What To Do?

In The Gift , Nabokov recounts this legend about Chernyshevsky’s What To Do? (Or, What Is To Be Done? ). Chernyshevsky wrote the novel in prison and gave proofs of each section to his friend Nekrasov. But “Nekrasov, on his way home (corner of Liteynaya and Basseynaya streets) in a hackney sleigh, lost the pink-paper package containing two manuscripts, each threaded through at the corners and entitled What To Do? While remembering with the lucidity of despair the whole of his route, he did not recall the fact than when nearing his house he had laid the package beside him in order to take out his purse – and just then the sleigh had turned . . . a crunch as it skidded . . . and What To Do? rolled off unnoticed: this was the attempt of the mysterious force – in this case centrifugal – to confiscate the book whose success was destined to have such a disastrous effect upon the fate of its author. But the attempt failed: on the snow near the Maryinski Hospital the pink package was picked up by a poor clerk burdened with a large family. Having plodded home, he donned his spectacles and examined his find . . . he saw that it was the beginning of some kind of literary work and without a tremor, and not burning his sluggish fingers, he put it aside. ‘Destroy it!’ begged a hopeless voice: in vain. A notice of its loss was printed in the Saint Petersburg Police Gazette . The clerk carried the package to the indicated address, for which he received the promised reward: fifty silver rubles.”