Novel
What Is to Be Done?
Что делать?
Nikolay Chernyshevsky · 1863
Opening lines
Поутру 11 июля 1856 года прислуга одной из больших петербургских гостиниц у станции московской железной дороги была в недоумении, отчасти даже в тревоге.
On the morning of 11 July 1856 the staff of one of the large Petersburg hotels near the Moscow railway station were puzzled, and even somewhat alarmed.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from ru.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Vera Pavlovna grows up in Saint Petersburg, in Gorokhovaya Street, under the thumb of a tyrannical mother who wants to marry her to a vain, rich officer. The medical student Dmitri Lopukhov, tutor to her younger brother, speaks to her in secret about socialism and the equality of the sexes; to rescue her from this marriage, he marries her in secret. The young couple settle on Vasilievsky Island and give themselves rules for living that guarantee each their freedom, and Vera seeks to win her independence through her work.
Context
The novel was written from 14 December 1862 to 4 April 1863, in the cell where the author awaited his judgment, and was in part a reply to Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. The manuscript passed through the commission of inquiry and then through the censor of Sovremennik, who saw in it only a love plot, and it appeared in three issues of the journal in 1863. The censor was dismissed and the issues banned, but the text circulated in copies; banned in Russia until 1905, it was printed separately in Geneva as early as 1867. Katkov called it the Koran of nihilism.
Who it is for
A long novel with a thesis, valuable above all as a document on the radical youth of the 1860s; several French translations are in the bookshops.
Prizes and reception
It inspired generations of Russian revolutionaries, and Kropotkin judged that no novel of its time had so wide an influence on the young.