Tkachev Petr Nikitich
- writer. Genus. in 1844 in Pskov province, in a poor landowner family. Entered the Faculty of Law in St. Petersburg. university, but soon ended up in the Kronstadt Fortress for participating in student riots, where he spent several months. When the university was reopened, T., without enrolling as a student, passed the exam for an academic degree. Involved in one of the political cases (the so-called “Ballod case”), T. served several months in the Peter and Paul Fortress, first in the form of the arrest of a defendant, then by sentence of the Senate. T. began writing very early. His first article (“On the trial for crimes against the laws of the press”) was published in No. 6 of the magazine “Time” for 1862. Following this, it was published in “Time” and “Epoch” in 1862-64. several more articles by T. on various issues related to judicial reform. In 1863 and 1864, T. also wrote in P. D. Boborykin’s “Library for Reading”; Here, by the way, the first “statistical studies” of T. were placed (crime and punishment, poverty and charity). At the end of 1865, T. became friends with G. E. Blagosvetlov and began to write in “Russian Word”, and then in “Delo”, which replaced it. In the spring of 1869 he was arrested again and in July 1871 he was sentenced to St. Petersburg. by the judicial chamber to 1 year and 4 months in prison (in the so-called “Nechaevsky case”). After serving his sentence, T. was exiled to Velikiye Luki, from where he soon emigrated abroad. T.'s journal activity, interrupted by his arrest, resumed in 1872. He again wrote in Delo, but not under his own name, but under various pseudonyms (P. Nikitin, P. N. Nionov, P. N. Postny, P. Gr- Lee, P. Gracioli, Still the same). T. was a very prominent figure in the group of writers of the extreme left wing of Russian journalism. He had an undoubted and extraordinary literary talent; His articles are written in a lively and sometimes fascinating manner. Clarity and strict consistency of thought, turning into a certain straightforwardness, make T.’s articles especially valuable for familiarizing with the mental trends of that period of Russian social life, which included the heyday of his literary activity. T. sometimes did not finish his conclusions only for censorship reasons. Within the framework that was allowed by external conditions, he dotted everything and, no matter how paradoxical the positions he defended sometimes seemed, T. was brought up on the ideas of the “sixties” and remained faithful to them until the end of his life. He differed from his other comrades in the “Russian Word” and “Deed” in that he was never interested in natural science; his thought always revolved in the sphere of social issues. He wrote extensively on population statistics and economic statistics. The digital material he had was very poor, but T. knew how to use it. Back in the 70s. he noticed the relationship between the growth of the peasant population and the size of the land allotment, which was subsequently firmly substantiated by P. P. Semenov (in his introduction to “Statistics of Land Ownership in Russia”). The majority of T.'s articles belong to the field of literary criticism; in addition, for several years he headed the “New Books” department in “Delo” (and earlier “Bibliographic List” in “Russian Word”). T.'s critical and bibliographic articles are purely journalistic in nature; it is a passionate preaching of well-known social ideals, a call to work for the implementation of these ideals. In his sociological views, T. was an extreme and consistent “economic materialist.” Almost for the first time in Russian journalism, the name of Marx appears in his articles. Back in 1865, in the “Russian Word” (“Bibliographic leaflet”, No. 12), T. wrote: “All legal and political phenomena are represented as nothing more than direct legal consequences of the phenomena of economic life; this legal and political life is, so to speak , a mirror in which the economic life of the people is reflected... Back in 1859, the famous German exile Karl Marx formulated this view in the most precise and definite way.” To practical activity, in the name of the ideal of “social equality” [“Currently, all people have equal rights, but not everyone is equal, that is, not everyone is gifted with the same opportunity to bring their interests into balance - hence the struggle and anarchy... Put everyone in the same conditions in relation to development and material support, and you will give everyone real actual equality, and not the imaginary, fictitious one which was invented by scholastic lawyers with the deliberate goal of fooling the ignorant and deceiving simpletons" ("Russian Word", 1865, No. XI, II department ., 36-7).], T. called “people of the future.” He was not an economic fatalist. Achieving a social ideal, or at least a radical change for the better in the economic system of society, should have been, in his views, the task of conscious social activity. “People of the future” in T.’s constructions occupied the same place as “thinking realists” in T. Before the idea of the common good, which should serve as a guiding principle for the behavior of people of the future, all the provisions of abstract morality and justice, all the requirements of the moral code adopted by the bourgeois crowd recede into the background. “Moral rules are established for the benefit of society, and therefore compliance with them is obligatory for everyone. But a moral rule, like everything in life, is relative in nature, and its importance is determined by the importance of the interest for which it was