Ukraine and Chernyshevsky’s Utopia in What Is to Be Done?

• In Event: Russian Radicals in Ukraine, Russian Radicals on Ukraine: Reception and Exchange

Abstract

Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s influential novel What Is to Be Done? (1863) contains several references to Ukraine, its culture and geography, for example, in the famous utopian vision in Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream, as well as in the novel’s finale, where the mysterious “lady in mourning” sings a Ukrainian folk song (which Chernyshevsky wrote down from memory when working on the novel’s manuscript in prison). In this paper, I will discuss the significance of these references for the imperial subtext of the novel and its utopian imagination, where Ukraine paradoxically appears both as the space of otherness and freedom and at the same time is fully appropriated into the “new Russia” of the future. I will also address the larger context of Chernyshevsky’s views on Ukraine and “the Slavic question” more generally, as expressed in his historiographical writings and literary criticism.

Author

• Valeria Sobol, U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign