Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Russian nihilist movement" in English language version.
For it was Bazarov who had first declared himself to be a "Nihilist" and who announced that, "since at the present time, negation is the most useful of all," the Nihilists "deny—everything."
Nihilism, (from Latin nihil, "nothing"), originally a philosophy of moral and epistemological skepticism that arose in 19th-century Russia during the early years of the reign of Tsar Alexander II.
Peter Kropotkin, the leading Russian anarchist, defined nihilism as the symbol of struggle against all forms of tyranny, hypocrisy, and artificiality and for individual freedom.
The philosophy of nihilism then began to be associated erroneously with the regicide of Alexander II (1881) and the political terror that was employed by those active at the time in clandestine organizations opposed to absolutism.
In Russian literature, nihilism was probably first used by N.I. Nadezhdin, in an 1829 article in the Messenger of Europe, in which he applied it to Aleksandr Pushkin. Nadezhdin, as did V.V. Bervi in 1858, equated nihilism with skepticism. Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov, a well-known conservative journalist who interpreted nihilism as synonymous with revolution, presented it as a social menace because of its negation of all moral principles.
Nihilism, (from Latin nihil, "nothing"), originally a philosophy of moral and epistemological skepticism that arose in 19th-century Russia during the early years of the reign of Tsar Alexander II.
At the novel's first appearance, the radical younger generation attacked it bitterly as a slander, and conservatives condemned it as too lenient
In sociopolitical terms, [Bazarov] represents the victory of the revolutionary intelligentsia over the aristocracy, to which Turgenev belonged.
first Russian political party to openly advocate a policy of revolution; it had been preceded only by conspiratorial groups. Founded in 1876
Zemlya i Volya, English Land and Freedom, first Russian political party to openly advocate a policy of revolution; it had been preceded only by conspiratorial groups.
The first truly Narodnik organization to emerge from this situation was the revolutionary group Zemlya i Volya.
Russian nihilism did not imply, as one might expect from a purely semantic viewpoint, a universal "negation" of ethical normativity, the foundations of knowledge or the meaningfulness of human existence.
The 1860s were once described by Trotsky as 'a brief eighteenth century' in Russian thought. The Nihilist thinkers sought to assimilate and resynthesize the main trends in Western materialism and positivism. As usual in Russia, imported ideas were treated selectively and deployed in quite distinctive intellectual formations.
Ill-informed authors of that time usually referred to all Russian revolutionaries as "nihilists." Well-informed ones either did not refer to narodnichestvo at all, or employed this word correctly in the specific, narrow sense of the mid-1870's. ... The same holds true of the writings of no less an authority than Stepniak-Kravchinsky. ... In Russian Storm Cloud, protesting the misuse in the West of the word "nihilist," he says that the Russian revolutionaries themselves use two names: a formal one—"socialist revolutionaries"—and a colloquial one—"radicals."
liberal critics called the radicals "materialists"; but then, when it was no longer sufficiently derogatory, they came to prefer the term "nihilists".
Russian Nihilism is perhaps best regarded as the intellectual pool of the period 1855–66 out of which later radical movements emerged
Even so, the term nihilism did not become popular until Turgenev published F&C in 1862. Turgenev, a sorokovnik (an 1840s man), used the term to describe "the children", the new generation of students and intellectuals who, by virtue of their relation to their fathers, were considered šestidesjatniki.
By 1861 the radicals were disappointed by the slow pace of reform, and especially by the illiberal terms of the emancipation of the serfs in that year.
In this context the very term "nihilism" was, if not embraced, so at least tolerated and occasionally used self-referentially—as the nihilists saw themselves.
"Realists" have the same referent as "nihilists"; the character chosen by Pisarev to represent "our realism" is Bazarov, the "representative of our young generation"—the archetypical nihilist.
