Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevskii, the Russian literary and social critic, was the guiding spirit of Russian nihilism and a major representative of positivistic materialism in nineteenth-century Russian philosophy.

Chernyshevskii was born in Saratov, Russia. The son of an Orthodox priest, he attended a theological seminary before entering the University of St. Petersburg in 1846. After his graduation in 1850, he taught secondary school in Saratov until 1853, when he returned to St. Petersburg, secured a master's degree in Russian literature, and began writing for leading reviews. He soon became a principal editor of Sovremennik (The contemporary), and by the early 1860s was the foremost spokesman of radical socialist thought in Russia. Arrested in 1862, he was banished to Siberia in 1864 and passed the remaining twenty-five years of his life in forced exile. He was permitted to return to Saratov, in failing health, a few months before his...