Nikolai Strakhov
Linda GersteinStrakhov was born in 1828, the same year as his great friend Leo Tolstoy and his great opponent Nikolai Chernyshevsky. His adult life spans the entire second half of the century. As a philosopher, literary critic, and journalist, he was involved in most of the major intellectual controversies of his time. He was personally close to and a major influence on the giants of the period: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solovev. One of the most penetrating thinkers of nineteenth-century Russia, he engaged in serious and often bitter debate with the leading intellectuals of Russian radicalism: Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, Mikhailovsky.
In this first full-length intellectual biography in any language of Strakhov, Linda Gerstein provides a guide both to the individual and to the amazingly complex picture of Russian intellectual life in the nineteenth century. Strakhov’s concerns, she shows, were the major concerns of his era: positivism, nihilism, materialism, the woman question, Darwinism. In all these matters he displayed a consistent intelligence and independence, unusual in that time of intellectual faddishness, that make him a rewarding figure to study.