Marriage without love, and familiarity without friendship, were equally 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 woolen 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 those who were legally considered husband and wife, preferred to break a bond which retained none of its essential features. Accordingly 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.
In Irkutsk we used to meet once a week in a club and have some dancing. I was for a time a regular visitor at these soirées, but afterwards, having to work, I abandoned them. One night, when I had not made my appearance for several weeks, a young friend of mine was asked by one of the ladies why I did not appear any more at their gatherings. “He takes a ride now when he wants exercise,” was the rather rough reply of my friend. “But he might come and 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 Miss So-and-So occasionally,” 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 its effect, for most of the Irkutsk girls soon began 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 declare to a high functionary that the latter cared not a straw for the welfare of those whom he ruled, but was simply a thief, and so on.
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 from 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 did not, he would walk every night to the far end of a large city to help her.
Two great Russian novelists, Turgenev and Goncharov, have tried to represent this new type in their novels. Goncharov, in Precipice, taking a real but unrepresentative individual of this class, made a caricature of nihilism. Turgenev 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, Bazarov, 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 Turgenev’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 Nekrasov 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 labor, whether the laborers 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 Karakozov 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 five dollars apiece a month for all their needs, and giving at the same time their fortunes for starting cooperative
