Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Essentially, it was a reference work masquerading as a novel, a method. (Chernyshevsky disarmingly believed that he had written a poetic and entertaining novel, similar to works of Dickens and The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas.)

His enemies ridiculed him, but the novel’s impact was just what the author wanted: the story of how an emancipated “new woman,” while setting up a quasi-socialist sewing factory, develops progressive amorous relations with two young “new men” became the bedside reading of Russian radicals for decades, replacing the once-popular novels of George Sand.

Lenin was most influenced by another character from the novel, Rakhmetov, who trains for underground activity: he lives ascetically, not drinking wine, or touching women, or eating white bread (just black), doing without sugar, reading only necessary books and meeting only necessary people, and preparing physically and mentally (he even sleeps one night on a bedding filled with nails) for the coming revolution. Gorky later noted that the intense Lenin cultivated self-imposed restraints that were akin to “self-torture, self-mutilation, Rakhmetov’s nails.”¹³

Lenin first read What Is to Be Done? at the age of fourteen, and he did not like the novel then. (He was enthralled by Turgenev, Chernyshevsky’s antipode, and he could quote long passages from Turgenev’s novels by heart.) But it was a favorite book of Lenin’s older brother, Alexander, a student at St. Petersburg University.

Alexander Ulyanov joined an underground student group that plotted to assassinate Alexander III. The police arrested them in 1887; five of the prisoners who refused to plead guilty and ask for pardon were hanged, including Alexander. This stunned Lenin. He reread What Is to Be Done? and decided to become a professional revolutionary, a “new man.”

Going from soft and poetic Turgenev to stern and dogmatic Chernyshevsky was a dizzying transformation, and Lenin achieved it not without considerable effort. Certainly along the way there were doubts and regrets. Just how difficult that road was is evinced by Lenin’s painfully conflicting attitude toward music. Actually, it is the only window into the young Lenin’s soul and its agonies.

Lenin could have repeated the words of the protagonist of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata: “And really, music is a strange thing … They say that music elevates the soul—nonsense, lies! … It doesn’t elevate or debase the soul, it irritates it … In China music is a state affair. And that is how it should be. A person cannot be permitted to hypnotize someone or many people and then do what he wants with them.”

There are accounts of Tolstoy listening to music and weeping, his face reflecting “something like horror” as he wept. The writer Romain Rolland commented that “only with such richness of spirit as Tolstoy’s, music can become threatening to a person.”¹⁴ Rolland was referring to heightened emotional arousal, present in complex personalities, of which Lenin clearly was one.

For Lenin, music had both sweet and tormenting associations. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata reminded him of his childhood: it had been played frequently by his mother and his beloved younger sister, Olga, who died of typhus when she was only nineteen.

Beethoven was also associated with his deepest love: in 1909 Lenin began his affair with Inessa Armand, thirty-five, a Russian revolutionary of French descent, a beautiful and independent woman, an accomplished pianist. Inessa idolized Beethoven, and Lenin often listened to her play his sonatas. He particularly liked Inessa’s interpretation of the Pathétique, which he said he could listen to “ten, twenty, forty times … and each time it captivates me and delights me more and more.”¹⁵

Abroad as a revolutionary émigré, Lenin lived in a classic ménage à trois with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and Inessa Armand. This union, based as much on emotions as on the commonality of interests and ideology, was undoubtedly inspired by Chernyshevsky’s ideas on married life, as expressed in What Is to Be Done?

This is another reason why Lenin blew up at a Party comrade who said the novel was primitive and without talent. “This is a work that gives you a charge for your entire life. Works without talent do not have that kind of influence,”¹⁶ Lenin said. Obviously, Lenin defended Chernyshevsky much more energetically than he had Pushkin.