ABSTRACT
Several versions of Lenin's intellectual development have been advanced. Communist historians assert that Lenin was a full fledged Marxist by 1887: at seventeen he supposedly was an expert reader of Das Kapital and an organizer of Social Democratic cells. Yet Lenin said that he read Das Kapital first in January 1889, about a year after his arrest. He had then been in Kokushkino where, almost two years earlier, Anna may have transported Alexander's copy. Lenin first embarked on the road to revolution by becoming 'irreligious'. He returned to Chernishevsky's book for several weeks in the summer of 1888; presumably he continued to study the remainder of Chernishevsky's works, writings which Lenin believed had influenced Alexander. Indeed, hundreds of Russians became revolutionaries because of the teachings of Chernishevsky. Chernishevsky was a materialist similar to Ludwig Feuerbach, a positivist like Auguste Comte, and a determinist, emphasizing the 'complete human being'.
