Dmitri Ivanovich Pissarev

Dmitry Pissarev

Dmitry Pisarev ( Russian Дмитрий Иванович Писарев * 2 ^{. Jul} / 14. October  1840 ^greg. In Znamenskoye, Ujesd Yelets ; † 4 ^jul. / 16th July  1868 ^greg. In Dubulti ) was a Russian literary critic, social critic and philosopher . He is considered the most important thought leader in Russian nihilism .

Life

Pissarew studied philosophy and literature at the University of Saint Petersburg . He began his literary history with studies of Ivan Alexandrowitsch Gontscharow and Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenew . After an unfortunate love affair with his cousin and a suicide attempt , he spent a time in a mental hospital, after which he withdrew to the country and devoted himself to his studies and writings. Because of his criticism of the Russian diplomat Baron Theodor von Fircks and his brochure published under a pseudonym in the interests of Poland ( Lettre d'un patriote polonais au gouvernement national de la Pologne publiée avec une préface et quelques notes explicatives par DK Schédo-Ferroti . Paris , Bruxelles, Leipzig, Berlin 1863) Pissarew was sentenced to five years imprisonment. However, in the unrest and puzzling arson attacks in Saint Petersburg that followed the liberation of the peasants in 1862, the government was in any case increasingly restrictive against radical students at the universities and in the editorial offices.

According to Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov , Pissarev spent the best years of his life in detention at the Peter and Paul Fortress . Pissarev was one of those writers who predicted the democratic revolutionary trend in Russia during the 1860s. The following generation of Russians, who were to become decisive in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the February Revolution of 1917 , recognized Pissarev's merits.

Dmitri Ivanovich Pissarew also earned services in supporting the Russian natural sciences, especially biology, and thereby promoting the career of his young compatriot Ivan Petrovich Pavlov .

Pissarev's primary goal was to overcome mass poverty and misery in Russia through a revolutionary upheaval . He articulated this desire in philosophical works, literary critical essays and family history analyzes.

His environment included the literary critic, publicist, materialist philosopher and revolutionary democrat Nikolai Alexandrowitsch Dobrolyubow , the economic journalist Nikolai Gavrilowitsch Chernyshevsky , who also gave the district his name Chernyshevsky , the mathematician and revolutionary Pyotr Lavrovich Lavrov and the anarchist , geographer and writer Alexevich Kropotkin . Chernyshevsky was detained in a solitary cell next to Pissarev in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The “extraordinarily fruitful literati” published their articles in the left-wing newspapers Sovremennik ( Der Zeitgenosse , founded in 1836 by Pushkin) and Russkoje Slovo ( Russian word ). During their period of activity, which was to shape the further development of their home country, they were hardly known outside of Russia.

As a literary critic, he turned against the works of Alexander Pushkin , whose empty content and alienation from reality in Russia he sought to prove. Ultimately, Pissarev's generally naturalistic attitude shaped an entire generation of Russian literary criticism: "The literary work of art had primarily to be socially useful."

Pissarew also poured out the “bowl of his anger” on Louis Pasteur , “because he had experimentally refuted the theory of the spontaneous emergence of life from the primordial mud”. Such unscientific fanaticism in connection with half-knowledge annoyed even Alexander Ivanovich's hearts , who were close to the young movement, and who thereupon published an article on amateurism in science .

Pissarev played another important role in the reception of the scientific statements of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species . In contrast to the clumsy translation by botany professor Sergei Raschinski , which with its detailed scientific descriptions only addressed a small group of scholars, Pissarev's own radical interpretation , which he wrote during the two years of imprisonment and published in Russkoye Slovo in 1864 , won a significantly larger readership: According to Torsten Rüters , however, he made a “ Lamarckist Darwinism popular in Russia” because he missed the “essentially new thing about Darwin's idea - the interlocking of variability and selection” by describing the “expediency in the world of organisms as a conscious determination and effort of will brought about environmental adaptation of the organisms ”explained. "His remarks were conceived as an ideological weapon in the disputes of the 1860s over the renewal of Russian society ..."

