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The metadata below describe the original scanning. Follow the 'All Files: HTTP' link in the 'View the book' box to the left to find XML files that contain more metadata about the original images and the derived formats (OCR results, PDF etc.). Rakhmetov is a fictional character from the 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? By Nikolai Chernyshevsky.Although he is only a minor character (appearing in just 1/10 of the book at the end of chapter three), he is the most famous because he inspired so many Russian revolutionaries. In his novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), Chernyshevsky endeavoured to detect positive aspects in the nihilist philosophy. Similarly, in his Memoirs, Prince Peter Kropotkin, the leading Russian anarchist, defined nihilism as the symbol of struggle against all forms of tyranny, hypocrisy, and artificiality and for individual. Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? Tolstoy and Dostoevsky both took serious issue with the political principles Chernyshevsky laced throughout his novel. But neither did they did not agree with each other. Tolstoy’s traditionalist critique and Dostoevsky’s nihilist critique are interesting arguments in themselves.

Word

What Is to Be Done? (novel)

What Is To Be Done?
Author Nikolai Chernyshevsky
Original title Shto delat (Что делать)
Country Russian Empire
Language Russian
Genre Novel
Publication date
1863
1886
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN NA

What Is to Be Done? (Russian: Что делать?, tr.Shto delat'?; also translated as 'What Shall We Do?') is an 1863 novel written by the Russian philosopher, journalist and literary critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky. It was written in response to Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev. The chief character is a woman, Vera Pavlovna, who escapes the control of her family and an arranged marriage to seek economic independence. The novel advocates the creation of small socialist cooperatives based on the Russian peasant commune, but 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. One of the characters in the novel, Rakhmetov, became an emblem of the philosophical materialism and nobility of Russian radicalism despite his minor role. The novel also expresses, in one character's dream, a society gaining 'eternal joy' of an earthly kind. The novel has been called 'a handbook of radicalism'[1] and led to the founding of the Land and Liberty society.[2]

When he wrote the novel, the author was himself imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress of St. Petersburg, and he was to spend years in Siberia. Chernyshevsky asked for and received permission to write the novel in prison, and the authorities passed the manuscript along to his former employer, the newspaper Sovremennik, which also approved it for publication in installments in its pages. Lenin, Plekhanov, Peter Kropotkin, Alexandra Kollontay, Rosa Luxemburg, and also the Swedish writer August Strindberg,[3] were all highly impressed with the book, and it came to be officially regarded a Russian classic in the Soviet period.[4][5]

  • Plot introduction1
  • Reactions2
  • Footnotes3
  • References4
  • External links5

Plot introduction

Within the framework of a story of a privileged couple who decide to work for the revolution, and ruthlessly subordinate everything in their lives to the cause, the work furnished a blueprint for the asceticism and dedication unto death which became an ideal of the early socialist underground of the Russian Empire.

Reactions

The book is perhaps better known in the English-speaking world for the responses it created than as a novel in its own right. Fyodor Dostoevsky mocked the utilitarianism and utopianism of the novel in his 1864 novella Notes from Underground, as well as in his 1872 novel Devils. Leo Tolstoy wrote a different What Is to Be Done?, published in 1886, based on his own ideas of moral responsibility.[6]Vladimir Lenin, however, found it inspiring and named a 1902 pamphlet 'What Is to Be Done?'. Lenin is said to have read the book five times in one summer, and according to Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Stanford, Joseph Frank, 'Chernyshevsky's novel, far more than Marx's Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.' [7]

Vladimir Nabokov's final novel in Russian, The Gift, thoroughly ridiculed What is to Be Done? in its fourth chapter.

In the book Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, author Chris Matthew Sciabarra says that What Is to Be Done? is one of the sources of inspiration for Rand's thought.[8] For example, the book's main character Lopuhov says 'I am not a man to make sacrifices. And indeed there are no such things. One acts in the way that one finds most pleasant.' Chernyshevsky's egoism was ultimately socialistic, and thus quite distinct from the capitalistic form later advocated by Rand.

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The main character of Gide's Les caves du Vatican (En. Lafcadio's Adventures), Lafcadio, bears a striking resemblance to Rakhmetov.

American playwright Tony Kushner referenced the book multiple times in his play Slavs!.

Footnotes

  1. ^Middlebury College
  2. ^Emory. It inspired several generations of revolutionaries in Russia: populists, nihilists, terrorists, and Marxists.
  3. ^Jan Myrdal, Ord & avsikt
  4. ^Чернец, Л.В. (1990). 'Н. Г.: Биобиблиографическая справка'. Русские писатели. Биобиблиографический словарь. Том 2. М--Я. Под редакцией П. А. Николаева. М., 'Просвещение'. Retrieved 2012-03-01.
  5. ^Плеханов, Г.В. (1910). 'Н.Г.Чернышевский'. Библиотека научного социализма. Т.4. Retrieved 2012-03-01.
  6. ^Boston theological
  7. ^
  8. ^Chris Matthew Sciabarra (1 November 2010). Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. Penn State Press. p. 28.

