SOURCE: “Egoistic Nihilism and Revolutionary Nihilism,” in The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 4-38.

[In the following essay, Freeborn traces the development of nihilism as evinced in Russian literature and assesses the impact of nihilist philosophy and literature on Russian history.]

In August 1860 [Ivan] Turgenev spent three weeks in Ventnor in the Isle of Wight. During that short period, and in characteristically wet and stormy English summer weather, he conceived the figure of his most significant literary hero, Bazarov, of his most famous novel, Fathers and Children, published two years later. The reasons for Turgenev's apparently sudden creation of such a positive hero, at such a moment in his life and in such an unlikely place, involve the much larger question of the ‘revolutionary’ situation that existed in Russia on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

The reforms upon which the Tsarist government had embarked after the defeat of Russia in the Crimean War were designed to modernise certain parts of the machinery of state while ensuring that the principle of autocratic rule remained unchanged. The linch-pin of the reforms was the emancipation of the serfs, but it was a linch-pin that, if allowed to slip, could easily precipitate the kind of peasant unrest that had assumed its most serious form in the revolt of Pugachyov, the Don Cossack, in 1773 and 1774. Worse still, perhaps, it could lead to civil war. Moreover, a change of such magnitude in a semi-feudal society would inevitably mean that the nobility, which depended so greatly upon serfdom for its economic as well as its social raison d'être, would be undermined as the leading class.

The Russian nobility had been both a privileged and a suspect class during the thirty years of Nicholas I's reign, from 1825 to 1855. It was privileged by virtue of its landowning and serf-owning rights (the krepostnoye pravo, as it was called), but the nobility had also—however over-simplified such a description of the relationship may seem—been ‘suspected’ by the Tsarist government throughout Nicholas's reign. He had come to the throne at the moment when leading members of the Russian nobility, specifically the officer class of the leading guards regiments, had demonstrated their disloyalty to the Crown during the so-called Decembrist Revolt of 14 December 1825 (O.S.). Although the revolt had involved no more than a few dozen officers, who had marched their regiments onto the Senate Square in St Petersburg on the morning of the day they were required to swear allegiance to Nicholas on his accession to the throne, their action in opposing the new Tsar and Nicholas's reprisals (the hanging of five ringleaders and the banishment of a hundred or so Decembrists to Siberia) were to cast a long shadow of martyrdom and dissent across the ensuing thirty years. What is more, the example of the Decembrists was to be an inspiring example to a younger generation of the nobility who could do little under the oppressive reign of Nicholas I save dream of future change in Russia. To the government of Nicholas even dreaming, whether in the form of student groups or, more seriously, dreaming aloud in the columns of journals or newspapers, smacked of treason and suffered persecution and censorship. The result was that the dreamers among the younger generation of the nobility began to seek their political ideals less in the realm of constitutional democracy or liberalism than in stormier, more exciting and radical visions of a utopian socialist or communist future for Russia.

The leading dreamers of the post-Decembrist generation were Alexander Herzen (1812-70) and his friend and collaborator Nikolay Ogaryov (1813-77). To Alexander Herzen especially the revolutionary example of the Decembrists became a lifelong inspiration. To him also belongs the honour of initiating both the first attempts to direct Russia towards socialism and, when he finally left Russia for self-imposed exile in the West in 1847, the first practical efforts to establish a free voice for Russia in the shape of the Free Russian Press, which he set up in London. Both Herzen and Ogaryov were of the generation of the so-called ‘men of the forties’, to which Turgenev also belonged. They were known by this title because it was during the ‘wonderful decade’¹ of the 1840s that, by their efforts and the work of the leading literary critic of the period, Vissarion Belinsky (1811-48), Russia acquired both a socially conscious literature and an articulate public opinion. It simultaneously acquired what became known as the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia. Put very briefly, the ‘men of the forties’ expressed a belief in the importance of the individual, the role of an educated—as distinct from a hereditary or privileged—élite in Russian society and the need for Russia to discover a separate, ‘Russian’ path of development.

Until the defeat of Imperial Russia in the Crimean War (1854-5) and the death of Nicholas, no political or social change in Russia occurred or seemed likely. Russia was an autocratically governed state controlled by a vast bureaucracy. Although Herzen deliberately chose exile in the West (‘Demand of me anything but don't demand of me duplicity … respect the free man in me!’ he urged of his friends left in Russia²), Ogaryov, already financially ruined, was forced into provincial exile and eventually succeeded in joining him in London in 1856; Turgenev was imprisoned for a month and then exiled to his country estate and Belinsky died in near-poverty in 1848. It was only in the changed circumstances of Russia after the Crimean War, with the new government under Alexander II prepared to contemplate reforms, that the possibility of future change became a reality. When, after 1858, the government permitted open discussion of the reforms in the press, it was soon apparent that an entirely new situation had developed, and it was a situation not entirely to the liking of the older generation of the intelligentsia, particularly Herzen and Turgenev.

In retrospect it may hardly seem very surprising that a new generation should suddenly spring into prominence after the defeat of Imperial Russia and the death of Nicholas. At the time the phenomenon undoubtedly had the power to shock. The new generation was not educated in principles of respect for the individual, for culture, for aesthetic, even if aristocratic or élitist, values, as had been Turgenev's generation. Cut off from direct experience of Western Europe by the exceptionally repressive measures of Nicholas I's government during the final period of his reign, 1848-55, the new generation had to discover its ideals for itself and looked not to Goethe and Hegel but to George Sand and Feuerbach for answers. The emancipation of women, like the emancipation from Idealism, was in essence a reflection of a deep-felt moral, political and social desire to repudiate the past in all its forms. This desire received its theoretical justification in the publicistic writings of the leading spokesman of the new generation, N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828-89), who first became prominent in 1855 with the publication of his thesis on aesthetics, The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality. Chernyshevsky repudiated the superiority of art to reality and declared that art was no more than a surrogate, at best only a replica of the real, and that a principal function of art was to be ‘a textbook on life’. In a series of articles for the leading radical journal The Contemporary he advocated the priority of content over form in art, materialism (based largely on Feuerbach) as the only viable philosophy and an anthropology that rejected the spiritual side of man. But Chernyshevsky, although providing what could loosely be described as a programme for change, assisted the emancipation of the new generation in a more general sense—he called into question previous assumptions and teachings and he fostered a rationalist, questioning approach based on respect for the natural sciences.

