This paper was presented at the 2022 ASEEES conference in Chicago, IL by Jillian Pignataro. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel, What is to be Done? has principally been considered as an ideological and didactic work, and the exceptional Rakhmetov has been seen as Chernyshevsky’s vision of the ideal man.[1] Nonetheless, as scholar Andrew Drozd has shown,