Just because a work unknown in modern times does not mean it isn't influential. Take "What Is to Be Done?", an 1863 novel written by the Russian philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky.
This book *DEEPLY* pissed off both Leo Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
Fyodor Dostoevsky mocked the utilitarianism and utopianism of the novel in his 1864 novella Notes from Underground, as well as in his 1872 novel Devils.
Leo Tolstoy wrote a different What Is to Be Done?, published in 1886, based on his own ideas of moral responsibility.
Vladimir Lenin, however, found it inspiring and named a 1902 pamphlet "What Is to Be Done?". Lenin is said to have read the book five times in one summer, and according to Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Stanford, Joseph Frank, 'Chernyshevsky's novel, far more than Marx's Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.'
Vladimir Nabokov's final novel in Russian, The Gift, thoroughly ridiculed What is to Be Done? in its fourth chapter.
In the book Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, author Chris Matthew Sciabarra says that What Is to Be Done? is one of the sources of inspiration for Rand's thought. For example, the book's main character Lopuhov says "I am not a man to make sacrifices. And indeed there are no such things. One acts in the way that one finds most pleasant." Chernyshevsky's egoism was ultimately socialistic, and thus quite distinct from the capitalistic form later advocated by Rand.
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Would you not called "What is to be done" one of the more influential books in Modern times, even though it isn't even in print in the USA?