Pisarev responded by writing an enthusiastic review ... endorsing the young generation's embrace of nihilism"; "Although realism, like nihilism, implies the rejection of metaphysics, sophistry, sentimentalism and aestheticism, it may, however, harbour a more positive and objective approach to reality, in contrast to nihilism and its connotations of subjectivism and nothingness.
Herzen, being one of the latter, argued in 1868, six years after the publication of Turgenev's novel and Pisarev's review (and hence in a different political climate), that the šestidesjatniki's nihilism had essentially been introduced by the sorokovniki.
During the communist period of Russian history, the principal "nihilist" theoreticians were officially lionized under the designation "Russian revolutionary democrats"
Russian Nihilism is perhaps best regarded as the intellectual pool of the period 1855–66 out of which later radical movements emerged
Russian nihilism was essentially a product of the 1860s evolving dialogue between sorokovniki and šestidesjatniki
Accordingly, nihilism, as a movement, did not exclusively consist of šestidesjatniki."; "The term nihilist, I suggest, in its significant association with the šestidesjatniki, should in this context be understood in relation to the idealist of the sorokovniki generation.
Though the sorokovniki had provided the šestidesjatniki with theoretical grounds for ideological advancement, the two generations became increasingly confrontational towards each other.
initially influenced by sorokovniki like Herzen and Belinsky, and also Turgenev
It has frequently been stressed that many of the šestidesjatniki were so-called raznočincy, which means that there would have been greater social diversity among them than would be found in the older generation, comprised of mostly ethnically Russian nobility from St. Petersburg or Moscow. This is true to a certain extent. But the historiographical tendency to equate nihilism with raznočincy has rightfully been criticized. Many of the prominent šestidesjatniki were of noble birth like their "fathers", or at least children of clergymen, both lacking first-hand experience of repression and poverty
... under the delayed influence of the French Enlightenment and the contemporaneous influence of post-Hegelian German materialism, came together with political radicalism to create a major social and intellectual movement with a broadly materialist philosophical foundation. ... the representatives of this movement came to be called 'nihilists'
Materialism came to Russia in the nineteenth century as it had come to Germany - as a reaction against German Idealism; and in both countries the trend was initiated by Ludwig Feuerbach. Among the liberally minded, Western-oriented Russian intelligentsia, brief but intense infatuations with Schelling, Hegel and Fichte were followed by enthusiasm for Feuerbach
Even earlier, older generations had pejoratively depicted the sorokovniki as nihilists.
The actual content of the 'materialism' preached by the radicals of 'the 1860s' is not always clear. As indicated, they often avoided the term itself for reasons of censorship"; "Government repression after 1866 put an end to the open development of this materialist movement
Materialism returned to intellectual prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
The theoretical underpinnings of the movement were elaborated in Russia ... and more freely in emigration by Mikhail Bakunin.
But the materialist trend in philosophy that Feuerbach inspired did not become a broad movement in Russia until the death of Nicholas I in 1855 and the end of the Crimean War a year later.
The šestidesjatniki indeed rejected idealism; their masters, however, like Herzen and Bakunin, had found understanding in the philosophies of Fichte and Hegel.
The theoretical underpinnings of the movement were elaborated in Russia (as far as tsarist censorship would permit) by Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Dmitrii Pisarev, Nikolai Dobroliubov, Ivan Sechenov and others
Dobrolyubov, perhaps himself a role model for Bazarov, came to the term nihilism through the šestidesjatnik and sociologist Vasilij Bervi-Flerovskij. In 1858, Bervi-Flerovskij used nihilism as a synonym for scepticism
The Russian tradition of 'civic criticism', inaugurated by Vissarion Belinskii, was developed further by Chernyshevskii, Pisarev, Dobroliubov and others, in part because the discussion of literature offered them a relatively protected forum for the social critique they could not publish directly.
