Russian nihilist movement

{{see also|Definition of nihilism}}

{{quote box|"He's a nihilist," repeated Arkady.

"A nihilist," said Nikolai Petrovitch. "That's from the Latin, nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who... who accepts nothing?"

"Say, who respects nothing," put in Pavel Petrovitch, and he set to work on the butter again.

"Who regards everything from the critical point of view," observed Arkady.

"Isn't that just the same thing?" inquired Pavel Petrovitch.

"No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in."{{cite book |title=Fathers and Sons |chapter=Chapter 5 |first=Ivan |last=Turgenev |author-link=Ivan Turgenev |translator-first=Constance |translator-last=Garnett}} {{small|(quoted as shown)}}|author=Ivan Turgenev|source=Fathers and Sons, Chapter 5|align=left|width=360px}}

The term nihilism has been widely misused in the West when discussing the Russian movement, especially in relation to revolutionary activity. Criticizing this misterming by Western commentators, Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky stated that revolutionaries themselves simply identified as socialist revolutionaries, or informally as radicals. However, from outside Russia, the term nihilist was misapplied to the entirety of the country's revolutionary milieu.{{cite journal|title=Narodnichestvo: A Semantic Inquiry|first=Richard|last=Pipes|year=1964|journal=Slavic Review|volume=23|number=3|pages=441–458|doi=10.2307/2492683|jstor=2492683|s2cid=147530830 |quote=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."}} The Encyclopædia Britannica attributes the probable first use of the term in Russian publication to Nikolai Nadezhdin who, like Vasily Bervi-Flerovsky and Vissarion Belinsky after him, used it synonymously with skepticism. Nadezhdin himself had applied the term to Aleksandr Pushkin. From there, nihilism was interpreted as a revolutionary social menace by the well-known conservative journalist Mikhail Katkov, for its negation of moral principles.{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Nihilism |encyclopedia=Encyclopædia Britannica|url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/nihilism/ |quote=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.}}|{{cite journal|title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=Vissarion Belinsky, had symptomatically employed the term in a more neutral sense |doi-access=free}}}} The term came into favour when accusations of materialism proved no longer sufficiently derogatory.{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=liberal critics called the radicals "materialists"; but then, when it was no longer sufficiently derogatory, they came to prefer the term "nihilists". |doi-access=free}}

The intellectual origins of the nihilist movement can be traced back to 1855 and perhaps earlier,{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Nihilism, Russian |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |first=Stephen |last=Lovell |year=1998 |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E072-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=Russian Nihilism is perhaps best regarded as the intellectual pool of the period 1855–66 out of which later radical movements emerged}}|{{cite book |title=The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism |first=Keiji |last=Nishitani |year=1990 |publisher=State University of New York Press |translator1-first=Graham |translator1-last=Parkes |translator2=with Setsuko Aihara |editor-first=Peter J. |editor-last=McCormick |isbn=0791404382 |quote=Nihilism and anarchism, which for a while would completely dominate the intelligentsia and become a major factor in the history of nineteenth-century Russia, emerged in the final years of the reign of Alexander I.}}}} where it was principally a philosophy of moral and epistemological skepticism.{{cite encyclopedia |title=Nihilism |encyclopedia=Encyclopædia Britannica |date=February 13, 2024 |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/nihilism |quote=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.}} However, it was not until 1862 that the term was first popularized when Ivan Turgenev's celebrated novel Fathers and Sons used nihilism to describe the disillusionment of the younger generation, the {{lang|ru|šestidesjatniki}}, towards both the traditionalists and the progressive reformists that came before them, the {{lang|ru|sorokovniki}}.{{unbulleted list|{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=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. |doi-access=free}} |{{cite encyclopedia |title=Nihilism |encyclopedia=Encyclopædia Britannica |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/nihilism/ |quote=It was Ivan Turgenev, in his celebrated novel Fathers and Sons (1862), who popularized the term through the figure of Bazarov the nihilist.}} |{{cite encyclopedia |title=Fathers and Sons |encyclopedia=Encyclopædia Britannica |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fathers-and-Sons/ |quote=Fathers and Sons concerns the inevitable conflict between generations and between the values of traditionalists and intellectuals.}} |{{cite book |title=Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture |first1=James M. |last1=Edie |first2=James |last2=Scanlan |first3=Mary-Barbara |last3=Zeldin |date=1994 |publisher=University of Tennessee Press |page=3 |quote=The "fathers" of the novel are full of humanitarian, progressive sentiments ... But to the "sons," typified by the brusque scientifically minded Bazarov, the "fathers" were concerned too much with generalities, not enough with the specific material evils of the day.}}}}The Russian terms {{lang|ru|sorokovnik}} and {{lang|ru|šestidesjatnik}} are used for the sake of accuracy in delineating the two generations. The former is often translated as 'man of the forties' and the latter as 'man of the sixties', though the sixties in this sense may include as early as 1855. This at a time when the terms faced by serfs under the emancipation reform of 1861 were seen as bitterly failing.{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Russian Materialism: 'the 1860s' |first=James P. |last=Scanlan |year=1998 |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E050-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=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.}}|{{cite book |title=Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture |first1=James M. |last1=Edie |first2=James |last2=Scanlan |first3=Mary-Barbara |last3=Zeldin |date=1994 |publisher=University of Tennessee Press |page=5 |quote=When emancipation finally came in 1861, however, it was a bitter disappointment to the men of the sixties, for its terms gave the serfs little chance of economic self-sufficiency or genuine freedom.}}}} The nihilist characters of Turgenev's novel take up the name of their own volition, stating that negation is the most necessary thing in the present age and as such they deny {{em|everything}}.{{cite book |title=Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 |last=Frank |first=Joseph |year=1995 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=0-691-01587-2 |url=https://archive.org/details/dostoevskymiracu00fran |url-access=registration |quote=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."}} Likewise, the movement very soon adopted the name, despite the novel's initial harsh reception among both the conservatives and younger generation,{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Fathers and Sons |encyclopedia=Encyclopædia Britannica |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fathers-and-Sons/ |quote=At the novel's first appearance, the radical younger generation attacked it bitterly as a slander, and conservatives condemned it as too lenient}}|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Nihilism |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |first=Donald A. |last=Crosby |year=1998 |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-N037-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=Bazarov's nihilism quickly became famous in Russia and was warmly endorsed by certain revolutionary groups there in the 1860s}}|{{cite magazine |title=Fathers and Sons |magazine=Novels for Students |access-date=August 11, 2020 |via=Encyclopedia.com |url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/fathers-and-sons |quote=when he returned to Saint Petersburg in 1862 on the same day that young radicals—calling themselves "nihilists"—were setting fire to buildings}}}} and wherever the term was not embraced it was at least accepted.{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=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. |doi-access=free}}

