Nikolai Chernyshevsky's Perpetuum Mobile – From Technical to Social Utopia

Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, known as the author of the utopian novel What Is to Be Done? and his dissertation on the Aesthetic Attitude of Art to Reality, worked on a perpetual motion machine project in his youth. He left notes on the project in the diaries he kept from 1848 to 1853. The article analyzes the text of the diaries in order to reconstruct the inventor's way of thinking, trace how his attitude toward the “machine” changed, and observe how those around him reacted to his idea. Chernyshevsky's mature publicist works assign the same role to technical innovations in improving the social order that the perpetual motion machine had in his youthful dreams. By carefully examining the history of the device's creation, we were able to clarify what features of the professional intelligentsia's perception of technology influenced the formation of his techno social utopian ideas