197 years ago today, July 24, 1828 (June 13, 1828 lunar calendar), the birthday of the Russian writer Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky, a Russian revolutionary democrat, literary critic, aesthetician, and writer. Born in Saratov on July 24, 1828 to a pastoral family, in 1846 after graduating from Saratov Orthodox secondary school, he entered the Department of Chinese History at Petersburg University. In 1848, he met members of Petrashevsky's group and began to read the works of French utopian socialists. After graduating from university in 1850, he returned to Saratov and taught Chinese in secondary schools. He was soon forced to leave school due to the dissemination of advanced ideas. In 1853, he moved to Petersburg and began to write for the "Fatherland Chronicle" and "Modern Man" magazines. At the same time, he began to write his dissertation "The Aesthetic Relationship between Art and Reality". The dissertation was approved in 1855; in the winter of the same year, he began to publish "An Overview of the Gogol Period of Russian Literature", which studied the development of Russian literary criticism. In 1856, he presided over the work of "Modern Man" and published many articles on Lesin, Pushkin, Lev Tolstoy, Shedrin and Turgenev in the journal. His literary theory and literary criticism inherited and developed Belinsky's realist tradition. His famous assertion that "beauty is life" had a profound impact on the development of Russian aesthetic thought. At the same time, he also completed many important works on philosophy and economics, such as "Principles of Humanism in Philosophy", "Capital and Labor", etc. The magazine "Modern Man", which he led with Dubroliupov, was suspended for 8 months in 1862 due to revolutionary propaganda. Then he himself was thrown into the Peter and Paul fortress and imprisoned for two years. He completed the novel "What to Do?" (1863) in prison. In 1864, the tsarist government exiled him to Siberia for hard labor, which was extended after seven years. During this period, he wrote some papers and works with strong perseverance, but only the novel "Prologue" was secretly sent abroad and survived. It was not until 1889 that he was allowed to return to Saratov. He died the same year. Lenin described Chernyshevtiki as "the pioneer of Russian Social Democracy" and as "the only truly great Russian writer."