Between Ideology and Desire: Rhetoric of the Self in the Works of Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Nikolai Dobroliubov

Departing from the familiar scholarly focus on the ideological content of works by intelligentsia forerunners, this article examines the record of everyday life in their private and public writing. Konstantine Klioutch kine argues that their obsessive focus on ordinary experience indicated that articulating mundane desires was as important to the two writers as expressing progressive views. As professional journalists, Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Nikolai Dobroliubov organized their experience primarily by way of writing. Accordingly, the article explores rhetorical procedures accommodating both ideology and desire in their influential account of themselves as prototypical new men.