The term realist was used by Dmitry Pisarev to describe the nihilist position and was also the name of a literary movement, literary realism, which had flourished in Russia in the wake of Pushkin.{{unbulleted list|{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote="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.|doi-access=free}}|{{cite book |title=Introduction to Russian Realism |first=Ernest J. |last=Simmons |year=1965 |publisher=Indiana University Press}}}} Although Pisarev was among those who celebrated the embrace of nihilism, the term realism may have done away with the connotations of subjectivism and nothingness that burdened nihilism while retaining the rejection of metaphysics, sophistry, sentimentality, and aestheticism.{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=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.|doi-access=free}} In a notably later political climate, Alexander Herzen instead presented nihilism as a product of the {{lang|ru|sorokovniki}} that the {{lang|ru|sestidesjatniki}} had adopted.{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=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.|doi-access=free}} Contemporary scholarship has challenged the equating of Russian nihilism with mere skepticism, instead identifying it with the fundamentally {{linktext|Promethean}} character of the nihilist movement.{{cite book |title=Nihilism Before Nietzsche |first=Michael Allen |last=Gillespie |author-link=Michael Allen Gillespie |year=1996 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=9780226293486 |pages=139 |quote=This nihilist movement was essentially Promethean"; "It has often been argued that Russian nihilism is little more than skepticism or empiricism. While there is a certain plausibility to this assertion, it ultimately fails to capture the millenarian zeal the characterized Russian nihilism. These nihilists were not skeptics but passionate advocates of negation and liberation.}} In fact, the nihilists sought to liberate the Promethean might of the Russian people which they saw embodied in a class of prototypal individuals, or new types in their own words.{{unbulleted list|{{cite book |title=Nihilism Before Nietzsche |first=Michael Allen |last=Gillespie |author-link=Michael Allen Gillespie |year=1996 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=9780226293486 |pages=143–144 |quote=While the two leading nihilist groups disagreed on details, they both sought to liberate the Promethean might of the Russian people"; "The nihilists believed that the prototypes of this new Promethean humanity already existed in the cadre of the revolutionary movement itself.}}|{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=These "new types", to borrow Pisarev’s designation |doi-access=free}}}} These individuals were seen by Nikolay Chernyshevsky as rational egoists, by Pisarev and Nikolai Shelgunov as the thinking proletariat, by Pyotr Lavrov as critically thinking personalities, by Nikolay Mikhaylovsky as the intelligentsia, and by others as cultural pioneers.{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Gavrilovich |first=Iu. N. |last=Korotov |year=1979 |encyclopedia= The Great Soviet Encyclopedia |access-date=September 17, 2020 |via=TheFreeDictionary.com |url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Chernyshevskii%2c+Nikolai+Gavrilovich |quote=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.}}|{{cite book |title=Nihilism Before Nietzsche |first=Michael Allen |last=Gillespie |author-link=Michael Allen Gillespie |year=1996 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=9780226293486 |pages=144 |quote=These Promethean cadres were called "new people" by Chernyshevsky, the "thinking proletariat" by Pisarev and Nikolai Shelgunov, "critically thinking personalities" by P. L. Lavrov, and "cultural pioneers" by others. N. K. Mikhaylovsky called them intelligentsia.}}}} Nihilism has also been attributed to a perennial temperament of the Russian people, long pre-existing the movement itself.{{cite book |title=The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism |first=Keiji |last=Nishitani |year=1990 |publisher=State University of New York Press |translator=Graham Parkes |translator2=with Setsuko Aihara |editor-first=Peter J. |editor-last=McCormick |isbn=0791404382 |quote=Nihilism in Russia is said to have been deeply rooted in the radical temperament of the Russian people before it took the form of thought.}}

Overlapping with forms of Narodism, the movement has also been defined in political terms. Soviet scholarship, for example, often interchanges the designation revolutionary democrats.{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Russian Materialism: 'the 1860s' |first=James P. |last=Scanlan |year=1998 |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E050-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=During the communist period of Russian history, the principal "nihilist" theoreticians were officially lionized under the designation "Russian revolutionary democrats"}}|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Nihilism |encyclopedia=The Great Soviet Encyclopedia |edition=3rd |year=1970–1979 |access-date=September 23, 2020 |via=TheFreeDictionary.com |url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/nihilism}}}} However, the role of politics was seen as outdated and irrelevant by most nihilists.{{cite book |title=Nihilism Before Nietzsche |first=Michael Allen |last=Gillespie |author-link=Michael Allen Gillespie |year=1996 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=9780226293486 |pages=140, 143 |quote=Most nihilists, however, were convinced that this positive goal could only be properly formulated when the chains of repression had been broken"; "This strange lack of concern was apparently the result of their belief that politics was linked to an outdated stage of humanity.}} Rather, they discarded politics,{{cite book |title=Nihilism Before Nietzsche |first=Michael Allen |last=Gillespie |author-link=Michael Allen Gillespie |year=1996 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=9780226293486 |pages=143, 160 |quote=This strange lack of concern was apparently the result of their belief that politics was linked to an outdated stage of humanity."; "The nihilists' neglect of politics, which they believed to be outdated, proved in this case to be their undoing.}} and those who did hold political views or socialist sympathies remained vague.{{unbulleted list|{{cite book |title=Nihilism Before Nietzsche |first=Michael Allen |last=Gillespie |author-link=Michael Allen Gillespie |year=1996 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=9780226293486 |page=140 |quote=First, the positive or constructive side of nihilism was never clearly defined. For some radicals, it was vaguely socialist, based on the idea of the village commune (mir). Others saw a managerial class as the basis for the new order.}}|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Nihilism, Russian |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |first=Stephen |last=Lovell |year=1998 |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E072-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=It is, however, the vagueness of their positive programmes that distinguishes the Nihilists from the revolutionary socialists who followed them.}}}} Russian nihilism has also been defined in subcultural terms,{{unbulleted list|{{cite book |title=Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture |first1=James M. |last1=Edie |first2=James |last2=Scanlan |first3=Mary-Barbara |last3=Zeldin |date=1994 |publisher=University of Tennessee Press |page=6 |quote=among the Russian students who used the name "Nihilism" to dignify youthful rebelliousness, this rejection of traditional standards went still further, expressing itself in everything from harmless crudities of dress and behavior to the lethal fanaticism of a revolutionary like Sergey Nechayev.}} |{{cite book |title=The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 |first=Richard |last=Stites |year=1978 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=0691100586 |pages=99–100 |quote=Nihilism was not so much a corpus of formal beliefs and programs (like populism, liberalism, Marxism) as it was a cluster of attitudes and social values and a set of behavioral affects—manners, dress, friendship patterns.}}}} in philosophical terms, and incorrectly as a form of political terrorism.

