There is always a danger, however, that one letter will fall out of the cosmic, and this danger was not evaded by Chernyshevski in his article “Communal Ownership,” when he began to operate with Hegel’s tempting triad, giving such examples as: the gasiformity of the world is the thesis, while the softness of the brain is the synthesis; or, even stupider: a cudgel turning into a carbine. “There lies concealed in the triad,” says Strannolyubski, “a vague image of the circumference controlling all life of the mind, and the mind is confined inescapably within it. This is truth’s merry-go-round, for truth is always round; consequently, in the development of life’s forms a certain pardonable curvature is possible: the hump of truth; but no more.”
Chernyshevski’s “philosophy” goes back through Feuerbach, to the Encyclopedists. On the other hand, applied Hegelianism, working gradually left, went through that same Feuerbach to join Marx, who in his Holy Family expresses himself thus:
.… no great intelligence
Is needed to distinguish a connection
Between the teaching of materialism
Regarding inborn tendency to good;
Equality of man’s capacities—
Capacities that generally are
Termed mental; the great influence
Exterior circumstances have on man;
Omnipotent experience; sway of habit
And of upbringing; the extreme importance
Of industry; the moral right to pleasure,
And communism.
I have put it into blank verse so it would be less boring.
Steklov is of the opinion that with all his genius, Chernyshevski cannot rank with Marx, in relation to whom he stands as the Barnaul craftsman Polzunov stands to Watt. Marx himself (“that petty bourgeois to the marrow of his bones” according to the testimony of Bakunin, who could not stand Germans) referred once or twice to the “remarkable” writings of Chernyshevski, but he left more than one contemptuous note in the margins of the chief work on economics “des grossen russischen Gelehrten” (Marx in general disliked Russians).
Chernyshevski repaid him in like coin. Already in the seventies he was treating everything new with negligence, with malevolence. He was particularly fed up with economics, which had ceased to be a weapon for him and by this token took on in his mind the aspect of an empty toy, of “pure science.” Lyatski is quite wrong when—with a passion for navigational analogies common to many—he compares the exiled Chernyshevski to a man “watching from a deserted shore the passage of a gigantic ship (Marx’s ship) on its way to discover new lands”; the expression is especially unfortunate in view of the fact that Chernyshevski himself, as if anticipating the analogy and wishing to refute it in advance, said of Das Kapital (sent to him in 1872): “I glanced through but didn’t read it; I tore off the pages one by one and made them into little ships [my italics], and launched them on the Vilyui.”
Lenin considered Chernyshevski to be “the one truly great writer who managed to remain on a level of unbroken philosophical materialism from the fifties right up until 1888” (he knocked one year off). Once, on a windy day, Krupskaya turned to Lunacharski and said to him with soft sorrow: “There was hardly anyone Vladimir Ilyich liked so much … I think he had a great deal in common with Chernyshevski.” “Yes, they undoubtedly had much in common,” adds Lunacharski, who had tended at first to treat this remark with skepticism. “They had in common both clarity of style and mobility of speech … breadth and depth of judgement, revolutionary fire … that combination of enormous content with a modest exterior, and finally their joint moral makeup.”
Steklov calls Chernyshevski’s article, “The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy,” the “first philosophical manifesto of Russian communism”; it is significant that this first manifesto was a schoolboy’s rendering, an infantile assessment of the most difficult moral questions. “The European theory of materialism,” says Strannolyubski, rephrasing Volynski somewhat, “took on with Chernyshevski a simplified, muddled, and grotesque form. Passing scornful and impertinent judgment on Schopenhauer, under whose critical fingernail his own saltatory thinking would not have survived for a second, he recognized out of all former thinkers, by a strange association of ideas and according to his mistaken memories, only Spinoza and Aristotle, whom he imagined himself to be continuing.”
Chernyshevski hammered unsound syllogisms together; the moment he had gone the syllogisms collapsed and the nails were left sticking out. In eliminating metaphysical dualism he fell into gnoseological dualism, and having lightheartedly taken matter as the first principle, he got hopelessly lost among concepts presupposing something that creates our perception of the external world itself. The professional philosopher Yurkevich had no trouble at all in pulling him to pieces.
