Work · Socialism, Anarchism, Marxism & Critical Theory
What Is to Be Done?
A novel written in prison about “new people” who live by rational egoism, cooperative work and equality between women and men; it became a model for Russian revolutionaries.
Introduction
Chernyshevsky wrote “What Is to Be Done?” between December 1862 and April 1863 in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The manuscript passed the prison commission and the censor and appeared in Sovremennik in 1863 before the authorities banned it. The novel, subtitled “From Tales about New People”, tells of Vera Pavlovna, who escapes an arranged marriage, organises a sewing cooperative and lives with two men in relationships based on equality and rational egoism. In her dreams she sees a future society in a palace of glass and iron, and the ascetic revolutionary Rakhmetov became a model for a generation. Literary critics have found the book clumsy, but its influence on Russian radicals, on the women’s movement and on Lenin was considerable. Dostoevsky answered it in “Notes from Underground” (1864).
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Connections
Criticized in
- Notes from Underground1864 · Fyodor Dostoevsky
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