If these features of the new generation's ideology tended to alarm, then in their social origins and attitudes, which necessarily had political undertones, they tended to shock and frighten. The generation that sprang into prominence after the Crimean War under the tutelage of Chernyshevsky's publicism became known as the ‘men of the sixties’ and they differed not only in terms of generation from the ‘men of the forties’ but also, generally speaking, in their social origin. They were the so-called raznochintsy. They belonged not to the privileged class of the landowning nobility but to an intermediate social layer between the nobility and peasantry, who ‘derived from different ranks’ of the Tsarist civil service or from the poorer squirearchy, the professional classes and the priesthood. In social origin they had little or no stake in the status quo; in their natural aspirations they sought change through education, but such change inevitably implied greater social and political power for themselves. They were an emergent technical meritocracy, indifferent to subtleties of culture or art, uncouth in their narrow scientific dogmatism but brutally clear-minded in their youthful denunciation of the past and the rather wishy-washy, if well-meaning, standards of the older generation.

In literature such a type had been a familiar but minor figure in several works of the 1850s. The young student Belyayev in Turgenev's only full-length play, A Month in the Country (1850), bears some of the hallmarks of the type. His freshness, spontaneity and Quixotic enthusiasm anticipate the future, whereas the world-weary cynicism and introspection of his older counterpart (a character named Rakitin, clearly modelled on Turgenev himself) are features of a Hamletism characteristic of the generation of the ‘fathers’. The distinction between the generations is as yet only adumbrated. For Turgenev the problem of the difference between the generations was paramount and abiding, both for its relevance to the development of the Russian intelligentsia (of which, in literary terms, he was to be the chronicler) and for its inspirational effect on the development of his art as a novelist. It was also important to him for the universality of its meaning, since the potency of its myth helped to define the essential contrast at the source of revolutionary conflict.

Though we know little about it, he appears to have attempted to diagnose the problem in a large novel that was provisionally entitled Two Generations.³ In 1855 he dropped this project in order to write what we now know as his first novel—Rudin. Its fame as a study of failure has tended to obscure its equally justifiable importance as a study in contrasts between dissimilar types, between, that is to say, the idealistic, though intellectualising, pedagogic, introspective type portrayed in Rudin and the heroine's youthful, strong-willed, essentially emotional character. For all that, Rudin's portrait has a depth and complexity that far surpass the other issues in the novel. It is the fullest portrayal that Turgenev ever offered of the weaknesses and strengths of his own generation. It poses as fully as any fictional portrayal before Bazarov the question of the intelligentsia's role in Russian society. Even though it is critical, and that criticism could hardly redound to the credit of his own generation, Turgenev succeeded in creating in the novel as first published (in 1856) a vivid and sympathetic portrait of an eloquent intellectual, a teacher of new ideas and a man capable of inspiring respect for freedom and truth in receptive members of the younger generation.

But Rudin could not act on his ideas, and what was demanded of literature by the younger generation was a hero who could act.⁴ In this way literature was to become more than a barometer of social change; it was to be a pretext for violent disagreement between the two generations of the intelligentsia—a fact demonstrated by the effectiveness of Dobrolyubov's brilliant combination of literary criticism and publicism in his famous critique of Goncharov's Oblomov (1859). If Goncharov in his famous novel portrayed the spirit of lethargy that seemed to possess the older generations, then no figure of the period represented the spirit of the younger generation more ardently and poignantly than N. A. Dobrolyubov (1836-61). He joined the radical journal The Contemporary in 1857 after having been befriended by Chernyshevsky and soon became its leading literary critic. His review of Goncharov's novel was his first spectacular critical success. Oblomov, the classic study of sloth, had been temporarily overshadowed when it first appeared in 1859 by the publication of Turgenev's second novel Home of the Gentry. It was only after the young Dobrolyubov had demonstrated how Oblomov could be interpreted as the latest—and the last—in a line of noblemen-heroes who all manifested in varying degrees traits of social superfluity that the social relevance of Goncharov's masterpiece became widely appreciated. Simultaneously, Dobrolyubov was able to show that Oblomov's malaise, the social origin of his slothfulness, could be traced back to the kind of moral servitude that united the landowning nobility and the enserfed peasantry. Just as important, he was able to argue allegorically that the nobility could no longer be accounted the leading class in Russian society. By implication this meant that the leading representatives of the older generation, meaning chiefly Herzen and Turgenev, could not be regarded as having the right to exert a progressive influence upon the younger generation of the Russian intelligentsia.

In 1857, largely on Ogaryov's initiative but with the active support of Herzen, the Free Russian Press in London began to publish a regular journal, The Bell. It quickly became enormously influential as the older generation's principal mouthpiece, despite the fact that it had to be smuggled into Russia and could only circulate clandestinely. It was intended initially as a means of exposing injustices in the Tsarist administration and of disseminating in Russia information about European politics and ideas. Strictly speaking, it had no programme. Cut off as it was from direct contact with current feelings in Russia at a time when the feelings were beginning to run high, The Bell reacted to the sometimes anonymous or incompletely attributed articles in The Contemporary by assuming that criticism of the older generation, particularly criticism of the ‘superfluous men’, was a deliberate attempt by the reviewers of The Contemporary to curry favour with the Tsarist authorities. This was the gist of Herzen's reply to Dobrolyubov's attacks. What appeared to be hardly more than a fairly mild difference of critical attitude over a literary phenomenon became the cause of a serious quarrel and what eventually proved to be an ideological rift between the two generations, or wings, of the Russian intelligentsia.

Supposedly in order to seek a truce, if not actually to make peace in the feud that had developed, Chernyshevsky travelled to London in June 1859 and met Herzen. What they discussed is known only indirectly and at second hand. As personalities they were utterly opposed. Herzen was a patrician democrat, eloquent, ebullient, even haughty, with a caustic wit and an intellect as spectacular as a firework. Chernyshevsky was a deeply moral, somewhat withdrawn, even ascetic pedagogue, of lowlier origins and less pyrotechnical brilliance, at heart an activist who would have preferred to be a politician rather than a journalist. Whatever they discussed, they certainly did not get on well. One subject that may have been raised was the possibility of publishing The Contemporary in London if it were to be banned in Russia. In any case, there appears to have been a secret aspect to the meeting, which may have had conspiratorial connections, as we shall see.

In the desire to turn this obviously reformist period ‘on the eve’ of the emancipation of the serfs into a ‘revolutionary’ situation, Soviet commentators have tended to exaggerate the revolutionary planning of both the St Petersburg radicals and the London exiles. If there was any such planning, its scale was small. That there was a desire for revolution in the hearts and minds of leading sections of the younger generation is not in any doubt. The older generation was committed to change, but on gradualist principles. Revolution in their eyes, with peasant unrest on the scale of the Pugachyov uprising, was abhorrent. Thus, a fairly clear alignment of interests began to emerge. The left-wing younger intelligentsia were in favour of any change, even to the extent of violent, revolutionary overthrow of the autocracy; the more right-wing older generation were in favour of gradual changes of a liberal-democratic character, which would rid Russia of its most obviously backward anomalies and allow it to become more modern and Westernised. For literature, as for all those concerned with projecting the image of the age, it was a question of asking Who? and What? Who was to be the activist type best suited to achieve the necessary changes? And what form were these changes to take?

