What Is to Be Done?

“The theater begins with the coat rack”—when the curtain opens. At the Taganka Theatre, there is no curtain, and the amphitheater of long student benches with high backs, where you can run down from the stage into the rows of spectators, turns the theater into one big lecture hall. In this stage design—somehow embracing the auditorium as well—the emotional and semantic key to the performance is set.

Yes, in imperial Russia, literature was the only “chair” from which advanced thought could address the people. And for even Chernyshevsky himself, who believed that literature is “a servant of ideas,” a “distributor of knowledge and education,” the novel What Is to Be Done? was not only a work of art. For several generations of revolutionaries it became a “textbook for life.”