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Title: What Is to Be Done by Nikolay Garvrilovich Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nathan Haskell Dole, K. Feuer ISBN: 0-87501-017-2 Publisher: Ardis Publishers Pub. Date: December, 1986 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.17 (6 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: The only reason to read this book is masochism
Comment: If you like watching cripples drag their mangled bodies along with fetid, termite ridden crutches, then you'll like Chernyshevsky's prose. The movements are comparable at least; Chernyshevsky jerks and stumbles his way through his prose (and tenses!) extricating himself from each new scene with a terrific, almost audible squelch of effort. Frankly, I started it because I was fascinated that any one author could enrage Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov to such a point that they all wrote pieces condemning him. I finished it because American television has gifted me with a sadistic sense of voyeurism; it was too terrible not to finish.
I am disgusted by those who brush off Chernyshevsky's lack of talent as relatively unimportant; that crass philistinism echoes Chernyshevsky's assertions that his novel, however lacking in grace, was better than any other book because it was true. The book is not "true"; it's a nauseating, simplistic, and disturbing illustration of socialist thought, with fascist implications. Aesthetics are never secondary in a novel. To all of you pompous college students: Keep your lumbering social agendas and moral mediocrities away from the creative sphere. Go write indignant letters to the editor or self-righteous editorials, just keep away from art.
Rating: 1
Summary: Mawkish, misguided, unbelievably bad
Comment: I note with amazement that some reviewers comment favorably (!) on the fact that Chernyshevsky was one of the forerunners of "Socialist Realism," and that this man was held in great esteem in the Soviet Union. It's as if, somehow, some people still have not heard the news about the Soviet Union 1918-1953: that it was perhaps the worst period in the entire history of the planet. It should at least be noted that such artists and thinkers as Vladimir Nabokov hold "Socialist Realism" to have been nothing but writing PR for a gang of slave-traders.
Another item -- strangely overlooked -- is just how awful this "novel" is. I mean this seriously: this novel is so bad that it even makes the agitprop churned out by Ayn Rand look good! :-0
Ayn Rand presents the reader with cardboard characters, but Chernyshevky manages not even to produce cardboard characters, but talking heads, wandering moralists, and mad sermonizers. Frequently the characters do not have names firmly attached to them, and one wonders just who is speaking. At least with such other propaganda efforts as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "The Fountainhead," one always knows who is speaking.
It is somehow vastly depressing to learn that Lenin read this book five times (!) in one summer, and that he firmly considered Chernyshevsky one of the leading influences on his thought. It is even more depressing to realize that "leading Russian criticism" of the 19th century was heavily influenced by such dolts as Chernyshevsky, claiming that novels without overt morals and overt moralizing were worthless. This utilitarian, overtly political school of criticism led straight to the tenets of Socialist Realism, a school which never produced any art at all! (Mounds of human corpses were produced, however, so many that it was impossible to bury them all during the harsh Russian winters.)
This is a fascinating book for the historian and the philosopher, or for anyone trying to understand what went wrong during the 20th century.
Rating: 4
Summary: Not artistically great, but strangely compelling
Comment: "What is to be done?" is the novel in which noted leftist critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky outlined his vision of a future of economic cooperation and women's rights. Though it is remembered more for its political message than its literary merit, a few words about its plot seem in order. We meet the main character, Vera Pavlovna, as she is about to be betrothed to a man who, though there's nothing especially terrible about him, she does not at all love. She meets the enlightened Dmitri Lopukhov and they fall in love, so, much to her parents' chagrin, they run off together and get married. After a few years of marriage, the odd behavior of Dmitri's close friend Alexander Kirsanov reveals to Dmitri that Alexander loves Vera, and Dmitri correctly suspects that the feeling is mutual, and that although Vera cares for Dmitri very much and appreciates all he has done for her, her passion for him was a youthful indiscretion. Ever sympathetic to his wife's interests, Dmitri contrives to get out of the lovers' way, and Vera and Alexander are happily married for pretty much all of the second half of the novel. Meanwhile, Vera has founded a highly successful sewing union, and Chernyshevsky uses this to preach the value of worker ownership of businesses and also to illustrate women's potential for industry outside the home.
Chernyshevsky admits at a number of points in the work that he wasn't born to be a novelist, and it shows--especially annoying were his inability to stay in the same verb tense and his periodic silly asides to "the sapient reader." Still, I was pleasantly surprised at how gripping I found the work; I was ever anxious to find out what was going to happen to the characters next (partly because their rather unorthodox views on marriage and other matters, especially given the time period, were bound to keep me guessing), and that made the fairly long novel go by a bit more enjoyably than I expected. Some of Chernyshevsky's views, and especially his prophecies for the future, seem a bit naive nowadays (though in my edition, translated in 1886, the translators gleefully note that Chernyshevsky predicted the invention of the electric light), but given when he was writing (1863), it's easier to see how he might fall into some of the traps that he did, and in fact the novel offers a very interesting look at Russian socialist thought in its relatively early years. All in all, though the novel's not great, it's better than it's generally given credit for, and if you're interested in the history of leftist thought or Russian literature, it's a worthwhile read.
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Title: Fathers and Sons by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Richard Freeborn ISBN: 0192833928 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky ISBN: 067973452X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: The Devils : The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, David Magarshack, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky ISBN: 0140440356 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1954 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Essential Works of Lenin : "What is to Be Done?" and Other Writings by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ISBN: 0486253333 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 May, 1987 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Stalin : The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia'sSecret Archives by Edvard Radzinsky ISBN: 0385479549 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 18 August, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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