NICHILISM. - The term n. commonly refers to that vast revolutionary movement, composed largely of young intellectuals, which deeply shook Russian life for several decades of the 19th century and even at the beginning of the 20th. In a stricter and more precise sense, it denotes a current of thought that prevailed among Russian students, broadly between 1860 and 1870, with revolutionary and terrorist tendencies in politics, at once individualist and collectivist aspirations, and philosophical ideologies uncompromisingly materialist and rationalist. The term n. was coined by Turgenev, and the “nihilists” were generally called “realists” in honor of their antireligious and anti-idealist tendencies, as well as their realistic and utilitarian sympathies in the artistic-literary sphere.
Nihilism fed on Western revolutionary and materialist thought, but in Russia it identified with a curious “inverted mysticism” that succeeded in drawing thousands of young people into the struggle. The lack of free political life and the absence of a strong middle class living by its own activity and initiative were the principal causes that drove a considerable part of Russian intellectual youth toward extremism. Tradition was to be fought in all its aspects, religion was seen as the mortal enemy, and unlimited, in a sense anarchic, freedom was aspired to; yet new idols, new heroes, and trivial fashions were fanatically idealized. An “ascetic” streak, perhaps of Slavo-Byzantine origin, drove these young revolutionaries to reject art, philosophy, and the classical world, which the people could not “use” and which were “diverting inventions” of the old world to distract the new generations from the exact sciences and social problems. Free love was preached as a challenge and in hatred of the old society, but—truly characteristic trait—the preaching of this doctrine was generally divorced among nihilists from any desire for sensual gratification. The ferment among student youth also spread to numerous women and girls, who brought to the movement great spirit of sacrifice and courage, but also tones of violence, primitivism, and exaltation. The book that in a way revealed this original and complex revolutionary ferment to Russia and Europe was Turgenev’s novel *Fathers and Sons*. The “positive ideal” of the young nihilists was, however, represented by various characters in the novel *What Is to Be Done?* by the revolutionary Chernyshevsky. According to the exponents of “realist” thought, literature depends on society and must serve society: it is a great honor and elevation for literature to serve a noble cause. The value of art, according to Pisarev, Dobrolyubov, and Chernyshevsky, can be judged by its contribution to social good. The concept of the useful thus replaces that of the beautiful. In the name of justice and of future “integral freedom,” a merciless tyranny over art and culture was meanwhile being proclaimed. On the political plane, under the blows of the “nihilists,” numerous representatives of the old regime fell: grand dukes, generals, policemen. However, on this specific plane, rather than of n.—a rather vague and generic term—one should speak of the “narodniki” (populists) and especially of their revolutionary wing, of various socialist schools and nuances, of the anarchists. At the beginning of the 20th century, revolutionary socialism took up again many characteristic features of 19th-century n. Like n., it was indeed revolutionary and libertarian, oscillating between socialism and individualism, between the “backward” masses of peasants and the working minorities, organized clandestinely and romantically underground, devoted to assassination, at once materialist, voluntarist, and pragmatist (the characteristic eclecticism, in short, rich in easy and attractive formulas, which was to have such powerful appeal for Russian youth). Nihilism spiritually and materially prepared the ground for the Bolshevik Revolution, which, however, energetically stifled its individualist and libertarian residues in the name of the single Party, the strong State, and the undisputed leader.