created... Not all moral rules are equal between themselves,” and, moreover, “not only different rules can be different in their importance, but even the importance of the same rule, in different cases of its application, can vary indefinitely.” When confronted with moral rules of unequal importance and social utility, one should not hesitate to give preference to the more important over the less important. This choice should be given to everyone; every person must be recognized “the right to treat the prescriptions of the moral law, in each particular case of its application, not dogmatically but critically”; otherwise, “our morality will not differ in any way from the morality of the Pharisees, who rebelled against the Teacher because on the Sabbath day he was engaged in healing the sick and teaching the people” (“Delo”, 1868, No. 3, “People of the future and heroes of the philistinism”). T. developed his political views in several brochures published by him abroad, and in the magazine "Nabat", published under his editorship in Geneva in 1875-76. T. sharply diverged from the then dominant trends in emigrant literature, the main exponents of which were and. He was a representative of the so-called. "Jacobin" tendencies, opposite to both anarchism and the "Forward" direction. In the last years of his life, T. wrote little. In 1883 he became mentally ill and died in 1885 in Paris, at the age of 41. Articles by T., more characterizing his literary physiognomy: “Business”, 1867 - “Productive forces of Russia. Statistical essays” (1867, No. 2, 3, 4); "New books" (nos. 7, 8, 9, 11, 12); “German idealists and philistines” (about Prince Scherr’s “Deutsche Cultur und Sittengeschichte”, Nos. 10, 11, 12). 1868 - “People of the Future and Heroes of the Philistinism” (Nos. 4 and 5); “Growing forces” (about the novels by V. A. Sleptsov, Marko Vovchka, M. V. Avdeev - Nos. 9 and 10); “Broken Illusions” (about Reshetnikov’s novels - Nos. 11, 12). 1869 - “About Daul’s book “Women’s Labor” and my article “Women’s Question” (No. 2). 1872 - “Unthought-out thoughts” (about the works of N. Uspensky, No. 1); “Unfinished people” (about Kushchevsky’s novel “Nikolai Negorev", Nos. 2-3); "Statistical notes on the theory of progress" (No. 3); "Saved and those being saved" (about Boborykin's novel: "Solid Virtues", No. 10); "Untinted Antiquity" (about the novel " Three countries of the world" by Nekrasov and Stanitsky and about the stories of Turgenev, No. 11-12). 1873 - “Statistical Essays on Russia” (Nos. 4, 5, 7, 10); “Tendentious novel” [about “Collected Works” by A. Mikhailov (Scheller), Nos. 2, 6, 7]; “Sick People” (about “Demons”, Nos. 3, 4); "Prison and its principles" (Nos. 6, 8). 1875 - “Empirical fiction writers and metaphysical fiction writers” (about the works of Kushchevsky, Gl. Uspensky, Boborykin, S. Smirnova, No. 3, 5, 7); “The role of thought in history” (regarding “The Experience of the History of Thought”, Nos. 9, 12). 1876 - “Literary potpourri” (about the novels: “Two Worlds” by Aleeva, “In the Wilderness” by M. Vovchka, “Teenager” by Dostoevsky and “Strength of Character” by S. I. Smirnova, Nos. 4, 5, 6); "French society at the end of the 18th century." (regarding Taine’s book, Nos. 3, 5, 7); “Will a small loan help us” (No. 12). 1877 - “The Idealist of Philistinism” (about the work of Avdeev, No. 1); “Balanced Souls” (about Turgenev’s novel “Nov”, No. 2-4); “On the benefits of philosophy” (regarding op. and, No. 5); "Edgar Quinet, critical-biographical essay" (No. 6-7). 1878 - “Harmless satire” (about Shchedrin’s book: “In an environment of confidence and accuracy,” No. 1); "Salon Art" (about Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina", No. 2 and 4); “Treasuries of wisdom of Russian philosophers” (regarding “Letters on Scientific Philosophy”, No. 10, 11). 1879 - “A man in the salons of modern fiction” [about the works. Ivanov (Uspensky), Zlatovratsky, Vologdin (Zasodimsky) and A. Potekhin, No. 3, 6, 7, 8, 9]; "Optimism in Science. Dedicated to Voln. Economics. Society" (No. 6); “The only Russian sociologist” (about Sociology, No. 12). 1880 - “The utilitarian principle in moral philosophy” (No. 1); “Rotten Roots” (about the work of V. Krestovsky pseudonym, No. 2, 3, 7, 8).
Tkachev Petr Nikitich
Russian revolutionary, ideologist of the Jacobin trend in populism, literary critic and publicist. From the small landed nobility. He graduated as an external student from the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University (1868), began his literary career in 1862. From 1865 he collaborated in the magazines “Russian Word” and “Delo” under the pseudonyms P. Nikitin, P. Nionov, All the same, etc. For revolutionary propaganda among students was imprisoned and constantly under police surveillance. During the student unrest in St. Petersburg in 1868-69, together with S. G. Nechaev, he led the radical minority. Arrested in 1869, tried in the “Nechaevite trial,” and after serving his prison sentence, he was deported to his homeland. In 1873 he fled abroad. In emigration he collaborated with the magazine “Forward!”, joined a group of Polish-Russian emigrants (see Russian Jacobins), after the break with he began publishing the magazine “Nabat” (1875-81), together with K. M. Tursky he was one of the founders "Society for People's Liberation" (1877), whose activities in Russia were insignificant. In the mid-1870s. became close to the French Blanquists, collaborated on their newspaper “Ni dieu, ni maìtre” (“Neither God, nor Master”). At the end of 1882 he became seriously ill and spent his last years in a psychiatric hospital.