Yurkevich kept wondering how does Chernyshevski account for the spatial motion of the nerves being transformed into nonspatial sensation? Instead of replying to the poor professor’s detailed article, Chernyshevski reprinted exactly a third of it in The Contemporary (i.e., as much as was allowed by law) and broke it off in the middle of a word, with no comment. He most definitely did not give a hoot for the opinions of specialists, and he saw no harm in not knowing the details of the subject under examination: details were for him merely the aristocratic element in the nation of our general ideas.
“His head thinks about the problems of humanity … while his hand carries out unskilled labor,” he wrote of his “socially conscious workman” (and we cannot help recalling those woodcuts in ancient anatomical atlases, where a pleasant-faced youth is depicted nonchalantly leaning against a column and showing the educated world all his viscera). But the political regime that was supposed to appear as the synthesis in the syllogism, where the thesis was the commune, resembled not so much Soviet Russia as the Utopias of his day.
The world of Fourier, the harmony of the twelve passions, the bliss of collective living, the rose-garlanded workmen—all this could not fail to please Chernyshevski, who was always looking for “coherency.” Let us dream of the phalanstery living in a palace: 1,800 souls—and all happy! Music, flags, cakes. The world is run by mathematics and well run at that; the correspondence which Fourier established between our desires and Newton’s gravity was particularly captivating; it defined Chernyshevski’s attitude to Newton for all his life, and it is pleasant to compare the latter’s apple with Fourier’s apple costing the commercial traveler a whole fourteen sous in a Paris restaurant, a fact that led Fourier to ponder the basic disorder of the industrial mechanism, just as Marx was led to acquaint himself with economic problems by the question of the wine-making gnomes (“small peasants”) in the Moselle Valley: a graceful origination of grandiose ideas.
While defending communal ownership of the land because of its simplifying the organization of associations in Russia, Chernyshevski was prepared to agree to the emancipation of the peasants without land, the ownership of which would have led in the long run to new encumbrances. At this point sparks flash from our pen. The liberation of the serfs! The era of great reforms! No wonder that in a burst of vivid prescience the young Chernyshevski noted in his diary in 1848 (the year somebody dubbed “the vent of the century”): “What if we are indeed living in the times of Cicero and Caesar, when seculorum novus nascitur ordo, and there comes a new Messiah, and a new religion, and a new world? …”
The fifties are now in full fan. It is permitted to smoke on the streets. One may wear a beard. The overture to William Tell is thundered out on every musical occasion. Rumors spread that the capital is being moved to Moscow; that the old calendar is going to be replaced by the new.
Under this cover Russia is busily gathering material for Saltikov’s primitive but juicy satire. “What is this talk of a new spirit in the air, I’d like to know,” said General Zubatov, “only the flunkeys have grown rude, otherwise everything has stayed the way it was.” Landowners and notably their wives began to dream terrible dreams not listed in dream books. A new heresy appeared: Nihilism. “A scandalous and immoral doctrine rejecting everything that cannot be palpated,” says Dahl with a shudder, in his definition of this strange word (in which “nihil,” nothing, corresponds as it were to “material”). Persons in holy orders had a vision: an enormous Chernyshevski strides along the Nevsky Prospect wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a cudgel.
And that first rescript in the name of the Vilno governor, Nazimov! And the Tsar’s signature, so handsome, so robust, with two full-blooded, mighty flourishes, which were to be later torn off by a bomb! And the ecstasy of Nikolay Gavrilovich: “The blessing promised to the meek and the peacemakers crowns Alexander the Second with a happiness which no other of Europe’s sovereigns has yet known.…”
But soon after the provincial committees were formed, Chernyshevski’s ardor cooled: he was incensed by the self-seeking of the nobles in most of them. His final disillusionment came in the second half of 1858. The size of the compensation! The smallness of the allotments! The tone of The Contemporary became sharp and frank; the expressions “infamous” and “infamy” began pleasantly to enliven the pages of this dullish magazine.
Its director’s life was not rich in events. For a long time the public did not know his face. Nowhere was he seen. Already famous, he remained as it were in the wings of his busy, talkative
