A formidable movement was developing in the meantime amongst the
educated youth of Russia. Serfdom was abolished. But quite a network
of habits and customs of domestic slavery, of utter disregard of
human individuality, of despotism on the part of the fathers, and
of hypocritical submission on that of the wives, the sons, and the
daughters, had developed during the two hundred and fifty years that
serfdom had existed. Everywhere in Europe, at the beginning of this
century, there was a great deal of domestic despotism--the writings of
Thackeray and Dickens bear ample testimony to it--but nowhere else had
that tyranny attained such a luxurious development as in Russia. All
Russian life, in the family, in the relations between commander and
subordinate, military chief and soldier, employer and employee, bore
the stamp of it. Quite a world of customs and manners of thinking, of
prejudices and moral cowardice, of habits bred by a lazy existence, had
grown up; and even the best men of the time paid a large tribute to
these products of the serfdom period.
Law could have no grip upon these things. Only a vigorous social
movement, which would attack the very roots of the evil, could
reform the habits and customs of everyday life; and in Russia this
movement--this revolt of the individual--took a far more powerful
character, and became far more sweeping in its criticisms, than
anywhere in Western Europe or America. ‘Nihilism’ was the name that
Turguéneff gave it in his epoch-making novel, ‘Fathers and Sons.’
The movement is often misunderstood in western Europe. In the press,
for example, Nihilism is confused with terrorism. The revolutionary
disturbance which broke out in Russia toward the close of the reign
of Alexander II., and ended in the tragical death of the Tsar, is
constantly described as Nihilism. This is, however, a mistake.
To confuse Nihilism with terrorism is as wrong as to confuse a
philosophical movement like Stoicism or Positivism with a political
movement, such as, for example, republicanism. Terrorism was called
into existence by certain special conditions of the political struggle
at a given historical moment. It has lived, and has died. It may revive
and die out again. But Nihilism has impressed its stamp upon the whole
of the life of the educated classes of Russia, and that stamp will be
retained for many years to come. It is Nihilism, divested of some of
its rougher aspects--which were unavoidable in a young movement of that
sort--which gives now to the life of a great portion of the educated
classes of Russia a certain peculiar character which we Russians regret
not to find in the life of Western Europe. It is Nihilism, again, in
its various manifestations which gives to many of our writers that
remarkable sincerity, that habit of ‘thinking aloud,’ which astounds
western European readers.
First of all, the Nihilist declared war upon what may be described as
the ‘conventional lies of civilized mankind.’ Absolute sincerity was
his distinctive feature, and in the name of that sincerity he gave up,
and asked others to give up, those superstitions, prejudices, habits,
and customs which their own reason could not justify. He refused to
bend before any authority except that of reason, and in the analysis of
every social institution or habit he revolted against any sort of more
or less masked sophism.
He broke, of course, with the superstitions of his fathers, and
in his philosophical conceptions he was a positivist, an agnostic,
a Spencerian evolutionist, or a scientific materialist; and while
he never attacked the simple, sincere religious belief which is a
psychological necessity of feeling, he bitterly fought against the
hypocrisy that leads people to assume the outward mask of a religion
which they continually throw aside as useless ballast.
The life of civilized people is full of little conventional lies.
Persons who dislike each other, meeting in the street, make their faces
radiant with a happy smile; the Nihilist remained unmoved, and smiled
only for those whom he was really glad to meet. All those forms of
outward politeness which are mere hypocrisy were equally repugnant to
him, and he assumed a certain external roughness as a protest against
the smooth amiability of his fathers. He saw them wildly talking
as idealist sentimentalists, and at the same time acting as real
barbarians toward their wives, their children, and their serfs; and he
rose in revolt against that sort of sentimentalism, which, after all,
so nicely accommodated itself to the anything but ideal conditions of
Russian life. Art was involved in the same sweeping negation. Continual
talk about beauty, the ideal, art for art’s sake, æsthetics, and the
like, so willingly indulged in--while every object of art was bought
with money exacted from starving peasants or from underpaid workers,
and the so-called ‘worship of the beautiful’ was but a mask to cover
the most commonplace dissoluteness--inspired him with disgust; and the
criticisms of art which one of the greatest artists of the century,
Tolstóy, has now powerfully formulated, the Nihilist expressed in the
sweeping assertion, ‘A pair of boots is more important than all your
Madonnas and all your refined talk about Shakespeare.’
Marriage without love and familiarity without friendship were
repudiated. The Nihilist girl, compelled by her parents to be a doll in
a doll’s house, and to marry for property’s sake, preferred to abandon
her house and her silk dresses; she put on a black woollen dress of the
plainest description, cut off her hair, and went to a high school, in
order to win there her personal independence. The woman who saw that
her marriage was no longer a marriage--that neither love nor friendship
connected any more those who were legally considered husband and
wife--preferred to break a bond which retained none of its essential
features; and she often went with her children to face poverty,
preferring loneliness and misery to a life which, under conventional
conditions, would have given a perpetual lie to her best self.
The Nihilist carried his love of sincerity even into the minutest
details of everyday life. He discarded the conventional forms of
society talk, and expressed his opinions in a blunt and terse way, even
with a certain affectation of outward roughness.
We used in Irkútsk to meet once a week in a club, and to have some
dancing, I was for a time a regular visitor at these _soirées_, but
gradually, having to work, I abandoned them. One night, as I had not
made my appearance for several weeks in succession, a young friend of
mine was asked by one of the ladies why I did not come any more to
their gatherings. ‘He takes a ride now when he wants exercise,’ was the
rather rough reply of my friend. ‘But he might come to spend a couple
of hours with us, without dancing,’ one of the ladies ventured to say.
