What Is to Be Done?

Written in a St. Petersburg prison cell in 1863, this deliberately didactic novel became a handbook for a generation of Russian radicals. Its heroine, Vera Pavlovna, escapes a suffocating family and a forced marriage to build an independent life, founding a workers’ sewing cooperative and imagining, in a series of famous dream visions, a rational and equal society to come. Around her move the “new people,” idealists who live by reason and useful labor, among them the iron-willed ascetic revolutionary Rakhmetov. Awkward as fiction but electric as propaganda, the book inspired everyone from the Populists to Lenin, who borrowed its title for his own pamphlet decades later. This free PDF and EPUB edition offers the full English translation.