Nikolai chernyshevsky biography of donald
What is to be done? - Nikolai Chernyshevsky
Preface by Chernyshevsky
[Note: Chernyshevsky references the "false start" to his novel, consisting of two short chapters, which precedes the actual story.—adri]
"The subject of this work is love, the main character is a woman; that's fine, even if the work itself is not that good," says the female reader.
"That's true," I reply.
The male reader does not confine himself to such easy conclusions, since from birth man's intellectual capability is greater than woman's and also much better developed. He says . . . (she probably thinks it, but sees no need to say it, so I have no grounds to quarrel with her), the male reader says: "I know for a fact that the gentleman who committed suicide did not really commit suicide." Seizing upon the phrase "know for a fact," I reply, "You don't know it for a fact, because you haven't been told it yet. Why, you know nothing at all by yourself! You don't even know that in the way I started this work I insulted you and humiliated you. You didn't know that, did you? Well, now you do!"
Yes, the first pages of my story reveal that I have a very poor opinion of my public. I employed the conventional ruse of a novelist: I began my tale with some striking scenes taken from the middle or the end, and I shrouded them with mystery. You, the public, are kind, very kind indeed, and therefore undiscriminating and slow-witted. You can't be relied upon to know from the first few pages whether or not a book is worth reading. You have poor instincts that are in need of assistance. For help you can look to two things: either the author's reputation or his striking style. Since this is only my first novel, you haven't yet formed an opinion of my literary talents. (Why, you have so many gifted authors to choose from!) My name could not have attracted you. So I was obliged to bait my hook with striking scenes. Don't condemn me for it: you deserve all the blame. It's your own simpleminded naiveté Yemelyan Yaroslavsky 1939 Author: Yemelyan Yaroslavsky; Fifty years ago in Saratov, one of the most remarkable public figures of the last century, the master of the thoughts of the best people of his time, a consistent revolutionary democrat, a remarkably deep critic of capitalism and the greatest representative of utopian socialism in Russia, as Lenin called him, died. He was furthermore the greatest historian, who in his conclusions came close to historical materialism. In the person of Chernyshevsky, who was tortured to death by the Tsarist executioners, Russia lost not only a remarkably deep critic of capitalism, who revealed the helplessness and fetishism of bourgeois political economy: 50 years ago, a great artist of the word also died, leaving us the immortal What Is To Be Done?, Prologue, and a series of other artistic works. Chernyshevsky was a great Hegelian and materialist, this is how Lenin assessed his role in the history of social thought in Russia. Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov were socialist Lessings, as Engels called them. Crowded gatherings throughout the Land of Soviets dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of his death, numerous editions of the works of the great Russian writer and materials about his life and struggle are an expression of the deep love of our people for Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and the high appreciation of his activities, which he dreamed of, sitting in Peter and Paul Fortress seventy-seven years ago. Our life belongs to history, he wrote on October 5, 1862 to his wife Olga Sokratovna, hundreds of years will pass, and our names will still be dear to people, a Literature can’t be all fun and Moomins, can it? So in the tradition of the 2010 readalong of Herman Melville’s Clarel and the 2011 Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity I am announcing the Wuthering Expectations What Is to Be Done? reading event. Some of you said you wanted it. I hold no one to any rashly made promise. I possess not one bit of artistic talent. I even lack full command of the language. But that doesn’t mean a thing; read on, dearest public, it will be we Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a Russian revolutionary renowned for his presentation of the materialist point of view. V. I. Lenin describes him thus: [T]he only really great Russian writer who, from the 1850s until 1888, was able to keep on the level of an integral philosophical materialism, and who spurned the wretched nonsense of the Neo-Kantians, positivists, Machians and other muddleheads, [although] owing to the backwardness of Russian life, was unable to rise to the level of the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels. Even earlier, back in 1874, Engels had already recognized Chernyshevky’s contributions, and starkly contrasted them to Bakunin’s: A country that has produced two writers of the stature of Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, two socialist Lessings, will not go down simply because it gives birth all at once to a humbug like Bakunin and a few green students who, with big words, puff themselves up like frogs and finally devour each other. Precisely because Chernyshevky operated in an environment in which burgeoning new ideas struggled against brutal tsarist censorship and the anarchistic and rustic anti-intellectual reaction to it, his writing turns out to be very relevant still. After all, the American “contempt for all theory” that Engels described in 1886 is seen to clearly persist over one hundred years later, as attested by, for example, Assata Shakur in her autobiography. Avowed Marxists today are very implicated in these problems of shallow understanding, phrase-mongering, and ineffective practice. This is partly because many such Marxists often discuss Marx and Engels’s works as some kind of heavenly gift, rather than as the outcome of state-of-the-art developments. Scientific theories are presented de-contextualized; every other philosopher, political theorist, and economist of their era is ridicul Nikolai Chernyshevsky
Written: 28 October 1939, delivered as a report at the meeting of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and the Union of Soviet Writers, dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the death of Chernyshevsky,;
First published: 1939 in Istorik Marksist no. 5-6, pg. 15-37;
Source: https://communist-ml.ru
Translated by: Anton P.
No, I am kidding, this will be fun. And educational. Mostly educational.
Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? is a radical socialist Utopian novel written while in prison, waiting to be tried for a bunch of trumped up nonsense for which he was eventually convicted and sent to Siberia. Given that Chernyshevsky was in prison because as an editor and essayist he was seen as a threat to the state, the fact that he was allowed to write and publish What Is to Be Done? is almost inexplicable. This was the novel that prepared the ground for revolution. Its importance in Russian intellectual history is immense.
The novel is full of idealized people doing idealized things. The novels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau served as Chernyshevsky’s models. Another inspiration was Hard Times, but Chernyshevsky thought Dickens wasted too much time on trivialities like love and happiness. Another great influence was Georges Sand, and the novel is openly feminist in the usual fashion of 19th century Utopians – if society is to reform, marriage and family must reform, too.
What Is to Be Done? was a direct response to the nihilist protagonist of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862); it in turn inspired Fyodor Dostoevsky to write Notes from the Underground (1864). Dozens of other novels spun off of this remarkable chain of books. Here is the problem: Why Read Chernyshevsky? (2022)