Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889)
Что делать (1863)
translated into English as What Is to Be Done? by Michael R. Katz (1989)

Roll 22 was 165, which is a blank divider row. Roll again.

Roll 23 was 995, which is What Is to be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. There’s only one modern English translation, and there’s only one edition of it. My local libraries and bookstores couldn’t come through for me on this one so I had to purchase it online, used. The copy I got was completely pristine, except for a stamp across the closed page edges: “NON-RETURNABLE.” This tells me that in a former life, it had been a course-required purchase that the university bookshop knew was too hot a potato to allow back through its doors. Not promising!

And maybe you can’t tell from the image, but the layout and presentation of this edition breathe academia, too. I’m sure Cornell University Press can muster more appealing design when they think they have something with a wider audience. This book, to my eye, has “for only one lecture? there’s no way I’m reading that” written all over it. The interior body font is the dated and size-inappropriate Zapf Book, which made me feel like I was sitting in an itchy chair in an ugly 70s office. Waiting for professor Katz’s office hours, I guess.

I just spent like an hour working out what font it was. Thanks for nothing, identifont.com.

What Is to Be Done? was truly fascinating to read: idiosyncratic and intriguing in style, form, and content, of unique and undeniable historical interest and significance, and not without charm. Whenever I was reading it, I was full of thoughts. I would have had plenty to say in section for this class had I done the reading.

That all said and meant, I unequivocally discourage any of you from ever touching this awful book. It was a total drag. A highly rewarding total drag. Is it possible for a book to be terrible and also really interesting? The six months I spent lugging this thing around say: “Sure.” What the work was, why it was, what it was saying and how it went about saying it — essentially, everything that falls comfortably within the purview of academia — all these questions were worthwhile and the answers were interesting. And remained interesting page for page; the book was continuously revealing new facets of itself in those regards. But at a more fundamental level, as an immediate artistic experience, it was NON-RETURNABLE.

Or… well, I think that’s how it breaks down. But I must admit to being a bit stumped by this one, aesthetically. It was a puzzler.

Let me quote from early in the book itself, from one of its many passages of noodgy second-person address:

I possess not one bit of artistic talent. I even lack full command of the language. But that doesn’t mean a thing; read on, dearest public, it will be well worth your while. Truth is a good thing; it compensates for the inadequacies of any writer who serves its cause. … But then again, dear readers… When I say that I have not one bit of artistic talent and that my tale is a very weak piece of work, you should by no means conclude that I’m any worse than those authors whom you consider to be great, or that my novel is any poorer than theirs. …

You may thank me. You so love to cringe before those who abuse you; so now you can cringe before me, too.

So yes, that’s the author assuring us that his ideas are more important than his admittedly graceless writing. But that passage itself should give a nutshell impression of the reading experience: it’s interesting — to the point of being amusing — that such an absurd and obnoxious passage exists at all, right? And that sort of interest can count for a lot. I grinned when I first came to a page of the author hectoring me outright — I was having genuine fun, encountering this, contemplating it. And yet there’s no getting around the fact that you would never want to read a book by this guy. That’s how the entire book was: generous of interest, and peculiar, and unappealing.

And here’s why: The book is actually an elaborate piece of agitprop. Yes, it bears some resemblance to a novel, but it’s not a real novel — it’s a phony one, a hollowed-out book with a pistol in it. It’s a big honking “truth pill” meant to wake people from the Matrix, hidden under the dust jacket of a soapy women’s romance. Basically, it’s a call to revolution dressed up to play as a formulaic love triangle story. Chernyshevsky seems to have done this for three reasons: firstly so that it would appeal to the masses who didn’t know they needed it, secondly so that it would go down easier, and thirdly to sneak it past the censors… who nonetheless must have been complete idiots not to have sussed out that something was fishy in this flagrantly ill-formed romance novel full of radical chit-chat.

Maybe there was a fourth reason too: I think Chernyshevsky may have felt that to couch his ideas in the interpersonal affairs of a few individuals — that is, within the world of “the novel” — was intellectually and aesthetically necessary. Ideas about social justice and social reform are, at heart, ideas about the souls of people, their inner lives, their needs and struggles. That is, the same stuff art is about. From a certain perspective, casting an ideology into novelistic form is not only more marketable and more vivid than passing out dogmatic pamphlets, but also more human and well-rounded, more true.