Russian nihilism, as stated in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "is perhaps best regarded as the intellectual pool of the period 1855–1866 out of which later radical movements emerged".{{cite encyclopedia|title=Nihilism, Russian|encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy|first=Stephen|last=Lovell|year=1998|publisher=Taylor and Francis|doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E072-1|isbn=9780415250696|quote=Russian Nihilism is perhaps best regarded as the intellectual pool of the period 1855–66 out of which later radical movements emerged}} During this foundational period, the countercultural aspects of the movement scandalized the country and even minor indiscretions left nihilists imprisoned for lengthy periods or in exile to Siberia, where grittier revolutionary attitudes fermented.{{cite book|last=Buckley|first=J.M.|title=The Midnight Sun, The Tsar and The Nihilist: Adventures and Observations In Norway, Sweden and Russia|chapter=Nihilism|date=2008|publisher=Kessinger|location=Whitefish, MT|asin=B008I9E4MA|pages=335–351}}

At its core, Russian nihilism inhabited an ever-evolving discourse between the {{lang|ru|sorokovniki}} and the {{lang|ru|šestidesjatniki}}.{{cite journal|title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=Russian nihilism was essentially a product of the 1860s evolving dialogue between sorokovniki and šestidesjatniki |doi-access=free}} While nihilism was not exclusive from them, the {{lang|ru|sorokovniki}} were on principle a generation given to idealism.{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=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. |doi-access=free}} "Their attraction to the airy heights of idealism was partly a result of the stultifying political atmosphere of the autocracy, but was also an unintended consequence of Tsar Nicholas I's attempt to {{linktext|Prussianize}} Russian society", writes historian M. A. Gillespie. "Their flight from the harsh reality of everyday life into the ideal was prepared on an intellectual level by the theosophy of Freemasonry, which exercised great intellectual force in Russian at the time, especially among those whose intellectual education had been shaped by Böhemian mysticism of the radical orthodox sects, the so-called Old Believers."{{cite book |title=Nihilism Before Nietzsche |first=Michael Allen |last=Gillespie |author-link=Michael Allen Gillespie |year=1996 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=9780226293486 |page=137}} {{small|(quoted as shown)}} Despite this, the {{lang|ru|sorokovniki}} provided the fertile soil for the {{lang|ru|šestidesjatniki}}'s ideological advancements, even in their confrontations.{{cite journal|title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=Though the sorokovniki had provided the šestidesjatniki with theoretical grounds for ideological advancement, the two generations became increasingly confrontational towards each other. |doi-access=free}}

{{main|Westernizers}}

The Westernizers were the progressive wing of the 1840s and 50s intelligentsia who saw adopting Western European ideas as the necessary way forward for Russia's development. In general Westernizers were advocates of liberal reform, the abolition of serfdom, Western science and technology, and Enlightenment ideals imported particularly from France or Germany.

Other preliminary figures of this generation include Ivan Turgenev and Vissarion Belinsky.{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=initially influenced by sorokovniki like Herzen and Belinsky, and also Turgenev |doi-access=free}}

{{main|Raznochintsy}}

The {{transliteration|ru|raznochintsy}} (meaning "of indeterminate rank"), which began as an 18th-century legal designation for those of the miscellaneous lower-middle classes, by the 19th century had become a distinct yet ambiguously defined social stratum with a growing presence in the Russian intelligentsia.{{cite journal|title=Problematics of Status Definition in Imperial Russia: The Raznočincy|first=Elise Kimerling|last=Wirtschafter|year=1992|journal=Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas|volume=40|issue=3|pages=320–321|jstor=41048847}} Put simply, the {{transliteration|ru|raznochintsy}} were "educated commoners".{{cite encyclopedia |last=Walicki |first=Andrzej |title=Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Gavrilovich (1828–89) |year=1998 |entry=Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Gavrilovich (1828–89) |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E008-1|isbn=9780415250696 }} Their backgrounds however, did not include peasants, foreigners, tributary natives, nor urban taxpayers such as merchants, guildsmen, and townsfolk, but instead included lower-end families of clergymen, civil servants, retired military servicemen, and minor officials.{{cite journal |title=Problematics of Status Definition in Imperial Russia: The Raznočincy |first=Elise Kimerling |last=Wirtschafter |year=1992 |journal=Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas |volume=40 |issue=3 |pages=322–323 |jstor=41048847}} While many of the most prominent nihilist thinkers were raised free from the extremes of poverty and hardship — some even having been born into aristocratic families — a connection between the {{transliteration|ru|raznochintsy}} and the new radicals has often been emphasized in comparison to the dominance of aristocratic intellectuals in previous generations.{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=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, {{sic|comprised |hide=y|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|doi-access=free}}

As early as the 1840s, the {{transliteration|ru|raznochintsy}} gained significant influence over the development of Russian society and culture,{{cite encyclopedia |title=Raznochintsy |encyclopedia=Encyclopedia of Russian History |access-date=August 18, 2020 |via=Encyclopedia.com |url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/raznochintsy |quote=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.}} the intelligentsia of this class came to be synonymous with the "revolutionary intelligentsia".{{cite journal |title=Problematics of Status Definition in Imperial Russia: The Raznočincy |first=Elise Kimerling |last=Wirtschafter |year=1992 |journal=Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas |volume=40 |issue=3 |page=321 |jstor=41048847}} Vissarion Belinsky and members of the Petrashevsky Circle were among these, being prominent figures of the movement to abolish serfdom.{{cite encyclopedia |title=Raznochintsy |encyclopedia=The Great Soviet Encyclopedia |edition=3rd |year=1970–1979 |access-date=September 18, 2020 |via=TheFreeDictionary.com |url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Raznochintsy |quote=The democrats among the {{transliteration|ru|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}} Of the nihilist generation, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Nikolay Dobrolyubov, and Maxim Antonovich were all sons of unaffluent priests before turning to atheist materialism.

{{Redirect|Russian materialism|an overview of materialist philosophy|Materialism}}

Russian materialism, which quickly became synonymous with Russian nihilism, developed under the influence of Left Hegelian materialism from Germany and the delayed influence of the French Enlightenment.{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Russian Materialism: 'the 1860s' |first=James P. |last=Scanlan |year=1998 |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E050-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=... 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'}} |{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=liberal critics called the radicals "materialists"; but then, when it was no longer sufficiently derogatory, they came to prefer the term "nihilists". |doi-access=free}}}} The origins of this followed from Ludwig Feuerbach as a direct reaction to the German idealism which had found such popularity under the {{lang|ru|sorokovniki}}—namely the works of Friedrich Schelling, Georg Hegel and Johann Fichte.{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Russian Materialism: 'the 1860s' |first=James P. |last=Scanlan |year=1998 |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E050-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=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}} |{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870|quote=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 |doi-access=free}}}} However, it was in fact those among the older generation who were first characterized as nihilists,{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=Even earlier, older generations had pejoratively depicted the sorokovniki as nihilists. |doi-access=free}} and it was Left Hegelianism that the Schellingians began to define as nihilism.{{cite book |title=Nihilism Before Nietzsche |first=Michael Allen |last=Gillespie |author-link=Michael Allen Gillespie |year=1996 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=9780226293486 |page=138 |quote=It was this apotheosis of man that outraged the Schellingians and led them to characterize Russian Left Hegelianism as nihilism.}}

After severely struggling in the face of censorship — from which much of its core content is left unclear and obscured — the open academic development of Russian materialism would later be suppressed by the state after an attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1866,{{cite encyclopedia |title=Russian Materialism: 'the 1860s' |first=James P. |last=Scanlan |year=1998 |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E050-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=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}} and would not see a significant intellectual revival until the late nineteenth century.{{cite book |chapter=Materialism and the Radical Intelligentsia: the 1860s |first=Victoria S. |last=Frede |year=2010 |title=A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity |editor1-first=G. M. |editor1-last=Hamburg |editor2-first=Randall A. |editor2-last=Poole |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=69–89 |doi=10.1017/CBO9780511712227.004 |isbn=9780511712227 |quote=Materialism returned to intellectual prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries}} The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy states:

