The influence of Tchernyshefsky upon the development of Russia was far wider, and far more many-sided, than might be supposed. Philosophy, ethics, æsthetics, criticism, political economy, politics, fiction:--these were the various fields of his activity; and everywhere his ideas determined the course of further development. It would require the elaborate study of a scholar to truly represent the historical value of Tchernyshefsky, who can justly be called the father of Russian Nihilism. Nihilism was entirely misunderstood in Western countries. It will, perhaps, appear somewhat surprising to an English reader to learn that Jeremy Bentham’s doctrine of utilitarianism offered the philosophical foundation of Nihilism. The latter was in reality nothing but an attempt to construct socialism upon the basis of individual utility. The village community, seen in the light of Nihilism, must evidently have presented quite a different aspect from that which it presented to both the slavophiles and the occidentalists of the preceding epoch. The first article of Tchernyshefsky upon the village community was written in 1857, on the eve of the emancipation of the peasants, and was in the form of a criticism on the papers that had appeared in the slavophile magazine _Russkaya Beseda_. Tchernyshefsky, though apparently an “occidentalist,” sided with the slavophiles, and in a series of brilliant articles laid down the basis of the so-called “peasantism” (_narodnitchestvo_) which since then, and until quite recently, has constituted the common ground of all liberal and radical aspirations in Russia, however greatly they may have differed upon other questions. “Must Russian development of historical necessity follow in the tracks of Western Europe? Cannot Russia benefit by the lessons taught by the history of Western nations, and find out some new way of her own to avoid that evil of pauperism which necessarily accompanies private enterprise in production?”