On the Radical side the leaders were CHERNYSHEVSKY, DOBROLYUBOV and
PISAREV. Chernyshevsky, who translated John Stuart Mill, and
published a treatise on the æsthetic relations of art and reality,
served a sentence of seven years' hard labour and of twenty years'
exile. His criticism--socialist propaganda, and an attack on all
metaphysics--does not belong to literature, but his novel _Shto
dielat_--"What is to be done?"--had an immense influence on his
generation. It deals with Nihilism. Dobrolyubov, who died when he was
twenty-four, belonged to the same realistic school. His main theory
was that Russian literature is dominated by Oblomov; that Chatsky,
Pechorin, and Rudin are all Oblomovs. Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov
followed Chernyshevsky in his realistic philosophy, in his rejection
of metaphysics, in his theory that beauty is to be sought in life
only, and that the sole duty of art is to help to illustrate life.
Pisarev recognized that Turgenev's Bazarov was a picture of himself,
and he was pleased with the portrait. Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov
died young.
VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV (1853-1900), critic as well as poet, moral
philosopher, and theologian, is one of the most interesting figures in
Russian literature. What is most remarkable about him, and what makes
him stand out, a radiant exception in Russian criticism, is his
absolute independence. He belonged to no camp; he was a slave to no
party cry; utterly unselfish, his sole aim was to seek after the truth
for the sake of truth, and to proclaim it. In an age of positivism, he
was a believing Christian, and the dream of his life was a union of
the Eastern and Western Churches. He deals with this idea in a book
which he wrote in French and published in Paris: _L'Église Russe et
l'Église Universelle_. He admired the older Slavophiles, but he
severely attacked the Nationalists, such as Katkov. His range of
subjects was great, and his style was brilliant; like many great
thinkers, he was far ahead of his time, and in his criticism of the
_Intelligentsia_ anticipated some tendencies, which have become
visible since the revolution of 1905. He reminds one at times of Mr.
A. J. Balfour, and even of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, with whose
"orthodoxy" he would have much sympathy; and he deals with questions
such as Woman's Suffrage in a way which exactly fits the present day.
He never became a Catholic, holding that the Eastern Church _qua_
Church had never been cut off from the West, and that only one
definite schism had been condemned; but he believed in the necessity
of a universal Church. He was the first intellectual Russian to point
out to a generation which took atheism as a matter of course that they
were possibly inferior instead of superior to religion. He believed in
Russia; he had nothing against the Slavophile theory that Russia had a
divine mission; only he wished to see that mission divinely performed.
He believed in the East of Christ, and not in that of Xerxes. He died
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