[4]: 14 What is to Be Done?, a novel by Nikolay Chernyshevsky that was much beloved by the young generation of Russian radicals, was first printed in book form by Elpidin.
Elpidin's efforts to publish this and the rest of Chernyshevsky's collected works were mired in legal challenges, financial difficulties, and delayed production.
[4]: 20–21 Elpidin's contemporaries had mixed opinions of him, finding him uncouth and crude, a "maniac", and "absurd" (Herzen).
[4]: 19, 18, 11 But he was respected for his energy, his bookstore, and his business expertise, and even those who expressed dismay at his eccentricity or lack of intellectual cachet were willing to work with him.
In any case, he appears to have funnelled the money paid to him by the Okhrana into publishing revolutionary literature at an even greater rate than before.