A Vital Question: Or, What Is to Be Done?

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Reading the novel "What's to Be Done?" by philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky inspired writer Vladimir Gilyarovsky to leave his home and become a burlak on the Volga. Vladimir Lenin regarded Chernyshevsky as the "greatest representative of utopian socialism in Russia." Fyodor Dostoevsky sought to challenge Chernyshevsky's views in "Notes from Underground," while the Russian Empire considered him public enemy number one. The work was written during Chernyshevsky's imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress from December 1862 to April 1863. How the censors allowed this overtly revolutionary work to pass is unknown, but officials quickly recognized their mistake, and the novel was banned until 1905. However, Russian émigrés successfully published it abroad. The story begins on a July night in 1856 when St. Petersburg is shaken by the news of a man's suicide at the Liteiny Bridge, leaving behind a farewell letter for his wife, Vera Pavlovna. The novel's anti-Nihilist themes were later adapted into a television series in 1971.