This attitude seems to me to have been fairly widespread in the era of the great novel, especially in Russia, and I basically agree with it. Art can embody ideas in ways that transcend the limitations of “mere language,” and that includes ideas of great practical consequence. Perhaps this is the biological function of art, in fact. Yes, mere language obviously has many clear advantages over art in its capacity to convey information. Language is like Legos: complex structures of meaning can be broken down, carried anywhere, and re-built more or less exactly. But the resolution is unfortunately a little blocky; subtleties can get lost. Art, on the other hand, can embody meaning with a resolution so fine and complexity so great that “resolution” and “complexity” seem like insufficient words… but that meaning is much harder to transport, especially as it gets more elaborate, and near-impossible to reconstruct exactly after being broken down. It’s an infinitely flexible but not particularly reliable way of conveying information. My dad the communications professional would probably have some technically appropriate words for these parameters. Art has unlimited bandwidth but a very high error rate (and, sadly, rapidly decreasing standardization of codes); language has very narrow bandwidth but a low error rate and very well-documented codes. Maybe?

So, what was I…? oh right right right. I was saying the book is just propaganda, ideology disguised as “a novel,” but then I said that I think he might have written it that way in good faith, for more or less the same reason that real writers write real novels. And, hm, real novels certainly embody ideologies, too. The Grapes of Wrath has just as clear a social message as What Is to Be Done?, but I wouldn’t call it “propaganda.” So what’s the difference?

I’m not sure I know the answer. This is part of what stumped me, and likewise a big part of why this was an interesting read. I was constantly asking myself “What is this? Is it a ‘work of literature,’ or something else? Might it not be that every work of literature is really just a Trojan horse bearing an ideological payload, and the only difference is that this book is more obvious about it?” I know that “all art is politics” is a notion that appeals to a lot of critics, but I’ve always instinctively rejected it as foolish; it’s like saying saying that every animal is essentially a walking skeleton, dressed up. The problem being that first of all, that’s an idiotic observation, and second of all it’s completely untrue. I’m at least as interested in invertebrate art as I am in mammalia, if not moreso. Certainly far more than I am in a book like What Is to Be Done?.

An easy answer to why it seemed like mere propaganda rather than art would be “because it was badly written,” but that feels like a cop-out. A more interesting answer is that it didn’t feel like art because it wasn’t actually right about the world. I think that this is probably why The Grapes of Wrath and the like get a pass — because we read such things and think, “hm, yeah.” I think Chernyshevsky might actually have been on to something when he said that Truth could redeem his stylistic failings — his real problem was that he also missed the boat on Truth.

This might also be a good answer to the question “why is it sometimes pleasurable for a movie to be ‘manipulative’ and sometimes completely infuriating?”, which has been rattling in my brain since seeing Amistad (as I mentioned back here). Namely: because we really do care about Truth. Amistad and Everything Is Illuminated were opportunistically disingenuous about the nature of the human soul, which is a far more odious sin than anything committed by, say, Avatar.

I don’t have a clear enough sense of Chernyshevsky’s milieu to accuse him of being disingenuous — but I do know that he was wrong. A critic’s quote on the back cover calls the book “psychologically sharp,” but it’s actually just that it’s intricate in its wrongness. The book is all about psychology, to be sure, and the author is obviously convinced that his understanding goes very deep indeed, but it’s all distorted and willful. He saw what he wanted to see and no more. His depths are all impossible halls of mirrors, soap opera as game theory: A knows that B knows that A knows that B intends to make a noble sacrifice for A, and so A must pre-empt B from pre-empting A from making a noble sacrifice by preventing B from doing so. Etcetera! They’re all chess geniuses of being considerate of one another. All of which, he assures us, is in fact quite self-serving and in keeping with the overall theory that people pursue only that which benefits themselves — because being noble gratifies the ego. That’s all well and good, but really? Really?? This is what you see when you look at people?

Chernyshevsky seems to have been a reasonably smart guy, and there is something sort of acute in the way he tries to write about psychological nuance; the problem is just that the subjects of his investigation are ridiculous paper doll contrivances in his own didactic scheme. The behavior he is supposedly teasing apart and exploring is all poppycock to begin with, so the layers he’s uncovering just feel like a journey down some crackpot rabbit hole. It’s like being told what really motivates The Man in the Yellow Hat to keep bringing that damn monkey to inappropriate places, at great length. Twenty pages about his basic human need to become a fully-realized individual, and how bringing the monkey everywhere somehow serves that need. Would that deepen Curious George, or would it in fact make it shallower, by giving it more chances to be wrong? I think the latter.