Its fullest legal expression in Russia came in the published writings of Chernyshevskii, Sechenov and Pisarev
Because outright denial of God's existence or rejection of faith as a source of knowledge could not readily be camouflaged to avoid censorship, the attention of Chernyshevskii, Sechenov and others in their works ... was directed primarily towards establishing the reductionist thesis - that is, towards functions, from the most 'animal' to the most refined, are materially based and can be exhaustively comprehended by the natural sciences. ... Sechenov's contribution to this argument is evident
Thereafter Nihilism quickly became the subject of polemical debate in the journal press and in works of literature.
Some readers, including Chernyshevskii, viewed Fathers and Children as a personal attack on Dobroliubov."; "[Antonovich's review] was so vituperative that it embarrassed many of his contemporaries.
Pisarev responded by writing an enthusiastic review that at the time became almost as famous as the book, endorsing the young generation's embrace of nihilism, as well as its coronation of Bazarov as its role model. ... According to Pisarev, Bazarovism, and the "realism" it represents, draws upon those with sufficient spiritual strength, a characteristic by him exclusively attributed to the young. Moreover, they possess the courage and capacity to face the times as they really are, despite whatever haunting social "malady". This is exactly what "Bazarovism" is: a malady that must be lived through rather than resisted in order for the patient, that is, society, to become healthy again.
The city of St. Petersburg erupted in flames in the spring and summer of 1862. Students of St. Petersburg and Moscow Universities, acting on an upsurge of revolutionary activism, had begun demonstrating their frustrations. Fyodor Dostoevsky blamed Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who at the time was a radical writer. The tale goes that Dostoevsky went to the home of Chernyshevsky to plead to him to stop fuelling the fires. While Chernyshevsky was no arsonist, this story is symptomatic of the 1860s atmosphere. This period was a time of great social and economic upheaval within Russia.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link)The manuscript for the novel was forwarded on to Sovremennik by the prison censor and published in 1863. With fantastic irony, the novel, which was to be the most revolutionary work of the nineteenth century, was published without difficulty. The publication has aptly been called "the most spectacular example of bureaucratic bungling in the cultural realm during the reign of Alexander II." Moreover, it was this censoring of Chernyshevsky and his imprisonment that drove him to write his novel.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link)These virtuous fictional creations were not the genuine, flesh-and-blood egoists whose growing presence in Russia Dostoevsky feared. Yet the doctrine these pseudo-egoists advanced–Rational Egoism–was a genuine danger, because by glorifying the self it could turn the minds of impressionable young people away from sound values and push them in the direction of a true, immoral, destructive egoism.
Chernyshevsky's legacy was continued and developed by a variety of individuals and organisations, including the first 'Land and Freedom' (Zemlya i Volya) secret society (1861–4).
Mark Natanson and Alexander Mikhailov, who in 1876 organized the Severnaia revoliutsionno-narodnicheskaia gruppa (Northern Revolutionary-Populist Group), an organization which two years later came to be known as Zemlia i volia.
From the 1840s the raznochintsy had a significant influence on the development of Russian society and culture, and became the main social stratum for the formation of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1860s.
Turgenev himself recounts what is now a famous anecdote from his life, when he returned to Saint Petersburg in 1862 on the same day that young radicals—calling themselves "nihilists"—were setting fire to buildings
The guiding figure in the university reform was A. V. Golovnin, the minister of education from 1861 to 1866. The new statute took shape against the backdrop of increasing student activism. Despite their refusal to grant students more rights, the reformers granted university professors considerable autonomy over curriculum, hiring and promotion, and internal university judicial proceedings. ... The University Statute did not open universities to matriculation by female students.
from Latin nihil "nothing at all" ... Turgenev used the Russian form of the word (nigilizm) in "Fathers and Children" (1862)
Chernyshevsky's legacy was continued and developed by a variety of individuals and organisations, including the first 'Land and Freedom' (Zemlya i Volya) secret society (1861–4).
