V.I. Lenin

MATERIALISM and EMPIRIO-CRITICISM

Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy

Supplement to Chapter Four, SECTION I [1]
[2]

In the first section of Chapter IV we showed in detail that
the materialists have been criticising Kant from a standpoint
diametrically opposite to that from which Mach and Avenarius
criticise him. It would not be superfluous to add here, albeit
briefly, an indication of the epistemological position held by
the great Russian Hegelian and materialist,
N. G. Chernyshevsky.

Shortly after Albrecht Rau, the German disciple of Feuerbach,
had published his criticism of Kant, the great Russian writer
N. G. Chernyshevsky, who was also a disciple of Feuerbach,
first attempted an explicit statement of his attitude towards
both Feuerbach and Kant. N. G. Chernyshevsky had appeared in
Russian literature as a follower of Feuerbach as early as the
’fifties, but our censorship did not allow him even to mention
Feuerbach’s name. In 1888, in the preface to the projected
third edition of his The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality, N. G. Chernyshevsky attempted to allude directly
to Feuerbach, but in 1888 too the censor refused to allow even
a mere reference to Feuerbach! It was not until 1906 that the