Description: Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevskii's 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? has long been dismissed as sociopolitical propaganda. It was reviled by Dostoevsky upon its publication -- Notes from the Underground began as an article attacking the novel -- and Turgenev said Chernyshevskii's "manner arouses physical disgust in me, like wormseed". Lenin, however, praised it as an inspiration to the Russian revolutionary movement, and in the USSR What Is to Be Done? was studied as an early call to political radicalism.

In this reexamination, Andrew M. Drozd argues that What Is to Be Done? has consistently been misread by both its detractors and its admirers, in large part because of a refusal to treat the novel as a literary text. While agreeing that the novel contains political content, Drozd claims it must be studied as fiction first and foremost. Traditionally seen as preaching materialism, utilitarianism, revolutionary asceticism, and socialism, Chernyshevskii is seen by Drozd as critical of these trends in radical ideology. The character of Rakhmetov, universally regarded as a revolutionary superman, is in fact a parody of a particular phenomenon in Russian society.

Interest in What Is to Be Done? has increased in recent years as scholars look again at texts that were casually dismissed during the East-West tensions of the Cold War. Employing in-depth scholarship as well as an original approach, Drozd uncovers the novel's distorted artistic merits and restores Chernyshevskii to his rightful place as a literary subversive.

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