Nikolay Chernyshevskiy(1828-1889)
- Writer
Chernyshevskiy (often simplified to Chernyshevsky) began his life as a
bright young Russian thinker who sympathized with the impoverished
masses in the old Tsarist Russian Empire and who opposed the Russian
"establishment." He got his degree from St Petersburg University in
1850 and then taught school 3 years in the provinces. He returned to
St. Petersbug (then the capital) in 1853, married, and became a writer
and editor (Russia's most famous liberal literary journal,
"Sovremennik" ["The Contemporary"]. As he became more radical and
critical of the established Tsarist order, he was jailed in the 1860s,
where he secretly wrote and smuggled from his cell his most famous
novel, "Chto delat?" ["What is to be Done?"]. His novel was hastily
published by "Sovremennik," but most copies were quickly seized by the
authorities. Thus Russians who wanted to read Chernyshevskiy's "banned
book" needed to get it in editions published abroad (in various
languages, including Russian). This inflammatory leftist book became
"forbidden fruit" for later Russian radicals like Lenin. After the
Russian Communist Revolution (1917), "What is to be Done" was canonized
as a major Soviet classic, published in mass editions, taught as a
compulsory text in schools, adapted for stage and screen, etc. (Even an
Italian film adaptation in the 1970s.) But in recent decades the old
Soviet classic writers and their writings -- Gorkiy (Gorky),
Chernyshevskiy, and their like -- have largely gone out of fashion.
Recent generations of young people have come to regard them as dogmatic
and boring. More film adaptations seem unlikely in the foreseeable
future, even though a recent Broadway stage treatment of Chernyshevskiy
and other old Russian radicals did attract some attention and critical
commentary.
