chernyshevski's thought. Chernyshevski the nihilist, of course, and not Chernyshevski the socialist or revolutionary, or Chernyshevski as economist—for he was all these—will interest us here.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1947
References
1 Kucharzewski, Jan, Od bialego Caratu do Czerwonego, 7 vols. (Warsaw, 1923–35), III, 328 Google Scholar; as Masaryk put it: “Chernyshevski's outlook became the basis of the realism of the sixties, for which Turgenev introduced the name of nihilism.” See Masaryk, T. G., Spirit of Russia, 2 vols. (London, 1919), II, 6 Google Scholar. The sixties are here considered to include the years 1855–70. This periodization has been conventionalized in the extensive literature on the history of Russian social thought. The best Soviet study of Chernyshevski is Staklov, Y., N. G. Chernyshevski, ego Zhizn’ i Deyatel'nost, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1928)Google Scholar. Its weaknesses arc those of most Soviet scholarship, which often seeks to force facts and ideas into arbitrary frameworks. Staklov rends to interpret Chernyshevski as a sort of Russian Marx.
2 The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality. See Polnoe sobranie sochinenii N. G. Chernyshevskago, 10 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1906), X, Part II, 84–164; hereafter cited as P.S.S. This work enjoys wide circulation as an individual brochure in the Soviet Union at present.
3 Ibid., X, Part II, 85.
4 Ibid., pp. 85–89.
5 Ibid., p. 89.
6 Ibid., p. 92.
7 L. Silberstein, “Belinski und Černysevskij,” Jahrbücher fur Kultur und Geschichte der Slaven, Vol. VII (1931), states that in the West his use of Feuerbach would have been so regarded.
8 P.S.S., X, Part II, 115.
9 On this last point, the views of Chernyshevski bore a certain resemblance to those of the famous “five,” the populists of music, Moussorgski, et al., who combated the musical “Westerners,” led by the Rubinsteins. Without laboring this minor point, one may remark that it is one among many indications of Chernyshevski's populist tendencies.
10 P.S.S., pp. 129, 136.
11 Sobranie sochineniia I. I. Panaeva (Moscow, 1912), VI, 428,429.
12 Published in P.S.S., VI, 179–239.
13 No evidence has been discovered which would indicate any influence by Marx on Chernyshevski.
14 P.S.S., p. 182.
15 Ibid., p. 206.
16 Chernyshevski hints that both may have derived their knowledge of Hegel's ideas from the same source. One wonders if he was thinking of Bakunin.
17 P.S.S., VI, 194.
18 Ibid., pp. 194–198.
19 Ibid., p. 198.
20 Ibid., pp. 198–200.
21 For Chernyshevski's own account of his evolution from Hegel to Feuerbach, see the Preface to the 3d ed. of the P.S.S., X, Part II, 190–197. He wrote this preface in 1888.
22 Ibid., p. 202.
23 Ibid., p. 204.
24 P.S.S., VI, 206–239.
25 Ibid., p. 224.
26 Ibid., pp. 227–230.
27 Kucharzewski, op. cit., p. 255.
28 Masaryk, op. cit., Vol. II, chap. 22.
29 This expression is used in a report on Chernyshevski's literary activity prepared for the Senate during his trial. M. Lemke, Politicheskie Protsessy M. I. Mikhailova, D. I. Pisareva, in Chernyshevskago (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 347–348.
30 It appeared originally in the Contemporary in 1863, while Chernyshevski was in prison awaiting trial. It soon became a “prohibited” work in Russia, but it was read by almost all Russian intellectuals; Russian editions were published abroad, in Geneva (1871 and 1876) and Leipzig (1898); there are English translations by Nathan Haskell Dole and S. S. Skidelsky (New York, 1886), and by the American anarchist Benjamin Tucker (Boston, 1886); it is published in Vol. IX of the collected works. Certain parts which had never before appeared because of the censorship have been published by the Soviets. The notes refer to the English translation by Dole and Skidelsky.
31 Sochinenna, ed. Lemke, XXI, 226, note.
32 Nicholas, Berdiaev, The Origm of Russian Communism (London, 1937), p. 56 Google Scholar.
33 See Chernyshevski, N. G., Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, 3 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928–30), I, 549–691 Google Scholar.
34 What Is to Be Done?, pp. 174–180.
35 Ibid., pp. 367–388.
36 Berdiaev, op. cit., p. 56.
37 See above, p. 46.
38 P.S.S., VI, 184–187.
39 Ibid., p. 216.
40 Ibid., p. 239.
41 This series appeared in four issues of the Contemporary in 1855 and 1856; published together in P.S.S., II, 1–276.
42 Chernyshevski, Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, II, 43, 44.
43 P.S.S., II, 120.
44 Ibid., p. 122.
45 Ibid., pp. 140–160. Chernyshevski approves Nadezhdin's criticism of Pushkin, in the course of which Nadezhdin used the word “nihilist,” incidentally.
46 Ibid., pp. 167–178.
47 Ibid., p. 274.
48 What Is to Be Done?, pp. 199–200.
49 Ibid., p. 291.