Russian nihilist movement

A radical intellectual and political movement in nineteenth-century Russia that rejected traditional authority, religious belief, and inherited social conventions.

Nikolay Chernyshevsky: A Russian revolutionary writer and philosopher whose novel What Is to Be Done? influenced radical thought. His novel offered an influential model of rational, emancipated life for young radicals.
Nihilism: A philosophical position that denies or questions established values, meanings, or foundations of knowledge. The Russian movement was a historically specific political and cultural form of nihilism.
Dmitry Pisarev: A Russian literary critic who advocated radical materialism and attacked traditional cultural authority. His essays became a forceful statement of nihilist criticism and practical radicalism.
Slavophilism: A nineteenth-century Russian intellectual current that emphasized Orthodox Christianity and Russia’s distinct communal traditions. It defended religious and national traditions that nihilists often rejected.
Russian revolutionary movement: The succession of political movements seeking fundamental change in Russia before and during the 1917 revolutions. Nihilism formed an early phase in a broader history of Russian revolutionary opposition.
What Is to Be Done?: Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel depicting rational egoism, social reform, and a cooperative future. Its characters and ideas helped shape the movement’s image of the new generation.
Materialism: The philosophical view that reality is fundamentally material and that mental phenomena depend on physical processes. Many Russian nihilists favored materialist explanations over religious or metaphysical ones.
Nikolay Dobrolyubov: A Russian literary critic associated with revolutionary democracy and the journal Sovremennik. His criticism connected literature to social injustice and political change.
Westernizers: Nineteenth-century Russian thinkers who favored adopting aspects of Western European institutions and ideas. They also criticized Russia’s inherited order, but did not share a single nihilist program.
Land and Liberty: A Russian revolutionary organization founded in 1876 that promoted socialist change and work among peasants. Its organizers inherited radical currents that had developed amid nihilist opposition.

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