The Story Archive

What Is to Be Done?

Nikolai Chernyshevsky · 1863 CE · Novel · Russian · Victorian

Vera Pavlovna escapes the marriage her mother has arranged by accepting a fictitious one from her brother's tutor, a medical student who installs her in rooms where each of them keeps a door that the other knocks at. She opens a dressmaking shop owned by the women who work in it, and dreams four times of a future built in glass and aluminium where labour is shared and nobody belongs to anyone. Written in a cell in the Peter and Paul Fortress and passed by a censor who had not troubled to read it, it became the handbook of two generations of Russian radicals and the thing Dostoevsky spent the next decade arguing with.

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