Nikołaj Czernyszewski

Dzieła

• 1860Zasada antropologiczna w filozofii

  Program materializmu po Feuerbachu: człowiek jest jedną istotą naturalną, a etyka powinna opierać się na oświeconym interesie własnym.

• 1863Co robić?

  Powieść napisana w więzieniu o „nowych ludziach”, którzy żyją racjonalnym egoizmem, wspólną pracą i równością kobiet i mężczyzn; stała się wzorem dla rosyjskich rewolucjonistów.

Stanowisko

Chernyshevsky is on the map as the main theorist of the Russian radicals of the 1860s. In “The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy” (1860) he followed Feuerbach: the human being is a single natural organism, and morality is explained by self-interest, which, rightly understood, coincides with the interest of society. His economic writings defended the peasant commune, which he thought might allow Russia to pass to socialism without going through the full development of capitalism – a question that Marx, who learned Russian partly to read him and praised him in the afterword to “Capital” (1873), later took up in his writings on the Russian commune. “What Is to Be Done?” turned these ideas into a model of life for the “new people” and inspired many revolutionaries; Lenin named his pamphlet of 1902 after it. Plekhanov wrote a monograph on him and saw him as a forerunner of Russian Marxism. Objections came early: the Kyiv philosopher Pamfil Yurkevych criticised his materialism, Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” (1864) rejected the “Crystal Palace” of a rationally calculated happiness, and Vladimir Nabokov later satirised his life in the novel “The Gift”.

Życie i kontekst

Nikolai Chernyshevsky was born on 24 July 1828 in Saratov, the son of a priest, and attended the seminary there before studying history and philology at St Petersburg University from 1846 to 1850. After teaching at the Saratov gymnasium he returned to the capital in 1853 and joined the journal “The Contemporary” (Sovremennik), edited by the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, where he and Nikolai Dobrolyubov became the leading voices of the radical intelligentsia. His master’s thesis on the aesthetic relations of art to reality (1855) declared that the beautiful is life. In the debates on the emancipation of the serfs (1861) he defended the peasant commune and criticised the terms of the reform. In July 1862 he was arrested and held in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he wrote “What Is to Be Done?”; the novel passed the censors and appeared in Sovremennik in 1863. On evidence that was partly fabricated he was sentenced in 1864 to hard labour and lifelong exile in Siberia, after a mock public execution in St Petersburg. He spent almost twenty years in Siberia, much of it in Vilyuysk in Yakutia, was allowed to settle in Astrakhan in 1883 and in Saratov in 1889, where he died on 29 October 1889.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality (Esteticheskie otnosheniia iskusstva k deistvitel’nosti, 1855)
• Critique of Philosophical Prejudices against Communal Ownership (Kritika filosofskikh predubezhdenii protiv obshchinnogo vladeniia, 1858)
• The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy (Antropologicheskii printsip v filosofii, 1860)
• What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat’?, 1863)