Speaking of Chernyshevsky, he is often considered part of a Russian intellectual and cultural movement that came to be called Nihilism. As I have noted elsewhere, t he tern Nihilism in mid 19th century Russia meant something a bit different from what we mean by the term nowadays. The Russian Nihilists of the mid-19th century were militant materialists and positvists, who promoted science and reason, while rejecting religious superstition and political autocracy. The term, Nihilist, in that sense, was popularized in Russia by the novelist, Ivan Turgenev, in his famous novel, Fathers and Sons , whose main protagonist, Bazarov, was presented as the prototypical Nihilist.
BTW many of the statements that Bazarov makes in Turgenev’s novel were lifted almost word for word from editorials that Turgenev’s erstwhile friend, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, had published in the magazine , The Contemporary, which Turgenev sometimes wrote for too. Chernyshevsky, who was then an important writer and editor was the author of the novel, What is to be Done? , which despite the fact that it was panned by most critics, influenced several generations of Russian revolutionaries including the young Lenin who borrowed the novel’s title for a famous political tract of his own. The popularity of Nihlism among Russia’s intellectual youth during the mid-19th century both intrigued (and in some cases appalled) Russia’s finest writers of the time. Turgenev devoted his novel Fathers and Sons to this issue, while Nihlism figured in several of Dostoyevsky’s novels including Crime and Punishment , Notes from the Underground , The Brothers Karamazov and The Possessed. Ultimately, Nihilism, by popularizing the ideas of materialistic and positivist thinkers from the West such as Feuerbach, Comte, Darwin, and J.S. Mill, opened the door for the later introduction of such doctrines as Marxism and anarchism which ultimately had a profound effect on Russian politics. Chernyshevsky himself was a socialist and is considered to be the father of revolutionary socialism in Russia. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#34150): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34150 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/110215988/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: marxmail+ow...@groups.io Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [arch...@mail-archive.com] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
