Dostoevsky had a clear idea of the philosophical background of utopian socialism and predicted its political consequences in Devils (Besy, 1871-72), also translated as The Possessed. The novel is based on his knowledge of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Cabet, as well as Russian materialist philosophers such as Chernyshevsky and Pisarev; and, in particular, on documentation about the radical activities of Sergei Nechayev. In Dostoevsky’s fictional reconstruction of the political debate of the 1860s, one of the main characters, the conservative Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, tries to understand his radical son Peter by reading Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat’?, 1863). Verkhovensky considers this novel a catechism of the radical movement and wants to know it in order to be able to counter its pernicious influence. We, too, if we wish to understand the background of Dostoevsky’s repudiation of nihilist politics, cannot circumvent What Is to Be Done? It is an early expression of philosophical materialism and explores its ideological consequences, which were totally rejected by Dostoevsky.

Utopian rationality in What Is to Be Done?

Chernyshevsky is a pivotal but much neglected figure in the history of pre-revolutionary Russia. Neither a great thinker nor a gifted writer, his crucial role has been easily overlooked. Yet, Joseph Frank was probably correct in observing that no work in modern literature, with the possible exception of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, can compete with What Is to Be Done? in its historical effect. As Frank writes, “far more than Marx’s Capital,” Chernyshevsky’s novel, with the telling subtitle “From stories about the new people” (“Iz rasskazov o novykh lyudyakh”), “supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution” (quoted by Katz and Wagner 1989: 1). Among all leftist criticism of Russian politics and culture it is primarily Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel that added the particular momentum to the Russian revolutionary movement.

That Dostoevsky in his fiction has numerous references to Chernyshevsky, and none to Marx, confirms Frank’s judgment.

Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) grew up in Saratov, a provincial town on the middle Volga, where his father was a priest in the Orthodox Church and where he attended the theological seminary in Saratov between 1842 and 1846.