On the Radical side the leaders were CHERNYSHEVSKY, DOBROLYUBOV and PISAREV. Chernyshevsky, who translated John Stuart Mill, and published a treatise on the æsthetic relations of art and reality, served a sentence of seven years' hard labour and of twenty years' exile. His criticism--socialist propaganda, and an attack on all metaphysics--does not belong to literature, but his novel _Shto dielat_--"What is to be done?"--had an immense influence on his generation. It deals with Nihilism. Dobrolyubov, who died when he was twenty-four, belonged to the same realistic school. His main theory was that Russian literature is dominated by Oblomov; that Chatsky, Pechorin, and Rudin are all Oblomovs. Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov followed Chernyshevsky in his realistic philosophy, in his rejection of metaphysics, in his theory that beauty is to be sought in life only, and that the sole duty of art is to help to illustrate life. Pisarev recognized that Turgenev's Bazarov was a picture of himself, and he was pleased with the portrait. Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov died young.
VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV (1853-1900), critic as well as poet, moral philosopher, and theologian, is one of the most interesting figures in Russian literature. What is most remarkable about him, and what makes him stand out, a radiant exception in Russian criticism, is his absolute independence. He belonged to no camp; he was a slave to no party cry; utterly unselfish, his sole aim was to seek after the truth for the sake of truth, and to proclaim it. In an age of positivism, he was a believing Christian, and the dream of his life was a union of the Eastern and Western Churches. He deals with this idea in a book which he wrote in French and published in Paris: _L'Église Russe et l'Église Universelle_. He admired the older Slavophiles, but he severely attacked the Nationalists, such as Katkov. His range of subjects was great, and his style was brilliant; like many great thinkers, he was far ahead of his time, and in his criticism of the _Intelligentsia_ anticipated some tendencies, which have become visible since the revolution of 1905. He reminds one at times of Mr. A. J. Balfour, and even of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, with whose "orthodoxy" he would have much sympathy; and he deals with questions such as Woman's Suffrage in a way which exactly fits the present day. He never became a Catholic, holding that the Eastern Church _qua_ Church had never been cut off from the West, and that only one definite schism had been condemned; but he believed in the necessity of a universal Church. He was the first intellectual Russian to point out to a generation which took atheism as a matter of course that they were possibly inferior instead of superior to religion. He believed in Russia; he had nothing against the Slavophile theory that Russia had a divine mission; only he wished to see that mission divinely performed. He believed in the East of Christ, and not in that of Xerxes. He died in 1900, before he had finished his _Magnum Opus_, a work on moral philosophy written on a religious basis. He preached self-effacement; pity towards one's fellow men; and reverence towards the supernatural. His whole work is a defence of moral principles, written with the soul of a poet, the knowledge of a scholar, and the brilliance of a dialectician. It is only lately that his books have gained the appreciation which they deserve; they are certainly more in harmony with the present generation than with that of the sixties and the seventies. His _Three Conversations_ has been translated into English. Vladimir Soloviev stands in a niche of his own, isolated from the crowd by his own originality, his brilliance, and his prematurity; he was _intempestivus_.