Core Theses
Reject every authority not justified by reason and science.
Art and metaphysics are luxuries; a good chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet (Bazarov).
Utilitarian materialism and “rational egoism”.
Destroy what cannot withstand criticism — “what can be smashed should be smashed” (Pisarev).
The name came from Ivan Turgenev‘s Fathers and Sons (1862) and stuck to the generation of Dmitry Pisarev, Nikolai Dobrolyubov and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. In time “nihilist” came to mean revolutionary terrorist, especially after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.
Literature answered loudly: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment and Demons are all in part anti-nihilist novels. Note that this is a political-moral movement, distinct from Friedrich Nietzsche‘s diagnosis of European nihilism — though Nietzsche was fascinated by the Russians.
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Fathers and Sons
Turgenev’s novel of the generation gap — the nihilist Bazarov against the old liberal Kirsanovs — which gave Russia the word “nihilist”.
The Road of Nihilism
How “nothing matters” became an idea, a movement, a diagnosis, and a test — from Jacobi to Camus.
What Is to Be Done?
Chernyshevsky’s prison-written utopian novel of “new people” and rational egoism — badly written, enormously influential, the target of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man.
Nikolai Stavrogin
The magnetic, empty aristocrat at the centre of Demons — everyone’s idol, nobody’s master, strength without belief.
Anton Chekhov
Russian doctor, short-story writer and playwright who revolutionised both forms — stories without neat plots or morals, plays where the drama happens beneath ordinary talk — and became the great artist of wasted lives, quiet longing and compassion.
Notes from Underground
A spiteful, hyper-conscious ex-official rants from his “mousehole” against reason, progress and the Crystal Palace — often called the first existentialist novel.