• This is a unique translation of the original Lenin’s work as explained bellow.
• Lenin’s work What Is To Be Done? was written at the end of 1901 and early in 1902. In “Where To Begin”, published in Iskra, No. 4 (May 1901), Lenin said that the article represented “a skeleton plan to be developed in greater detail in a pamphlet now in preparation for print”.
• Lenin began the actual writing of the book in the autumn of 1901. In his “Preface to the Pamphlet Documents of the ‘Unity’ Conference”, written in November 1901, Lenin said that the book was in preparation “to be published in the near future”. In December Lenin published (in Iskra, No. 12) his article “A Talk with Defenders of Economism”, which he later called a conspectus of What Is To Be Done? He wrote the Preface to the book in February 1902 and early in March the book was published by Dietz in Stuttgart. An announcement of its publication was printed in Iskra, No. 18, March 10, 1902.
• In republishing the book in 1907 as part of the collection Twelve Years, Lenin omitted Section A of Chapter V, “Who Was Offended by the Article ‘Where To Begin,’” stating in the Preface that the book was being published with slight abridgements, representing the omission solely of details of the organisational relationships and minor polemical remarks. Lenin added five footnotes to the new edition.
• The text of this volume is that of the 1902 edition, verified with the 1907 edition.

Four most significant works, also including "The Development of Capitalism in Russia"; "Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism"; "The State and Revolution".

Nikolai Chernyshevsky's great novel, originally published in 1863, transformed Russian views of the peasantry in much the same way that Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin changed American perceptions of slavery. In its pages, a group of idealistic Russian intellectuals go back to the land, easing the lot of the peasants with scientific methods of farming and liberating the serfs from hardship. The intellectuals' socialist vision offers the promise of a world that subsequent events did not bear out, and it is fascinating to consider in the light of historical reality. Fyodor Dostoyevsky gave Chernyshevsky's tale, full of sermonizing and idealism, a darkly pessimistic twist in his masterpiece The Possessed.