{{blockquote|The only strictly philosophical legacy of the materialists came in the form of their influence on Russian Marxism. Georgii Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin, the two thinkers most responsible for the development of Marxism in Russia, credited Chernyshevskii with having, respectively, 'massive' and 'overwhelming' influence on them. During the communist period of Russian history, the principal 'nihilist' theoreticians were officially lionized under the designation 'Russian revolutionary democrats' and were called the most important materialist thinkers in the history of philosophy before Marx.{{cite encyclopedia |title=Russian Materialism: 'the 1860s' |first=James P. |last=Scanlan |year=1998 |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E050-1 |isbn=9780415250696}} {{small|(quoted as shown)}}}}

File:Bakunin_Nadar.jpg, often regarded as the father of Russian nihilism]]

Left Hegelianism in Russia began with those of the Westernizer generation who sought to radicalize Hegelian thought and build upon Ludwig Feuerbach's materialism. Among these were Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin, both sons of noblemen though Herzen had been born illegitimate. Bakunin became a Hegelian in 1838 and an extreme Left Hegelian shortly after visiting Berlin in 1840. That same year, Herzen began work on his own analysis of Hegel interpreted through August Cieszkowski and Feuerbach.

Both Bakunin and Herzen held concerns about the extremes of materialism. Whereas Bakunin is more strictly considered a Russian materialist, Herzen sought a reconciliation between empiricist materialism and abstract thought. He saw universalism as one of the great achievements of idealism which a crude materialism could threaten.{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Russian Materialism: 'the 1860s' |first=James P. |last=Scanlan |year=1998 |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E050-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=The theoretical underpinnings of the movement were elaborated in Russia ... and more freely in emigration by Mikhail Bakunin.}} |{{cite journal|title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=By promoting the role of negation, against the political as well as divine sovereign, Bakunin provided the radical movement with a pre-Marxist Hegelian impetus.|doi-access=free}}}} In one of the first serious attempts to give a radical left-wing interpretation of Hegelian dialectics, Bakunin wrote his 1842 article "The Reaction in Germany" and essentially foreshadowed later generations of nihilists with his infamous declaration:{{cite book |title=Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture |first1=James M. |last1=Edie |first2=James |last2=Scanlan |first3=Mary-Barbara |last3=Zeldin |date=1994 |publisher=University of Tennessee Press |page=3 |quote=When Mikhail Bakunin closed his essay, "The Reaction in Germany," with a celebration of "the passion for destruction," he was in effect anticipating the men of the 1860's}}

{{blockquote|Let us therefore trust the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion too!{{cite news |title=Reaction in Germany |first=Mikhail |last=Bakunin |author-link=Mikhail Bakunin |year=1842}}}}

Bakunin and Herzen began to meet rejection from others in the Westernizer camp for their open embrace of far-left politics. For Herzen this came with embracing the anarchist socialism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose ideas he began circulating among Moscow's radical circles in the 1840s. The first roots of Bakunin's own interest in anarchism can also be traced to around this time. Bakunin was also the one to introduce Hegelian thought to Vissarion Belinsky.

File:N_G_Chernyshevsky.jpg, utopian socialist, a major intellectual force behind nihilism]]

Often considered the first of the {{lang|ru|šestidesjatniki}}, Nikolay Chernyshevsky became an admirer of Feuerbach, Herzen, and Belinsky towards the end of the 1840s. It was at this time that he drew towards socialist materialism and was in close contact with members of the Petrashevsky Circle.{{unbulleted list|{{cite book |title=Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture |first1=James M. |last1=Edie |first2=James |last2=Scanlan |first3=Mary-Barbara |last3=Zeldin |date=1994 |publisher=University of Tennessee Press |page=12}}|{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=Chernyshevsky (1828–1889), one of the older šestidesjatniki, was initially influenced by sorokovniki like Herzen and Belinsky, and also Turgenev, but was politically radicalized in the late 1850s. |doi-access=free}}}}

It was not until the death of Nicholas I in 1855 and the end of the Crimean War the following year that this Feuerbachian materialist trend developed into a broad philosophical movement.{{cite encyclopedia |title=Russian Materialism: 'the 1860s' |first=James P. |last=Scanlan |year=1998 |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E050-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=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.}} Alexander II's ascent to the throne brought liberal reforms to university entry regulations and loosened control over publication, much to the movement's good fortune.{{cite book |title=Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture |first1=James M. |last1=Edie |first2=James |last2=Scanlan |first3=Mary-Barbara |last3=Zeldin |date=1994 |publisher=University of Tennessee Press |page=5}} The newly emerging generation continued to draw from the Left Hegelians but thoroughly abandoned Hegel and the German idealists from whom they had drawn their influence. Where those early thinkers such as Bakunin and Herzen had found use of Fichte and Hegel, the younger generation were set on their rejection of idealism and were more ready to abandon politics as well.{{unbulleted list |{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=The šestidesjatniki indeed rejected idealism; their masters, however, like Herzen and Bakunin, had found understanding in the philosophies of Fichte and Hegel. |doi-access=free}} |{{cite book |title=Nihilism Before Nietzsche |first=Michael Allen |last=Gillespie |author-link=Michael Allen Gillespie |year=1996 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=9780226293486 |pages=143, 160 |quote=The nihilists' neglect of politics, which they believed to be outdated, proved in this case to be their undoing.}}}} Historian K. Petrov writes that:

{{blockquote|Bakunin and Herzen held nihilistic views and contributed to the nihilists' cause. One should, however, remember that some significant differences remain between the nihilist "fathers" and the nihilist "children". ... Although Herzen could be qualified as a nihilist in several senses, he was by virtue of belonging to an older generation, supposedly prone to philosophical idealism, still regarded as an "other" by some of the canonized nihilists among the 1860s generation.{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |doi-access=free}}}}

German materialists Ludwig Büchner, Jacob Moleschott, and Carl Vogt became new favourites. Further influence came from the utilitarian ideas of John Stuart Mill, though his bourgeois liberalism was detested, and later from evolutionary biologists Charles Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.{{cite book |title=Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture |first1=James M. |last1=Edie |first2=James |last2=Scanlan |first3=Mary-Barbara |last3=Zeldin |date=1994 |publisher=University of Tennessee Press |pages=5–6}}

File:Dimitri_Pisarev.jpg, nihilist philosopher]]

In 1855, Chernyshevsky completed his first philosophical work and master's dissertation "The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality" — applying Feuerbach's methods to a critique of Hegelian aesthetics. The mid-1850s also saw the emergence of Nikolay Dobrolyubov as a budding university activist and poet.

