The leading idea of TCHERNYSHÉVSKIY was that art cannot be its own aim; that life is superior to art; and that the aim of art is _to explain life_, _to comment upon it_, and _to express an opinion about it_. He developed these ideas in a thoughtful and stimulating work, _The Æsthetic Relations of Art to Reality_, in which he demolished the current theories of æsthetics, and gave a realistic definition of the Beautiful. The sensation--he wrote--which the Beautiful awakens in us is a feeling of bright happiness, similar to that which is awakened by the presence of a beloved being. It must therefore contain something dear to us, and that dear something is _life_. “To say that that which we name ‘Beauty’ is life; that that being is beautiful in which we see life--life as it ought to be according to our conception--and that object is beautiful which speaks to us of life--this definition, we should think, satisfactorily explains all cases which awaken in us the feeling of the beautiful.” The conclusion to be drawn from such a definition was that the beautiful in art, far from being superior to the beautiful in life, can only represent that conception of the beautiful which the artist has borrowed from life. As to the aim of art it is much the same as that of science, although its means of action are different. The true aim of art is to remind us of what is interesting in human life, and to teach us how men live and how they ought to live. This last part of Tchernyshévskiy teachings was especially developed by Dobrolúboff. DOBROLÚBOFF (1836-1861) was born in Nízhniy Nóvgorod, where his father was a parish priest, and he received his education first in a clerical school, and after that in a seminarium. In 1853 he went to St. Petersburg and entered the Pedagogical Institute. His mother and father died the next year, and he had then to maintain all his brothers and sisters. Lessons, for which he was paid ridiculously low prices, and translations, almost equally badly paid--all that in addition to his student’s duties--meant working terribly hard, and this broke down his health at an early age. In 1855 he made the acquaintance of Tchernyshévskiy and, having finished in 1857 his studies at the Institute, he took in hand the critical department of _The Contemporary_, and again worked passionately. Four years later, in November, 1861, he died, at the age of twenty-five, having literally killed himself by overwork, leaving four volumes of critical essays, each of which is a serious original work. Such essays as _The Kingdom of Darkness_, _A Ray of Light_, _What is Oblómoffdom?_ _When comes the Real Day?_ had especially a profound effect on the development of the youth of those times.