NIHILISM. — The term n. commonly denotes that vast revolutionary movement composed for the most part of young intellectuals which profoundly shook Russian life for several decades of the nineteenth century and still at the beginning of the twentieth. In a narrower and more exact sense, it refers to a current of thought that prevailed among Russia’s student youth, broadly between 1860 and 1870, with revolutionary and terrorist tendencies in politics, aspirations that were at once individualist and collectivist, and philosophical ideologies uncompromisingly materialist and rationalist. The term n. was coined by Turgeniev, while the “nihilists” generally called themselves “realists,” in honor of their antireligious and anti-idealist tendencies, as well as of their veristic and utilitarian sympathies in the artistic-literary sphere.
N. drew nourishment from Western revolutionary and materialist thought, but in Russia it became identified with a curious “inverted mysticism,” which succeeded in drawing thousands of young people into the struggle. The lack of a 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 Russia’s intellectual youth toward extremism. Tradition in all its aspects was to be combated; religion was regarded as the mortal enemy; unlimited and, in a certain sense, anarchic freedom was desired, yet new idols, new heroes, and frivolous fashions were then fanatically idealized. An “ascetic” strain, perhaps of Slavo-Byzantine origin, drove these young revolutionaries to reject art, philosophy, and the classical world, of which the people could not “make use” and which were supposedly “diversions” devised by the old world to divert the new generations from the exact sciences and social problems. Free love was preached as a challenge to and out of hatred for the old society, but — a truly characteristic feature — among the nihilists the preaching of this doctrine was generally unconnected with any desire for sensual pleasure. The ferment among the student youth also spread to numerous women and girls, who brought to the movement a great spirit of sacrifice and courage, but also accents of violence, primitivism, and exaltation. The book that in a certain sense revealed this original and complex revolutionary ferment to Russia and Europe was Turgeniev’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 Černyševskij. According to the exponents of “realistic” thought, literature depends on society and must serve society: it is a great honor and a great elevation for literature to serve a noble cause. The value of art, according to Pisarev, Dobroljubov, and Černyševskij, can be assessed according to its contribution to the social good. The concept of utility thus came to replace the concept of beauty. In the name of justice and future “integral freedom,” a merciless tyranny over art and culture was meanwhile being heralded. On the political plane, numerous representatives of the old regime fell beneath the blows of the “nihilists”: grand dukes, generals, and police officers. Nevertheless, on this specific plane, rather than n. — a somewhat vague and general term — one ought to speak of the “narodniki” (populists), and especially of their revolutionary wing, of various socialist schools and tendencies, and of the anarchists. At the beginning of the twentieth century, revolutionary socialism took up again several characteristic elements of nineteenth-century n. Like n., it was in fact revolutionary and libertarian, wavering between socialism and individualism,
between the “backward” mass of the peasants and the workers’ minorities, organized clandestinely and romantically underground, devoted to assassinations, and at the same time materialist, voluntarist, and pragmatist (the characteristic eclecticism, in short, rich in easy and attractive formulas, which was to exert such a powerful influence on Russian youth). N. spiritually and materially prepared the ground for the Bolshevik Revolution, which, however, vigorously suppressed its individualist and libertarian remnants in the name of the single Party, the strong State, and the undisputed leader.