To Turgenev the question was principally one of types. He sought an answer in the fundamental contrast, as he saw it, between the dominant literary heroes of European culture—the types of Hamlet and Don Quixote. He developed the idea that Don Quixote represents selfless dedication to an ideal, in the pursuit of which he nevertheless must ultimately appear comic, while Hamlet represents the type of introspective egoist who is ultimately tragic in his lack of faith or ideal. The wholly integrated man should of course combine both these poles of human nature, just as the wholly integrated relationship between hero and heroine should combine the heart and head, the idealistically enthusiastic and the cynically realistic, the Quixotic and the Hamlet-like. If the contrast has universal meaning, then for Turgenev it had specific meaning as a way of identifying the aspiration towards change, liberation and revolution which could be discerned in the younger generation but which Turgenev himself did not share and which he could not as yet discern in Russian society at large.

He published his article ‘Hamlet and Don Quixote’ in The Contemporary early in 1860, almost simultaneously with the publication of his third novel On the Eve in The Russian Messenger, Katkov's liberal journal. Turgenev's refusal to let The Contemporary publish his novel was invitation enough for Dobrolyubov to attack him for making his hero, Insarov, a Bulgarian. ‘What's the point of having a Bulgarian hero, why not a Russian?’ he asked in a review with a suitably interrogative title, ‘When will the Real Day Come?’⁵ The question was obviously designed to elicit a revolutionary answer. Similarly, Chernyshevsky's answer to On the Eve, even though less immediate, was also to take the form of the question posed in the title of his famous novel What is to be Done? Inherent in the question was the idea that humanity should be fundamentally transformed, or that the Hamlets should become Don Quixotes. If Turgenev could see only Hamlets in the Russian males of this epoch, he could discern Quixotic impulses in such female types as his heroines of Rudin and Home of the Gentry and especially in Yelena Stakhova of On the Eve. Yelena's transformation into a young woman dedicated to her own moral liberation as well as that ideal of national liberation which she shared with Insarov is one that summarised the younger generation's appetite for revolutionary change more fully, if only by implication, than any portrayal to date.⁶ The role of the Russian nineteenth-century novel as a chronicle and criticism of its time acquired at this point—on the eve of the emancipation of the serfs—a revolutionary dimension. Its revolutionary character hinged both on its publicistic function as a forum for opinion and on its specific literary power to project images of change. The image of womanhood emancipated from conventional constraints was one such revolutionary image, but more essentially novel, and relevant to the time, was the image of humanity liberated by scientific knowledge.

The combination of scientific knowledge and revolutionary idealism was destined to exert a mesmerising influence on generations of the Russian intelligentsia. The catalyst may well have been provided by the English historian H. T. Buckle, whose history of English civilisation became so popular among the Russian younger generation of the 1860s. Buckle laid particular stress on the idea that physical science had contributed significantly to the revolutionary process in France. If ‘the hall of science is the temple of democracy’, as Buckle claimed,⁷ then the coupling of science with the French Revolution meant that social rebellion might somehow be summoned into being as assuredly as the physical, external world might be seen to be governed by scientific laws. Buckle did not put it quite as categorically, though what he implied amounted to the same thing:

The intimate connection between scientific progress and social rebellion, is evident from the fact, that both are suggested by the same yearning after improvement, the same dissatisfaction with what has been previously done, the same restless, prying, insubordinate and audacious spirit.⁸

Turgenev felt challenged by this spirit and was the first to give it a name. He recognised that the liberalism of his generation, together with his own reputation as a writer, formed the targets of this challenge. To meet it he had to formulate his own answer to the question: ‘What is to be done?’ It was with this in mind that he resolved to have a holiday in Ventnor in the Isle of Wight in August 1860.

Ventnor in the Isle of Wight had become a favourite holiday venue of the Russian émigré community. Turgenev was aware that a group of his compatriots, including Herzen (though he changed his mind and went to Bournemouth—or ‘Bunmuss’, as he called it),⁹ would be gathering in Ventnor that summer. The aim of such a gathering was not only to enjoy the sea-bathing but perhaps also to discuss the state of Russia and consider certain plans for the future. On 8 August Turgenev arrived in London, apparently met Herzen, and then on 12 August, a Sunday, travelled to Ventnor, where he took rooms in Rock Cottage, Belgrave Road. In a letter to his friend, Countess Lambert, of 18 August he announced that he had ‘begun to work a little: I've thought of the subject for a novel—will anything come of it?’¹⁰ We also know from his Literary Reminiscences that it was in Ventnor that he conceived his most famous novel, Fathers and Children, and his most famous hero, Bazarov:

I was sea-bathing at Ventnor, a little town on the Isle of Wight—it was in August 1860—when I had the first idea for Fathers and Children, that work thanks to which the kindly disposition towards me of the Russian younger generation has ceased—and has ceased apparently for ever. More than once I have heard and have read in critical articles that in my works I ‘start from an idea’ or ‘accompany an idea’; some have praised me for this, others, on the contrary, have censured me; for my own part I must admit that I have never attempted to ‘create an image’ unless I have had as a starting point not an idea but a living person, to which suitable elements have gradually been added or applied.¹¹

He goes on at this point to mention that his hero Bazarov was based on the personality of a young provincial doctor who had much impressed him (the man had apparently died in 1859). This living prototype of Bazarov has given rise to all kinds of speculation. No doubt, if he actually existed, he personified for Turgenev the ‘nihilist’ type. It is far less certain that he exemplified the revolutionary vocation, with its educative, transforming role, which became a primary characteristic of Bazarov and may have had its source in Turgenev's three-week stay at Ventnor, as we shall see later. In his Reminiscences he goes on to explain what the provincial doctor meant to him:

In this remarkable man were embodied—in my eyes—that scarcely conceived, still fermenting principle which later received the name of nihilism. The impression produced upon me by this person was very strong and at the same time not entirely clear; at the start I was unable to define him—and I listened to and studied intently everything around me, as if wishing to endorse the truthfulness of my own feelings. I was upset by the following fact: not in a single work of literature did I come across so much as a hint of what I sensed everywhere.¹²

Turgenev here stresses the novelty of the phenomenon of nihilism and his own intuitive awareness of it. When he wrote these words, in 1868 or 1869 (at least eight years after his Ventnor holiday), he may have wished to justify the rightness of his intuition and he perhaps over-stressed the novelty. Yet he always liked to stress the truthfulness and novelty of his perception of the type of Bazarov in his Reminiscences and, when he summarised the reasons for the critical reaction to his hero, it was precisely the truthfulness and novelty that he emphasised:

The entire cause of the misunderstandings, all—as one might say—the ‘trouble’ resided in the fact that the type of Bazarov as reproduced by me did not have the time to pass through the gradual phases through which literary types usually pass. It was not his lot, as it was Onegin's or Pechorin's lot, to undergo an epoch of idealization, of sympathy and acclaim. At the very moment when this new man, Bazarov, appeared, the author approached him critically … objectively.

