Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) is a figure of monumental importance in Russian literature and culture. An influential journalist and literary critic, a theoretician of the aesthetic relations of art to reality, and a prominent political activist, Chernyshevsky is the author of What Is to Be Done? (1863), the novel that has had the greatest impact on human lives in the history of Russian literature. This book approaches culture from a semiotic perspective, seeing it as a language that organizes human behaviour. But the author takes a direction quite different from that of semiotic work: rather than solely emphasize how the code shapes individuals, she also explores how individuals can influence the cultural code. Through an examination of Chernyshevsky's life and works, the author traces the transformation of personal experience into literary structure, then, in reverse, the work's ensuing influence in structuring the experience and behaviour of others.