Nikolay Chernyshevsky's cooperative fiction

The article deals with the cooperative fiction of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, represented by his two novels What Is to Be Done? and Reflections of Radiance. The novelty of the article lies in the fact that it deals with the cooperative discourse of Chernyshevsky’s novels written when he was held captive in the Peter and Paul Fortress and later when he served his sentence in the Vilyuysk prison. The narrative of these works is connected with the cooperative theory of partnership set forth by Chernyshevsky in his article “Capital and Labor” and his “Studies on Political Economy (according to Mill)”. The relevance of the present research lies in the need to comprehend the creative heritage of Chernyshevsky, one of the founders of the cooperative theory, and to evaluate its influence on the socioeconomic development of the country. The workshop of Vera Pavlovna and the cooperative factory of Avrora Vasilievna are used as examples to identify the types of cooperative partnerships (productive associations) presented in these novels. The analysis of the memoirs of Chernyshevsky’s contemporaries shows the influence of his novel What Is to Be Done? on society, especially on the revolutionary-minded youth, who accepted it as a guide to action. The initiatives of the populist intelligentsia to organize artel workshops coincided with the first stage of the artel movement. The desire to carry out the planned work as quickly as possible led to the collapse of the artel undertakings of the Narodniks. The article outlines the reasons for the failure of social experiments to reorganize society on the basis of productive associations. The novel Reflections of Radiance was not available to contemporaries, readers got to know it quite late, so it did not have any impact on society. At the same time, the literary and artistic representation of the productive association in this novel allows us to classify it as a piece of cooperative fiction.