with increasingly radical ideas in each new generation after the 1840s. “Nihilism” was a term that was first popularized by the novelist Ivan Turgenev in 1862 (though it had been used in Russia and abroad for several decades before that time) to characterize the rebellious and highly unconventional youths who had appeared in Russia by the late 1850s. The nihilists rejected the idealism and relative optimism of the heroes of a previous generation of the Russian intelligentsia, who had been led by the essayist Alexander Herzen and the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky. Nihilism, with its “critical realism,” gave intellectual respectability to a rebellion against the established values and conventions of polite society that defended the institutions of family, nobility, church, and state. Many of the young nihilists belonged to the growing numbers of the raznochintsy, or the people of various ranks in society, such as the sons and daughters of priests, lower officials, and others of strata below the aristocracy.
One of the models for the nihilists was Dmitry Pisarev, a literary critic who attacked the world’s most famous products of art and literature and took an extreme position in favor of naturalistic realism and scientific utiltarianism. The most famous prototype of the nihilist was the character of Bazarov in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (Otsy i deti), who repudiated all conventional values and standards. That novel aroused a storm of controversy with its depiction of a schism between the idealistic Russian liberals of the preceding generation and the apparently amoral nihilists of the younger generation. While leading figures of the previous generation who had endorsed liberal principles and socialist ideals had held out the hope of gradual reform in society and improvements in the moral consciousness of individuals, the nihilists called for revolutionary changes, with the complete destruction of established institutions. It is often said that the rise of nihilism in the intelligentsia reflected the weakness of social roots and affiliation with the traditions of the past among many young members of the intelligentsia. Turgenev himself continued to be sympathetic toward gradual reforms, but Pisarev welcomed the label of nihilist as a form of praise.
The nihilists flaunted their unconventionality and supposedly hardheaded realism. As Adam Yarmolinsky describes in Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism (1962), “to the conserv1053
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atives frightened by the threatening effects of the new freedom, nihilism connoted atheism, free love, sedition, the outraging of every decency and accepted belief by men, and as often, by the unwomanly ‘emancipated’ woman.” And yet the term “nihilism” was a misnomer from the start. Though the nihilists were often described as people who no longer believed in anything, in actuality they believed in their own ideas with passionate and indeed fanatical intensity. The nihilists believed that “the emancipation of the person,” or the emergence of independent, critically thinking individuals, whose outlook had replaced sentimental idealism with scientific rigor and realism, was the means of leading the way to a new society, since it was possible for only an exceptional minority to achieve enlightenment. The nihilists were influenced by theories that had come from Western Europe, including German philosophy and French socialist thought, but they were most impressed by new discoveries and theories in the realm of the natural sciences, so that they virtually worshiped science, which they saw as guiding individuals of the new type who would usher in a new society.
Nihilism was soon succeeded by populism among the radical intelligentsia. The distinction between nihilism and populism is blurred in many accounts, as indeed it was in the writings of many observers from the 1860s to the 1880s, who referred to Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the great hero of the populists, as a nihilist. In reality, although the populists were deeply influenced by the nihilists, there were sharp differences between the two schools of thought. While the nihilists had glorified the minority of supposedly brilliant, bold, and unconventional intellectuals, and felt disdain for the unenlightened majority in society, the populists idealized the Russian peasants as morally superior, and were theoretically committed to learning from the peasants, who for a new generation of radicals constituted the narod (the people). While the populists agreed that revolutionary change was necessary, they believed that the peasant commune could be the basis for a uniquely Russian form of socialism. The nihilists had never developed any coherent program for political change. This may explain in part why they were succeeded by the populists, even though the populist strategy for transformation had some gaps of its own. See also: BAZAROV, VLADIMIR ALEXANDROVICH; INTELLIGENTSIA; PISAREV, DMITRY IVANOVICH; POPULISM; TURGENEV, IVAN SERGEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kelly, Aileen M. (1998). Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tompkins, Stuart Ramsay. (1957). The Russian Intelligentsia: Makers of the Revolutionary State. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Venturi, Franco. (1960). Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia, tr. Francis Haskell. New York: Wei-denfeld and Nicolson.
(1889-1950), Russian dancer and choreographer.
The most famous Russian male dancer, Vaslav Fomich Nijinsky was also a choreographer, though madness cut short his career. Nijinsky, like his colleague Anna Pavlova, achieved international fame through his appearances with Sergei Diagilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris, beginning in 1909. Trained at the Imperial Theater School in St. Petersburg, Nijinsky joined the Imperial Ballet in 1907, but left the troupe in 1911, his international career already well established. Onstage, Nijinsky’s somewhat sturdy frame became a lithe instrument of unprecedented lightness and elevation. Noted for seemingly effortless leaps, Nijinsky’s photographs also reveal the dancer’s uncanny ability to transform himself from role to role. Nijinsky’s first choreography, for L’Apr?s-midi d’un Faune (1912), to Debussy’s music, scandalized Paris with its eroticism, though the ballet’s true innovation lay in its turn from the virtuosity for which Nijinsky had become famous. Niji nsky’s choreography for Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (1913) went even farther in demonstrating the choreographer’s disdain for the niceties of ballet convention and his embrace of primitivism. Asymmetrical and unlovely, the work was dropped from the Ballets Russes repertory after some nine performances.
Nijinsky, once the lover of Diagilev, married in 1913 and was dismissed from Diagilev’s company. After itinerant and often unsuccessful performances during World War I, Nijinsky was diagnosed a schizophrenic in 1919. The remaining years of the great dancer’s life were spent mostly in san-itoriums. See also: BALLET; BOLSHOI THEATER; DIAGILEV, SERGEI: PAVLOVICH; PAVLOVA, ANNA MATVEYEVNA
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Buckle, Richard. (1971). Nijinsky. New York: Simon and Schuster. Nijinsky, Vaslav. (1999). The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, tr. Kyril FitzLyon; ed. Joan Acocella. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Ostwald, Peter. (1991). Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap into Madness. New York: Carol.
Famed Russian merchant and autobiographer; exact dates of birth and death unknown.
Afanasy Nikitin was a Russian merchant from Tver who left a diary of his travels to Iran and India during a four-year period between 1466 and 1475. The traveler’s own account remains the primary source of information on his personal history and the purpose of his long journey. Under the title The Journey Beyond Three Seas, Afanasy’s travel record is a document of great interest, both to historians studying the interactions of medieval Russians with the Muslim East, and in general as one of the first autobiographical accounts in the literature. It has been repeatedly published in the original Russian with annotations and translated into many languages.
Afanasy’s notes describe how he left Tver, intending to join a trade expedition headed for the Caucasian principality of Shirvan. On the way, his party was robbed of their goods. He was rescued by the Shah of Shirvan, but, despite the high risk, decided to continue his journey to Derbent, a market familiar to him, and then to Baku, rather than return to Tver empty-handed. He went on to cross the Caspian Sea, continued his travels across Iran, and then crossed the Indian Ocean to the Deccan. After surveying the markets, customs, and courts of the Bahmani and Vijayanagar empires, he made his way back to Russia, crossing the Black Sea. Somewhere in the region of Smolensk, he met an untimely death. Merchants brought his notes to Vasily Mamyrev, secretary to Grand Prince