And when he first mentioned his idea for Bazarov to one of the Russians staying in Ventnor with him, he was astonished to hear him remark: ‘But surely, it seems, you have already presented a similar type in Rudin.’ On hearing this, Turgenev was at a loss for words. ‘What was there to say? Rudin and Bazarov—one and the same type!’¹³

In spite of Turgenev's professed astonishment, the mention of Rudin may not have been altogether accidental at this particular moment, nor altogether inappropriate. Although he had written Rudin five years before, in June 1860, in an anonymous review appearing in The Contemporary, Rudin had been severely criticised.¹⁴ Such criticism had been personally hurtful to Turgenev. He had construed it as an attack on his liberalism and the liberalism of his generation. One tantalising possibility now emerges. If, in the version originally published in 1856, Rudin had ended as ‘a homeless wanderer’, then at some point in 1860 Turgenev added what we now know as the final scene of the novel depicting the hero's death on the Paris barricades of 1848. It seems possible to assume that, either during his European travels before reaching the Isle of Wight or while he was at Ventnor, he took a decision to turn Rudin into a revolutionary. For those who died on the Paris barricades of 1848 were revolutionaries, there can be no doubt of that, and Turgenev was therefore deliberately ‘revolutionising’ his hero.

In doing this he was apparently doing two things. He was not only creating the first true revolutionary hero in Russian literature, he was also redeeming the reputation of his own older generation in the eyes of the younger generation. Simultaneously, it seems, he was conceiving the image and the story of his hero Bazarov ‘critically … objectively’. The initial image of his Bazarov may have been tragic: that of a dying man.¹⁵ But the ideological impulse behind the portrait must have been educative, concerned, that is to say, with the dissemination of new social attitudes and new ideas in a manner similar to his portrayal of such a type in the figure of Rudin. The reasons for this emphasis in Bazarov's portrayal may be traceable to two influences that could have affected him while he was staying in Ventnor.

The first influence was obviously revolutionary. Herzen may have had little stomach for the actual organisation of revolution; not so his friend Ogaryov. His role as one of the first—if not the first Russian of his generation—to engage actively in revolutionary organisation, perhaps on lines that may ultimately have influenced Lenin, has only fairly recently received the attention due to it.¹⁶ Ogaryov's planning seems to have been prompted by the visit of Chernyshevsky to London in 1859.¹⁷ What he planned, under a heading of ‘Ideals’ (a clandestine document that he had presumably only shown to trusted sympathisers), was a society aimed at establishing in Russia a social structure based on the communal ownership of the land. The ensuing democratisation¹⁸ of Russia would be effected by the creation of a centre in Russia permanently linked to a ‘chief organ’ (presumably The Bell) in London. The internal Russian organisation would be in the hands of politically conscious activists and organisers, known as ‘apostles’,¹⁹ who would in turn have ‘pupils’, and the further such members of the society were from the centre the more ‘unconscious’ as agents of the society they would be. In Ogaryov's view, this secret society, as a thinking minority, had a paramount duty to forge vital links with the peasantry in order to ensure the twin revolutionary aims of confederation and the independence of the village.

A considerable part of this programme, in broad terms, was published by him in The Bell for 1 August 1860 in an article entitled ‘Letters to a Compatriot’. It is unthinkable that Turgenev did not know of these ‘Letters’ either through having read them or through discussions among his fellow Russians gathered in Ventnor. Whether or not he knew the secret programme of Ogaryov's ‘Ideals’ is uncertain. It is certain that the idea of ‘propagators of knowledge for the peasantry’ must have been known to him, for at the end of his ‘Letters’ Ogaryov added, as a kind of after-thought:

Yes, I've still forgotten another question: popular education … It is necessary to prepare teachers, propagators of knowledge for the peasantry, for the people, itinerant teachers who could carry useful and practical knowledge from end to end of Russia.²⁰

Ogaryov's mention of the importance of ‘popular education’ no doubt served to provide the second influence that Turgenev experienced during his Ventnor holiday—the question of education in Russia. It may be no coincidence that on 15 August 1860 there appeared in The Times a lengthy report and an editorial on a parliamentary debate devoted to the Ragged Schools. What the report of the debate and the editorial served to stress was that the Privy Council did not originate anything in the field of popular education in England but gave money to those who were willing to subscribe money for such a purpose. As The Times pointed out, the Education Committee of the Privy Council was less concerned with pecuniary aid than with ‘making the education given as much as possible the base and beginning of a course of self-improvement and social utility’.

Whether or not Ogaryov's ‘Letters to a Compatriot’ or the report and editorial in The Times had a direct effect cannot be determined from any testimony by Turgenev, but it would be reasonable to suppose that they must have had some role to play, for the greater part of Turgenev's time at Ventnor was taken up with discussing and preparing a draft programme for ‘A Society for the Propagation of Literacy and Primary Education’ in Russia.²¹ The aim was to establish a voluntary society in Russia with the object of persuading the government (perhaps in the same way as the Privy Council would be persuaded in England) that the cause of ‘emancipation’ would also be served by emancipating the Russian people from the slavery of ignorance. The society would concern itself with primary education and the organisation of schools that would be ‘as simple, uncomplicated and inexpensive as possible’.²² In other words, the aim was to provide limited elementary education of a quite practical kind.²³ Implicit in such an aim was the idea that the liberally-inclined sections of the Russian nobility should be seen to be actively engaged in supporting the government's reforms and should not be regarded as having any revolutionary or seditious intent.

