Nikolai Mikhailovsky was one of the most influential and respected journalists in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was a narodnik (Populist) who believed that the autarkic Russian peasant commune contained the kernel of a future socialist society. The main purpose of thought and action for Mikhailovsky was to create the conditions for the flowering of the integral personality. Subjective sociology, of which he was a cofounder, obliged a person to oppose progress and the so-called objective course of events in the name of the subjective ideal of the well-rounded individual. A prolific literary critic, Mikhailovsky believed that art should serve social ideals. During his long career he pronounced his stern but entertaining judgments on most of the important writers of his day.

Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovsky was born into the Russian nobility on 15 November 1842 to a Russianized German mother and a gentry landowner father...