Nihilism in nineteenth-century Russian literature and thought

The term “nihilism” generally denotes the rejection of established beliefs and authorities, and often political violence as well. In late imperial Russia,
nihilism served as a loose negative construct with which conservative thinkers
and writers and government officials attacked members of the radical intelligentsia and the surging revolutionary movement. This chapter ranges over the aesthetic, ethical and metaphysical ideas associated with nihilism in Russia, the sub-culture established by disaffected members of the younger generation,
and the political unrest and terrorism of the 1870s and 1880s. I focus on three
aspects of the Russian debate about nihilism, in which major writers and
thinkers participated. First, I consider the novel Fathers and Children, in which
Turgenev imagined representatives of the phenomenon and gave them a
name. Second, I outline the contribution of Chernyshevsky and Pisarev to the intellectual revolt, especially their hope that ‘new people’ might emerge who
would both achieve personal liberation and bring about social and political revolution. Third, I examine the influential way in which the dangers of rejection of existing values are treated in the novels of Dostoevsky, for whom nihilism portended apocalypse.