we watch Černyševskii at work, when we contemplate his labours by day and by night, we can have no doubt concerning the true nature of his "very useful utility" (thus does he formulate his view in The Anthropological Principle), and we understand why his egoism is to be "rational." Černyševskii's opponents marshalled all the old arguments which have from the first been adduced against hedonism, and yet Černyševskii was anything other than hedonist and epicurean in the sense of their accusations. Černyševskii detested moral sermonising and the inert sentimentality of the altruists. He simply wanted people to do something for their neighbours, to work on their behalf. His "neighbour" was for him no abstraction, but the extant social organisations, graded in the way that has been previously described; and for these and with these the individual was to work. Černyševskii's ethic was eo ipso social. For him useful labour was the goal of all activity, and this implied for him the demand that each man should work for himself, and should never make another work for him and in his place. Černyševskii's ethic is not social merely, but socialistic; his conception of practical and active love is communistic, for he sets out from the naturally given equality of all men (or, as he would put it, of all the organisms of humanity). Materialism is ethical and socio-political communism; it is the equality of rights of organised human beings, who by nature lead gregarious lives. The love for his fellows, and the self-love which are inborn to man, lead, upon a materialistic basis, to an equality of rights; but this equality of rights is by Černyševskii carried to its logical term, is conceived by him socialistically or communistically in its applications to all departments of social life. His communism does not halt before family life and marriage. "My linen your linen; my pipe-stem your pipe-stem; my wife your wife": thus speaks Rahmetov in What is to be Done.
While imprisoned in St. Petersburg, Černyševskii wrote his first novel, What is to be Done?[1] The work was published in 1863, and became the program of the younger radical generation, the program of the sons against their fathers. In Fathers and Children, Turgenev had analysed nihilism, then in its inception; in What is to be Done, Černyševskii wrote the gospel of nihilism, which was already at work. Kropotkin,
- ↑ An English translation by Nathan Haskell Dole, has been published in New York under the title, A Vital Question or What is to be Done?
