Russian nihilist movement
The Russian nihilist movement was a philosophical, cultural, and revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from which the broader philosophy of originated. In Russian, the word came to represent the movement's unremitting attacks on morality, religion, and traditional society. Even as it was yet unnamed, the movement arose from a generation of young radicals disillusioned with the social reformers of the past, and from a growing divide between the old aristocratic intellectuals and the new radical intelligentsia.
Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, as stated in the Encyclopædia Britannica, "defined nihilism as the symbol of struggle against all forms of tyranny, hypocrisy, and artificiality and for individual freedom." As only an early form of nihilist philosophy, Russian nihilism saw all the morality, philosophy, religion, aesthetics, and social institutions which were in place as worthless and meaningless but did not necessarily see meaninglessness in all ethics, knowledge, and human life. It did however, incorporate theories of hard determinism, atheism, materialism, positivism, and egoism in an aim to assimilate and distinctively recontextualize core elements of the Age of Enlightenment into Russia while dropping the Westernizer approach of the previous generation. Russian nihilism developed an atmosphere of extreme moral scepticism, at times praising outright selfishness and championing those who held themselves exempt from all moral authority. In its most complete forms it also denied the possibility of common ideals, instead favouring a relativist and individualistic outlook. Nihilists predictably fell into conflict with the Russian Orthodox religious authorities, as well as with prevailing family structures and the Tsarist autocracy.
Although most commonly associated with revolutionary activism, most nihilists were in fact not political and instead discarded politics as an outdated stage of humanity. They held that until a destructive programme had overcome the current conditions no constructive programme could be properly formulated, and although some nihilists did begin to develop communal principles their formulations in this regard remained vague. With the widespread revolutionary arson of 1862, a number of assassinations and attempted assassinations of the 1860s and 70s, and the eventual assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, Russian nihilism was characterized throughout Europe as a doctrine of political terrorism and violent crime. Kropotkin argues that while violence and terrorism were used, this was due to the specific revolutionary context and was not inherent to nihilist philosophy, though historian M. A. Gillespie adds that nihilism was nevertheless at the core of revolutionary thought in Russia throughout the lead-up to the Russian Revolution. Professor T. J. J. Altizer further states that Russian nihilism in fact had its deepest expression in a Bolshevist nihilism of the 20th century.
Definition
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. 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. The term came into favour when accusations of materialism proved no longer sufficiently derogatory.The intellectual origins of the nihilist movement can be traced back to 1855 and perhaps earlier, where it was principally a philosophy of moral and epistemological skepticism. 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 šestidesjatniki, towards both the traditionalists and the progressive reformists that came before them, the sorokovniki. This at a time when the terms faced by serfs under the emancipation reform of 1861 were seen as bitterly failing. 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. Likewise, the movement very soon adopted the name, despite the novel's initial harsh reception among both the conservatives and younger generation, and wherever the term was not embraced it was at least accepted.
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. 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. In a notably later political climate, Alexander Herzen instead presented nihilism as a product of the sorokovniki that the sestidesjatniki had adopted. Contemporary scholarship has challenged the equating of Russian nihilism with mere skepticism, instead identifying it with the fundamentally character of the nihilist movement. 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. 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. Nihilism has also been attributed to a perennial temperament of the Russian people, long pre-existing the movement itself.
Overlapping with forms of Narodism, the movement has also been defined in political terms. Soviet scholarship, for example, often interchanges the designation revolutionary democrats. However, the role of politics was seen as outdated and irrelevant by most nihilists. Rather, they discarded politics, and those who did hold political views or socialist sympathies remained vague. Russian nihilism has also been defined in subcultural terms, in philosophical terms, and incorrectly as a form of political terrorism.
Historical context
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". 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.At its core, Russian nihilism inhabited an ever-evolving discourse between the sorokovniki and the šestidesjatniki. While nihilism was not exclusive from them, the sorokovniki were on principle a generation given to idealism. "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 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." Despite this, the sorokovniki provided the fertile soil for the šestidesjatniki's ideological advancements, even in their confrontations.
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.
''Raznochintsy''
The , 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. Put simply, the were "educated commoners". 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. 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 and the new radicals has often been emphasized in comparison to the dominance of aristocratic intellectuals in previous generations.As early as the 1840s, the gained significant influence over the development of Russian society and culture, the intelligentsia of this class came to be synonymous with the "revolutionary intelligentsia". Vissarion Belinsky and members of the Petrashevsky Circle were among these, being prominent figures of the movement to abolish serfdom. Of the nihilist generation, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Nikolay Dobrolyubov, and Maxim Antonovich were all sons of unaffluent priests before turning to atheist materialism.