We may reasonably assume that, confronted by the revolutionary aspirations of the younger generation of the Russian intelligentsia and revolutionary planning by such a leading spokesman of his own generation as Ogaryov, Turgenev answered the question ‘What is to be done?’—at least during the three wet and windy weeks in Ventnor—by doing his own planning. What he planned took the form of a draft programme for educational change in Russia—a subject in which he had not previously shown interest and which he did not pursue actively beyond his Ventnor stay. At the same moment he was formulating his ideas for his new fictional hero, Bazarov. And at the heart of this newly conceived figure, living prototypes apart, was the ‘idea’ of nihilism, and it was an ‘idea’ that evidently had another significance. If he was apparently concerned to display his loyalty to the Russian government in his draft plan for popular education, then in his ‘idea’ for Bazarov there may have been more than just a ‘critical’ and ‘objective’ portrayal of nihilism. As he put it in the most explicit statement of his intentions, the letter that he wrote to the young poet K. K. Sluchevsky shortly after Fathers and Children appeared in 1862: if Bazarov ‘is called a nihilist, then in place of that word one ought to read: revolutionary’.²⁴

‘Rudin and Bazarov—one and the same type!’ The idea apparently astonished Turgenev, but the roles of teacher and revolutionary have something in common. Turgenev turned his most pedagogic hero, Rudin, into a revolutionary; he made his most revolutionary hero a teacher. At the opening of the novel, in chapter 5 and 6, when Bazarov first emerges as the hero-figure with a central role in the work, he is deliberately portrayed as a teacher who has a natural vocation for explaining to the peasant boys at Mar'ino why he catches frogs. In his absence from the breakfast table his most adept pupil in the novel, the young Arkady Kirsanov, offers his definition of Bazarov as a nihilist (‘A man who does not acknowledge any authorities, who does not accept a single principle on faith, no matter how much that principle may be respected’) and when Bazarov is confronted for the first time by the needling of the ‘aristocratic’ Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov and questioned by Nikolay Petrovich on the subject of soil fertilisation and Liebig's discoveries, his reply and Nikolay Petrovich's thought serve at once to underline the conjunction of teacher and nihilist:

‘I am at your service, Nikolay Petrovich, but there's no need to bring in Liebig! You've got to learn your Abc first, only then can you start on a book, but we haven't even set eyes on the letter A yet.’

Well, I can see you really are a nihilist, thought Nikolay Petrovich

(ch. 6).

The difference between Bazarov and all the other characters in the novel is beyond question. He is different, for instance, in the formal role allotted to him, as a stranger to the place of the fiction whose significance is revealed stage by stage as the scene moves from Mar'ino to the local township, then to Odintsova's estate and finally to the humble home of Bazarov's parents.²⁵ Different in formal terms, he is also different in social pedigree, different in his supposed commitment to science and different chiefly in his nihilistic concern for negation and denial. When taxed by Pavel Petrovich, the proponent of aristocratism and individuality, to explain his views, Bazarov simply asserts that ‘we act on the strength of what we consider useful … At the present time denial is of more use than anything else, so we deny’ (ch. 10). He commits himself to a spirit of denial not only through a cast of mind or temper that, in its youthfulness, makes him an opponent of the older man, but also because he repudiates all attempts to idealise the peasantry or to redress the situation by talk of art, parliamentary institutions or a new legal system:

‘When it's all a matter of one's daily bread, when the crudest superstition holds sway among us, when all our joint stock companies go bust through lack of honest people, when even the freedom about which the government is making such a fuss won't be much good to us, because the peasant'll be only too glad to steal from himself in order to drink himself into a stupor down the local tavern.’

Revolutions are bred, it seems, as much in the minds of establishments as in the hearts of revolutionaries. Pavel Petrovich may seem an inadequate opponent for the hard-headed Bazarov, but he reveals in his own way how prone are establishments to erect barriers of ‘principles’, ‘rules’, ‘habits’ and ‘-isms’ to fend off the ostensibly unprincipled, emotional assaults of the revolutionary young. By contrast the revolutionary young, in this fairly simplist form of confrontation, must just as inevitably repudiate rational argument as they repudiate all authority accepted on faith. To Pavel Petrovich such nihilism is to be equated with abuse; it is no more than talk. But if it is to become action it will inevitably be mindless and destructive. It is here that Pavel Petrovich enunciates more than just a rationalisation of the status quo. When he deplores the use of force and extols the value of civilisation, he speaks with greater passion than his character would seem to justify. He speaks with the passion of Turgenev himself, who perceived more acutely than any of his contemporaries (with the exception of Botkin and Dostoyevsky)²⁶ the uncivilising negatives of the nihilistic pose.

He declared in his Literary Reminiscences that he shared practically all Bazarov's convictions, with the exception of his views on art.²⁷ It is, though, an exception of the utmost significance. Bazarov may dismiss Raphael in his apostolic pursuit of a utilitarian materialism, but the dismissal is an acknowledgement of his own sensuous impoverishment and the essentially unaesthetic bravado of his Quixotic nihilism. The reversal process upon which his fictional existence depends, for this is precisely what the stages in his characterisation are designed to achieve, demands that he should discover through love, through the ‘romanticism’ that he so abhors, the aesthetic sense in his own nature. That this does not romanticise him or unbalance his portrayal is one measure of Turgenev's success. Bazarov's greatness as a piece of characterisation is attributable to the absence of the sort of over-intellectualising of emotion that we find in Rudin. He exhibits precisely the opposite of all artiness in his healthy rejection of nature-worship, art-worship and peasant-worship. In contrast to the artificiality of the Kirsanovs, the amiable exhibitionism of other members of the younger generation (Sitnikov, Kukshina), the pretensions of Odintsova and her grandiose Nikol'skoye, Bazarov himself and his parental background are deliberately portrayed as natural, honest, kindly at heart. Or as Turgenev put it in explaining that his novel was directed against the nobility as the leading class in Russian society:

All the true iconoclasts (otritsateli) I have known (Belinsky, Bakunin, Herzen, Dobrolyubov, Speshnev et al.) have without exception come from relatively kindly and honourable parents. And this enshrines something of great significance: it removes from the activists, the iconoclasts, any taint of personal dissatisfaction, personal grudge-bearing. They follow their chosen path simply because they are more sensitive to the needs of the life of the people.²⁸

This points up very concisely the positive virtue of Bazarov as one who follows his own path out of sensitivity to the needs of the peasantry, though they may in the end reject him in much the same way that he rejects the nobility. Although an apostle of new ideas, echoing distantly the words of a Chernyshevsky or a Dobrolyubov, Bazarov acts upon his convictions not in a revolutionary way but rather in the manner of a practical reformer. He is seen to serve the needs of the peasantry as a teacher who enlightens, as a doctor who heals. His vocation may be ‘bitter, harsh and lonely’, as he tells Arkady (ch. 26), and after its fashion it may seem revolutionary to the older generation, but it gives no impression of having the utterly dedicated, annihilating impulse of the political nihilist (of Kojukhov, say, in The Career of a Nihilist). He negates, but in order to prepare the way for the elementary practical tasks of the future.

