Abstract

In nineteenth-century Russian culture, there were two great writers and thinkers so closely though contradictorily related to each other that any researcher who writes about Dostoevsky must invariably recall Chernyshevsky, and vice versa. The saddest part is that their affinity seems like an absolute opposition, as if two enemies entwined in a terrifying bout. Meanwhile, if we carefully trace the intertwining of their destinies and ideas, we see that Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky formed a kind of spiritual duo within the struggle of Russian ideologues, both of them opposing Russian devilry and small-minded officialdom. Not only did they both suffer the trials of Peter-and-Paul Fortress and penal servitude, they both dreamed of a Christian deepening of Russian life. The main demon of Dostoevsky’s Demons scolds Chernyshevsky as a reactionary, and when the official press went after Chernyshevsky on the eve of his arrest, Dostoevsky alone came to his defense. I would also remind readers that Dostoevsky’s journal was the only one to support Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? It is worth remembering that, for all the intense humanist searches in nineteenth-century Russian literature, it offers only two heroes that represent the author’s embodiment of an absolutely ideal person: Rakhmetov in Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Both of these heroes bear the stamp of their creators’ individuality in worldview, as well as their emotional, psychological, and even mental individuality. There is another important point of affinity between these two thinkers. Bakhtin wrote that Chernyshevsky had posed the problem of creating ideological novels in Russian literature. The questions that resound in his work offered a paradigm that all reasoning henceforth had to employ. If we make no concessions, then Dostoevsky was the only one among Chernyshevsky’s contemporaries not overwhelmed by this task. The task of this chapter is to demythologize Chernyshevsky’s image and to uncover his filiations with Dostoevsky.