The revolutionary democrat whose What Is to Be Done? remade Lenin and shaped a generation of revolutionaries
Marx, in the Afterword to the second edition of Capital, called Chernyshevsky 'the great Russian scholar and critic'; Engels referred to him and Dobrolyubov as 'socialist Lessings.'
The foremost thinker of Russian revolutionary democracy, he led Sovremennik and established materialist aesthetics and agrarian socialism. What Is to Be Done? (1863), written in solitary confinement at the Peter and Paul Fortress, became the handbook for two generations of revolutionaries.
Career Timeline
- 1853First articles in Otechestvennye Zapiski and Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti
- 1855–1862De facto editor of Sovremennik — turned it into the organ of revolutionary democracy
- 1855Defended master's thesis Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality
- 1860The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy — Russian Feuerbachian materialism
- 1862–1864Arrested; wrote What Is to Be Done? in solitary at Peter and Paul Fortress
- 1864Civil execution; 7 years hard labour, lifelong Siberian exile
- 1864–1883Hard labour at Kadaya/Alexandrovsky Zavod, exile in Vilyuysk — wrote Prologue
- 1883–1889Returned to Astrakhan, then Saratov — late literary work
Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality (1855)
Chernyshevsky's master's thesis Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality (1855) was the founding manifesto of Russian materialist aesthetics. He overturned idealist aesthetics by declaring that "the beautiful is life" (прекрасное есть жизнь). The task of art is not to create beauty but to reproduce life, explain it, and pass moral judgment on it: to serve as a "textbook of life." His insistence that nature and reality surpass any artwork was a declaration of war on "art for art's sake," and he urged that art should help people understand the world and move toward transformative practice. The dissertation became the starting point for a lineage of Russian revolutionary aesthetics that ran through Plekhanov and Lunacharsky to socialist realism.
Arrest, Civil Execution, and Siberian Exile (1862–1883)
On July 7, 1862, Chernyshevsky was arrested on charges of drafting the proclamation 'To the Manorial Peasants from Their Well-Wishers, Greetings' and imprisoned in solitary confinement in the Alekseyevsky Ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress. In internal documentation between the gendarmerie and the secret police, he was designated 'enemy number one of the Russian Empire.' The immediate pretext was a letter intercepted by the police from Herzen to Nikolai Serno-Solovyevich, in which Chernyshevsky's name was mentioned in connection with a proposal to publish the banned Sovremennik in London.
The investigation lasted about a year and a half. Chernyshevsky protested the commission's illegal actions with a nine-day hunger strike. During 678 days of detention he produced at least 200 printer's sheets of manuscript: the most famous product being What Is to Be Done? (1863). When the censor mistook the novel for a mere love story and approved it, it appeared in Sovremennik nos. 3–5 and was immediately banned yet circulated nationwide.
On February 7, 1864, Senator Karniolin-Pinsky sentenced Chernyshevsky to fourteen years' hard labour (katorga) followed by lifelong Siberian exile. Alexander II reduced the katorga term to seven years. On May 19 (31), 1864, the civil execution took place on Mytninskaya Square in St. Petersburg. Chernyshevsky was made to kneel before the crowd; a sword was broken over his head and he was chained to the pillory. But the ritual of humiliation backfired: in the rain, the crowd stood silent, and someone threw a bouquet of flowers. Chernyshevsky stood calmly through the mockery.
He was then sent to the Kadaya mine and Alexandrovsky Zavod in the Nerchinsk district for hard labour, and in 1871 transferred to Vilyuysk. In 1874 he was formally offered release but refused to petition for pardon. Two daring rescue attempts punctuated his exile: in 1871, German Lopatin, a member of the General Council of the First International, infiltrated Irkutsk to prepare an escape but was recognized and arrested; in 1875, Ippolit Myshkin, armed with forged documents and a gendarme officer's uniform, reached Vilyuysk but was caught and later executed. Chernyshevsky was not permitted to return to European Russia until 1883, settling in Astrakhan: his total time in prison, katorga, and exile exceeding twenty-one years.
What Is to Be Done? (1863)
Written in just over three months (December 1862–April 1863) from solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress, What Is to Be Done? became the 'gospel' of the Russian revolutionary movement. Conceived as a reply to Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, the novel smuggled radical ideas (women's emancipation, cooperative production, and 'rational egoism') inside the shell of a love story. After passing censorship and appearing in Sovremennik, it provoked an explosive response; though immediately banned, it circulated nationwide in hand-copied manuscripts. Vera Pavlovna's sewing commune inspired dozens of real-world imitations, and Rakhmetov, the 'special man,' became the archetype of the ascetic professional revolutionary. Lenin recalled that the book 'deeply plowed me,' and Kropotkin, Plekhanov, and Mayakovsky each testified to its formative power. When Lenin gave his own 1902 programmatic pamphlet the same title, it was a direct homage to Chernyshevsky.