At the age of 27, Pissarev drowned while bathing in the Gulf of Riga .

Reception by Lenin

Lenin made use of extensive quotations from Pissarev on several occasions; B. in the fifth chapter of his main work What to do? ( Russian Что делать ?, wiss. Transliteration Čto delať? ) as the text comparison and his handwritten notes in the original manuscript prove.

The mere thought of these threatening questions makes me cold and I just wonder where to hide. I will try to hide behind Pissarev.

“One dichotomy is not like another,” wrote Pissarew about the dichotomy between dream and reality. “My dreams can run ahead of the natural course of events, or they can go completely astray, on paths which the natural course of events can never take. In the first case dreaming is completely harmless; it can even promote and strengthen the energy of the working person ... Such dreams have nothing in themselves that affects or paralyzes the creativity. In fact, quite the opposite. If man were devoid of all ability to dream in this way, if he could not hurry ahead now and then in order to see in his phantasy as a unified and perfect image the work that is just beginning to emerge under his hands, then I can absolutely not imagine what motive would compel man to undertake large and arduous work in the field of art, science and practical life and bring it to an end ... The dichotomy between dream and reality is not harmful, if only the dreaming seriously believes in his dream when he observes life attentively, compares his observations with his castles in the air and generally works conscientiously on the realization of his dream picture. If there is just any point of contact between dream and life, then everything is fine. "

literature

• Christine Frances Donaldson: Russian Nihilism of the 1860's. A science-based social movement . Ann Arbor / Michigan 1979. (Dissertation Ohio State University)
• Heinrich Heine: 10 essays / D. Iwanowitsch Pissarew . From d. Soot. v. Wilfried Josch. With e. Before u. Nachw. V. Joseph Görlich, Kulturwort, Vienna 1965.
• Peter C. Pozefsky: The nihilist imagination: Dmitrii Pisarev and the cultural origins of Russian radicalism (1860-1868). Peter Lang Verlag, New York / Washington, DC / Baltimore a. a. 2002, ISBN 0-8204-6161-X .
• K. Waliszewski : Littérature Russian. A. Colin, Paris 1900. Digitized

Web links

• Literature by and about Dmitri Iwanowitsch Pissarew in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works at Lib.ru / Classics (Russian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Confino: Révolte juvénile et contre-culture. Les nihilistes russes des “années 60”. (Youth revolts and counterculture. The Russian nihilists of the 1960s.) In: Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique. 31 (1), 1990
2. ↑ Peter C. Pozefsky: The Nihilist imagination. Dmitrii Pisarev and the Cultural Origins of Russian Radicalism (1860-1868). (The nihilistic conception. Dmitrii Pisarev and the cultural roots of Russian radicalism.) Lang, New York 2003, ISBN 0-8204-6161-X .
3. ^ BP Babkin: Pavlov: A Biography . The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1949.
4. ^ Günther Stökl : Russian history. From the beginnings to the present (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 244). 4th enlarged edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-520-24404-7 , p. 568.
5. ↑ Tatjana Sinizina: Alexander Pushkin's final resting place. ( Memento of the original from January 6, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on: russland.ru February 10, 2004. 
6. ^ Günther Stökl: Russian history. From the beginnings to the present (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 244). 4th enlarged edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-520-24404-7 , p. 621.
7. ^ Günther Stökl: Russian history. From the beginnings to the present (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 244). 4th enlarged edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-520-24404-7 , p. 572.
8. ↑ Quoted from: Helmut Höge: Genossenschaften / Towaristschestwo. (2), July 25, 2008.
9. ↑ Lenin quotes the article DI Pissarev's mistakes in immature thought . (See DI Pissarew, Werke, Vol. 3, 1956, pp. 147–149)
10. ↑ Simon Sebag Montefiore: Young Stalin. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, p. 303.
11. ^ "Plan" of an all-Russian political newspaper. In: VI Lenin: What to do? Cape. 5b.