T.'s views were formed under the influence of the democratic and socialist ideology of the 50-60s. 19th century T. rejected the idea of “originality” of the Russian social system and argued that the post-reform development of the country was moving towards capitalism. He believed that the victory of capitalism could be prevented only by replacing the bourgeois economic principle with a socialist one. Like all populists, T. pinned his hope for the socialist future of Russia on the peasantry, communist “by instinct, by tradition,” imbued with “the principles of communal ownership.” But, unlike other populists, T. believed that the peasantry, due to its passivity and darkness, is unable to independently carry out a social revolution, and the community can become a “cell of socialism” only after the existing state and social system is destroyed. In contrast to the apoliticalism that dominated the revolutionary movement, T. developed the idea of political revolution as the first step towards a social revolution. Following P. G. Zaichnevsky, he believed that the creation of a secret, centralized and conspiratorial revolutionary organization was the most important guarantee of the success of the political revolution. The revolution, according to T., boiled down to the seizure of power and the establishment of a dictatorship of a “revolutionary minority,” opening the way for “revolutionary organizing activity,” which, in contrast to “revolutionary destructive activity,” is carried out exclusively by persuasion. The preaching of political struggle, the demand for the organization of revolutionary forces, and the recognition of the need for a revolutionary dictatorship distinguished the concept of T. from the ideas of and.
T. called his philosophical views “realism,” meaning by this “... a strictly real, rationally scientific, and therefore highly human worldview” (Selected works on socio-political topics, vol. 4, 1933, p. 27). Acting as an opponent of idealism, T. identified it in epistemological terms with “metaphysics,” and in social terms with an ideological apology for the existing system. T. made the value of any theory dependent on its relationship to social issues. Under the influence of the works and partly of K. Marx, T. adopted certain elements of the materialist understanding of history, recognized the “economic factor” as the most important lever of social development, and viewed the historical process from the point of view of the struggle between the economic interests of individual classes. Guided by this principle, T. criticized the subjective method in sociology and their theories of social progress. However, on the question of the role of the individual in history, T. was inclined to subjectivism. A qualitative feature of historical reality, according to T., is that it does not exist outside and apart from the activities of people. The individual appears in history as an active creative force, and since the limits of the possible in history are mobile, then individuals, the “active minority,” can and should contribute “... to the process of development of social life a lot of things that are not only not determined, but sometimes even decisively contradicts both previous historical prerequisites and the given conditions of society...” (Selected works on socio-political topics, vol. 3, 1933, p. 193). Guided by this position, T. created his own scheme of the historical process, according to which the source of progress is the will of the “active minority.” This concept became the philosophical basis for T.'s theory of revolution.
In the field of literary criticism, T. was a follower, and. Continuing the development of the theory of “real criticism,” T. demanded that a work of art be highly ideological and socially significant. T. often ignored the aesthetic merits of a work of art, erroneously assessed a number of modern literary works, accused I. S. Turgenev of distorting the picture of people’s life, rejected the satire of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, and called him a “salon writer.”
The populist revolutionaries of the late 1860s and early 1870s, who rejected political revolution in the name of social revolution, rejected the doctrine of T. Only in the late 1870s. The logic of the historical process led the Narodnaya Volya members to direct political action against the autocracy. “The attempt to seize power, prepared by Tkachev’s sermon and carried out through “terrifying and truly terrifying terror, was majestic...” wrote (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 6, p. 173). Highly appreciating the merits of T. and the Narodnaya Volya, he criticized the conspiratorial tactics of Blanquism (see ibid., vol. 13, p. 76). The defeat of Narodnaya Volya essentially meant the defeat of the theory of T. and at the same time the collapse of the Jacobin (Blanquist) trend in the Russian revolutionary movement.
Soch.: Soch., vol. 1-2, M., 1975-76; Favorite soch., vol. 1-6, M., 1932-37; Favorite lit.-critical articles, M. - L., 1928.
Lit.: Engels F., Emigrant literature, Marx K. and Engels F., Works, 2nd ed., vol. 18, pp. 518-48; ., What to do?, Full. collection cit., 5th ed., vol. 6, pp. 173-74; , Our disagreements, Fav. Philosopher proizv., vol. 1, M., 1956; Kozmin B.P., P.N. Tkachev and the revolutionary movement of the 1860s, M., 1922; his, From the history of revolutionary thought in Russia, M., 1961; him, Literature and History, M., 1969; Reuel A.L., Russian economic thought of the 60-70s. XIX century and Marxism, M., 1956; Sedov M.G., Some problems in the history of Blanquism in Russia. [Revolutionary doctrine of P. N. Tkachev], “Questions of History”, 1971, No. 10; P. N. Tkachev, in the book: History of Russian literature of the 19th century. Bibliographic index, M. - L., 1962, p. 675-76; P. N. Tkachev, in the book: Populism in the works of Soviet researchers for 1953-70. Literature Index, M., 1971, p. 39-41; P. N. Tkachev, in the book: History of Russian philosophy. Index of literature published in the USSR in Russian for 1917-1967, part 3, M., 1975, p. 732-35.
B. M. Shakhmatov.
Great Soviet Encyclopedia. - M.: Soviet Encyclopedia. 1969-1978.
Populism gave rise to several organizations that tried in different ways to approach the problem of connecting the “socialist consciousness” of the Russian people with the revolutionary explosion in Russia.
Pyotr Tkachev was a representative of the extreme wing of populism, which broke with the liberalism of Herzen and the democratism of Lavrov.
