Russian Nihilism – 2

Serfdom, recognized as the source of Russia’s poverty, weakness and low standard of public morality, was abolished in 1861 and the country turned over a new leaf.

Continuing Russian Nihilism,
our selection from Sergius Stepniak. The selection is presented in six easy 5 minute installments.

Previously in Russian Nihilism.

Time: 1881
Place: Russia

Serfdom, recognized as the source of Russia’s poverty, weakness and low standard of public morality, was abolished in 1861 and the country turned over a new leaf. The enfranchisement of the millions of peasantry was a measure that revolutionized the entire moral, economic and social life of our country. Not peasants alone were slaves in Russia in the old times. The absolute, uncontrolled power of the serf-owners, who formed the bulk of the cultured and governing class, produced certain habits of despotism which extended to all spheres of national life. The children were slaves to their parents, the wives to their husbands, the petty officials to their superiors, the employed to the employer. A good education was no protection against the vitiating influences of this immoral institution. It was at this time that the French, who had to deal with the most cultured part of Russian society, said that one need only scratch a Russian to find a Tartar. Tartars our fathers were, the varnish of civilization not withstanding and their families knew this fact better than anyone else.

The abolition of serfdom, the worst form of dependency of men upon men, was the signal for a general rising of all the op pressed part of the community. Throughout Russia there was an outburst of rebellion against all sorts of dependency, all authority imposed upon men’s freedom in the domain of personal conduct as well as in the domain of thought. The individual, tired of oppression, rose in all his pride and power, breaking the chains of ancient tradition and recognizing no other guidance but his individual mind.

Such were the true nihilists, the destroyers, who did not trouble themselves about what was to be built after them. They did not exactly deny everything, for they believed firmly, fanatically, in science and in the power of the individual mind. But they thought nothing else worth the slightest respect and they attacked and sneered at family, religion, art and social institutions, with all the more vehemence the higher they were held in the opinion of their countrymen.

Something similar took place in Germany in the so-called Sturm und Drang period and for similar reasons. But the Ger mans of the first quarter of this century had not so much to de stroy and they had not the same lust for destruction ; there was much in their past that they had reason to love and respect. Besides, in those days, European science and philosophy had not at their command such weapons of destruction as were at the service of the Russian nihilists in the second half of this century.

Thus, nihilism proper, the nihilism embodied in Bazarof, was a genuine Russian apparition. It was an impassioned pro test against the former annihilation of the individual. With all its exaggerations and mistakes it was a grand movement, for its basis was sound and its effect beneficial in a country like ours.

Nihilism of Bazarof ‘s type was dead and buried about ten years before the starting of the present revolutionary movement. No one denies art and poetry nowadays, no one wears ugly clothes on principle, no one protests against the idea of men’s duties toward the community. No one preaches against the obligations imposed upon the people by family life. But there is no country where the relations between parents and children and men and women are based to such an extent upon the principle of equality and there is no society so broad-minded and tolerant as the Russian. Much of this is due to the gallant struggle of the early nihilists, who were the first to engraft upon Russia the proud Western conception of individuality which struck root and will spread with every generation.

It is impossible not to see a close relationship between the early nihilism and the present militant one, in which the old spirit of personal independence is revived, joined this time with social feeling, urging the individual to sacrifice himself for the many who feel and suffer like himself. But in its state of absolute purity, unalloyed with any social feeling, stern and fierce as expounded by Bazarof, nihilism could not stand long. The Russians are the least individualistic of all people in Europe, the feeling of organic union with their countrymen being with them the strongest feeling. The striving for individual happiness, however refined, could not suit their sympathetic gregarious nature, craving for works of devotion to others. Even in the palmy days of the nihilism of Bazarof ‘s school, there was in the movement an undercurrent making for another direction. It may be called social nihilism, as opposed to the individualistic and was represented in i860 by Nikolai Tchernyshevsky, the publicist, journalist, economist and novelist, whose name is familiar to all those who have studied the Russian question.

Tchernyshevsky was a socialist and the father of the Russian revolutionary movement. He preached the absolute devotion of the individual to the cause of the regeneration of his country. Only he gave the idea of self-sacrifice an individualistic interpretation. “All men’s actions,” he said, “are stimulated by ego tism and have no other scope than individual happiness. But one person, whose intellectual and moral standard is low, finds his pleasure and happiness in making money or in drinking or in over-eating, whilst another is happy in doing good to his fellow men, in dying, if necessary, for their sake.” And Tchernyshevsky went on scoffing at and ridiculing self-sacrifice as a logi cal absurdity, while preaching it passionately in practice. The theory of moralized egotism and egotistical self-abnegation was developed by Tchernyshevsky and his followers with admirable skill and dialectical subtlety and served as a transition to the doctrine of absolute devotion to the good of the community, which the next generation transformed into a sort of religion.

As time went on, the influence of Tchernyshevsky gained ground upon that of the genuine nihilism, represented by Pisareff, a young, highly gifted journalist and the writers grouped around him. The generation of 1870 was educated entirely by Tchernyshevsky but it took from him only the kernel of his ethics, dropping as useless his theory of all-pervading individualism.

Continued.

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