What Is to Be Done? (novel)

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What Is To Be Done?
Author	Nikolai Chernyshevsky
Original title	Chto delat (Что делать)
Country	Russia
Language	Russian
Genre(s)	Novel
Publication date	1863
Published in English	1973
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	NA

What is to be Done? (Russian: 'Что делать') (alternatively translated as "What Shall we Do?") is a novel written by the Russian philosopher, journalist and literary critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky when he was in the Peter and Paul Fortress. It was written in response to "Fathers and Sons" by Ivan Turgenev. The novel's hero, named Rakhmetov, became an emblem of the philosophical materialism and nobility of Russian radicalism. The novel also expresses, in one character's dream, a society gaining "eternal joy" of an earthly kind. The novel has been called "a handbook of radicalism"^[1] and led to the founding of a Land and Liberty society.^[2]

When he wrote the novel, the author was himself imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress of St.Petersburg, and he was to spend years in Siberia; the book was smuggled out from his cell. Lenin, Plekhanov, Alexandra Kollontay and Rosa Luxemburg were all highly impressed with the book, and it became an official Soviet classic^{[citation needed]}.

1 Plot introduction
2 Reactions
3 Footnotes
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Plot introduction

Within the framework of a story of a privileged couple who decide to work for the revolution, and ruthlessly subordinate everything in their lives to the cause, the work furnished a blueprint for the asceticism and dedication unto death which became an ideal of the early socialist underground of the Russian Empire.

[edit] Reactions

The book is perhaps best known in the United States for the responses it created than as a novel in its own right. Leo Tolstoy wrote a different What is to be Done? based on moral responsibility, see What is to be Done? (Tolstoy)^[3]. Fyodor Dostoevsky mocked the utilitarianism and utopianism of the novel in Notes from Underground. Vladimir Lenin, however, found it inspiring and named a pamphlet after it, see What is to be Done? (pamphlet). Lenin is said to have read the book five times in one summer, and according to Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Stanford, Joseph Frank, 'Chernyshevsky's novel, far more than Marx's Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.' ^[4]