As a fellow {{lang|ru|šestidesjatnik}}, he further elborated the ideas of Russian materialism and is at times seen as a leading nihilist.{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Russian Materialism: 'the 1860s' |first=James P. |last=Scanlan |year=1998 |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E050-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=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}}|{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71|issue=2|pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=Dobrolyubov, a šestidesjatnik, and an intellectual occasionally seen as a leading nihilist |doi-access=free}}}} Dobrolyubov had in fact occasionally used the term nihilism prior to its popularization at the hands of Turgenev, which he had picked up from sociologist and fellow {{lang|ru|šestidesjatnik}} Vasily Bervi-Flerovsky, who in turn had used it synonymously with skepticism.{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=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 |doi-access=free}} Together with Chernyshevsky, of whom he was a disciple and comrade, Dobrolyubov wrote for the literary journal Sovremennik—Chernyshevsky being its principle editor. With their contributions, the journal became the primary organ of revolutionary thought in its time.{{cite book|title=Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture|first1=James M.|last1=Edie|first2=James|last2=Scanlan|first3=Mary-Barbara|last3=Zeldin|date=1994|publisher=University of Tennessee Press|page=11|quote=[Chernyshevsky] began to write for some of the leading literary journals, soon becoming principle editor of the Sovremennik (The Contemporary). Together with his friend and disciple Nicholas Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky have The Contemporary its character as foremost organ of radical opinion in the sixties.}} The two of them, later followed by Maxim Antonovich and Dmitry Pisarev, had taken up the Russian tradition of socially-charged literary criticism which Belinsky had begun. The discoursing of Russian literature allowed them the vehicle to have their ideas published that censorship would not have otherwise granted.{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia|title=Russian Materialism: 'the 1860s'|first=James P.|last=Scanlan|year=1998|encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy|publisher=Taylor and Francis|doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E050-1|isbn=9780415250696|quote=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.}}|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Антонович Максим Алексеевич |first=Л. В. |last=Чернец |editor-first=П. А. |editor-last=Николаева |date=1990 |dictionary=Biobibliographic Dictionary |volume=1 |access-date=September 5, 2020 |url=http://az.lib.ru/a/antonowich_m_a/text_0160.shtml}}}} Pisarev himself wrote at first for Rassvet and then for Russkoye Slovo—the latter of which came to rival Sovremennik in its influence over the radical movement.{{unbulleted list|{{cite book |title=Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture |first1=James M. |last1=Edie |first2=James |last2=Scanlan |first3=Mary-Barbara |last3=Zeldin |date=1994 |publisher=University of Tennessee Press |pages=61–62}}|{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |doi-access=free}}}}

By the late 1850s however, Chernyshevsky had become politically radicalized and began to reject Herzen's social discourse, devoting himself instead to the revolutionary socialist cause. Alongside Chernyshevsky came Ivan Sechenov, who would later be credited as the father of Russian physiology and scientific psychology by Ivan Pavlov.{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Russian Materialism: 'the 1860s' |first=James P. |last=Scanlan |year=1998 |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E050-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=Its fullest legal expression in Russia came in the published writings of Chernyshevskii, Sechenov and Pisarev}}|{{cite journal |title=Discoveries in the Human Brain. Neuroscience Prehistory, Brain Structure, and Function |first1=Lindsay |last1=Haas |first2=Margaret |last2=Lewis |year=1999 |journal=Brain |volume=122 |issue=4 |pages=785–786 |doi=10.1093/brain/122.4.785|doi-access=free }}}} Chernyshenvsky and Sechenov shared the argument that the natural sciences were wholly adequate to study human and animal life according to a deterministic model, and Sechenov lent particular influence to Chernyshevsky in this regard. This more subtle argument was favoured since state censorship made no allowance for outwardly challenging its religious doctrines.{{cite encyclopedia |title=Russian Materialism: 'the 1860s' |first=James P. |last=Scanlan |year=1998 |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E050-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=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}}

File:Turgenev by Repin.jpg's portrait of Ivan Turgenev, who popularized the term nihilism with his character Bazarov]]

{{nsl|Bazarovism}}, as popularized by Dmitry Pisarev, was the marked embrace of the style and cynicism of the nihilist character Yevgeny Bazarov from Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, in which the term nihilism was first popularized. Pisarev graduated university in 1861, the same year as serfdom was abolished and the first major student demonstration was held in St. Petersburg.{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |doi-access=free}} Turgenev himself notes that as early as 1862, the year of the novel's publishing, violent protestors had begun calling themselves nihilists.{{cite magazine |title=Fathers and Sons |magazine=Novels for Students |access-date=August 11, 2020|via=Encyclopedia.com |url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/fathers-and-sons |quote=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 surge of student activism became the backdrop for Alexander II's education reforms, under the supervision of education minister Aleksandr Vasilevich Golovnin. These reforms however, while conceding an expansion of the {{transliteration|ru|raznochinnaya}} intelligentsia, refused to grant more rights to students and university admittance remained exclusively male.{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Great Reforms (Russia) |encyclopedia=Encyclopedia of Modern Europe: Europe 1789-1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire |access-date=August 11, 2020 |via=Encyclopedia.com |url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/great-reforms-russia |quote=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.}}|{{cite encyclopedia |title=Raznochintsy |encyclopedia=Encyclopedia of Russian History |access-date=August 18, 2020|via=Encyclopedia.com |url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/raznochintsy |quote=After the opening of university education for the middle class, the number of educated people in the Russian empire rapidly increased. Thus increased the number of raznochintsy.}}}} Historian Kristian Petrov writes:

{{blockquote|Young nihilist men dressed in ill-fitting dark coats, aspiring to look like unpolished workers, let their hair grow bushy and often wore blue-tinted glasses. Correspondingly, the young women cut their hair shorter, wore large plain dresses and could be seen with a shawl or a big hat, together with the characteristic glasses. Such a nihilist could, however, above all be identified by a reversal of official etiquette; the men demonstratively refusing to act chivalrously in the presence of women, and the women behaving contrary to expectations. Both sexes hence sought to incarnate Bazarov’s roughness, his "cynicism of manner and expression."{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71|issue=2|pages=73–97|doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |doi-access=free}} {{small|(quoted as shown)}}}}

Literary works and journals quickly became enrapt with polemical debate over nihilism.{{cite encyclopedia |title=Nihilism, Russian |encyclopedia=Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy |first=Stephen |last=Lovell |year=1998 |publisher=Taylor & Francis |doi=10.4324/9780415249126-E072-1 |isbn=9780415250696 |quote=Thereafter Nihilism quickly became the subject of polemical debate in the journal press and in works of literature.}} Nikolay Chernyshevsky for his part saw Turgenev's novel as a personal attack on Nikolay Dobrolyubov, and Maxim Antonovich attacked the book with such vitriol that others in the movement took issue with him.{{cite book |chapter=Materialism and the Radical Intelligentsia: the 1860s |first=Victoria S. |last=Frede |year=2010 |title=A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity |editor1-first=G. M. |editor1-last=Hamburg |editor2-first=Randall A. |editor2-last=Poole |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=69–89 |doi=10.1017/CBO9780511712227.004 |isbn=9780511712227 |quote=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 famously published his own review at the time of the novel's release, where he championed Bazarov as the role model for the new generation and celebrated the embrace of nihilism. To him, Bazarovism was the societal struggle that must be toiled through rather than resisted—he attributed it to the exclusive and distinct spiritual strength of the young and their courage to face social disorder. The popularity of Pisarev's review rivaled that of even the novel itself.{{cite journal |title='Strike out, right and left!': a conceptual-historical analysis of 1860s Russian nihilism and its notion of negation |first=Kristian |last=Petrov |year=2019 |journal=Studies in East European Thought |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=73–97 |doi=10.1007/s11212-019-09319-4 |s2cid=150893870 |quote=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. |doi-access=free}}