Thus, Tkachev’s theory of the “revolutionary minority” boils down to the use of popular discontent to seize power by this minority. In the very act of seizing power, Tkachev saw the main meaning of revolution. The fact that, having seized power, the “revolutionary minority” destroys all opponents, and then, using the “power and authority of power,” introduces socialism, is, of course, an open recognition of the need for violence to introduce socialism, especially since Tkachev openly considered all other paths to be utopia .
Not only turning the seizure of state power into the main goal of the revolution, but also considering power to be the main value in itself, Tkachev subordinated everything else to this value, including internal relationships in the “revolutionary minority.”
Petr Tkachev
The influence of Tkachev's ideas on Lenin
Lenin in his main work “What to do? "(its name not without reason echoes the main work of Chernyshevsky: Lenin, according to N. Valentinov, chose him quite consciously) sets the task of creating a disciplined, closed party of a “revolutionary minority, a party that has put itself in a state of siege in a fist.” In order to justify the creation of such a party from the point of view of Marxism, to connect his party-organizational doctrine with the doctrine of Marx, Lenin ascribes, and then assigns to his small group of professional revolutionaries, the name “advanced detachment of the proletariat,” “avant-garde of the proletariat.”
This statement, never verified by any democratic votes, is the new element that Lenin found necessary to connect the Marxist doctrine with the left-populist (Tkachev) organizational principles.
We will not cite here numerous quotes from Lenin’s pamphlet “What is to be done?”, nor endless evidence characterizing the Bolshevik group as having adopted the organizational principles of a “state of siege in a fist.”
As just one of many examples, let us cite the impressions of the famous Bolshevik Olminsky in a collision with the Leninist group already in the early stages of his work in RSDLP. Soon after II Party Congress, Olminsky, as he writes, “... was imbued with a strong prejudice against the majority for its bureaucracy, Bonapartism and the practice of a state of siege.” Subsequently reconciled with Bolshevism Olminsky, in the first phase of the struggle between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, declared that he could not “subject himself to the tyranny of a state of siege, submit to the demand for “blind obedience,” “a narrow interpretation of party discipline,” and the elevation of the principle of “not reasoning” to a guiding principle; recognize the highest institutions [of the party] as having “the power to carry out their will by purely mechanical means...”.
Thus, Lenin tried, from the time of the split with Mensheviks in 1903 to create a cohesive group from the party “true revolutionism, which would consist in seizing state power.”
The “revolutionary dictatorship” that the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries insisted on came from the same sources, from the same extreme wing of populism from which Lenin drew his passionate will for violent revolution even when a democratic legal system was established in the country. That is why, when defending this position, Lenin did not hesitate to state in print that out of 10 thousand people who read or heard about the “withering away of the state, 9,990 do not know or do not remember what Engels directed his conclusions...not only against anarchists. And of the remaining ten people, probably nine do not know what a “free people’s state” is and why attacking this slogan is an attack on opportunists.” A few lines further, Lenin admits that the slogan of German Social Democracy is “a free people's state” and was the slogan of a democratic republic. All the self-confident statements that among the 9999 (all except Lenin!) “do not know or do not remember” the works of Marx and Engels, Lenin needed to justify the admissibility of a violent seizure of power when the establishment of the most democratic republic in Russia became historical fact.
Comes from a poor landowner family. He entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University, but was soon involved in one of the political cases (the so-called “Ballod case”; for participation in student riots) and served several months in the Peter and Paul Fortress, first in the form of the arrest of the defendant, then by the verdict of the Senate. When the university was reopened, Tkachev, without enrolling as a student, passed the exam for an academic degree (1868).
Tkachev began writing very early. His first article (“On the trial for crimes against the laws of the press”) was published in No. 6 of the magazine “Time” for 1862. Following this, several more articles by Tkachev on various issues related to judicial reform were published in “Time” and “Epoch” in 1862-64. In 1863 and 1864, Tkachev also wrote in P. D. Boborykin’s “Library for Reading”; Tkachev’s first “statistical studies” were placed here (crime and punishment, poverty and charity). At the end of 1865, Tkachev became friends with G.E. Blagosvetlov and began writing in the Russian Word, and then in the Delo that replaced it. For revolutionary propaganda among students, he was imprisoned and was constantly under police surveillance. During the student unrest in St. Petersburg in 1868-69, together with S. G. Nechaev, he led the radical minority. In the spring of 1869, he was arrested again and in July 1871 he was sentenced by the St. Petersburg Judicial Chamber to 1 year and 4 months in prison. After serving his sentence, Tkachev was exiled to his homeland, Velikiye Luki, from where he soon emigrated abroad.
Life in exile
Tkachev's journal activities, interrupted by his arrest, resumed in 1872. He again wrote in Delo, but not under his own name, but under different pseudonyms (P. Nikitin, P. N. Nionov, P. N. Postny, P. Gr-li, P. Grachioli, Still the same). In emigration, he collaborated with the magazine “Forward!”, joined a group of Polish-Russian emigrants, after a break with P. L. Lavrov, he began publishing the magazine “Nabat” (1875-81), together with K. M. Tursky was one of the creators of “ Society for People's Liberation" (1877), whose activities in Russia were insignificant. In the mid-1870s. became close to the French Blanquists, collaborated on their newspaper “Ni dieu, ni maitre” (“Neither God, nor Master”). Tkachev developed his political views in several brochures published by him abroad, and in the magazine “Nabat”, published under his editorship in Geneva in 1875-76. Tkachev sharply diverged from the then dominant trends in emigrant literature, the main exponents of which were P. L. Lavrov and M. A. Bakunin. He was a representative of the so-called “Jacobin” tendencies, opposite to both the anarchism of Bakunin and the direction of Lavrovsky’s “Forward!” In the last years of his life, Tkachev wrote little. At the end of 1882, he became seriously ill and spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. Died in 1886 in Paris, 41 years old.