‘What would he do here?’ retorted my Nihilist friend, ‘talk with you
about fashions and furbelows? He has had enough of that nonsense.’
‘But he sees occasionally Miss So-and-So,’ timidly remarked one of
the young ladies present. ‘Yes, but she is a studious girl,’ bluntly
replied my friend, ‘he helps her with her German.’ I must add that
this undoubtedly rough rebuke had the effect that most of the Irkútsk
girls began next to besiege my brother, my friend, and myself with
questions as to what we should advise them to read or to study. With
the same frankness the Nihilist spoke to his acquaintances, telling
them that all their talk about ‘this poor people’ was sheer hypocrisy
so long as they lived upon the underpaid work of these people whom they
commiserated at their ease as they chatted together in richly decorated
rooms; and with the same frankness a Nihilist would inform a high
functionary that he (the said functionary) cared not a straw for the
welfare of those whom he ruled, but was simply a thief!
With a certain austerity the Nihilist would rebuke the woman who
indulged in small talk, and prided herself on her ‘womanly’ manners
and elaborate toilette. He would bluntly say to a pretty young person:
‘How is it that you are not ashamed to talk this nonsense and to wear
that chignon of false hair?’ In a woman he wanted to find a comrade,
a human personality--not a doll or a ‘muslin girl’--and he absolutely
refused to join in those petty tokens of politeness with which men
surround those whom they like so much to consider as ‘the weaker sex.’
When a lady entered a room a Nihilist did not jump off his seat to
offer it to her--unless he saw that she looked tired and there was no
other seat in the room. He behaved towards her as he would have behaved
towards a comrade of his own sex; but if a lady--who might have been a
total stranger to him---manifested the desire to learn something which
he knew and she knew not, he would walk every night to the far end of
a great city to help her with his lessons. The young man who would
not move his hand to serve a lady with a cup of tea, would transfer
to the girl who came to study at Moscow or St. Petersburg the only
lesson which he had got and which gave him daily bread, simply saying
to her: ‘It is easier for a man to find work than it is for a woman.
There is no attempt at knighthood in my offer, it is simply a matter of
equality.’
Two great Russian novelists, Turguéneff and Goncharóff, have tried to
represent this new type in their novels. Goncharóff, in _Precipice_,
taking a real but unrepresentative individual of this class, made a
caricature of Nihilism. Turguéneff 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. Russian youth could not
be satisfied with the merely negative attitude of Turguéneff’s hero.
Nihilism, with its affirmation of the rights of the individual and its
negation of all hypocrisy, was but a first step toward a higher type
of men and women, who are equally free, but live for a great cause. In
the Nihilists of Chernyshévsky, as they are depicted in his far less
artistic novel, ‘What is to be Done?’ they saw better portraits of
themselves.
* * * * *
‘It is bitter, the bread that has been made by slaves,’ our poet
Nekrásoff wrote. The young generation actually refused to eat that
bread, and to enjoy the riches that had been accumulated in their
fathers’ houses by means of servile labour, whether the labourers were
actual serfs or slaves of the present industrial system.
All Russia read with astonishment, in the indictment which was produced
at the court against Karakózoff and his friends, that these young men,
owners of considerable fortunes, used to live three or four in the
same room, never spending more than ten roubles (one pound) apiece a
month for all their needs, and giving at the same time their fortunes
for co-operative associations, co-operative workshops (where they
themselves worked), and the like. Five years later, thousands and
thousands of the Russian youth--the best part of it--were doing the
same. Their watchword was, ‘V naród!’ (To the people; be the people.)
During the years 1860-65 in nearly every wealthy family a bitter
struggle was going on between the fathers, who wanted to maintain the
old traditions, and the sons and daughters, who defended their right to
dispose of their life according to their own ideals. Young men left the
military service, the counter, the shop, and flocked to the university
towns. Girls, bred in the most aristocratic families, rushed penniless
to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kíeff, eager to learn a profession which
would free them from the domestic yoke, and some day, perhaps, also
from the possible yoke of a husband. After hard and bitter struggles,
many of them won that personal freedom. Now they wanted to utilize it,
not for their own personal enjoyment, but for carrying to the people
the knowledge that had emancipated them.
In every town of Russia, in every quarter of St. Petersburg, small
groups were formed for self-improvement and self-education; the works
of the philosophers, the writings of the economists, the researches
of the young Russian historical school, were carefully read in these
circles, and the reading was followed by endless discussions. The aim
of all that reading and discussion was to solve the great question
which rose before them: In what way could they be useful to the masses?
Gradually, they came to the idea that the only way was to settle
amongst the people and to live the people’s life. Young men went
into the villages as doctors, doctors’ assistants, teachers, village
scribes, even as agricultural labourers, blacksmiths, woodcutters, and
so on, and tried to live there in close contact with the peasants.
Girls passed teachers’ examinations, learned midwifery or nursing, and
went by the hundred into the villages, devoting themselves entirely to
the poorest part of the population.
They went without even having any ideals of social reconstruction or
any thought of revolution; merely and simply they wanted to teach the
mass of the peasants to read, to instruct them, to give them medical
help, or in any way to aid to raise them from their darkness and
misery, and to learn at the same time from them what were _their_
popular ideals of a better social life.
When I returned from Switzerland I found this movement in full swing.