User:Aboardm1/What Is to Be Done? (novel)

Notes:
removed some content from the information provided in the lead section due to poor sourcing and dates that do not align.

Utopianism in the Novel
The novel advocates the creation of small socialist cooperatives based on the Russian peasant commune, but ones that are oriented toward industrial production. The author promoted the idea that the intellectual's duty was to educate and lead the laboring masses in Russia along a path to socialism that bypassed capitalism. Despite his minor role, Rakhmetov, one of the characters in the novel, became an emblem of the philosophical materialism and nobility of Russian radicalism. Through one character's dream, the novel also expresses a society gaining "eternal joy" of an earthly kind.

The work itself can be analyzed as a work of literary utopia through its alternating narrative style, wherein Cherneshevsky makes use of metaliterary techniques that implicate the reader through the author's interruptions and direct addresses to the reader. The reader's complicity with the author, who is presumably the narrator, further implicates them in the political act of engaging with Cherneshevsky's ideology.

Vera Pavlovna's Dreams
Vera Pavlovna has four dreams throughout the course of the novel. Vera's dreams ultimately work to transform her own desires into action. Vera Pavlovna's dreams follow in the Russian literary tradition of the prophetic dream, having a predictive relationship from sleep to waking life.

In her first dream, Vera's "dream-guide" (a version of herself) introduces herself as "the bride of your [Vera's] bridegroom," solidifying Vera's intention to marry Lopukhov and free herself from her cellar. In her dream, Vera continues to free other young girls from their own cellars. Vera does so in real life by forming her sewing co-operative and residential commune that affords both herself and other young girls the ability to become financially independent and self-sufficient.

Vera Pavlovna witnesses a theoretical conversation between Lopukhov and Kirsanov about the philisophical constituents of dirt in her second dream. While this dream does not appear to directly spur Vera into revolutionary action, the conversation is an allegory for Cherneshevsky's belief that socioeconomic conditions shape individuals. Wagner says of this dream:"'Chernyshevsky uses Liebig's theories regarding the fertility of different types of soil... to expound his own idea that socioeconomic conditions shape an individual's character, and that therefore the revolutionary trans­ formation of these conditions will ensure social justice and prosperity by fostering appropriate personality traits.'"Vera Pavlovna's third dream exposes her doubts within her marriage to Lopukhov, forming the foundation for Vera's formation of a variety of relationships later in the novel that do not conform to the monogamous and heterosexual social norms.

Ultimately, Vera's fourth dream constructs an agrarian utopia. Vera sees a crystal palace that is a technological and scientific marvel. The utopia in Vera's dream is reminiscent of Charles Fourier's phalanstères. Vera's dream-guide champions equal rights between all women and men as the foundation for this utopian society. It is here that Vera recognizes herself as her dream-guide, thus positioning utopian potential in the everyday through such actions and ideologies as Vera Pavlovna's.

Influence
The novel inspired several generations of revolutionaries in Russia, including populists, nihilists, and Marxists. Likewise, Vladimir Lenin, Georgi Plekhanov, Peter Kropotkin, Alexandra Kollontay, Rosa Luxemburg, and Swedish writer August Strindberg were all highly impressed with the book. Emma Goldman, a Russian-born anarchist, describes her intent to found a sewing cooperative based on Vera Pavlovna's model found in the novel.

The novel came to be officially regarded as a Russian classic in the Soviet period, as Cherneshevsky was celebrated as a forefather of the revolution. According to Joseph Frank, "Chernyshevsky's novel, far more than Marx's Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution."

The novel was controversial upon its publishing and continues to be. Fyodor Dostoevsky mocked the utilitarianism and utopianism of the novel in his 1864 novella Notes from Underground, as well as in his 1872 novel Demons, as did Vladimir Nabokov in his final novel in Russian, The Gift. Leo Tolstoy wrote his own What Is to Be Done?, published in 1886, based on his own ideas of moral responsibility. Vladimir Lenin named his 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done? due to the influence the novel had on him.

The novel's influence spread beyond the Russian radical tradition and Russian radical intellectuals. For example, it is referenced by Tony Kushner multiple times in his play Slavs!, by André Gide's Les caves du Vatican (Lafcadio's Adventures), and, some have argued, by Ayn Rand.