Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/78

52 transfer his political influence to the domain of science, and his opponents do the same thing, the former over-estimating and the latter under-estimating the value of his contributions to science and philosophy.

In actual fact, Černyševskii was a brilliant publicist and literary critic, but as far as scientific work is concerned, his views on political economy had the effect for years of turning the younger radical generation away from the study of economics. His novel What is to be Done was and remained the most influential of all his writings.

In What is to be Done Černyševskii described the actual life of his "new men." He gave, it is true, a somewhat vague sketch of socialist plans for the future. Far more important and far more influential was his elaboration of the characters in the book, and especially of Rahmetov, the idealist, an exceptional man among the "new men," a "primal source of energy," upon whom Černyševskii makes extremely exalted claims. What the monk had been for the church, Rahmetov was to be for the new society, a man of iron will, one who on his own behalf and on behalf of those among whom his lot was cast accepted the dictates of reason as self-evident truths.

The revolutionaries of the sixties and seventies were affected more by Černyševskii's example than by his precepts. Černyševskii in Siberia was for them a living memento, and he was this not to them only, but also to the government and to the reactionaries—for these, as Bakunin aptly diagnosed, were privileged persons in point of political blindness. At any rate they failed to understand that, as Poerio, the Italian statesman persecuted by the king of the Two Sicilies, phrased it, "il patire è anche operare."

Černyševskii’s realism paved the way for Marxism and social democracy, but those Marxists err who contend that Černyševskii was a Russian Marx or something approaching this.

Nor is it right to assert that Černyševskii was founder or father of the narodničestvo. Černyševskii took a more realistic view of the mužik and the mir than Bakunin and Herzen had taken, and this enabled him to strengthen the more political and practical trends of the narodničestvo; but he conceived the mir to be an association in the European socialist sense and did not, like the later narodniki, ascribe exclusive importance to that institution. Nor did Černyševskii, as did the