On October 29, 1889, at the age of sixty-one, Chernyshevsky died.
"Bookworm"
Chernyshevsky's early life and dubrov, along with its equal name, have many similarities. He was also born into a well-read clergyman family, educated at home before the age of 14, read a lot of books, read beyond ordinary people, and mastered a variety of foreign languages. Chernyshevsky was called a "bookworm" at a young age.
At the age of 15, Chernyshevsky was sent to a church school, but he was not interested in the school's curriculum. At the age of 18, he was admitted to the University of Petersburg. During his five years of study, he was deeply influenced by European currents, especially German philosophy, British political economy, and French utopianism, and read many of the works of Hegel and Feuerbach, and was also a follower of Belinsky and Herzen.
After graduating from university, Chernyshevsky returned to his hometown as a teacher. Under the influence of the French Revolution and Western democratic ideas, he began to write and left the middle school podium shortly after.
In 1854, Chernyshevsky entered the progressive magazine Modern Man and began to work on the magazine the following year. He wanted to run the magazine like The Bell, founded by Herzen, and to attack the Tsarist government and serfdom in a humorous tone. But this caused a disagreement within the magazine, and the result was that several heavyweight writers such as Turgenev left Modern Man.
From 1855 to 1831, Chernyshevsky led both Modern Man and Military Anthology, and wrote a large number of articles on philosophy, economics, aesthetics, literature, sociology, and other fields.
Chernyshevsky was both a successful scholar and a political commentator and literary critic with a fighting spirit. He believed that the emancipation of serfs by peaceful means was tantamount to seeking fish from a tree, so he actively spread the idea of a serf revolution and hoped that the serfs would carry out the revolution. In Chernyshevsky's view, the only way out for Russia was for the overthrow of feudal despotism by the serf revolution and the return of land to the hands of the people, and it must be the distribution of land, not the redemption of land.
As soon as Chernyshevsky entered the Russian literary scene, he attracted widespread attention. At the age of twenty-seven, he challenged the reputable philosopher Hegel with his master's thesis ,"The Aesthetic Relationship between Art and Reality", and demonstrated his extraordinary talent. In this paper, Chernyshevsky proposed a new view of literature, not "art for art", but art for reality. Later, another literary theorist, Pisarev, developed this idea.
"The Outsider"
In the era when Chernyshevsky lived, the torrent of history crashed on the shore.
In 1848, Karl Marx published the Communist Manifesto, and the revolution swept through Germany, Austria, Hungary and other countries, known in history as the "Spring of the People". When the Crimean War broke out in 1853, the Russian side, despite its victory at the Battle of Sinop and the War of Sevastopol, ended with an active peace and the signing of the Treaty of Paris. As required by the peace treaty, the Black Sea was neutralized, and Russia returned the Danube estuary and South Bessarabia to Moldavia. In 1855, Nicholas I died and Alexander II ascended the throne. Under the internal and external troubles, the undercurrent of Russian society is surging and the people are looking forward to "spring".
In 1861, the Tsar announced the abolition of serfdom and announced a series of transitional measures to ensure the smooth resolution of the land and property problems. In the process, Chernyshevsky described what he saw as "a cup in mid-air," and he was more concerned not with "what's in the cup" but with "nothing."
Chernyshevsky watched like an outsider, propagating progressive ideas from a humanistic perspective, calling on the serfs not to bow to their masters again. In his view, apart from the change in title, nothing substantial has changed. So, he concluded: "The Tsar has deceived us, and should be like the French and the British." It's time to pick up the pole and axe. "It's tantamount to throwing a bombshell at the Russian populace."
In mid-1863, Chernyshevsky fell into the Peter Fortress prison. Even in the days when he lost his freedom, he did not stop fighting—verbally arguing with the police, on a nine-day hunger strike, and most importantly, completing the novel "What to Do?" 》。
When "What to Do?" Published in the magazine Modern Man, the author himself is still in prison. In 1864, Chernyshevsky was sentenced to fourteen years of hard labor in Siberia. Later, Alexander I shortened the period of hard labor to seven years, but Chernyshevsky spent a total of more than twenty years in prison.
What to do? What kind of novel is it? Why have generations of Russians been reading for more than a hundred years?
"The Textbook of Life" "What to Do? 》
The heroine Vera and the male protagonists, Lopkhov and Kirsanov, are both from the cold door. Vera's parents are desperate to marry their daughter to a powerful and rich family, and Vera is helpless for this pain. The governess, Lopkhov, in order to help Vera, formed an avant-garde family with her. After marriage, they respected each other, but lived separately. Vera began to earn an independent living and transformed into an entrepreneurial young woman.
Vera (1971 film What to do?) 》）
Lophof (1971 film What to do?) 》）
Lopkhov's friend Kirsanov was a frequent guest, and gradually fell in love with Vera. Lopfov discovers that his feelings for Vera are not true love, but between his friends Kilsanov and Vera. So he committed suicide by jumping into the river in disguise, and the human world evaporated. Vera, who had obtained the certificate of her ex-husband's death, qualified to legally remarry and formally married Kirsanov.
Kirsanov (1971 film What to do?) 》）
The key figure in the book, Rakhmetov, is the highest example of a positive figure in Russian critical realist literature, the image of the first professional revolutionary, and the ordinary "newcomers" such as Lopkhov are like an ordinary house to a majestic palace compared to him. He came from a wealthy family, but from his youth he continued to sharpen and regulate himself, reinvent himself, and dedicate everything to the people who raised him through labor, roaming, strict Spartan and even ascetic life and busy and dangerous underground activities. The needs of the people became the only guideline for his thoughts and actions, and at the same time he sought to raise the consciousness of the people; this was the common feature of the progressive Russian intellectuals of the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century.
Rakhmetov (1971 film What to do?) 》）
Rakhmetov eventually became the Ringer, letting Vera and Kirsanov know that Lopkhov was still alive. At this time, Lopfhov assumed the pseudonym Bimont and married Vera's girlfriend Katerina. Since then, the two families have lived in harmony.
The image of the five "newcomers" took the "republic" in Chernyshevsky's mind.
"Prometheus of Russia"
In 1864, Chernyshevsky was escorted to Usoliyer on charges of being a "state sinner" and did hard labor in a salt factory in Siberia. However, the local officials, fearing Chernyshevsky's enormous influence, requested that he be transferred. In 1866 he was transferred to the Alexander factory in Nebuchu and the following year he was thrown into the Akatuy prison. In 1871, Chernyshevsky, who had completed hard labor, went to Velyuysk to continue his imprisonment. In 1874, he was supposed to be released, but he refused to file a petition. On the days of suffering, Chernyshevsky never stopped holding his pen. During this period, he continued to write political essays and memoirs, the most important of which was the translation of Vebel's twelve-volume General History from German from 1884 to 1888. In 1889, Chernyshevsky returned to his hometown of Saratov. He died of illness three months later.
Chernyshevsky died nine times without regret for the utopia in his heart. Plekhanov, the thinker who first spread Marxism in Russia and Europe, called him "the Prometheus of Russia."
"Young helmsman in the storm of the future"
Chernyshevsky developed the idea of Russian revolutionary democracy to an unprecedented height. With his rich writings and noble qualities, he enjoyed high prestige among Russians, became an idol of The progressive youth of Russia, and gave a powerful impetus to the Russian revolutionary movement.
Chernyshevsky was the second generation of Russian revolutionaries who came to the stage of history after the aristocratic revolutionaries, and was the most outstanding representative of the civilian intellectual revolutionaries. Lenin hailed him as "the young helmsman in the storm of the future."
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