- Chernyshevskiy (often simplified to Chernyshevsky) began his life as a bright young Russian thinker who sympathized with the impoverished masses in the old Tsarist Russian Empire and who opposed the Russian "establishment." He got his degree from St Petersburg University in 1850 and then taught school 3 years in the provinces. He returned to St. Petersbug (then the capital) in 1853, married, and became a writer and editor (Russia's most famous liberal literary journal, "Sovremennik" ["The Contemporary"]. As he became more radical and critical of the established Tsarist order, he was jailed in the 1860s, where he secretly wrote and smuggled from his cell his most famous novel, "Chto delat?" ["What is to be Done?"]. His novel was hastily published by "Sovremennik," but most copies were quickly seized by the authorities. Thus Russians who wanted to read Chernyshevskiy's "banned book" needed to get it in editions published abroad (in various languages, including Russian). This inflammatory leftist book became "forbidden fruit" for later Russian radicals like Lenin. After the Russian Communist Revolution (1917), "What is to be Done" was canonized as a major Soviet classic, published in mass editions, taught as a compulsory text in schools, adapted for stage and screen, etc. (Even an Italian film adaptation in the 1970s.) But in recent decades the old Soviet classic writers and their writings -- Gorkiy (Gorky), Chernyshevskiy, and their like -- have largely gone out of fashion. Recent generations of young people have come to regard them as dogmatic and boring. More film adaptations seem unlikely in the foreseeable future, even though a recent Broadway stage treatment of Chernyshevskiy and other old Russian radicals did attract some attention and critical commentary.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Prof Steven P Hill, Russian and Cinema Studies, University of Illinois.
- SpouseOlga Sokratovna Vasilieva(April 1853 - October 17, 1889) (his death)
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