Nikolai Chernyshevsky 1828 – 1889

Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a Russian revolutionary democrat, materialist philosopher, and novelist and the most influential radical Russian thinker of the 1850s and 1860s. As editor of the journal Sovremennik, he became the leading voice of the new radical intelligentsia, and his novel What Is to Be Done?, written in prison after his arrest in 1862, shaped a generation of Russian revolutionaries, including the young Lenin. He spent more than two decades in Siberian exile and katorga. His Anthropological Principle in Philosophy and The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality articulated a robust materialism and a doctrine of rational egoism that he held would issue in social solidarity.