A short life of the author
Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (24 July 1828 – 29 October 1889) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, literary critic, and revolutionary thinker whose single novel — What Is to Be Done? Tales About New People (Chto delat?, 1863) — is one of the most politically consequential works of fiction ever written. The novel, composed in the Peter and Paul Fortress while Chernyshevsky was imprisoned for revolutionary agitation, was smuggled out and published in the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary) through a censorship oversight, and it became the bible of the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin read it five times in a single summer, titled his own most important pamphlet after it, and said that Chernyshevsky had “ploughed him over” — a statement that effectively makes What Is to Be Done? one of the books that changed the course of world history.
Life
Chernyshevsky was born in Saratov, the son of a priest. He was educated at the local seminary and at the University of St. Petersburg, where he studied philology and came under the influence of the materialist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach and the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier. He became the leading literary critic and radical publicist of the late 1850s, writing for Sovremennik — the most important Russian literary journal of the era — where he developed a theory of art as the servant of social progress and attacked the aesthetic formalism that he saw as a luxury of the privileged classes.
His master’s thesis, The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality (1855), argued that art should depict life as it actually is and should serve as a weapon in the struggle for social justice — a position that made him the intellectual godfather of socialist realism, for better and for worse.
In 1862, he was arrested by the tsarist government on charges of revolutionary conspiracy. He was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where he wrote What Is to Be Done? in four months. He was sentenced to seven years of hard labour in Siberia, followed by indefinite exile. He spent a total of twenty-one years in Siberian exile — the tsarist government considered him too dangerous to release — and returned to European Russia only in 1883, a broken man. He died in Saratov at sixty-one.
What Is to Be Done? (1863)
The novel tells the story of Vera Pavlovna, a young woman who escapes the tyranny of her petit-bourgeois family through a fictitious marriage, establishes a cooperative sewing workshop based on socialist principles, and eventually achieves personal and political emancipation. The novel’s “new people” — rational, selfless, devoted to the common good — are presented as the model for the revolutionary transformation of Russian society.
The novel is, by conventional literary standards, not very good. The plotting is melodramatic, the characters are idealised to the point of implausibility, and the famous “Fourth Dream of Vera Pavlovna” — a utopian vision of the future — is more programmatic than imaginative. Chernyshevsky was not a natural novelist; he was a polemicist who used the novel form because it could reach a wider audience than philosophical treatises.
But the novel’s influence was enormous and operated on two levels. On the practical level, it inspired the creation of cooperative workshops, communal living arrangements, and women’s emancipation projects across Russia — concrete social experiments modelled on the fiction. On the ideological level, it provided the Russian revolutionary movement with a vision of the “new man” (and new woman) who would build a rational, just society through the application of reason and selflessness to social organisation.
Dostoevsky’s Response
Notes from Underground (1864) was written as a direct response to Chernyshevsky — a savage attack on the idea that human beings are rational creatures who will choose the good if shown it clearly. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man — irrational, spiteful, perversely self-destructive — is the anti-Chernyshevsky: a demonstration that human nature is far more complex, contradictory, and resistant to rational improvement than the utopian socialists imagined. The intellectual war between Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky — between rational utopianism and tragic individualism — is one of the central debates of Russian and indeed world intellectual history.
Collecting Chernyshevsky
Russian first editions of Chto delat? in the original Sovremennik publication (1863) are extremely rare. English translations are more accessible: What Is to Be Done? (various publishers, most commonly Cornell University Press, 1989) brings $15–$40. The critical and philosophical writings are available primarily in academic editions.