Now, a parallel universe of elaborate bogus psychology would be perfectly excusable if it were in the service of an interesting plot, but it’s not: here, in fact, it’s in the service of half-baked proposals for total social reorganization, which makes it dangerous — or, since from my historical vantage point the danger has already come and gone, pitiful. A theory of society is only as good as its theory of the individual. And so it turns out that the very thing that makes the work artistically legitimate is also what makes it bad: yes, casting it in human terms is a good way to show the world whether your utopia makes any sense, and no, it clearly doesn’t, because you’re so utterly blinkered. Toward the end I would find myself involuntarily shaking my head “no” as I read.

I can now see Notes from the Underground as a very important rebuttal to Chernyshevsky’s cockeyed premises. No, people aren’t always rational! No, people don’t even always have their own best interests in mind! The world is full of muck, and so are human beings. You could say that Dostoevsky’s writing was about why communism would never ever be able to work the way it was supposed to. He was so right.

Toward the end of the book we get a long and detailed description/advertisement for a wonderful, wonderful seamstresses’ cooperative, from which the reader is free to extrapolate a fantastic new world built on the same principles. Here is just one of many reasons he gives why it makes fabulously good sense for co-workers to all live together and all work in the same place where they live:

… Many other expenses are either drastically reduced or completely unnecessary. Consider this, for example. To walk two or three versts a day to the store puts extra wear and tear on shoes and clothes. The following example is trivial, but it can be applied to other things of the same sort. If you don’t own an umbrella, your dress can suffer major damage as a result of rain. … Let’s say a simple cotton umbrella costs two rubles. There are twenty-five seamstresses in the workshop. Umbrellas for all would cost fifty rubles. Anyone who didn’t have one would face a loss much greater than two rubles. But since they live together and each one goes out only when it’s convenient, in bad weather it rarely happens that many of them have to leave the house at the same time. They found that five umbrellas would be quite enough. These five umbrellas are of fine silk and cost five rubles apiece. The total expenditure on umbrellas was twenty-five rubles, or one ruble per seamstress. You see, each one gets to use a fine umbrella instead of a worthless one for only half the price. So it is with a large number of things, which together result in major savings.

Hard to read that without shaking your head “no,” isn’t it? It was for me. Not for Lenin! Seriously: it was part of the communist utopia — way back before anyone had to make real plans! This was part of the utopian vision! —  that there would only be one umbrella for every five people. It boggles the mind.

The workings of the new society are a just mess of snake oil doodles like this, which clearly don’t actually interest our author, except for insofar as he is utterly convinced that they are oh so brilliant and oh so simple! The thing that really interests him is that once all this new stuff — whatever it is — gets put in place and gets working, everything will be much, much, better. Toward the end of the book I found myself strangely moved by our heroine’s dream where she has a vision of a futuristic post-revolutionary society, in which people are living communally in huge crystalline palaces built of aluminum in the middle of lush, spreading fields. The people sing and smile as they work the crop; a huge flowing canopy is moved over them so that they are always in the shade; the palaces have showerheads on the roofs so that they can create rain whenever they like, and the interiors are provided with electric light so that people may party late into the night — which they do every night after eating luxurious feasts. These fairy-tale wonders are presented with a quiet, loving simplicity, and in reading that passage I finally felt some (pitying) sympathy for our author’s cause. A revolution would be solely to bring this about — and of course no sacrifice is too great if heaven on earth is the reward. I think that was the first time that I was able to understand the emotional appeal of revolution. Only if we undo everything and start again might we ever be allowed finally to embrace our hopes; not just our tight, calculated hopes, but our expansive, unbounded hopes, the hope for magic and wonder and joy to be present in all things. When the ways of the world seem clearly to preclude our hearts’ fantasies, the only way to stay true to those fantasies is to tear down the world. To make room for aluminum palaces!