Ill-informed authors of that time usually referred to all Russian revolutionaries as "nihilists." Well-informed ones either did not refer to narodnichestvo at all, or employed this word correctly in the specific, narrow sense of the mid-1870's. ... The same holds true of the writings of no less an authority than Stepniak-Kravchinsky. ... In Russian Storm Cloud, protesting the misuse in the West of the word "nihilist," he says that the Russian revolutionaries themselves use two names: a formal one—"socialist revolutionaries"—and a colloquial one—"radicals."
These virtuous fictional creations were not the genuine, flesh-and-blood egoists whose growing presence in Russia Dostoevsky feared. Yet the doctrine these pseudo-egoists advanced–Rational Egoism–was a genuine danger, because by glorifying the self it could turn the minds of impressionable young people away from sound values and push them in the direction of a true, immoral, destructive egoism.
In the meantime he had grown into a martyr of the radical movement, and this undoubtedly enhanced the popularity of his novel.
Mark Natanson and Alexander Mikhailov, who in 1876 organized the Severnaia revoliutsionno-narodnicheskaia gruppa (Northern Revolutionary-Populist Group), an organization which two years later came to be known as Zemlia i volia.
Russian nihilism did not imply, as one might expect from a purely semantic viewpoint, a universal "negation" of ethical normativity, the foundations of knowledge or the meaningfulness of human existence.
Ill-informed authors of that time usually referred to all Russian revolutionaries as "nihilists." Well-informed ones either did not refer to narodnichestvo at all, or employed this word correctly in the specific, narrow sense of the mid-1870's. ... The same holds true of the writings of no less an authority than Stepniak-Kravchinsky. ... In Russian Storm Cloud, protesting the misuse in the West of the word "nihilist," he says that the Russian revolutionaries themselves use two names: a formal one—"socialist revolutionaries"—and a colloquial one—"radicals."
liberal critics called the radicals "materialists"; but then, when it was no longer sufficiently derogatory, they came to prefer the term "nihilists".
Even so, the term nihilism did not become popular until Turgenev published F&C in 1862. Turgenev, a sorokovnik (an 1840s man), used the term to describe "the children", the new generation of students and intellectuals who, by virtue of their relation to their fathers, were considered šestidesjatniki.
In this context the very term "nihilism" was, if not embraced, so at least tolerated and occasionally used self-referentially—as the nihilists saw themselves.
"Realists" have the same referent as "nihilists"; the character chosen by Pisarev to represent "our realism" is Bazarov, the "representative of our young generation"—the archetypical nihilist.
Pisarev responded by writing an enthusiastic review ... endorsing the young generation's embrace of nihilism"; "Although realism, like nihilism, implies the rejection of metaphysics, sophistry, sentimentalism and aestheticism, it may, however, harbour a more positive and objective approach to reality, in contrast to nihilism and its connotations of subjectivism and nothingness.
Herzen, being one of the latter, argued in 1868, six years after the publication of Turgenev's novel and Pisarev's review (and hence in a different political climate), that the šestidesjatniki's nihilism had essentially been introduced by the sorokovniki.
Russian nihilism was essentially a product of the 1860s evolving dialogue between sorokovniki and šestidesjatniki
Accordingly, nihilism, as a movement, did not exclusively consist of šestidesjatniki."; "The term nihilist, I suggest, in its significant association with the šestidesjatniki, should in this context be understood in relation to the idealist of the sorokovniki generation.
Though the sorokovniki had provided the šestidesjatniki with theoretical grounds for ideological advancement, the two generations became increasingly confrontational towards each other.
initially influenced by sorokovniki like Herzen and Belinsky, and also Turgenev
It has frequently been stressed that many of the šestidesjatniki were so-called raznočincy, which means that there would have been greater social diversity among them than would be found in the older generation, comprised of mostly ethnically Russian nobility from St. Petersburg or Moscow. This is true to a certain extent. But the historiographical tendency to equate nihilism with raznočincy has rightfully been criticized. Many of the prominent šestidesjatniki were of noble birth like their "fathers", or at least children of clergymen, both lacking first-hand experience of repression and poverty
Even earlier, older generations had pejoratively depicted the sorokovniki as nihilists.