Literary activity
Tkachev was a very prominent figure in the group of writers on the extreme left wing of Russian journalism. In literature, he followed the ideas of the “sixties” and remained faithful to them until the end of his life. He differed from his other comrades in the “Russian Word” and “Delo” in that he was never interested in natural science; his thought always revolved in the sphere of social issues. He wrote extensively on population statistics and economic statistics. The digital material he had was very poor, but Tkachev knew how to use it. Back in the 1870s, he noticed the relationship between the growth of the peasant population and the size of the land allotment, which was subsequently firmly substantiated by P. P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky (in his introduction to “Statistics of Land Ownership in Russia”). The majority of Tkachev's articles relate to the field of literary criticism; in addition, for several years he led the “New Books” department in “Delo” (and previously the “Bibliographic List” in “Russian Word”). Tkachev's critical and bibliographic articles are purely journalistic in nature; it is a passionate preaching of well-known social ideals, a call to work for the implementation of these ideals. In his sociological views, Tkachev was an extreme and consistent “economic materialist.” Almost for the first time in Russian journalism, the name of Karl Marx appears in his articles. Back in 1865, in “Russian Word” (“Bibliographic Sheet”, No. 12), Tkachev wrote:
Tkachev called “people of the future” to practical activity, in the name of the ideal of “social equality”:
He was an ethical fatalist. .Achieving a social ideal, or at least a radical change for the better in the economic system of society, should have been, in his views, the task of conscious social activity. “People of the future” in Tkachev’s constructions occupied the same place as “thinking realists” in D.I. Pisarev. Before the idea of the common good, which should serve as a guiding principle for the behavior of people of the future, all the provisions of abstract morality and justice, all the requirements of the moral code adopted by the bourgeois crowd recede into the background. “Moral rules are established for the benefit of the community, and therefore observance of them is obligatory for everyone. But a moral rule, like everything in life, is relative in nature, and its importance is determined by the importance of the interest for which it was created... Not all moral rules are equal to each other,” and, moreover, “not only different rules can be different in their importance, but even the importance of one and the same rule, in different cases of its application, can vary indefinitely.” When confronted with moral rules of unequal importance and social utility, one should not hesitate to give preference to the more important over the less important. This choice should be given to everyone; every person must be recognized “the right to treat the prescriptions of the moral law, in each particular case of its application, not dogmatically but critically”; otherwise, “our morality will not differ in any way from the morality of the Pharisees, who rebelled against the Teacher because on the Sabbath day he was engaged in healing the sick and teaching the people” (People of the Future and Heroes of the Philistinism // Business. - 1868. - No. 3.).
Views of P. N. Tkachev
Tkachev's views were formed under the influence of the democratic and socialist ideology of the 50-60s of the 19th century. Tkachev rejected the idea of “originality” of the Russian social system and argued that the post-reform development of the country was moving towards capitalism. He believed that the victory of capitalism could be prevented only by replacing the bourgeois economic principle with a socialist one. Like all populists, Tkachev pinned his hope for the socialist future of Russia on the peasantry, communist “by instinct, by tradition,” imbued with “the principles of communal ownership.” But, unlike other populists, Tkachev believed that the peasantry, due to its passivity and darkness, was unable to independently carry out a social revolution, and the community could become a “cell of socialism” only after the existing state and social system was destroyed. In contrast to the apoliticalism that dominated the revolutionary movement, Tkachev developed the idea of political revolution as the first step towards a social revolution. Following P. G. Zaichnevsky, he believed that the creation of a secret, centralized and conspiratorial revolutionary organization was the most important guarantee of the success of the political revolution. The revolution, according to Tkachev, boiled down to the seizure of power and the establishment of a dictatorship of a “revolutionary minority”, opening the way for “revolutionary organizing activity”, which, unlike “revolutionary destructive activity”, is carried out exclusively by persuasion. The preaching of political struggle, the demand for the organization of revolutionary forces, and the recognition of the need for a revolutionary dictatorship distinguished Tkachev’s concept from the ideas of M. A. Bakunin and P. L. Lavrov.
Tkachev called his philosophical views “realism”, meaning by this “... a strictly real, rationally scientific, and therefore highly human worldview” (Selected works on socio-political topics. T. 4. - M., 1933. - P. 27). Speaking as an opponent of idealism, Tkachev identified it in epistemological terms with “metaphysics”, and in social terms with an ideological apology for the existing system. Tkachev made the value of any theory dependent on its relationship to social issues. Under the influence of the works of N. G. Chernyshevsky and partly K. Marx, Tkachev assimilated certain elements of the materialist understanding of history, recognized the “economic factor” as the most important lever of social development and viewed the historical process from the point of view of the struggle between the economic interests of individual classes. Guided by this principle, Tkachev criticized the subjective method in the sociology of P. L. Lavrov and N. K. Mikhailovsky, their theories of social progress. However, on the question of the role of the individual in history, Tkachev tended to be subjectivist. A qualitative feature of historical reality, according to Tkachev, is that it does not exist outside and apart from the activities of people. The individual appears in history as an active creative force, and since the limits of the possible in history are mobile, then individuals, the “active minority,” can and should bring “... into the process of development of social life a lot of things that are not only not determined, but sometimes even decisively contradict as previous historical prerequisites, as well as the given conditions of society...” (Selected works on socio-political topics. T. 3. - M., 1933. - P. 193). Guided by this position, Tkachev created his own scheme of the historical process, according to which the source of progress is the will of the “active minority.” This concept became the philosophical basis for Tkachev’s theory of revolution.
