Nikolay Chernyshevsky and the Real Day

Abstract

Whatever is thought of its literary merits,¹ it would be hard not to acknowledge that What Is To Be Done? (1863)² is amongst the most famous and influential books in the Russian Language. It has been called ‘a Bible for all advanced Russian women with aspirations toward independence’,³ and its impact can be said to have gone far beyond the literary or even intellectual world more generally: ‘In its political effects, as a fundamental text of Russian socialism, this novel has probably changed the world more than any other.’⁴ This is not an exaggerated claim; Lenin himself noted:

Chernyshevsky’s novel is too complicated, too full of ideas, to understand and evaluate at an early age …. But after the execution of my brother, knowing that Chernyshevsky’s novel was one of his favourite books, I set about reading it properly and sat over it not just a few days but whole weeks. It was only then I understood its depth. It’s a thing that can fire one’s energies for a lifetime.⁵

Certainly, the novel, written in the Peter and Paul Fortress before the author was exiled to Siberia, made a profound impression on Chernyshevsky’s contemporaries and became one of the central texts in the debates around the ‘woman question’.⁶ In turn, it prompted a series of anti-Nihilist novels and other writings for the next decade or so.⁷