The article discusses the fate and some characteristic traits of the personality, as well as controversial issues of N. G. Chernyshevsky’s biography, uncovered in the forgotten book by L. B. Kamenev Chernyshevsky (1933), an insightful phenomenon of the Soviet humanities of the 1930s, which allows us to relate the moral experience and the tragedy of the revolutionary Democrat, the deep sense of his aesthetics and ethics to the problems of the Soviet reality the 1920–1930s.