Read "What is to be Done?" by Nikolay Chernyshevsky online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Of course in other cases of this sort Kirsánof would not have thought of running such a risk; it would be more simple to take the girl from home, and let her marry whomsoever she pleased. But here the affair was complicated by the girl's ideas, and the peculiarities of the man whom she loved. With her ideas of the inseparability of husband and wife, she would have clung to the wretched man even if she had found that to live with him was a torment. To unite them would be worse than to kill. Therefore there remained one choice, either to kill, or to give her the possibility of coming to reason.
On the next day the consultation was held, composed of some of the practitioners in the high world. There are five doctors, the most renowned; it is impossible not to have the best; how otherwise could they bend Pólozof? It was necessary that the sentence should be without appeal in his eyes. Kirsánof spoke; they listened with great condescension to what he said, and they all confirmed it with an air of great importance. It could not be otherwise, because, you remember, there is in existence a certain Claude Bernard, and he lives in Paris; and besides that, Kirsánof says such things which -- but the plague take these boys! You can't understand them! Then how can you help agreeing with them?