The atmosphere of the 1860s had led to a period of great social and economic upheaval across the country and the driving force of revolutionary activism was taken up by university students in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Mass arson broke out in St. Petersburg in the spring and summer of 1862 and, coinciding with insurrections in Poland, in 1863. Fyodor Dostoevsky saw Nikolay Chernyshevsky as responsible for inciting the revolutionaries to action and supposedly pleaded with him to bring a stop to it. Historian James Buel writes that while St. Petersburg faced threat of destruction, arson became rampant all throughout Russia.{{unbulleted list|{{cite journal |title=The Debate around Nihilism in 1860s Russian Literature |first=Sasha |last=St. John Murphy |journal=Slovo |year=2016 |volume=28 |number=2 |pages=48–68 |url=https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1514593/|doi=10.14324/111.0954-6839.045 |doi-broken-date=November 1, 2024 |quote=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 book |title=Russian Nihilism and Exile Life in Siberia |chapter=Chapter 5 |first=James |last=Buel |year=1883 |location=St. Louis, MO |publisher=Historical Publishing Co. |page=95 |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/russiannihilisme00buel/page/95/ |quote=In 1863 Poland, that had dreamed of an untrampled autonomy, at least since 1815, became the scene of a bloody insurrection, while all over Russia blazed up incendiary fires, and St. Petersburg was threatened with destruction.}}}}

Turgenev's own opinion of Bazarov is highly ambiguous, stating: "Did I want to abuse Bazarov or extol him? I do not know myself, since I don't know whether I love him or hate him!"{{cite book |title=Nihilism Before Nietzsche |first=Michael Allen |last=Gillespie |author-link=Michael Allen Gillespie |year=1996 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=9780226293486 |page=138 |quote=Turgenev's own opinion of Bazarov was ambivalent. "Did I want to abuse Bazarov or extol him? I do not know myself, since I don't know whether I love him or hate him!" (FAS, 184; cf 190).}} Nevertheless, Bazarov represented the triumph of the {{transliteration|ru|raznochinnaya}} intelligentsia over those like Turgenev from the aristocracy.{{cite encyclopedia |title=Fathers and Sons |encyclopedia=Encyclopædia Britannica |url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fathers-and-Sons/ |quote=In sociopolitical terms, [Bazarov] represents the victory of the revolutionary intelligentsia over the aristocracy, to which Turgenev belonged.}} Comparing to Ivan Goncharov's The Precipice, which he describes as a caricature of nihilism, Peter Kropotkin states in his memoirs that Bazarov was a more admirable portrayal yet was still found dissatisfying to nihilists for his harsh attitude, his coldness towards his old parents, and his neglect of duties as a citizen.{{cite book |title=Memoirs of a Revolutionist |first=Peter |last=Kropotkin |author-link=Peter Kropotkin |year=1899 |publisher=Houghton Mifflin Company |quote=Goncharóff, in "Precipice," taking a real but unrepresentative individual of this class, made a caricature of nihilism. Turguenéneff was too good an artist, and had himself conceived too much admiration for the new type, to let himself be drawn into caricature painting; but even his nihilist, Bazároff, did not satisfy us. We found him too harsh, especially in his relations with his old parents, and, above all, we reproached him with his seeming neglect of his duties as a citizen.}}

{{main|What Is to Be Done? (novel)}}

File:What_is_to_be_Done.jpg]]

Chernyshevsky published his landmark 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? while being held at Peter and Paul Fortress as a political prisoner.{{cite book |title=Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture |first1=James M. |last1=Edie |first2=James |last2=Scanlan |first3=Mary-Barbara |last3=Zeldin |date=1994 |publisher=University of Tennessee Press |page=14}} By an extraordinary failure of bureaucracy, government censors allowed the book to be published without any trouble despite it being the most openly revolutionary work of its era and a direct product of the suppression Chernyshevsky had faced.{{cite journal|title=The Debate around Nihilism in 1860s Russian Literature|first=Sasha|last=St. John Murphy|journal=Slovo|year=2016|volume=28|number=2|pages=48–68|url=https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1514593/|doi=10.14324/111.0954-6839.045 |doi-broken-date=November 1, 2024|quote=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.}} The novel marked a significant departure for Chernyshevsky into utopian socialism.

In the meantime, extensive castigation of nihilism had found its place in Russian publication, official government documents, and a burgeoning trend of antinihilistic literature. Notable earlier works of this literary current include Aleksey Pisemsky's Troubled Seas (1863), Nikolai Leskov's No Way Out (1864), and Viktor Klyushnikov's The Mirage (1864).{{cite encyclopedia|title=Nihilism|encyclopedia=The Great Soviet Encyclopedia|edition=3rd|year=1970–1979|access-date=September 23, 2020|via=TheFreeDictionary.com|url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/nihilism |quote=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}} Also in 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky published his novel Notes from Underground as a direct satire upon Chernyshevsky's novel. Interestingly, the protagonist both criticizes and is a parody of Chernyshevsky's views on egoism. Dostoevsky posited this dislikable glorifier of self-will as a more realistic portrayal of an egoist than the benign depictions of rational self-interest.{{cite journal|title=The Case against Rational Egoism in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground|first=James P.|last=Scanlan|year=1999|journal=Journal of the History of Ideas|volume=60|number=3|pages=549–567|publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press|doi=10.2307/3654018|jstor=3654018|url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/3654018}} {{nobr|"[Chenyshevsky's]}} virtuous fictional creations were not the genuine, flesh-and-blood egoists whose growing presence in Russia Dostoevsky feared", writes scholar James P. Scanlan. "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."{{cite journal|title=The Case against Rational Egoism in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground|first=James P.|last=Scanlan|year=1999|journal=Journal of the History of Ideas|volume=60|number=3|pages=553–554|publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press|doi=10.2307/3654018|jstor=3654018|url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/3654018 |quote=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 continued to write essays and literature while incarcerated. In 1864, he was sentenced and given a mock execution before being exiled to Siberia, where he served seven years in forced labour camps followed by further imprisonment.{{cite encyclopedia|title=Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Gavrilovich|first=Iu. N.|last=Korotov|year=1970–1979|encyclopedia=The Great Soviet Encyclopedia|edition=3rd|access-date=September 17, 2020|via=TheFreeDictionary.com|url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Chernyshevskii%2c+Nikolai+Gavrilovich |quote=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.}} Chernyshevsky gained a legendary reputation as a martyr of the radical movement and,{{cite book|chapter=Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? and Dostoevsky's Dystopian Foresight|title=Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West|first=Douwe|last=Fokkema|year=2011|pages=211–232|publisher=Amsterdam University Press|jstor=j.ctt46mwnv.13|isbn=9789089643506|chapter-url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46mwnv.13 |quote=In the meantime he had grown into a martyr of the radical movement, and this undoubtedly enhanced the popularity of his novel.}} unlike Mikhail Bakunin, not once did he plead for mercy or pardon during his treatment at the hands of the state.{{cite book|title=History of Anarchism in Russia|first=Emelian|last=Yaroslasky|year=1922|publisher=Lawrence and Wishart|quote=It is worth while comparing this behavior with that of another Russian revolutionary, N. G. Chernyshevsky. For twenty years he was confined in a fortress and put to penal servitude in Siberia, but he did not sink so low as to plead for pardon from his mortal enemy, the tsar, although his position was much worse than that of Bakunin, and although he had no rich an prominent relatives to intercede for him as was the case with Bakunin.}}