References

  • The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, pages 1,085–1,086

External links

Nikolai chernyshevsky
  • (Russian text)What Is to Be Done?
  • English translation (1886)
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Rakhmetov
What Is to Be Done? character
Created byNikolai Chernyshevsky
In-universe information
GenderMale
NationalityRussian

Rakhmetov is a fictional character from the 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Although he is only a minor character (appearing in just 1/10 of the book at the end of chapter three), he is the most famous because he inspired so many Russian revolutionaries. His only action in the story is to give the heroine, Vera Pavlovna, a note from her husband explaining that he has faked his suicide. He also offers his criticisms to Vera Pavlovna for her abandoning of her sewing cooperative.

Rakhmetov is descended from Rakhmet, a thirteenth-century Tatar chief. He is the second youngest of eight children. He inherits 400 serfs and 7,000 acres of land. He is 22 when the novel takes place. His father is deeply conservative and clever. At 15, he falls in love with his father's mistress.

He studies at St. Petersburg University from 16–19, then gives up his studies to travel, estranging himself from his siblings and in-laws. At 17 he builds up his physical strength through gymnastics, then by barge hauling at 20 from which he gets the nickname Nikitouchka Lomoff, a legendarily strong boat hauler on the Volga. His other nickname is 'the rigorist'. He performs all kinds of manual labor on his travels: digging, sawing and iron forging. He explains: 'I must do it, it will make me loved and esteemed by the common people. And it is useful ; some day it may prove good for some-thing.'[1]

He befriends five or six students and studies obsessively, reading continuously for 82 hours, fueled by eight strong coffees before sleeping for 15 hours. He adopts a strict, puritanical way of life. He is celibate, teetotal, sleeps on planks and usually eats black bread and steak. The only luxury he allows himself are fine cigars 'Without my cigar I cannot think; if that is a fact, it is not my fault; but perhaps it is due to the weakness of my will.'[2] In St. Petersburg, he permits himself oranges because there ordinary people eat them, but in the countryside he doesn't touch them. After six months continuous reading (mainly Nikolai Gogol, Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill), he decides he has acquired enough knowledge. He never visits people longer than necessary and only visits people with influence over others. He only visits his home to sleep at two or three in the morning.

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His ultimate act of self punishment is sleeping on a bed of nails, which may have been based on certain Orthodox Saints. He explains this as a 'A trial. It was necessary to make it. Improbable, certainly, but at all events it was necessary to make it. I know now what I can do.'[3] Two months later he loses a lump of flesh saving a 19-year-old widow from a stampeding horse. She nurses him, falls in love with him but he rejects her explaining his devotion to the people precludes love.

He tours Europe and the USA. He is rumoured to have met the founder of a new German school of philosophy, possibly Karl Marx. He has decidedly modern views on suicide, only understanding it if it is to escape a painful illness.

Impact[edit]

Rakhmetov was variously regarded as a saint, holy fool or just an eccentric. He inspired the founders of Russian Nihilism and Bolshevism. Vladimir Lenin imitated Rakhmetov with daily weight lifting,[4] while Sergei Nechayev copied him by sleeping on a wooden bed and living on black bread. Nikolai Ishutin copied the character's boat hauling feats.[5]

Chernyshevsky What Is To Be Done Pdf Editor File

Anarchist Alexander Berkman used Rakhmetov as a pseudonym when he prepared to assassinate Henry Clay Frick in 1892.[6]

His character was praised by the Soviet government as an example of how the new Soviet man should act.

The main character of André Gide's Les caves du Vatican (English: Lafcadio's Adventures), Lafcadio, bears a striking resemblance to Rakhmetov. Pavel Aleksandrovich Bakhmetev, a noble acquaintance of Chernyshevsky who sold his serfs in 1857, may have inspired the character.[7]

References[edit]

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  1. ^What Is to Be Done? page 211
  2. ^What Is to Be Done? page 213
  3. ^What Is to Be Done? page 219
  4. ^Orlando Figes, The People's Tragedy ,page 389
  5. ^Andrew Michael Drozd, Chernyshevskii's What is to be done?: a reevaluation, page 115
  6. ^Avrich, Paul; Avrich, Karen (2012). Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. pp. 13, 66. ISBN978-0-674-06598-7.
  7. ^Andrew Michael Drozd, Chernyshevskii's What is to be done?: a reevaluation, page 126

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