Chernyshevsky gets one thing very right and must be given his due: that the inner lives of women are exactly as real as the inner lives of men, despite the fact that almost nobody in 1863 believed it. He is very clear on this point, and, I think, very insightful as to just how deep the problem goes. I.e. he understands that worshiping women as sublime and ethereal goddesses is still a kind of oppression. One section in particular, a historical pageant of women’s long, long march toward personhood, is sympathetic and nicely done. It was painful to me that at the heart of this dreadful muddle was such a fundamentally admirable observation. If this had been a pure feminist novel — if someone had cut out all the cooperatives and “materialism” and revolutionary insinuations, I would have had a very different response to it. Well, okay, they would have had to do a lot more editing than that.

Chernyshevsky walks his heroine progressively from philosophical darkness to light, presumably at the same pace as an imaginary reader would need to become slowly acclimated to the truth. This progression governs the underlying structure and timeline of the book; the ostensible love triangle plot is actually subsidiary, which results in bizarre pacing for anyone trying to read the pedestrian story advertised in the prologue. The author’s attention swerves unpredictably around this “plot” like the screwy orbit of a planet in some pre-Galilean model of the universe with the wrong body at the center. And after Vera Pavlovna has finally reached her enlightened state, he has to make some more structurally wacky choices — he suddenly lurches into the story of a brand new female character so that he can resolve the triangle happily into two couples, and then drifts into a really peculiar epilogue that introduces yet another new female character known only as “the woman in mourning,” who is apparently meant to be his (Chernyshevsky’s) wife, grieving while he languishes in prison writing this very book. We get to see these lively young people having a grand, grand old time of things, partying and whatnot, and singing songs, and wink wink, talking about certain things, wink wink. I think he honestly thought that he and his friends were absolutely the bee’s knees, but it’s actually all rather ominous. He calls the book a “tale about New People,” and by “New People” he means him and his friends, the clique of awesomeness who were finally going to set the world right.

The last pages tell us that by 1865 (2 years after publication) the revolution will have already come and all will be well on its way to wonderful. In fact what happened is that the book created a tremendous scandal but no social change, and Chernyshevsky was eventually sent to Siberia and had the spirit crushed out of him.

Harold Bloom says of his list that of non-fiction it includes only that which is “of great aesthetic interest.” On those grounds I agree with this work’s inclusion: it’s a work of great aesthetic interest. (He didn’t say “great aesthetic beauty,” after all.) This is writing that very intentionally seizes on fiction itself as a tool, but only as a tool, and wields it self-consciously — sometimes sincerely, sometimes tongue-in-cheek — to aesthetic ends. There’s a modernistic attitude in that, a bit ahead of its time; Chernyshevsky apparently came to it through his own pure inventiveness and radical heart, and it is raw indeed. When he would smirk and snark directly at me, the reader, about this strange book that he was writing and I was reading — which happened often — I couldn’t help but feel that I had really been drawn into an actual philosophical-aesthetic engagement with this strange man from 150 years ago. And yes, I enjoyed that.

The title, by the way, is a leading question to which the unspeakable answer is obviously “a revolution.” That’s one for the FAQ.

If you google about this book, you will find quite a few people writing about how the most important character is named Rakhmetov. This provides an easy way of distinguishing the people who actually read the book from those who read it in college, wink wink. Rakhmetov is in fact a walk-on; the main characters are Vera Pavlovna, Lopukhov, and Kirsanov. Rakhmetov is described, in his brief appearance, as an astounding, near-superhuman figure, a hero of idealized revolutionary strength, intelligence, and zeal… and then the author says outright that this Rakhmetov has been placed in the work solely so that a bewildered (and lowly) reader who thinks the protagonists seem extraordinary in their oh-so-forward-thinking ways will have a truly extraordinary figure to place beside them, better to see that this is in fact a story about quite ordinary people doing achievable things. As it turns out, the passage about the “extraordinary man” ended up making a strong impact on Lenin and other revolutionaries, so naturally any course that covers the book is going to talk about Rakhmetov. But make no mistake! He only appears for a few pages in the middle of a long book about other people, and anyone who implies otherwise is probably faking it.

Okay, I finally reached my 4000 word quota! No, just kidding. Really sorry about the length.

For those of you who, having read this, are now considering an intervention to stop me from reading another randomly chosen book, rest assured that the next random number has directed me to be a short and well-liked book that people actually read and that I would have wanted to read anyway. A book that some of you have already read and enjoyed. So don’t worry!

Thanks for your concern, though.