Viéra Pavlovna is coming of age, and her scheming mother tries to arrange for her to be married to a wealthy man. Viéra feels trapped and unhappy. She finds escape through her brother's tutor Lopukhóf, who often visits the house, and they develop an understanding that they'll get married and build a household together. Both of them consider it very important to be equal partners in the marriage, and so Viéra Pavlovna sets up a sewing collective to retain some of her independence.
Chernyshevsky wrote What Is to Be Done? in 1863 while imprisoned in St. Petersburg. It was passed to the magazine Sovremennik and published in installments. Chernyshevsky explores themes of absolute equality of the sexes and equality of the classes in an effort to spur reformation of society at large. By forming small work collectives, he suggests, agrarian Russia could bypass capitalism and move into a utopian modern age.
If this suggestion sounds familiar, it might be because What Is to Be Done? was a major influence on revolutionists like Kropotkin and Lenin, who went so far as to name one of his most influential political tracts after the novel. The novel went on to become a Soviet-era classic thanks to its revolutionary ideas that foreshadowed Marxist socialism.
This English translation was originally published with the title A Vital Question; this Standard Ebooks edition uses the more common modern title.
Part romance, part radical manifesto in disguise, What Is to Be Done? is the rare novel that changed the course of history as much as any political tract-essential reading for anyone curious about the ideas that helped shape revolutionary Russia decades before 1917.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)
