Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Gavrilovich

« Belinskii's view on the special mission of literature and literary criticism in autocratic Russia.

He decided, therefore, to provide literary critics with a theoretical clarification of the essence of art (with particular emphasis on literature) and of the role of art in society.

He fulfilled this task in his master's dissertation 'Ė teticheskie otnosheniia iskusstva k deistvitelnosti' (The Aesthetic Relations Between Art and Reality) (published and publicly defended in the spring of 1855). Chernyshevskii's dissertation (as he himself explained in the preface to its third edition, 1888) was in fact a critique of Hegelian aesthetics from the point of view of Feuerbachian materialism.

However, the Draconian censorship regulations, introduced in 1848 and still holding at the time of its writing, made it impossible to refer openly to Hegel and Feuerbach.

Hence, Chernyshevskii's thesis took the form of a sharp critique of the Hegelian aesthetics of F.T.

Visher, seen as a representative specimen of the 'dominant aesthetic theory' . Against Hegelian idealism, defining beauty as a manifestation of the Absolute Idea, Chernyshevskii set his own conception, which reads as follows: 'Beauty is life; beautiful is that being in which we see life as it should be according to our conceptions' .

In accordance with Feuerbach's anthropological materialism, this was to be a materialist and an anthropocentric conception: materialist, because 'life' was seen in it as rooted in nature and the beauty of art was interpreted a mere reflection of natural beauty; anthropocentric because the human being in the full flowering of his faculties was made the measure of all things and the supreme ideal of beauty.

Chernyshevskii conceded that this anthropological ideal could be interpreted in different ways, depending on historical and social circumstances, but strongly insisted that the aesthetic ideas of the privileged classes reflected an artificial life and were, therefore, normatively illegitimate.

Only the working people, living in touch with nature, were the true representatives of the human species and thus the living embodiments of the supreme aesthetic ideal.

In this way the Feuerbachian 'rehabilitation of nature' was linked with a cult of the common people and with the demand for the widest possible democratization of art. Chernyshevskii's programmatic naturalism led to the conclusion that art was merely a surrogate for reality. Against aesthetic idealism Chernyshevskii set the view that works of art could only copy real life and that artists, therefore, could not claim to possess genuinely creative power.

Nevertheless, he also stressed, somewhat inconsistently, that the function of art is not only to reproduce reality, but also to explain and evaluate it - to 'pass judgment' on the real-life phenomena that have been recreated in it.

He made it explicit that because of this art, especially literature, could and should perform a socially useful didactic role, and that artists, especially writers, could and should become spiritual leaders of society. Chernyshevskii's aesthetic ideas aroused very different reactions.

Critics who defended uncommitted 'pure art' were horrified by them; Ivan Turgenev, expressing the views of many liberal-minded writers, reduced them to 'blind malice and stupidity'; in contrast with this Dmitrii Pisarev praised Chernyshevskii's thesis as a total. »