Dmitri Ivanovich Pisarev, the Russian literary critic and social philosopher, was educated at St. Petersburg University (1856–1861). His studies were interrupted by a nervous breakdown requiring four months of institutionalization. At this time he twice attempted suicide. Pisarev was imprisoned from 1862 to 1866 for his outspoken criticism of the tsarist regime. He drowned while swimming in the Baltic Sea, under circumstances that suggest suicide, at the age of twenty-eight.

Pisarev called himself a "realist" and praised "fresh and healthy materialism," but his own philosophical position was a sense-datum empiricism. In his early writings on ethics and social philosophy, in the years 1859 to 1861, he advocated the "emancipation of the individual person" from social, intellectual, and moral constraints but particularly stressed the preservation of the wholeness of human personality in the face of the fragmenting pressures of functional specialization and the division of labor.

Among the...