Chernyshevsky was a nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary, a forerunner of the major ideologies and political currents that led to the October Revolution of 1917.
An economist, philosopher, and writer, he was imprisoned at the age of thirty-four in 1862 and remained incarcerated until 1888.
Written during his early years of imprisonment by a young idealist, the novel bears an overwhelming moral and political imprint, one that compromises its strictly narrative component.
The theme remains strikingly timely: women’s freedom and equality.
Vera (meaning "faith" in Russian) lives in a narrow-minded bourgeois family and is destined for a marriage of convenience with a wealthy, vulgar suitor.
In a splendid depiction provided by one of Vera’s dreams at the end of the book (an extraordinary foreshadowing of Nietzsche’s oneiric style), Queen Astarte commands the young woman, portrayed as "a reclining woman," to submit to her lord.
> Brighten his leisure hours.
Love him, for he bought you; and if you love him not, he will kill you
.
But Vera replies that it is not she
> depicted in this scene.
Back then I did not exist.
That woman was a slave.
where equality is lacking, there is no place for me
.
And indeed, Vera rejects her destiny, rebels against her family, and marries a young doctor.
It is no mere rebellion of a resolute adolescent.
Vera knows full well that she has emerged from "a damp and dark cellar" to liberate other women, who "still lie captive and infirm."
Now independent, Vera sets up a sewing workshop, where the seamstresses not only share profits and decide on business matters and organizational structure for themselves, but also dedicate themselves to their own education and the emancipation of women.
The marital relationship between Vera and her husband is modeled on friendship, devoid of emotional and sexual ties.
> Listen carefully now: this is how we shall live (...).
First of all, we will have two rooms, yours and mine: in a third room we will dine, and receive our mutual friends.
Secondly, I shall not enter your room (...) nor will you enter my room
.
Later in the final dream, Vera imagines this female figure being represented by another queen, Virginity.
> Man’s primitive brutality was gradually tamed by womanly beauty.(...) Man loved the pure, inaccessible virgin.
Yet woman did not yet possess a consciousness
.
It appears to be a tranquil situation, but a deep unease pervades Vera.
It is a dream that reveals this.
The young woman imagines that an artist forces her to read her diary.
> It spoke of the two of us (Vera recounts to her husband) and how fond we are of each other, and then all of a sudden, at the touch of his hand, vile words appeared, saying that I did not love you
.
Vera certainly cannot follow the third queen, Aphrodite, who beckons toward an apparent freedom, pursued as it is by "trafficking in pleasure."
She must experience true love, founded upon an equality of intellect, feeling, and sex between man and woman.
She falls in love with a friend of her husband, Kirsanov: their affair is fraught, as both wish to disavow it and remain faithful—she to her bridegroom, he to his friend.
The suicide of Vera’s husband enables their love story to materialize, bringing about "equality between the two beings who love each other."
Thus speaks the fourth queen in Vera’s dream.
> Once the equality of the sexes is recognized, man no longer regards woman as his property.
They love each other because they wish to do so
.
(...) If you wish to express in a single word what I am, call me equality.
The overriding reliance on dialogue between the characters, particularly between Vera, her husband, and Kirsanov, gives the impression of being faced with a Socratic dialogue, reinforcing the philosophical and moralizing character of the writing.
It is always Vera who steers the reasoning, while the two men are stereotypes, figures flattened by the woman's personality.
Vera is a complex character; at first, she is simply a young woman still uncertain and frightened; she pragmatically seizes the opportunity of a liberating marriage; with typical youthful confidence, she faces a relationship devoid
of that gentle, assiduous caress, the need to cradle oneself voluptuously in a feeling of tenderness«.
Then, she experiences »the imperiousness of that gentle feeling
> , even if she cannot bring herself to call it love.
Her husband’s suicide devastates her, but she overcomes it, defining the ensuing guilt as a
pointless melodrama".
A little selfishness does no harm! In the end, she becomes a woman thoroughly conscious of her own worth and aspirations.
It may be that Chernyshevsky identified with Vera, and that the book is therefore a *Bildungsroman*, or the swan song of a lost youth.
From a literary standpoint, it is a mediocre tale; the dialogue-driven narrative style and the glut of reflections, digressions, and declarations make it bombastic, repetitive, and prolix.
Only the dreams carve out an innovative rupture within a traditional narrative structure that is ill-suited to plumbing the depths of its characters and situations.
Why not read it? It is boring.