Yet at the very centre of his appeal as a character is the egoism inseparable from his nihilism. Altruistic though he may appear to be in his Quixotic denial of self, he is ultimately as preoccupied with his own ego as any Hamlet. As he puts it to his ‘pupil’ Arkady: ‘It's not for the gods to bake the pots!’ (ch. 19). For such an apostle of nihilism the only thing that will make him alter his high opinion of himself is an encounter with someone who shows no deference towards him. No bully, not really uncouth, Bazarov is distinguished in his egoism by a form of social inferiority complex that compensates with displays of assumed hatred and aggression. He declares himself ready to fight, and if he tilts at many illusory windmills to prove his knightly valour in the manner of a Quixote, then he just as readily allows his sense of purpose to be ‘sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought’ that emphasises the metaphysical despair at ever achieving any form of real change in life, whether among the peasants for whom he will sacrifice himself or the nobility to whom he is opposed.

Pascal's vision of man seems to be at the source of his despair.²⁹ It is also at the source of his rage against the dying of the light. In conception a tragic figure, as Turgenev insisted more than once, Bazarov has in the end only one destiny in life—to die decently. To this extent he is more poignantly real to us as a humanly comprehensible character of fiction than any revolutionary hero could be, but it is precisely in his increasing awareness of the purposelessness of his life that he loses socio-political meaning as a character. In rejecting the nobility, in devoting himself to the peasantry, he becomes socially outcast, perhaps finally as much superfluous after his fashion as Rudin. He is represented as a man who, having failed in his attempt to achieve happiness through love, is given no choice save to fill his time with some form of activity until death fishes him from the waters of life.

Bazarov's legacy has taken many forms, but the most durable and profound has probably been his importance as the apotheosis of scientific respect for truth.³⁰ That we know very little about the scientific research that he undertakes in the novel is scarcely relevant. What we do know is that he denies all authorities save those which can be justified by reference to the natural sciences. He stands for denial of God, social institutions based on custom and all principles accepted on faith. He stands for what is honest, straightforward, useful and necessary in life, but above all he exemplifies an image of man as self-sufficient and independent.³¹ His questioning of assumptions, like his denial of authorities, is the most potent of his legacies, for it is in this respect that he embodies not just a commitment to science but also that essential challenge to parental authority, the essential revolt of the children against the fathers, which justifies his nihilistic independence. His is an independence, moreover, as much moral or ethical as it is anti-establishment; it questions the place of God in the material universe as much as it queries the right of the past to legislate for the present. It is the same kind of independence that a Raskolnikov or an Ivan Karamazov will claim to assert in the name of free will. That it in turn seeks to arrogate to itself the sole right to enunciate the truth is the basis of Bazarov's revolt, just as it is what foredooms him in Turgenev's eyes.

For Bazarov the decent death is not made simple by the expedient of an adversary's bullet. He survives the ludicrous duel with Pavel Petrovich, an event that serves only to highlight his innate nobility and superiority. Not for him, as for Rudin, anything as simple and theatrical as the waving of a red flag and a blunt sword on a revolutionary barricade. No bullet passes through his heart and ends it all. His finale was to be more grandiose and terrible, for as Turgenev puts it:

I dreamed of a sombre, wild, huge figure, half-grown from the earth. Powerful, wicked and honest—and yet doomed to perish—because it still stands on the threshold of the future—I dreamed of some strange pendant to the Pugachyovs and so on …³²

He dreamed of the doomed revolutionary as well as the hero-figure, no matter how great, who faces in the last resort only the single elemental fact of death. Darkness covers over Bazarov's life at the end, as his last word emphasises. He was not needed by Russia, any more than his vision of himself as engaged on a gigantic task was needful to life. However apparently accidental, his death resembles a martyrdom in the name of some incomplete but magnificent vision of human perfection. This is what lends the figure of Bazarov such enduring appeal.

Turgenev did not answer the question ‘What is to be done?’ but he did suggest, if only by the power of his art, that literature had a role to play in anticipating future change as well as in defining the latest phenomena in Russian society. Chernyshevsky's What is to be Done? (1863) obviously relates directly to Turgenev's novel in the sense that it is an answer to it and an extension of it. Where Turgenev had always supposed that literature involved creation—the creating, for example, of a new type such as Hamlet, whom Shakespeare discovered, as it were, and made accessible to all men—Chernyshevsky did not suppose at the time he wrote his novel that art could ever be more than a surrogate of reality and life.³³ The fundamental purpose of his own novel was as utilitarian as its title. It may have owed nothing to Turgenev's masterpiece in terms of literary example, but it nevertheless owed something in terms of impulse, even though diametrically opposed. Whereas Turgenev deliberately portrayed his hero as one who denied all authority save that of the natural sciences, Chernyshevsky concerned himself with establishing a utilitarian code of conduct for the ‘new men’ of the sixties, which would essentially be authoritative, didactic and affirmative.

What is to be Done? springs directly out of a revolutionary situation that was a personal tragedy for Chernyshevsky. The emancipation of the serfs, promulgated in February 1861, had been denounced by many, including Chernyshevsky, as scarcely more than emancipation in name. By the spring of 1862, and almost at the same time as the publication of Turgenev's Fathers and Children, large-scale public disturbances were occurring in St Petersburg. They were directly connected with the younger generation's dissatisfaction over the reformative measures of the government. Proclamations had begun to appear, some perhaps the work of Chernyshevsky himself, but by far the most inflammatory was the proclamation entitled ‘Young Russia’ calling for bloody revolution. Then, towards the end of May 1862, widespread arson occurred in St Petersburg, the work supposedly of nihilists and revolutionaries. One consequence was the banning of The Contemporary. Chernyshevsky was already under suspicion for his publicistic activities and his days of freedom were already numbered, but the pretext for his arrest was the discovery of his name in a letter from Herzen intercepted on the Russian border. Herzen had stated in this intercepted letter that the London émigrés were ready to publish the recently banned Contemporary in London or Geneva—a proposal that may have had something to do with Ogaryov's suggestion in his ‘Ideals’ for a ‘chief organ’ situated abroad but permanently linked to a revolutionary organisation in Russia. However, Chernyshevsky was arrested on 7 July and incarcerated in the Peter and Paul fortress. His novel was written at great speed while he was under judicial investigation between December 1862 and April 1863, in between hunger-strikes and various other literary enterprises. It may seem surprising that the authorities permitted him to write; it is far more surprising that the manuscript of his novel was permitted to leave the fortress for onward transmission to his cousin, A. N. Pypin, who in turn passed it to Nekrasov, editor of The Contemporary. En route to the printer's, Nekrasov apparently lost it. By the oddest of ironies he then arranged for the loss of the manuscript of this ‘revolutionary’ work to be advertised in the St Petersburg Police Gazette, offering a reward of 50 silver roubles for its recovery. The manuscript was found by a minor official and returned. To cap the astonishing saga, the novel was in fact published in The Contemporary in 1863³⁴ through a mix-up between the commission investigating Chernyshevsky's revolutionary connection and the censor appointed to vet it for publication. Needless to say, as soon as the subversive character of the novel became known it was banned for the rest of the century.