In the field of literary criticism, Tkachev was a follower of N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. A. Dobrolyubov and D. I. Pisarev. Continuing the development of the theory of “real criticism,” Tkachev demanded that a work of art be highly ideological and socially significant. Tkachev often ignored the aesthetic merits of a work of art, erroneously assessed a number of modern literary works, accused I. S. Turgenev of distorting the picture of people’s life, rejected the satire of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, and called L. N. Tolstoy a “salon writer.”
The populist revolutionaries of the late 1860s and early 1870s, who rejected political revolution in the name of social revolution, rejected Tkachev’s doctrine. Only at the end of the 1870s did the logic of the historical process lead the Narodnaya Volya to a direct political action against the autocracy.
Bibliography
Main article - Bibliography of P. N. Tkachev
Essays
- Tkachev, P. N. Selected works: in 6 volumes - M., 1932-37. - 6 t.
- Tkachev, P. N. Selected literary critical articles. - M.; L., 1928.
- Tkachev, P. N. Treasures of wisdom of Russian philosophers / Intro. article, compilation, preparation of text and notes by B. M. Shakhmatov. - M., Pravda, 1990. - (From the history of Russian philosophical thought. Appendix to the journal “Questions of Philosophy”).
Literature about P. N. Tkachev
- Plekhanov, G.V. Our disagreements // Selected philosophical works. T. 1. - M., 1956.
- Kozmin, B.P.P.N. Tkachev and the revolutionary movement of the 1860s. - M., 1922.
- Kozmin, B.P. From the history of revolutionary thought in Russia. - M., 1961.
- Kozmin, B. P. Literature and history. - M., 1969.
- Reuel, A. L. Russian economic thought of the 60-70s. XIX century and Marxism. - M., 1956.
- Shakhmatov, B. M. P. N. Tkachev. Sketches for a creative portrait. - M.: Mysl, 1981 (1980?).
- Shakhmatov, B. M. Russian Gracchus - French “Alarm” (New about P. N. Tkachev) // Torch. 1989. - M., 1989.
- Sedov, M. G. Some problems in the history of Blanquism in Russia. [Revolutionary doctrine of P. N. Tkachev] // Questions of history. - 1971. - No. 10.
- Rudnitskaya, E. L. Russian Blanquism. Peter Tkachev. - M., 1992.
- P. N. Tkachev // History of Russian literature of the 19th century. Bibliographic index. - M.; L., 1962. - P. 675-76.
- P. N. Tkachev // Populism in the works of Soviet researchers for 1953-70. Literature index. - M., 1971. - P. 39-41.
- P. N. Tkachev // History of Russian philosophy. Index of literature published in the USSR in Russian for 1917-1967. Part 3. - M., 1975. - P. 732-35.
Pyotr Nikitich Tkachev (July 11, 1844, the village of Sivtsovo, Velikolutsk district, Pskov province - January 4, 1886, Paris) - Russian literary critic and publicist, ideologist of the Jacobin trend in populism.
Comes from a poor landowner family. He entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University, but was soon involved in one of the political cases (the so-called “Ballod case”; for participation in student riots) and served several months in the Peter and Paul Fortress, first in the form of the arrest of the defendant, then by the verdict of the Senate. When the university was reopened, Tkachev, without enrolling as a student, passed the exam for an academic degree (1868).
Tkachev began writing very early. His first article (“On the trial for crimes against the laws of the press”) was published in No. 6 of the magazine “Time” for 1862. Following this, several more articles by Tkachev on various issues related to judicial reform were published in “Time” and “Epoch” in 1862-64. In 1863 and 1864, Tkachev also wrote in P. D. Boborykin’s “Library for Reading”; Tkachev’s first “statistical studies” were placed here (crime and punishment, poverty and charity). At the end of 1865, Tkachev became friends with G.E. Blagosvetlov and began writing in the Russian Word, and then in the Delo that replaced it. For revolutionary propaganda among students, he was imprisoned and was constantly under police surveillance. During the student unrest in St. Petersburg in 1868-69, together with S. G. Nechaev, he led the radical minority. In the spring of 1869, he was arrested again and in July 1871 he was sentenced by the St. Petersburg Judicial Chamber to 1 year and 4 months in prison. After serving his sentence, Tkachev was exiled to his homeland, Velikiye Luki, from where he soon emigrated abroad.
