An economist and journalist, leader of an underground party, and founder of the first state in history of workers and peasants—few other people influenced the fate of Russia and the world in the 20th century as Vladimir Lenin did. Is Lenin’s cause alive today? That question remains open. But his books—undoubtedly. Elites can argue endlessly about what literature is and what it isn’t, what form is normative and what is marginal; but when the writer Lenin appears, all commonly accepted canon simply gets devalued and abolished. All of this once again confirms the Marxist thesis that true literature is, above all, a social practice.
Judging by the effect it produced, it is Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?” that is the main book of the 20th century. This Lenin brochure changed the world, splitting it into two camps: it explained to the interested public how to build a spaceship capable of overcoming capitalist gravity, and how to recruit a crew for it—those people who would be tasked with building the best state in the world. The work sounds both like a furious polemic with the “workers’ leaders” and like a manifesto—and also like instructions for creating an organization that can operate under total secrecy. In two words, you can’t explain it—you have to listen.