By any standards What is to be Done? can hardly be considered a dangerously subversive work, although its effect, largely due to the proscribing of it, was to prove revolutionary in several important ways. The novel can be easily sniped at and mocked. Its story is implausible, its manner portentously earnest and some of the writing displays only too clearly the speed with which it was written. It opens with the contrived suicide of Vera Pavlovna's husband, shows us by lengthy flashbacks her background, the reasons for her marriage to Lopukhov and then gradually her disenchantment with him and her growing interest in his friend Kirsanov. The supposed suicide of Lopukhov is the ‘secret’ of the novel, its appeal as a mystery story and the falsehood at the very centre of its oft-proclaimed truthfulness. By means of this providential suicide Vera Pavlovna is enabled to marry Kirsanov and thus fulfil her real desires. It is giving nothing away to reveal that towards the novel's close a certain C. Beaumont arrives in St Petersburg from America, marries a girl called Katya and the Beaumonts and the Kirsanovs live happily ever after à quatre.

Throughout his novel Chernyshevsky likes to insist that it is drawn straight from life without recourse to either artifice or art. Despite this, for all his professed repudiation of artifice, it is ironic that at the centre of his true-to-life novel he should have been obliged to maintain the fiction of concealing the truth. But the collision between ostensible truth to life and the need for fictional interest never amounts to much, for the simple reason that What is to be Done?, as its title implies, aspires to be a textbook on life and unlike any novel before it. Designed to capture the novelty of the ideas of the time ‘borne on the air like the aroma of the fields when the flowers are in bloom’, the novel, it is assumed, will act upon the reader in a revolutionary way, much as the ideas that she encounters act upon the heroine and change her way of life.

No one was perhaps more changed by this novel than V. I. Lenin. Describing the impact of the novel on him, he is reputed to have said:

Chernyshevsky's novel is too complicated, too full of ideas, to understand and evaluate at an early age. I myself tried to read it when I was about fourteen. That was an utterly pointless, superficial reading. But after the execution of my brother, knowing that Chernyshevsky's novel was one of his favourite books, I set about reading it properly and sat over it not just a few days but whole weeks. It was only then I understood its depth. It's a thing that can fire one's energies for a lifetime.³⁵

Lenin is also reputed to have claimed that hundreds of people became revolutionaries after reading Chernyshevsky's novel. We are dealing therefore with a novel of which the ideas constituted a blueprint for revolutionary change. That change is demonstrated in the novel by the revolutionary effect of new ideas on the heroine.

She is influenced by them initially to achieve a domestic revolution of the first magnitude—to become independent of her mother by marrying Lopukhov, that is—and she also succeeds in escaping from the role of sexual chattel that the society of the time had prescribed for her. Given the stuffy proprieties of the time, Chernyshevsky is remarkably candid in his treatment of sexual relationships. The neutral room between Vera Pavlovna and her husband may seem absurdly prim, but the idea is clear enough: Lopukhov's relationship to Vera Pavlovna is that of teacher rather than lover. It is he who introduces her to the theory of rational egoism. Through him she learns to distinguish between her ‘real desires’ and those that are simply the product of fantasy.³⁶ Under his influence, she experiences her first dream of freedom, in which she must escape from her ‘underground’.³⁷ She is the youth of her generation attacked by a disabling paralysis, just as she is the image of all women seeking emancipation and independence. If she emancipates herself by marriage, she achieves a form of socio-economic independence in real terms by organising a co-operative for seamstresses on socialist lines.

None of these ideas can of course become effective without the ingredient of work. This, as we learn from her second dream, is the principal element in reality.³⁸ Though it has to be supposed that Vera Pavlovna ‘works’ in organising and expanding her co-operatives, in a conventional sense she actually seems to do very little. She never cooks a meal, does no dusting or even light domestic work; she has no children to look after, it seems, although a baby Mitya is found in her arms (Part IV, ch. 12); she is emancipated from all the customary burdens of womanhood. Like her, her husbands are inoculated from most of the hardships common to the non-professional classes.³⁹ In material terms, the basis of the new life as envisaged in her second dream (and in her final, fourth, dream) would seem to be hydraulic: field irrigation, drainage, the maintenance of humidity. Work as heavy labour is no part of her dream of the future. All her activities are to be ordered by a doctrine of rational egoism, which presupposes self-interest as the guiding impulse, the pursuit of ‘real desires’ as the object of life and the source of true happiness. Her working relationships with others are to be governed by principles of equality, mutual respect and co-operation, whether in her successful co-operatives for seamstresses or in her relations with her two husbands.

On the face of them all these ideas appeal to reason and practical commonsense. They are to serve as a rational basis for a new life-style. In their lack of sophistication they invite the mocking cynicism of Dostoyevsky's ‘underground man’ and the crude hostility of so much anti-nihilist literature of the 1860s. Of course, the chief object of such hostility was Chernyshevsky's much fuller demonstration of these rational precepts in the figure of his revolutionary hero, Rakhmetov, who is ancillary to the main relationships in the fiction but undoubtedly illustrative of its main issues.

Rakhmetov is ‘ploughed up’ by the compulsion to self-improvement more fundamentally than Vera Pavlovna. His repudiation of his gentry background, his total, humourless dedication to becoming a ‘rigorist’, involving him in a severe course of physical and intellectual self-discipline, his suppression of all personal feelings, including the rejection of love, his concern to know only the essential data and the essential people, his preposterous self-mortification by sleeping on a bed of nails, notwithstanding his failure to give up smoking cigars—all these features make him, in Chernyshevsky's famous words, ‘the flower of the best people, the movers of the movers, the salt of the salt of the earth’. The implication of his role as one of ‘the movers of the movers’ is that by subjecting himself to such revolutionary rigorism he will help to cause revolutionary change in the society around him.