Tkachev's journal activities, interrupted by his arrest, resumed in 1872. He again wrote in Delo, but not under his own name, but under different pseudonyms (P. Nikitin, P. N. Nionov, P. N. Postny, P. Gr-li, P. Grachioli, Still the same). In emigration, he collaborated with the magazine “Forward!”, joined a group of Polish-Russian emigrants, after a break with P. L. Lavrov, he began publishing the magazine “Nabat” (1875-81), together with K. M. Tursky was one of the creators of “ Society for People's Liberation" (1877), whose activities in Russia were insignificant. In the mid-1870s. became close to the French Blanquists, collaborated on their newspaper “Ni dieu, ni maitre” (“Neither God, nor Master”). Tkachev developed his political views in several brochures published by him abroad, and in the magazine “Nabat”, published under his editorship in Geneva in 1875-76. Tkachev sharply diverged from the then dominant trends in emigrant literature, the main exponents of which were P. L. Lavrov and M. A. Bakunin. He was a representative of the so-called “Jacobin” tendencies, opposite to both Bakunin’s anarchism and the direction of Lavrov’s “Forward!” In the last years of his life, Tkachev wrote little. At the end of 1882, he became seriously ill and spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. He died in 1886 in Paris, 41 years old.
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(1844-07-11 )
Beginning of life
Comes from a poor landowner family. He entered the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University, but was soon involved in one of the political cases (the so-called “Ballod case”; for participation in student riots) and served several months in the Peter and Paul Fortress, first in the form of the arrest of a defendant, then by sentence of the Senate. When the university was reopened, Tkachev, without enrolling as a student, passed the exam for an academic degree (1868).
Tkachev began writing very early. His first article (“On the trial for crimes against the laws of the press”) was published in No. 6 of the magazine “Time” for 1862. Following this, several more articles by Tkachev on various issues related to judicial reform were published in “Time” and “Epoch” in 1862-64. In 1863 and 1864 he also performed in the “Library for Reading” by P. D. Boborykin; Tkachev’s first “statistical studies” were placed here (crime and punishment, poverty and charity). At the end of 1865, he became friends with G. E. Blagosvetlov and began writing in the “Russian Word”, and then in the “Delo” that replaced it. For revolutionary propaganda among students, he was imprisoned and was constantly under police surveillance. During the student unrest in St. Petersburg in 1868-69, together with S. G. Nechaev, he led the radical minority. In the spring of 1869 he was arrested again and in July 1871 he was sentenced by the St. Petersburg Judicial Chamber to 1 year and 4 months in prison. After serving his sentence, he was deported to his homeland, Velikie Luki, from where he soon emigrated.
Life in exile
Tkachev’s journal activity, interrupted by his arrest, resumed in 1872. He again wrote in Delo, under different pseudonyms ( P. Nikitin, P. N. Nionov, P. N. Postny, P. Gr-li, P. Gracioli, All the same). While in exile, he collaborated with the magazine “Forward! ", joined a group of Polish-Russian emigrants, after a break with P. L. Lavrov, he began publishing the magazine "Alarm" (1875-81) in Geneva; together with K. M. Tursky, he was one of the founders of the "People's Liberation Society" (1877 ), whose activities in Russia were insignificant. In the mid-1870s. became close to the French Blanquists, collaborated in their newspaper “Ni dieu, ni maitre” (“Neither God, nor Master”). He expressed his political views in the magazine “Nabat”, published under his editorship in 1875-76, as well as in several brochures published abroad. Tkachev sharply disagreed with the trends that were then dominant in emigrant literature, the main exponents of which were P. L. Lavrov and M. A. Bakunin. He was a representative of the so-called “Jacobin” tendencies, opposite to both the anarchism of Bakunin and the direction of Lavrovsky’s “Forward!” In recent years I have written little. At the end of 1882 he became seriously ill and spent the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital. He died in 1886 in Paris, 41 years old...
Literary activity
Tkachev was a very prominent figure in the group of writers on the extreme left wing of Russian journalism. In literature, he followed the ideas of the “sixties” and remained faithful to them until the end of his life. He differed from his other comrades in the “Russian Word” and “Delo” in that he was never interested in natural science; his thought always revolved in the sphere of social issues. He wrote extensively on population statistics and economic statistics. The digital material he had was very poor, but Tkachev knew how to use it. Back in the 1870s, he noticed the relationship between the growth of the peasant population and the size of land allotment, which was subsequently firmly substantiated by P. P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky (in his introduction to “Statistics of Land Ownership in Russia”). The majority of Tkachev's articles relate to the field of literary criticism; in addition, for several years he led the “New Books” department in “Delo” (and previously the “Bibliographic List” in “Russian Word”). Tkachev's critical and bibliographic articles are purely journalistic in nature; it is a passionate preaching of well-known social ideals, a call to work for the implementation of these ideals. In his sociological views, Tkachev was an extreme and consistent “economic materialist.” Almost for the first time in Russian journalism, the name of Karl Marx appears in his articles. Back in 1865, in “Russian Word” (“Bibliographic Sheet”, No. 12), Tkachev wrote:
“All legal and political phenomena are represented as nothing more than direct legal consequences of the phenomena of economic life; this legal and political life is, so to speak, a mirror in which the economic life of the people is reflected... Back in 1859, the famous German exile Karl Marx formulated this view in the most precise and definite way.”
Tkachev called “people of the future” to practical activity, in the name of the ideal of “social equality”:
Currently, all people have equal rights, but not everyone is equal, that is, not everyone is endowed with the same opportunity to bring their interests into balance - hence struggle and anarchy... Put everyone in the same conditions in relation to development and material security, and you will give everyone real actual equality , and not the imaginary, fictitious one that was invented by scholastic lawyers with the deliberate goal of fooling the ignorant and deceiving simpletons.