The šestidesjatniki indeed rejected idealism; their masters, however, like Herzen and Bakunin, had found understanding in the philosophies of Fichte and Hegel.
Dobrolyubov, perhaps himself a role model for Bazarov, came to the term nihilism through the šestidesjatnik and sociologist Vasilij Bervi-Flerovskij. In 1858, Bervi-Flerovskij used nihilism as a synonym for scepticism
Pisarev responded by writing an enthusiastic review that at the time became almost as famous as the book, endorsing the young generation's embrace of nihilism, as well as its coronation of Bazarov as its role model. ... According to Pisarev, Bazarovism, and the "realism" it represents, draws upon those with sufficient spiritual strength, a characteristic by him exclusively attributed to the young. Moreover, they possess the courage and capacity to face the times as they really are, despite whatever haunting social "malady". This is exactly what "Bazarovism" is: a malady that must be lived through rather than resisted in order for the patient, that is, society, to become healthy again.
Mark Natanson and Alexander Mikhailov, who in 1876 organized the Severnaia revoliutsionno-narodnicheskaia gruppa (Northern Revolutionary-Populist Group), an organization which two years later came to be known as Zemlia i volia.
Chernyshevskii described the lives of new types of persons—the "rational egoists," who live by their own labor, lead a new kind of family life, and disseminate the ideas of socialism in practice.
The democrats among the raznochintsy, who had produced a number of outstanding leaders of the emancipation movement (V. G. Belin-skii, the Petrashevtsy) before the peasant reform of 1861, played a prominent role in the post-reform revolutionary movement
Reactionary publicistic writers seized upon the term during a lull in the revolutionary situation and used it as a derisive epithet. As such, it was extensively employed in publicistic articles, official government documents, and antinihilistic novels, notably A. F. Pisemskii's Troubled Seas, N. S. Leskov's Nowhere to Go, and V. P. Kliushnikov's The Mirage
While in the Peter and Paul Fortress, Chernyshevskii also wrote the novella Alfer'ev (1863), Tales Within a Tale (1863–64), and Brief Stories (1864). ... Chernyshevskii in 1864 was found guilty, through false testimony and provocation, of "taking steps to overthrow the existing system of government." He was sentenced to seven years' penal servitude and lifetime residence in Siberia. After the ceremony of "civil execution" in Mytninskaia Square on May 19, 1864, Chernyshevskii was sent to the Nerchinsk hard labor camps (Kadaia mine; transferred to the Aleksandrovskii plant in 1866). In 1871, having completed his term of hard labor, he was sent to jail in Viliuisk.
a secret revolutionary organization founded in Moscow by N. A. Ishutin ... The Ishutin Circle emerged in September 1863, as a group aligned with the first Land and Liberty group.
After the self-liquidation of the latter, the circle, having developed an independent existence, to some extent brought together the uncoordinated groups of the Moscow underground.
The Supreme Criminal Court gave out various sentences to 32 members
The city of St. Petersburg erupted in flames in the spring and summer of 1862. Students of St. Petersburg and Moscow Universities, acting on an upsurge of revolutionary activism, had begun demonstrating their frustrations. Fyodor Dostoevsky blamed Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who at the time was a radical writer. The tale goes that Dostoevsky went to the home of Chernyshevsky to plead to him to stop fuelling the fires. While Chernyshevsky was no arsonist, this story is symptomatic of the 1860s atmosphere. This period was a time of great social and economic upheaval within Russia.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link)The manuscript for the novel was forwarded on to Sovremennik by the prison censor and published in 1863. With fantastic irony, the novel, which was to be the most revolutionary work of the nineteenth century, was published without difficulty. The publication has aptly been called "the most spectacular example of bureaucratic bungling in the cultural realm during the reign of Alexander II." Moreover, it was this censoring of Chernyshevsky and his imprisonment that drove him to write his novel.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link)