CHERNYSHEVSKY, NIKOLAY GAVRILDVICH (1823-1889), Russian writer and political leader, was born at Saratov. His first works dealt with literary criticism (The Aes thetic Relations of Art to Reality, 1855, and Studies of the Age of Gogol). In the great reform movement which set in after the Crimean War, Chernyshevsky took a most active part. His jour nal, The Contemporary, urged a programme of education, more railways and a "rational distribution of economic forces"—in other words, the emancipation of the serfs. On this last point he laid particular stress, and when the tsar Alexander put forward his first reform programme (Jan. 1858), Chernyshevsky in The Con temporary ranked him higher than Peter the Great. The incom pleteness of the agrarian reform, when promulgated, and the de lays in its execution, ended, however, in turning Chernyshevsky against the Government, and he, with his colleague Dobrolyubov, became the leaders of the radical party which demanded immedi ate and wholesale reform. A visit to Hertzen in London convinced Chernyshevsky of the futility of the Liberal movement, and re sulted in a definite rupture between the Liberals and Radicals. Chernyshevsky, now supported by the Nihilists, increased his agi tation till his sudden arrest in 1862. He was tried in 1864 and sent for 24 years to Siberia. During his imprisonment in the fortress of St. Petersburg he had written his famous novel Shto Delat ("What is to be done?", 1863, Eng. trans. under the title The Vital Question, 1866)—a classic of the revolutionary movement which earned him his severe sentence. In 1883 he was transferred from north Siberia to Astrakhan, where he began to translate Weber's Universal History. In 1889 he was allowed to return to Saratov, where he died, broken in health, a few months after.
See G. Plekhanov, N. G. Tschernyschewsky (Stuttgart, 1894).