Nikolay Chernyshevsky, the son of a priest, was born in Saratov in 1828, and stayed there till 1846.
He graduated at the local seminary where he learnt English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Greek and Old Slavonic., and where he gained a love of literature.
At St. Petersburg university, where he often struggled to warm his room, he kept a diary of trivia, like the number of tears he shed over a dead friend; here he had become an atheist and had been inspired by the works of Ludwig Feuerbach and Charles Fourier, After graduating from Saint Petersburg University in 1850, he had taught literature at a gymnasium in Saratov.
From 1853 to 1862, he lived in Saint Petersburg, and became the chief editor of Sovremennik ("Contemporary"), in which he published his main literary reviews and his essays on philosophy.
In 1862, he had been arrested and confined in the Fortress of St. Peter and Paul, where he wrote his famous novel What Is to Be Done?
The novel will be an inspiration to many later Russian revolutionaries, who will seek to emulate the novel's hero Rakhmetov, who is wholly dedicated to the revolution, ascetic in his habits and ruthlessly disciplined, to the point of sleeping on a bed of nails and eating only raw steak in order to build strength for the Revolution.
Among those who will referenced the novel include Lenin, author of a work of political theory of the same name.
Sentenced to civil execution (mock execution), followed by penal servitude (1864-72), and by exile to Vilyuisk, Siberia (1872-83), Chernyshevsky will return to Moscow in 1883 after 21 years of exile in Siberia.
A founder of Narodism, Russian populism, Chernyshevsky agitates for the revolutionary overthrow of the autocracy and the creation of a socialist society based on the old peasant commune.
Chernyshevsky's ideas are heavily influenced by Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky, and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach.
He sees class struggle as the means of society's forward movement and advocates for the interests of the working people.
In his view, the masses are the chief maker of history.
He is reputed to have used the phrase "the worse the better", to indicate that the worse the social conditions become for the poor, the more incline they will be to launch a revolution.