Leading up to 1864, the movement underwent what Dostoevsky termed the 'schism of the nihilists'. The Sovremennik began taking a more moderate or even regressive position while Russkoye Slovo continued to push further into radical nihilism. Maxim Antonovich, now head of the Sovremennik's literary criticism department entered into bitter disputes with other publications ever since his disagreements with Pisarev over Bazarovism.{{unbulleted list|{{cite encyclopedia|title=Антонович Максим Алексеевич|first=Л. В.|last=Чернец|editor-first=П. А.|editor-last=Николаева|date=1990|dictionary=Biobibliographic Dictionary|volume=1|access-date=September 5, 2020|url=http://az.lib.ru/a/antonowich_m_a/text_0160.shtml}} {{in lang|ru}}|{{cite news|title=Господин Щедрин, или Раскол в нигилистах|first=Fyodor|last=Dostoevsky|work=Собрание сочинений в 15 томах|volume=11|access-date=September 25, 2020|via=Lib.ru|url=http://az.lib.ru/d/dostoewskij_f_m/text_0660.shtml}} {{in lang|ru}}}} Under Pisarev, Russkoye Slovo took over as the leading journal of radical thought.

{{Further|Dmitry Karakozov#Attempted assassination of Alexander II}}

Revolutionary organizations during the 1860s took only the form of conspiratorial groups.{{cite encyclopedia|title=Zemlya i Volya|encyclopedia=Encyclopædia Britannica|url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/Zemlya-i-Volya |quote=first Russian political party to openly advocate a policy of revolution; it had been preceded only by conspiratorial groups. Founded in 1876}} From the revolutionary turmoil of the years 1859–1861, which had included peasant uprisings in Bezdna and Kandievka, the secret society Zemlya i volya emerged under the strong influence of Nikolay Chernyshevsky's writings.{{unbulleted list|{{cite journal|title=Vera Zasulich's Critique of Neo-Populism|first1=Daniel|last1=Gaido|first2=Constanza Bosch|last2=Alessio|year=2015|journal=Historical Materialism|volume=23|number=4|pages=93–125|doi=10.1163/1569206X-12341441|hdl=11336/85843 |url=https://philarchive.org/rec/ALEVZC |quote=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).|hdl-access=free}}|{{cite encyclopedia|title=Земля и воля|first=Shneer Mendelevich|last=Levin|encyclopedia=The Great Soviet Encyclopedia|edition=3rd|year=1970–1979|access-date=September 4, 2020|via=TheFreeDictionary.com|url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Land+and+Liberty}}|{{cite encyclopedia|title=Chronology|encyclopedia=The Great Soviet Encyclopedia|edition=3rd|year=1970–1979|access-date=September 4, 2020|via=TheFreeDictionary.com|url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Chronology}}}} Among its key members were Nikolai Serno-Solovyevich, his brother Aleksandr Serno-Solovyevich, Aleksandr Sleptsov, Nikolai Obruchev and Vasily Kurochkin. The full extent of the organization spanned St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, and several cities in Ukraine.{{cite encyclopedia|title=Земля и воля|first=Shneer Mendelevich|last=Levin|encyclopedia=The Great Soviet Encyclopedia|edition=3rd|year=1970–1979|access-date=September 4, 2020|via=TheFreeDictionary.com|url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Land+and+Liberty}}

The group supported the intellectual development of social and political thought that expressed the critical interests of the Russian peasantry, and also worked to publish and disseminate prohibited revolutionary writings and ideas to commoners, intellectuals, and soldiers. Alexander Herzen, Nikolay Ogarev, and Mikhail Bakunin all kept contact with its leadership. Zemlya i volya accrued supporters within the Russian military and allied itself with revolutionary activity in Poland. In league with the organization was the Ishutin Circle, founded in Moscow in 1863, under the leadership of Nikolai Ishutin.{{cite encyclopedia|title=Ishutin Circle|first=E. S.|last=Vilenskaia|encyclopedia=The Great Soviet Encyclopedia|edition=3rd|year=1970–1979|access-date=September 4, 2020|via=TheFreeDictionary.com|url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Ishutin+Circle |quote=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.}} Historian Shneer Mendelevich Levin writes:

{{blockquote|During 1863, the revolutionary situation in Russia virtually exhausted itself. The general peasant uprising, toward which Zemlya i volya was oriented, did not take place, and the Polish uprising was suppressed. Under these conditions, the revolutionary work of Zemlya i volya began to die down. Many members of the society were arrested or were forced to emigrate, and by the spring of 1864, Zemlya i volya had dissolved itself.}}

After the disappearance of Zemlya i volya, the Ishutin Circle began to unite various underground groups in Moscow.{{cite encyclopedia|title=Ishutin Circle|first=E. S.|last=Vilenskaia|encyclopedia=The Great Soviet Encyclopedia|edition=3rd|year=1970–1979|access-date=September 9, 2020|via=TheFreeDictionary.com|url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Ishutin+Circle |quote=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 group arranged the escape of Polish revolutionary Jarosław Dąbrowski from prison in 1864. The same year, the group founded a bookbinding workshop, then in 1865, a sewing workshop, a tuition-free school, and a cotton wadding cooperative. They failed, however, in their attempts to arrange Chernyshevsky's escape from penal servitude. Ties were forged with Russian political {{lang|fr|émigrés}}, Polish revolutionaries, and fellow organizations in Saratov, Nizhny Novgorod, Kaluga Province, and elsewhere. The Circle then formed a steering committee, known as the Organization, and a sub-group within it known as Hell.{{cite encyclopedia|title=Ishutin Circle|first=E. S.|last=Vilenskaia|encyclopedia=The Great Soviet Encyclopedia|edition=3rd|year=1970–1979|access-date=September 9, 2020|via=TheFreeDictionary.com|url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Ishutin+Circle}} Dmitry Karakozov, who was the cousin of Nikolai Ishutin, joined the Circle in 1866 and on April 4 of that year carried out an attempted assassination of Alexander II, firing a shot at the Tsar at the gates of the Summer Garden in Saint Petersburg. The attempt failed and Karakozov was sentenced to death.{{cite encyclopedia|title=Karakozov, Dmitrii Vladimirovich|first=E. S.|last=Vilenskaia|encyclopedia=The Great Soviet Encyclopedia|edition=3rd|year=1970–1979|access-date=September 9, 2020|via=TheFreeDictionary.com|url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Karakozov%2c+Dmitrii+Vladimirovich}} Nikolai Ishutin was also arrested and sentenced to be executed before ultimately being exiled to a life of forced labour in Siberia.{{cite encyclopedia|title=Ishutin, Nikolai|first=E. S.|last=Vilenskaia|encyclopedia=The Great Soviet Encyclopedia|edition=3rd|year=1970–1979|access-date=September 9, 2020|via=TheFreeDictionary.com|url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Ishutin%2c+Nikolai}} In total, thirty-two members of the Circle were sentenced.{{cite encyclopedia|title=Ishutin Circle|first=E. S.|last=Vilenskaia|encyclopedia=The Great Soviet Encyclopedia|edition=3rd|year=1970–1979|access-date=September 9, 2020|via=TheFreeDictionary.com|url=https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Ishutin+Circle |quote=The Supreme Criminal Court gave out various sentences to 32 members}}

