and not 11ecessarily to that of the Russians, even though his Russian disciples
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R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
Chernyshevsky believed in the decisive historical role of the application of science to Ii(e, but, unlike Pisarev, did not regard individual enterprise, still less capitalism, as indispensable to this process. He
retained enough of the Fourierism of his yC"uth to look upon the free
associations of peasant communes and craftsmen's artels as the basis
of all freedom and progress. But at the same time, like the Saint
Simonians, he was convinced that little would be achieved without
collective action-state socialism on a vast scale. These incompatible
beliefs were never reconciled ; Chernyshevsky's writings contain
statements both in favour of and against the desirability of large-scale
industry. He is similarly ambivalent about the part to be played (and
the part to be avoided) by the state as the stimulator and controller of
industry, about the function of managers of large collective industrial
enterprises, about the relations of the public and private sectors of the
economy, and about the political sovereignty of the democratically
elected parliament and its relation to the state as the source of centralised
economic planning and control.
The outlines of Chernyshevsky's social programme remained vague
or inconsistent, and often both. It is the concrete detail which.
founded as it was on real experience, spoke directly to the representatives of the great popular masses, who had at last found a spokesman and interpreter of their own needs and feelings. His deepest aspirations
and emotions were poured into What is to he done?, a social Utopia
which, grotesque as a work of art, had a literally epoch-making effect
on Russian opinion. This didactic novel described the 'new men' of
the free, morally pure, cooperative socialist commonwealth of the
future; its touching sincerity and moral passion bound their spell upon
the imaginations of the idealistic and guilt-stricken sons of prosperous
parents, and provided them with an ideal model in the light of which
an entire generation of revolutionaries educated and hardened itself
to the defiance of existing laws and conventions �d to the acceptance
of exile and death with sublime unconcern.
Chernyshevsky preached a naive utilitarianism. Like James Mill.
and perhaps Bentham, he held that basic human nature was a fixed,
physiologically analysable pattern of natural processes and faculties,
ignored this concession, and insisted that capitalism was making enormous
atridea in Russia. and would soon obliterate the differences that divided it
from the west. Plekhanov (who stoutly denied that Chemyshevsky �w:·ever
been a populist) elaborated this theory; Lenin acted upon it.
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RU SSIAN POP U L I S M
and that the maximisation of human happiness could therefore be
scientifically planned and realised. Having decided that imaginative
writing and criticism were the only available media in Russia for
propagating radical ideas, he filled the Contemporary, a review which
he edited together with the poet Nekrasov, with as high a proportion
of direct socialist doctrine as could be smuggled in under the guise of
literature. In his work he was helped by the violent young critic
Dobrolyubov, a genuinely gifted man ofletters (which Chemyshevsky
was not) who, at times, went even further in his passionate desire to
preach and educate. The aesthetic views of the two zealots were
severely practical. Chernyshevsky laid it down that the function of
art was to help men to satisfy their wants more rationally, to disseminate knowledge, to combat ignorance, prejudice, and the antisocial passions, to improve life in the most literal and narrow sense of these words. Driven to absurd consequences, he embraced them gladly.
Thus he explained that the chief value of marine paintings was that
they showed the sea to those who, like, for instance, the inhabitants
of central Russia, lived too far away from it ever to see it for themselves; or that his friend and patron Nekrasov, because by his verse he moved men to greater sympathy with the oppressed than other
poets had done, was for this reason the greatest Russian poet, living or
dead. His earlier collaborators, civilised and fastidious men of letters
like Turgenev and Botkin, found his grim fanaticism increasingly
difficult to bear. Turgenev could not long live with this art-hating
and dogmatic schoolmaster. Tolstoy despised his dreary provincialism,
his total lack of aesthetic sense, his intolerance, his rationalism, his
maddening self-assurance. But these very qualities, or, rather, the
outlook of which they were characteristic, helped to make him the
natural leader of the 'hard' young men who had succeeded the idealists
of the I 84-os. Chernyshevsky's harsh, flat, dull, humourless, grating
sentences, his preoccupation with concrete detail, his self-discipline,
his dedication to the material and moral good of his fellow-men, the
grey, self-effacing personality, the tireless, passionate, devoted, minute
i ndustry, the hatred of style or of any concessions to the graces, the
unquestionable sincerity, utter self-forgetfulness, brutal directness,
indifference to the claims of private life, innocence, personal kindness,
pedantry, disarming moral charm, capacity for self-sacrifice, created
the image that later became the prototype of the Russian revolutionary
hero and martyr. More than any other publicist he was responsible
for drawing the final line between 'us' and 'them'. All his life he
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R U S SIAN T H I N K E R S
preached that there must be no compromise with 'them', that the war
must be fought to the death and on every front; that there were no
neutrals; that, so long as this war was being fought, no work could
be too trivial, too repulsive, or too tedious for a revolutionary to
perform. His personality and outlook set their seal upon two generations
of Russian revolutionaries; not least upon Lenin, who admired him
devotedly.
In spite of his emphasis on economic or sociological arguments,
the basic approach, the tone and outlook of Chernyshevsky and of the
populists generally, is moral, and at times religious. These men believed
in socialism not because it was inevitable, nor because it was effective,
not even because it alone was rational, but because it was just. Concentrations of political power, capitalism, the centralised state, trampled on the rights of men and crippled them morally and spiritually.
The populists were stern atheists, but socialism and orthodox Christian
values coalesced in their minds. They shrank from the prospect of
industrialism in Russia because of its brutal cost, and they disliked the
west because it had paid this price too heartlessly. Their disciples, the
populist economists of the 1 88os and 90s, Danielson and Vorontsov
for example, for all their strictly economic arguments about the possibility of capitalism in Russia (some of which seem a good deal sounder than their Marxist opponents have represented them as being), were