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What Is to Be Done? · Concept
The “new people”
Lopukhov, Kirsanov, and Vera model rational egoism and cooperative work — Chernyshevsky’s answer to “what is to be done?”
Chernyshevsky’s novel is a program disguised as fiction. The “new people” arrange marriages, workshops, and study as experiments in living without the old family’s tyranny. Rational self-interest is supposed to align with the good of others once superstition and coercion drop away.
The Fourth Dream projects that ethic into a radiant future. Readers who only know the book as a revolutionary influence need this concept to see how classroom romance and political prophecy share one plot.