File:Russian Nihilists are being tied to chairs on horse-drawn pl Wellcome V0041837.jpg

Following the attempt on the Tsar's life, the political environment in Russia immediately began returning to the stifling atmosphere of Nicholas I's rule.{{cite book|title=Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture|first1=James M.|last1=Edie|first2=James|last2=Scanlan|first3=Mary-Barbara|last3=Zeldin|date=1994|publisher=University of Tennessee Press|page=3|quote=And it was a "Nihilist student," Dmitry Karakosov, whose attempt on the Tsar's life in 1866 completed the return of Russian society to the dark repression of the era of Nicholas I.}}

Dostoevsky published his following work, Crime and Punishment, in 1866, particularly in response to Pisarev's writings.{{cite book|title=Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871|last=Frank|first=Joseph|year=1995|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=0-691-01587-2|url=https://archive.org/details/dostoevskymiracu00fran|url-access=registration}}

File:Нечаев Сергей Геннадиевич.jpg, nihilist revolutionary most often associated with propaganda of the deed and terrorism]]

Zemlya i volya was re-established in 1876,{{cite book|title=Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture|first1=James M.|last1=Edie|first2=James|last2=Scanlan|first3=Mary-Barbara|last3=Zeldin|date=1994|publisher=University of Tennessee Press|page=116|quote=the re-establishment of the underground Land and Liberty (Zemlya i volya) organization in 1876}} originally under the name {{lang|ru|Severnaia revoliutsionno-narodnicheskaia gruppa}} (Northern Revolutionary-Populist Group), by Mark Natanson and Alexander Dmitriyevich Mikhaylov.{{cite journal|title=Narodnichestvo: A Semantic Inquiry|first=Richard|last=Pipes|year=1964|journal=Slavic Review|volume=23|number=3|pages=441–458|doi=10.2307/2492683|jstor=2492683|s2cid=147530830 |quote=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.}} As a political party, the organization became the first to separate itself from past conspiratorial groups with its open advocacy of revolution.{{cite encyclopedia|title=Zemlya i Volya|encyclopedia=Encyclopædia Britannica|url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/Zemlya-i-Volya |quote=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 party was predominated by Bakuninists,{{cite book|title=Russian Philosophy Volume II: the Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture|first1=James M.|last1=Edie|first2=James|last2=Scanlan|first3=Mary-Barbara|last3=Zeldin|date=1994|publisher=University of Tennessee Press|page=116|quote=Bakuninists predominated in the re-establishment of the underground Land and Liberty (Zemlya i volya) organization}} though became the first truly {{lang|ru|Narodnik}} organization to emerge.{{cite encyclopedia|title=Narodnik|encyclopedia=Encyclopædia Britannica|url=https://www.britannica.com/topic/Narodnik |quote=The first truly Narodnik organization to emerge from this situation was the revolutionary group Zemlya i Volya.}}

Sergei Nechayev heightened aggression within the movement and pressed for violent conflict against the tsarist regime. He appeared on the scene in 1868, and soon afterward fled to Switzerland.{{cite book |last=Hingley |first=Ronald |url=https://archive.org/details/nihilistsrussian00hing |title=Nihilists; Russian radicals and revolutionaries in the reign of Alexander II, 1855-81 |date=1969 |publisher=Delacorte Press |location=New York, NY |pages=[https://archive.org/details/nihilistsrussian00hing/page/56 56-59] |url-access=registration}} Bakunin, an admirer of Nechayev's zeal and success, provided contacts and resources to send Nechayev back to Russia to found a new secret cell based organization, called the People's Retribution (Russian: Narodnaya Rasprava), based on the principles of the Catechism.[https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sergey-Gennadiyevich-Nechayev "Sergey Gennadiyevich Nechayev"]. Encyclopaedia Britannica. The uncompromising tone and content of the Catechism was influential far beyond the mere character Nechayev personified in the minds of the revolutionaries.{{cite book |last=Sijak |first=Ana |title=Angel of Vengeance: The Girl Who Shot the Governor of St. Petersburg and Sparked the Age of Assassination |date=2009 |publisher=St. Martin's Press |location=United Kingdom |pages=21–38 |asin=B005E8AJVI}} The organization had just a few dozen members when student Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov—one of Nechayev's first and most active followers—began to protest the leader's methods. This threat to his authority spurred Nechayev into action. He secretly gathered the group members closest to him, declared that the mysterious imaginary central committee possessed the evidence of Ivanov's betrayal, albeit not producible for security reasons, and obtained his death sentence.{{cite book|last1=Venturi|first1=Franco|author-link=Franco Venturi|title=Il populismo russo; Volume II: Dalla liberazione dei servi al nihilismo|edition=2nd|pages=305–306|publisher=Einaudi|location=Turin|language=it|date=1972}} Author Ronald Hingley wrote: "On the evening of 21 November 1869 the victim [Ivanov] was accordingly lured to the premises of the Moscow School of Agriculture, a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment, where Nechayev killed him by shooting and strangulation, assisted without great enthusiasm by three dupes. [...] Nechayev's accomplices were arrested and tried", while he managed to flee back to Switzerland again. Upon his return from Russia to Switzerland, Nechayev was rejected by Bakunin for taking militant actions and was later extradited back to Russia where he spent the remainder of his life at the Peter and Paul Fortress.{{cite book|last=Bakunin|first=Mikhail|title=Bakunin on Violence: Letter to S. Nechayev|date=1870|publisher=New York: Anarchist Papers|location=New York, NY|pages=2–25}} Due to his charisma and force of will, Nechayev continued to influence events, maintaining a relationship to Narodnaya Volya and weaving even his jailers into his plots and escape plans. In December 1881 69 members of the prison guard were arrested and Nechayev's prison regime was rendered exceedingly harsher. He was found dead of scurvy in his cell on 21 November 1882.{{cite book|last1=Venturi|first1=Franco|author-link=Franco Venturi|title=Il populismo russo; Volume II: Dalla liberazione dei servi al nihilismo|edition=2nd|page=318|publisher=Einaudi|location=Turin|language=it|date=1972}}

• Anti-nihilistic novel
• Cynicism
• Narodniks
• Narodnaya Volya
• Nihilist Faction

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• [http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Aragorn___Nihilism__Anarchy__and_the_21st_century.html Nihilism, Anarchy, and the 21st Century].
• [http://wwics.si.edu/topics/pubs/ACF2B0.pdf George Kennan and the Russian Empire: How America's Conscience Became an Enemy of Tsarism] by Helen Hundley.
• Wasiolek, Edward. Fathers and Sons: Russia at the Cross-roads. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. {{ISBN|0-8057-9445-X}}.

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{{Wiktionary|Nihilism}}

Category:19th century in the Russian Empire

Category:Nihilism

Category:Philosophical schools and traditions

Category:Political movements in the Russian Empire

Category:Revolutionary movements

Category:Russian philosophy

Category:Freemasonry-related controversies