What Is to Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky
Published 1863 · 183,628 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Political Fiction, Utopian Fiction
How hard is What Is to Be Done? to read?
What Is to Be Done? scores 47 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Chernyshevsky's prose, rendered in Michael Katz's translation, uses accessible mid-19th-century language with only occasional period-specific terms: Councillor of State, silver rubles, the Semenovsky Bridge, specific Russian social ranks. Rare or archaic vocabulary is sparse; the writing is direct and purposeful, aimed at a broad intelligentsia readership rather than a literary one.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Sentences run to moderate length with nested subordinate clauses, particularly in Lopukhov's philosophical letter in Chapter Four and the narrator's digressive addresses to the reader. The intrusive narrator creates syntactic complexity through parenthetical asides and ironic qualifications, but the prose never approaches Jamesian hypotaxis or Proustian subordination—it remains functionally navigable.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- The novel explicitly embeds utilitarian and proto-socialist philosophy through character speeches, narrator digressions, and Vera's four allegorical dreams. Lopukhov's extended analysis of 'sociable versus reserved' personality types in Chapter Four exemplifies the didactic mode: abstract principles stated plainly rather than dramatized. The Fourth Dream, depicting a utopian crystal palace, operates as pure ideological allegory.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- The narrative carries two parallel information streams: a domestic realist plot tracking Vera Pavlovna's escape from her family and two marriages, and a socio-political program advocating cooperative workshops, rational love, and women's liberation. The translator's footnotes add historical and literary context on nearly every page. The density is moderate—ideas are repeated and explained, not compressed.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- Chernyshevsky's narrator is aggressively direct, constantly addressing 'the perspicacious reader' to explain what is happening and why. Meanings are stated, not implied. The opening mystery of a fake suicide note is solved within pages, and characters explain their own motivations at length. Nothing requires inference that the text does not immediately supply.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- Vera Pavlovna's four dreams carry sustained allegorical weight: the First Dream depicts liberation from a damp cellar, the Fourth Dream presents a vision of a utopian future in a crystal palace. Rakhmetov, the 'special person' who sleeps on nails to harden himself, functions as a type-figure for the revolutionary intelligentsia rather than a rounded character. The domestic narrative supports but does not obscure this symbolic layer.
- Ironic distance: 38 out of 100
- The narrator employs social irony in depicting the landlady's gossip about the Lopukhovs' unconventional marriage and in mocking the 'old order' of patriarchal family arrangements. But the irony is satirical, not destabilizing: Chernyshevsky's didactic purpose is earnest, and the gap between surface text and authorial intent is narrow. The reader is never asked to read against the narrator.
- Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
- The domestic plot resolves fully: Lopukhov arranges his own disappearance to free Vera, reappears under a new identity as Beaumont, and the characters settle into a harmonious commune. Chapter Six jumps to 1865 and closes with a deliberately cryptic scene suggesting Chernyshevsky's own future liberation from prison, but this is a coda, not sustained ambiguity. The novel's program concludes with affirmation.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- The novel opens with an unexplained mystery (a note and a shot), then rewinds to tell Vera's story chronologically. It is punctuated by four allegorical dream-chapters, interpolated letters, an extended digression on Rakhmetov that breaks the main narrative entirely, and Chapter Six's sudden jump forward to 1865. The narrator's intrusive meta-commentary creates a layer of self-conscious structure uncommon in realist fiction of the period.
How What Is to Be Done? is regarded
What Is to Be Done? holds a literary regard score of 69 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.