Prologue: A Novel for the Beginning of the 1860s

by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Michael R. Katz (Introduction)

Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89) is most famous as the author of What Is to Be Done? (1863), one of the most inspirational texts in the Russian revolutionary movement. But during his long and lonely Siberian exile Chernyshevsky wrote Prologue, an novel of extraordinary interest for anyone eager to understand the course of Russian history and the political debate over democratization taking place in Russia today.

Set in Petersburg in 1857, on the eve of the great reforms that would include the emancipation of the serfs, Prologue expresses the author's hostility toward Russian liberals, their halfhearted attempts to alleviate the sufferings of peasants, and their insufficient support of revolution, while also exploring the obstacles in the path of women's social and personal development in the Victorian era. Michael R. Katz's new translation makes this singular work available to the non-Russian reading public for the first time.

359 pages, Hardcover

First published August 16, 1995

About the author

Nikolaj Gavrilovič Černyševskij (Russian: Николай Гаврилович Чернышевский, Николай Чернышевский) was a Russian revolutionary democrat, materialist philosopher, lexicographer, journalist and socialist (seen by some as a utopian socialist). He was the leader of the revolutionary democratic movement of the 1860s, and an influence on Vladimir Lenin, Emma Goldman, and Serbian political writer and socialist Svetozar Marković.
The son of a priest, Chernyshevsky was born in Saratov in 1828, and stayed there till 1846. After graduating from Saint Petersburg University in 1850, he taught literature at a gymnasium in Saratov. From 1853 to 1862, he lived in Saint Petersburg, and became the chief editor of Sovremennik ("Contemporary"), in which he published his main literary reviews and his essays on philosophy.

He was the spiritual guidance of the progressive intellectuals. Because of his radical ideas he was arrested in July 1862 in St. Petersburg, he was released after seven years of prison in Siberia and eighteen in exile and confined in the Fortress of St. Peter and Paul, where he wrote his only finished novel Что делать? What Is to Be Done?, written during his imprisonment. The novel was written in a only apparent innocuous style and with a romantic plot in the fashion style of the era foreshadowing its real messages and its deeply critical political and social themes to avoid censorship. The novel was published in the Sovremennik review in 1863 and later, when it was banned, the novel began to circulate in clandestine copies becoming a cult novel for generations of Russian revolutionaries, who sought to emulate the novel's hero, who was wholly dedicated to the revolution, ascetic in his habits and ruthlessly disciplined, to the point of sleeping on a bed of nails and eating only meat in order to build strength for the Revolution. Among those who took inspiration from the character was Lenin, who wrote a work of political theory of the same name, and who was ascetic in his personal life.

In 1862, Chernyshevsky was sentenced to civil execution (mock execution), followed by penal servitude (1864-72), and by exile to Vilyuisk, Siberia (1872-83). He died at the age of 61, only four months after his release and his return to his hometown Saratov.