Nikolai Garf Lilovic Chernyshevski (ниолайгавриловиче) was born in a priest. From 65438 to 0856, he was the editor-in-chief of Dangdai. 1862 Contemporary was forced to stop publishing. In July of the same year, he was arrested by the Tsar and imprisoned and exiled for 22 years. 1889 was allowed to go back to his hometown. His works are extremely rich, covering philosophy, history, political economy, aesthetics, literary theory and literary history, mainly including Aesthetic Relationship between Art and Reality (translated as Life and Aesthetics), Overview of Russian Literature in Nikolai Nikolai Gogol's Period, Lessing, Criticism of Philosophical Prejudice of Commune Ownership, Humanism Principle in Philosophy and Capital and Labor. Marx praised his works for adding real glory to Russia, and Lenin said that he was "the only truly great writer" and his works "exuded the breath of class struggle".

In philosophy, Chernyshevski thought that the source of knowledge was the objective world that influenced people's senses, refuted Kant's agnosticism, and tried to transform Hegel's dialectics with the spirit of materialism. His materialist philosophy is revolutionary and realistic, but it fails to abandon Feuerbach's humanism, so his materialism is incomplete and cannot rise to the heights of dialectical materialism and historical materialism.

In aesthetics, he inherited and developed belinsky's materialism tradition, and upheld and defended the principles of humanism and realism in literature. His works, such as Aesthetic Relationship between Art and Reality, put forward the famous conclusion that "beauty is life" from materialism in view of Hegelian idealistic aesthetic view at that time, and held that "everything we see in it should live like this according to our understanding, and that is beauty; Anything that shows life or reminds us of life is beautiful. " This definition not only affirms the objectivity of aesthetic categories such as beauty, but also points out the ideal of beauty, emphasizing that beauty changes with the changes of the times, and the new era has new requirements, and only new beauty can meet people's requirements. He also pointed out that the concept of beauty is restricted by social conditions, and different social groups have different aesthetic standards. For example, farmers and nobles have different views on female beauty. From the above point of view, he emphasized that artistic beauty is the reflection of realistic beauty, the purpose and essence of art is to reproduce life, and the content of art is "common interesting things in life". He attaches great importance to the social education function of art, and thinks that art should "explain life" and "judge life phenomena" by describing the themes put forward by life, "express certain thoughts" and "become a textbook of human life". At the same time, it also points out the aesthetic characteristics of art, emphasizing that "art does not use abstract concepts, but uses living individual facts to express ideas" and "expresses everything concretely with vivid pictures and individual images as much as possible." However, he often unilaterally emphasizes the decisive role of life and belittles the value of art, thinking that art is a "pale" and "poor reproduction" of life, and fails to scientifically clarify the dialectical relationship between aesthetic object and aesthetic subject, art and reality. In his works such as Introduction to Russian Literature in the Period of Nikolai Nikolai Gogol, he criticized the "pure art theory" advocated by liberal scholars and its various denigrations and distortions of realistic literature represented by Nikolai Nikolai Gogol, thus defending the realistic traditions of Nikolai Nikolai Gogol and belinsky.

Although Chernyshevski's aesthetic thought has the characteristics of mechanical materialism and a certain degree of one-sidedness and metaphysics, he clearly put forward the proposition that "beauty is life" for the first time in the history of aesthetics, and turned aesthetics ruled by Hegel's objective idealism into materialism for a long time. It has a far-reaching influence on the development of materialist aesthetics and realistic art theory.