Utopia and Gender Politics in Chernyshevsky's "What Is to Be Done?"
Nikolai Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? From Tales About New People (1862) describes a
utopia in which male, female, worker and employer all coexist in harmony. Through
his main character and socialist heroine Chernyshevsky illustrates various
problematic elements affecting the "woman question" and the role
women play within that question. Chernyshevsky’s own political involvement and
personal investement in gender relations led to this novelistic attempt to set
out a prescriptive program for equality between the sexes.
The major paradox of the novel lies in the two
conflicting messages created by the vacillation between the events of Vera
Pavlovna's daily life and her dreams. The novel seems to both complement female
equality and argue the impossibility of equality in modern society. While the
novel is often praised for Chernyshevsky's presentation of revolutionary
ideals, I argue that the novel makes it clear that the social equality modeled
by Vera’s life remains confined to the space of an apartment. As a result, Chernyshevsky’s
realist work becomes a futuristic novel depicting gender equality as the major characteristic
of utopia.
My arguments respond in part to Irina Paperno’s work, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism which explains Chernyshevsky’s personal and professional commitment to the idealism he describes in the novel. I examine this idealism in consideration of the role of language and the function of dreams as discussed in the literary criticisms of Luce Irigaray (the commodification of women, the relationship of mother and daughter), Judith Butler (language as an assertion of phallic power) and the philosophical interpretations of Elizabeth Grosz (the identification of gendered spaces).