Nihilism

NIHILISM. - Under the term n. is commonly understood that vast revolutionary movement made up for the most part of young intellectuals which profoundly shook Russian life for several decades of the 19th century and still at the beginning of the 20th. In a stricter and more exact sense, it is a current of thought that prevailed among the studious Russian youth, broadly between 1860 and 1870, with revolutionary and terrorist tendencies in politics, with aspirations at once individualist and collectivist, with philosophical ideologies intransigently materialist and rationalist. The term n. was coined by Turgenev, and the "nihilists" generally called themselves instead "realists," in honor of their anti-religious and anti-idealist tendencies, as well as of their veristic and utilitarian sympathies on the artistic-literary plane.

N. was nourished by Western revolutionary and materialist thought, but in Russia it is identified with a curious "inverted mysticism," which succeeded in dragging 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 its own initiative were the principal causes that drove a notable part of the Russian intellectual youth toward extremism. There was a tendency to combat tradition in all its aspects, religion was seen as the mortal enemy, there was an aspiration to an unlimited and in a certain sense anarchic freedom, but then new idols, new heroes, futile fashions were fanatically idealized. An "ascetic" substratum, perhaps of Slavo-Byzantine origin, drives these young revolutionaries to aversion for art, for philosophy, for the classical world, of which the people could not "make use" and which would be "diversions" devised by the old world to distract the new generations from the exact sciences and from social problems. Free love is preached as a challenge and in hatred of the old society, but — a truly characteristic trait — the preaching of this doctrine is generally joined among the nihilists by every desire for voluptuousness. The ferment of the studious youth was communicated also to numerous women and girls, who brought to the movement a great spirit of sacrifice and courage, but also accents of violence, of primitivism and of exaltation. The book that in a certain sense revealed to Russia and to Europe this original and complex revolutionary ferment was Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons. The "positive ideal" of the young nihilists was moreover represented by various characters of the novel What Is to Be Done? by the revolutionary Chernyshevsky. 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, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky, can be appreciated according to its contribution to the social good. The concept of the useful thus comes to replace the concept of the beautiful. In the name of justice and of the future "integral freedom," a merciless tyranny for art and for culture is meanwhile being foretold. On the political plane, under the blows of the "nihilists" fell numerous representatives of the old regime: grand dukes, generals, policemen. However, on this specific plane, rather than of n. — a somewhat vague and generic term — one should speak of the "narodniki" (populists) and especially of their revolutionary wing, of various schools and shades of socialism, of the anarchists. At the beginning of the 20th century, revolutionary socialism took up several characteristic motifs of 19th-century n. Like n., it was in fact revolutionary and libertarian, oscillating between socialism and individualism, between the "backward" mass of the peasants and the working-class minorities, organized clandestinely and romantically in the underground, devoted to assassinations, at the same time materialist, voluntarist and pragmatist (the characteristic eclecticism, in short, rich in easy and attractive formulas, which was to take such a powerful hold on the Russian youth). N. prepared spiritually and materially the ground for the Bolshevik Revolution, which moreover energetically stifled its individualist and libertarian residues, in the name of the single Party, of the strong State and of the undisputed leader.

Wolf Giusti