Russian word. - 1865. - No. XI, II department. - pp. 36-37
He was an ethical fatalist. Achieving a social ideal, or at least a radical change for the better in the economic system of society, should have been, in his views, the task of conscious social activity. “People of the future” in Tkachev’s constructions occupied the same place as “thinking realists” in D.I. Pisarev. Before the idea of the common good, which should serve as a guiding principle for the behavior of people of the future, all the provisions of abstract morality and justice, all the requirements of the moral code adopted by the bourgeois crowd recede into the background. “Moral rules are established for the benefit of the community, and therefore observance of them is obligatory for everyone. But a moral rule, like everything in life, is relative in nature, and its importance is determined by the importance of the interest for which it was created... Not all moral rules are equal to each other,” and, moreover, “not only different rules can be different in their importance, but even the importance of one and the same rule, in different cases of its application, can vary indefinitely.” When confronted with moral rules of unequal importance and social utility, one should not hesitate to give preference to the more important over the less important. This choice should be given to everyone; every person must be recognized “the right to treat the prescriptions of the moral law, in each particular case of its application, not dogmatically but critically”; otherwise, “our morality will not differ in any way from the morality of the Pharisees, who rebelled against the Teacher because on the Sabbath day he was engaged in healing the sick and teaching the people” (People of the Future and Heroes of the Philistinism // Business. - 1868. - No. 3.).
Views of P. N. Tkachev
Tkachev's views were formed under the influence of the democratic and socialist ideology of the 50-60s of the 19th century. Tkachev rejected the idea of “originality” of the Russian social system and argued that the post-reform development of the country was moving towards capitalism. He believed that the victory of capitalism could be prevented only by replacing the bourgeois economic principle with a socialist one. Like all populists, Tkachev pinned his hope for the socialist future of Russia on the peasantry, communist “by instinct, by tradition,” imbued with “the principles of communal ownership.” But, unlike other populists, Tkachev believed that the peasantry, due to its passivity and darkness, was unable to independently carry out a social revolution, and the community could become a “cell of socialism” only after the existing state and social system was destroyed. In contrast to the apoliticalism that dominated the revolutionary movement, Tkachev developed the idea of political revolution as the first step towards a social revolution. Following P. G. Zaichnevsky, he believed that the creation of a secret, centralized and conspiratorial revolutionary organization was the most important guarantee of the success of the political revolution. The revolution, according to Tkachev, boiled down to the seizure of power and the establishment of a dictatorship of a “revolutionary minority”, opening the way for “revolutionary organizing activity”, which, unlike “revolutionary destructive activity”, is carried out exclusively by persuasion. The preaching of political struggle, the demand for the organization of revolutionary forces, and the recognition of the need for a revolutionary dictatorship distinguished Tkachev’s concept from the ideas of M. A. Bakunin and P. L. Lavrov.
Tkachev called his philosophical views “realism”, meaning by this “... a strictly real, rationally scientific, and therefore highly human worldview” (Selected works on socio-political topics. - M., 1933. - T. 4. - P. 27). Speaking as an opponent of idealism, Tkachev identified it in epistemological terms with “metaphysics”, and in social terms with an ideological apology for the existing system. Tkachev made the value of any theory dependent on its relationship to social issues. Under the influence of the works of N. G. Chernyshevsky and partly K. Marx, Tkachev assimilated certain elements of the materialist understanding of history, recognized the “economic factor” as the most important lever of social development and viewed the historical process from the point of view of the struggle between the economic interests of individual classes. Guided by this principle, Tkachev criticized the subjective method in the sociology of P. L. Lavrov and N. K. Mikhailovsky, their theories of social progress. However, on the question of the role of the individual in history, Tkachev tended to be subjectivist. A qualitative feature of historical reality, according to Tkachev, is that it does not exist outside and apart from the activities of people. The individual appears in history as an active creative force, and since the limits of the possible in history are mobile, then individuals, the “active minority,” can and should bring “... into the process of development of social life a lot of things that are not only not determined, but sometimes even decisively contradict as previous historical prerequisites, as well as the given conditions of society...” (Selected essays on socio-political topics. - M., 1933. - T. 3. - P. 193). Guided by this position, Tkachev created his own scheme of the historical process, according to which the source of progress is the will of the “active minority.” This concept became the philosophical basis for Tkachev’s theory of revolution.
In the field of literary criticism, Tkachev was a follower of N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. A. Dobrolyubov and D. I. Pisarev. Continuing the development of the theory of “real criticism,” Tkachev demanded that a work of art be highly ideological and socially significant. Tkachev often ignored the aesthetic merits of a work of art, erroneously assessed a number of modern literary works, accused I. S. Turgenev of distorting the picture of people’s life, rejected the satire of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, and called L. N. Tolstoy a “salon writer.”
The populist revolutionaries of the late 1860s and early 1870s, who rejected political revolution in the name of social revolution, rejected Tkachev’s doctrine. Only at the end of the 1870s did the logic of the historical process lead the Narodnaya Volya to a direct political action against the autocracy.
// Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron: in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - St. Petersburg. , 1890-1907.