July 24: Nikolai Chernyshevsky – "enemy number one of the Russian Empire"
On July 24, 1828, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a utopian philosopher, socialist, and ideologist of the Narodniks, was born in Saratov to an archpriest. In official gendarmerie correspondence, he was called "enemy number one of the Russian Empire."
Your life will be as bright and good, as rich in joy and pleasure, as you can transfer [all this] from the future into it. Strive for it, work for it, bring it closer, transfer from it into the present everything that you can transfer.
(novel "What is to be done?")
Childhood and Education
Chernyshevsky received his primary education at home, taught by his father and a French tutor. From childhood, he suffered from severe myopia, was unable to master any of the children's arts, and became a bibliophage, a devourer of books.
At 15, he entered the Saratov Theological Seminary. Without graduating—he was too far ahead of his peers in terms of preparation—he enrolled in the philosophy department of St. Petersburg University. He read the works of Hegel and Feuerbach, and the journalism of Belinsky and Herzen.
The beginning of a career and the path to revolution
After graduating, he taught literature at a boys' high school in Saratov. At 26, after marrying, he moved to St. Petersburg and took a job as a teacher in the cadet corps, but was soon forced to resign after a conflict with an officer.
By the age of 30, he had earned a Master's degree in Russian literature—and he devoted his skills entirely to the cause of the revolution. By then, he had already published in Otechestvennye Zapiski and Sovremennik, which he effectively ran together with Nekrasov and Dobrolyubov.
Revolutionary activities
Together with the Narodnik leaders Herzen and Ogarev, Chernyshevsky sought to win over the army. He edited the journal "Military Collection" and simultaneously recruited officers into revolutionary circles. In the 1860s, he was widely known in Russia as a materialist philosopher. He opposed agrarian reforms, fearing that their success would dampen revolutionary sentiment.
After the abolition of serfdom, he became one of the inspirers (though he was not formally a member) of the secret revolutionary society "Land and Freedom." Marx and Engels called him "the head of the revolutionary party." He was under secret police surveillance.
Suspected of constantly inciting hostile feelings towards the government
(from the characterization of the chief of gendarmes)
Arrest and the novel "What is to be done?"
In 1862, Chernyshevsky was arrested. He was accused of drafting revolutionary proclamations and plotting an anti-government conspiracy. While confined in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress, he wrote his famous novel, What Is to Be Done?, incorporating the ideas of the utopian Fourier and his "self-sufficient commune" (phalanstery). In 1863, the novel was published in Sovremennik and caused a sensation.
Everywhere, production and consumer associations began to spring up: workshops, sewing shops, shoemakers, bookbinders, laundries, communal dormitories, and family apartments with neutral rooms. Sham marriages, intended to free generals' and merchants' daughters from the yoke of family despotism, in imitation of Lopukhov and Vera Pavlovna, became commonplace. Moreover, the rare woman thus liberated did not start a sewing workshop.
(critic Alexander Skabichevsky)
Sentence and civil execution
In 1864, Chernyshevsky was sentenced to 14 years of hard labor and a permanent settlement in Siberia (Alexander II reduced his sentence to seven years). Before his transfer, the 36-year-old Chernyshevsky was subjected to a "civil execution" in St. Petersburg: a sword was publicly broken over his head as a symbol of his deprivation of all rights, and he was chained to the pillory.
We are assigned to transport a criminal, but we are transporting a saint.
— the gendarmes said when they were taking him to Siberia, to hard labor (Nikolai Berdyaev).
Exile and Return
Chernyshevsky served his exile in Transbaikalia and Yakutia. He spent over 20 years in prison, hard labor, and exile, refusing to petition for clemency. In 1883, he returned from exile and was allowed to settle in Astrakhan. He returned to his native Saratov only three months before his death: arriving there in 1889, he contracted malaria and died at the age of 61.
Until 1905, Chernyshevsky's works were banned in Russia—they were published abroad and in underground printing houses. At the time, the novel "What Is to Be Done?" was required reading for every liberal.
