Pirogov to resign from his high post in education administration. His dismissal provoked a series of rebellious demonstrations by Kiev University students.
Pirogov’s government service, however, did not come to an end. In 1862 he was assigned the challenging task of organizing and supervising the education of Russian students enrolled in Western universities. In 1866 the government again retired him; the current minister of public education thought that the supervision of foreign education could be done more effectively by a “philologist” than by a “surgeon.”
In 1881 a large group of scholars gathered in Moscow to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Pirogov’s engagement in science. Four years later, an even larger group founded the Pirogov Society of Russian Physicians with a strong interest in social medicine. It was not unusual for the periodic conventions of the Society to be attended by close to two thousand persons. See also: EDUCATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Frieden, Nancy M. (1981). Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856-1905. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vucinich, Alexander. (1963-1970). Science in Russian Culture, vols. 1-2. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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(1840-1868), noted literary critic, radical social thinker, and proponent of “rational egoism” and nihilism.
Born into the landed aristocracy, Dmitry Ivanovich Pisarev studied at both Moscow University and St. Petersburg University, concentrating on philology and history. From 1862 to 1866, Pis-arev served as the chief voice of the journal The Russian Word (Russkoye slovo), a journal somewhat akin to The Contemporary (Sovremennik), which was published and edited by the poet Nikolai Nekrasov (1821-1878). In 1862 Pisarev was imprisoned in the Petropavlovsk Fortress for writing an article criticizing the tsarist government and defending the social critic Alexander Herzen, editor of the London-based ?migr? journal The Bell (Kolokol). Ironically, Pisarev’s arrest marked his own rise to prominence, coinciding with the death of Nikolai Dobrolyubov in 1861 and arrest of Nikolai Chernyshevsky in 1862. During his incarceration for the next four and one-half years, Pisarev continued to write for the The Russian Word, including several influential articles exhibiting his literary panache: “Notes on the History of Labor” (1863), “Realists” (1864), “The Historical Ideas of Auguste Comte” (1865), and “Pushkin and Belinsky” (1865). His articles on Plato and Prince Metternich, and especially the article “Scholasticism of the Nineteenth Century” brought him fame as a literary critic.
Pisarev differed from other, more liberal, social reformers of the first half of the decade, since he stressed individual-ethical aspects of socioeconomic reforms, such as family problems and the difficult position of women in society. When Cherny-shevsky’s novel What is to Be Done (Chto delat?) came out in 1863, Pisarev praised it as a utilitarian tract focusing on the positive aspects of nihilism (generally, the view that no absolute values exist). At the same time, Pisarev criticized Chernyshevsky for his intellectual timidity and failure to develop his ideas far enough. According to Pisarev, a functional society did not need literature (“art for art’s sake”), and literature, therefore, should simply merge with journalism and scholarly investigation as descriptions of reality. He even assaulted the reputation of Alexander Pushkin, claiming that the poet’s work hindered social progress and should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Rather than scorn Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (Otsy i deti), written in 1862, as Chernyshevsky did, claiming it castigated the radical youth, Pisarev strongly identified with the novel’s hero Bazarov-a nihilist who believes in reason and has a scientific understanding of society’s needs, but rejects traditional religious beliefs and moral values. “Bazarov,” Pisarev wrote, “is a representative of our younger generation; in his person are gathered together all those traits scattered among the mass to a lesser degree.” To Pis-arev, Bazarov’s “realism” and “empiricism” reduced all matters of principle to individual preference. Turgenev’s hero is governed only by personal caprice or calculation. Neither over him, nor outside him, nor inside him does he recognize any regulator, any moral law. Far above feeling any moral compunction against committing crimes, the new hero of the younger generation would hardly subordinate his will to any such antiquated prejudice.
Pisarev’s readers gleaned in the author himself some of these same extremist, nihilist tendencies. However, while Pisarev was an extremist intellectual, he was an honest one. He eloquently advocated such practical social types as Bazarov- activists for the intelligentsia, that is, people who could play the role of a “thinking proletariat.” Yet Pisarev himself did not advocate a political revolution. He believed society, and above all the mass of the people, could be transformed through so-cioeconomic change. He simply denounced whatever stood in the way of such peaceful change more trenchantly than any of his predecessors had. Thus this urging to attack anything that seemed socially useless sounded more revolutionary than it really was.
Upon his release from prison, Pisarev contributed articles to the journals The Task (Delo) and Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski). Although he drowned in the Gulf of Riga in 1868, at the age of twenty-eight, his ideas continued to influence other writers, notably Fyodor Dos-toyevsky. In Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie) Dostoyevsky’s hero Raskolnikov (from the word raskol or “split”) shows what occurs when one flaunts moral principles and takes a human life. In The Possessed (Besy) Dostoyevsky shows his reader the worst ways in which human beings can abuse their freedom. Several characters in this novel act on horrifying beliefs, leaving numerous dead bodies in their wake. Raskolnikov’s views pale next to the shocking behavior of the “demons” whom Dostoyevsky feared most: human beings who lose their perspective and let the worst side of their natures predominate.
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See also: DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; GOLDEN AGE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE; INTELLIGENTSIA; NIHILISM AND NIHILISTS; TURGENEV, IVAN SERGEYEVICH
Berdiaev, Nikolai, and Shatz, Marshall. (1994). Vekhi: A Collection of Articles About the Russian Intelligentsia. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Freeborn, Richard. (1982). The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak. New York: Cambridge University Press. Glicksberg, Charles Irving. (1975). The Literature of Nihilism. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Hingley, Ronald. (1969). Nihilists: Russian Radicals and Revolutionaries in the Reign of Alexander II, 1855-81. New York: Delacorte Press. Pozefsky, Peter C. (2003). The Nihilist Imagination: Dmitrii Pisarev and the Cultural Origins of Russian Radicalism (1860-1868). New York: Peter Lang.
The term “planners’ preferences” was introduced by Abram Bergson, in his study (1961) of Soviet national income, to capture the idea that the Soviet economy was ultimately directed by the top leadership of the Communist Party, rather than by consumer sovereignty as in market economies. The preferences of said leadership provide the determining orientation and socially desired objectives of a socialist economic plan designed to govern all economic activity over a defined period. As such, the term refers to the objective function used in economic analyses to “rationalize” the decisions and actions of producers and distributors of economic goods and services in a planned or Soviet-type economy. These objectives are to replace the objectives implicit in the market aggregation of consumers’ and users’ preferences in a properly functioning market economic system. Such preferences (tastes, needs, and desires), together with income constraints, determine the demands for goods and services. These demands, together with technological possibilities for supply, then determine the market prices offered for these goods and services, and hence underlie the market prices (key coordinating and incentive signals) in a market economy. Similarly, planners’ preferences are supposed to underlie planned prices and production and distribution commands in a centrally planned economy, capturing the rationale of, and rationality behind, the comprehensive economic plan. In principle they can reflect social and collective objectives beyond any individual or organizational preference ordering, and hence capture and optimally respond to “externalities” of a social, political, or environmental nature. As such, they are sometimes used to describe the objective function in a formal welfare economic analysis of policy issues or problems. In the practice of centrally planned economies, however, they appear largely to reflect the interests and objectives of the dictator or (later) ruling elite (nomenklatura), when not
