What Is to Be Done?
Translated by Nathan Haskell Dole_simon S Skidelsky
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This seminal work of Russian literature offers a radical blueprint for personal and social transformation, inspiring generations of activists and thinkers with its vision of a just, cooperative world.
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Book Summary
Nikolay Chernyshevsky's novel follows Vera Pavlovna's journey from an oppressive household to independence through education, work, and rational love. It advocates for women's emancipation, cooperative socialism, and a new moral code based on enlightened self-interest, challenging 19th-century Russian social norms.
The story begins with the apparent suicide of Dmitri Lopukhov, who sacrifices himself so his wife Vera Pavlovna can marry his friend Alexander Kirsanov. Vera, having escaped her domineering mother's plans for a mercenary marriage, had earlier married Lopukhov to gain freedom. She establishes a successful sewing cooperative based on socialist principles, embodying the novel's ideals of rational egoism and collective work. After Lopukhov's staged death, Vera marries Kirsanov, and they live harmoniously. Later, Lopukhov returns under the alias Charles Beaumont, marries Katerina Polozova, and the two couples become neighbors, sharing a life of mutual respect and progressive values. The novel interweaves philosophical dialogues, dreams, and direct authorial commentary to critique bourgeois society and envision a future of equality, education, and personal fulfillment.
Reading guide
Go deeper in What Is to Be Done?
Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
Viéra Pavlovna
Viéra Pavlovna builds a life on her own terms: a sewing cooperative, pupils, evenings of music with her husband Dmitri and his friend Kirsánof. The passages show her days filling with walks to the shop, stories told to the girls, opera, and long evenings where the three sit together far longer than before. What begins as rational arrangement quietly becomes something she did not plan for, and the novel's early-middle arc turns on whether her self-command can survive her own heart.
Dmitri Sergéitch Lopukhóf
Lopukhóf rescues Viéra from her mother's plans by marrying her, then lives with her in a strange, scrupulous arrangement that puzzles their landlady. When Kirsánof's visits grow frequent and charged, Lopukhóf sees what is happening before either of them admits it, and his calm, almost clinical generosity becomes the story's most unsettling force. His refusal to act selfishly is precisely what drives the early-middle plot toward its famous rupture.
Aleksandr Matvéitch Kirsánof
Kirsánof is the new man in miniature: a doctor who observes rather than cures, respected by students, beloved by hospital servants, and welcomed nightly into the Lopukhófs' home. The passages catch him in the moment he goes silent mid-conversation, then leaves early, and later confronts Lopukhóf with angry eyes and a forbidden subject. His honesty and his discipline collide with a desire he cannot reason away, making him the hinge on which the novel's central triangle turns.
Marya Alekséyevna
Marya Alekséyevna runs a pawn shop, a household, and a campaign to marry Viéra to the highest bidder, and the passage catches her mid-calculation when Julie and Serge arrive at her shabby stairs. She is delighted by the word 'spouse,' loud enough for Viéra to hear, and instantly converts her rage into a truce when a colonel's uniform enters the room. Her mixture of greed, performance, and genuine blindness to her daughter's inner life makes her the pressure that Viéra must escape.
Rakhmétof
Rakhmétof appears at the edges of the Lopukhófs' orderly life, the man whose name Marya Alekséyevna invokes with dread and whose discipline makes ordinary virtue look soft. The passages place him near the rescue of Viéra and in the orbit of the household whose strange, brother-sister marriage the landlady cannot decipher. He matters less as a plot agent than as a measuring rod: when the novel asks what a human being might be, Rakhmétof is the answer it refuses to soften.
Katerina Vasílyevna
Katerina Vasílyevna moves through her father's frivolous house surrounded by flatterers and fortune hunters, her imagination fixed on Geneviève and Miss Nightingale rather than on the marriage market. The Sólovtsof episode leaves her asking whom she can believe, and her charitable giving only deepens her sense that money cannot fix the poverty it creates. Her seriousness and her wealth make her a natural friend for Viéra and a quiet counterweight to the novel's more programmatic characters.
Women's Emancipation
The novel centers on Vera Pavlovna's struggle for independence from her oppressive family and society, her pursuit of education and meaningful work, and her rejection of traditional marriage as a form of ownership.
Rational Egoism
Characters act according to enlightened self-interest, believing that truly understanding one's own needs leads to moral and beneficial actions for all, as seen in Lopukhov's calculated marriage and the cooperative workshop.
Utopian Socialism
The book presents a vision of a cooperative society through Vera Pavlovna's sewing workshop, where workers share profits and live communally, arguing that such economic arrangements can eliminate poverty and exploitation.
Love and Marriage
The narrative critiques conventional marriage as a form of prostitution and advocates for relationships based on mutual respect, equality, and freedom, exemplified by the characters' unconventional living arrangements and open discussions of love.