without exaggeration. We must not in Pisarev's work mistake the envelope of style for the contents. I do not take the manifest exaggerations too seriously. Mihailovskii is doubtless right when he says that Pisarev's onslaught upon Puškin was a piece of vandalism; but the talk about the "annihilation of aesthetics" and similar extravagances indicate no more than that Pisarev was a literary protagonist at war with the abnormal political and social conditions of Russia in the epoch of the enfranchisement of the serfs. (Pisarev wrote from 1859 to 1868.) Such sayings as that a cigar is the realist's only happiness, that without which the realist (the "thoughtful realist"!) cannot think properly, and similar utterances, are in truth childish; but the saying is expressive of the mentality of a considerable proportion of young Russia, for Pisarev and his subjective outpourings were taken very seriously by the young.
Pisarev was even less concerned than Černyševskii to consider the philosophical foundations of his outlook and to excogitate the problems of principle. Just as Černyševskii adhered to Feuerbach or to Mill, so did Pisarev seek his teachers and authorities, expound their doctrines, popularise and disseminate them. Authoritatively he conducted the campaign against authority. There was no critical, epistemological reflection, or at least there was no determination of a course; his criticism did not deal with fundamentals but only with isolated doctrines and their consequences.
With him, as with his predecessors, the authority against which, on principle, he was campaigning was that of the theocracy, the state, and the church. Hence on the negative side he advocated atheism, and on the positive side positivism and materialism. From the first, no attempt was made to effect an epistemological and metaphysical settlement between positivism and materialism. The sources of his positivism were various, for he drew from Comte, Mill, and Buckle, as well as from Feuerbach. To Comte he was especially indebted, and he knew also the work of Taine.
Pisarev's materialism was derived from Feuerbach, but also from Vogt, Büchner, and Moleschott, whose views Pisarev popularised. He deliberately took his stand against the Hegelians, resolving the dialectical historical process into the physiological vital process, taking materialist sensualism as his starting point. Hence his preference for the natural
