Nikolay Chernyshevsky

Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828 to 1889) was a Russian literary and social critic, journalist, novelist and socialist philosopher, often identified as a utopian socialist and a leading theorist of Russian nihilism and the Narodniks. The son of a priest, he was born in Saratov, took his degree at the University of St Petersburg in 1850 and became chief editor of the journal Sovremennik. His master's dissertation, The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality (1855), helped found materialist aesthetics in Russia. Arrested in 1862, he wrote the novel What Is to Be Done in the Peter and Paul Fortress, a book that inspired later revolutionaries. He was sentenced to civil execution, penal servitude from 1864 to 1872 and exile in Vilyuisk, Siberia, until 1883. A founder of Narodism, he urged agrarian socialism built on the peasant commune, saw class struggle as the engine of social change and opposed Darwinism. Marx, Plekhanov and Lenin praised him, while Dostoevsky wrote Notes from Underground largely against his ideas.