The casual reader, not to mention Chernyshevsky's own ineptly funny ‘perspicacious reader’, can hardly fail to notice the artificiality of such types as Rakhmetov or Vera Pavlovna and her two husbands. Flying, as it were, in the face of reason, but evidently in order to make a self-fulfilling prophecy, Chernyshevsky insists on their typicality: ‘I wanted to depict ordinary decent people of the new generation, people of whom I've met hundreds … I wanted to show people behaving like all ordinary people of their type, and I hope I've succeeded.’⁴⁰

Their behaviour, with its obvious challenge to the hypocritical standards of the time, presupposes a new morality in which the guiding criterion is the pursuit of universal happiness. The central contrivance of the fiction is just as utilitarian. So that Vera Pavlovna should fulfil her real desires—sexually, one supposes, as well as in other respects—and should not be held to have violated her marriage vows, Lopukhov contrives his suicide, Rakhmetov connives at the deception and Vera Pavlovna is left free to pursue the course of true happiness with Kirsanov. At this stage in the novel the appeal to reason resolves itself into a far more emotional, impassioned and genuine summons to make the pursuit of happiness the true aim of life:

Climb out of your slums, my friends, climb out, it's not all that bad, come out into the free light of day, life's splendid here, and the way is easy and attractive, try it, try making yourselves more developed … Desire only to be happy—that's all you need desire. For this you'll enjoy taking trouble over your development: this is happiness

(Part III, ch. 31).

This plea for what Chernyshevsky calls ‘development’ (razvitiye) as the clue to universal happiness is not rationally argued but emotionally proclaimed. For in the end Chernyshevsky respected the heart as much as the head. Kirsanov who is to bring Vera Pavlovna the ultimate happiness has the knack of loving, it seems. This seems to be what chiefly differentiates him from Lopukhov. Although the story of his love for a consumptive girl can be dismissed as sentimental, it illustrates a very important feature of Chernyshevsky's ideal future society. The need for love as the lasting cement in human relations is emphasised by him at the crucial point in the novel when Vera Pavlovna, acknowledging how Kirsanov's love has made her independent, dreams her fourth dream about the gradual emancipation of women throughout history and the creation of that all-aluminium, electrically-lit Crystal Palace of the utopian future. The social revolution that will emancipate women must be accompanied by a revolutionary changing of nature and man's relation to it. The creation of this revolutionary state of things is ‘what has to be done’ in answer to the novel's title:

Tell everyone: this is what it will be like, a future bright and beautiful. Love it, strive for it, work for it, bring about as much of it as you can: your life will be bright and full of goodness, rich in joy and happiness, only to the extent that you can bring to it something from the future

(Part IV, ch. 16: 11).

For all its sententiously propagandising manner and sketchiness of both characterisation and form, the novel aims above all to express this deeply cherished credo. As a novel it aspired to break with tradition in literary terms quite as much as it aimed to project a utopian vision of the future. The final artifice of pretending that he is writing about 1865 when the date at the end of his text is 4 April 1863 serves to emphasise Chernyshevsky's indifference to realistic conventions in literature. As a novelist he sought to free himself from formal literary constraints by proclaiming ‘truth’ as the substance of his fiction, just as his heroine sought to emancipate herself from her servile role in society by proclaiming socialism as her life-style. The over-simplifications involved in such claims should not detract from their potency as hallmarks of the revolutionary novel in Russian literature. The teleology of the revolutionary ideal as of the literary phenomenon was paramount. Chernyshevsky, writing as a prisoner confined in the Peter and Paul fortress, could hardly do otherwise than assume that human relations should achieve through the example of his utopian novel that dignity and freedom which were denied to him personally. What mattered, therefore, was the future, for only the future could bring revolutionary change.

By contrast, the novel's final image may seem contradictory and pessimistic. It is the image of the ‘woman all in black’ considered by many commentators as a portrait of Chernyshevsky's grieving wife, to whom the novel is dedicated. For all its connotations of bereavement and sorrow, this figure appears to be less that of a widow or a woman waiting her beloved (her final song suggests as much) than that of a mother who sings to entertain her children. Such a final image of motherhood is symbolically appropriate. It underlines the fact that revolution involves giving birth to a new life. In the Russian novel it is an image signalling change, renewal and revolutionary transformation. What is to be Done?, with its emphasis on an emancipated, revolutionary womanhood and its final image of motherhood, signals from mid nineteenth-century Russia that ideal of the revolutionary mother which is to be given literary coherence for the first time by Maxim Gorky.

The Russian novel became the midwife to the revolutionary impulse in Russian society. In turn, it drew inspiration and creative life from that impulse.⁴¹ All the great novels of the 1860s and 1870s can be said to be reflections of the impulse toward change that swept through Russian society in the form of anarchism or nihilism, the ‘thinking realists’ of Pisarev, the ‘critically thinking individuals’ of Lavrov, the subjective sociology of Mikhailovsky, the anti-capitalist idealism of Populism, the political activism and, finally, the terrorism of ‘Land and Freedom’ and ‘The People's Will’. From Turgenev's Fathers and Children to Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov the Russian novel consciously echoed and recreated not only the conflicts between generations but also those between East and West, radicalism and conservatism, atheistic socialism and Christian belief, metropolitan bureaucracy and rural communalism, ever-increasing industrialisation and decaying agrarian ideals. These conflicts were endemic to Russian social growth during the Epoch of Great Reforms and the Epoch of Great Endeavours, during the 1860s and 1870s, that is to say. Though none of the great novelists could be regarded as wholly sympathetic to Chernyshevsky's utopian vision of the future, his novel challenged all who followed in his wake to create a literature that would be relevant to Russian purposes, visionary as well as realistic, purposive as well as objective. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, for all that it records the tragedy of its heroine's destruction by a vicious and hypocritical society, presupposes the moral regeneration of the hero in Levin's discovery of faith at the end, just as we may suppose that Solomin's activity at the end of Turgenev's Virgin Soil promises the unforeseen but implied technocratic utopia that excited so many apprehensions in Turgenev himself.⁴² Similarly, Dostoyevsky's vision of the new Christ with his boy-disciples promising a new heaven on earth at the close of The Brothers Karamazov suggests that Russia should aim to realise the precepts of Zosima rather than to cultivate the sour-tasting manna of the Grand Inquisitor.

In such novels as these literature is not only the conscience of a nation, not only its ‘living memory’, as Solzhenitsyn has called it,⁴³ but also a textbook on life in a revolutionary sense. It is a literature, in other words, that aims to change men's minds about the way they should live. But in the revolutionary novel, more than in any other version of the genre, the essentially solipsistic character of literature stands more nakedly apparent than the illusionism of a realistic literature usually allows. For if literature is in any allowable sense the creation of new life, then the revolutionary novel purports to show how that new life can be created. What is to be Done? leaves the reader in no doubt that life must be changed; it may seem too naive a blueprint for the infinitely complex and wilful human spirit to find appealing, yet, for all its silliness, it challenges literature to be true to its power to create and infect and influence, and in doing that it raises the need, to which Russian writers felt a keener response than other European writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for literature to revolutionise itself in the name of revolutionary change.

Neither Fathers and Children nor What is to be Done? spawned immediate successors in the genre, and of the two works the Turgenevan masterpiece was clearly the more influential in purely literary terms. Russian literature had to wait almost until the end of the nineteenth century for the first true revolutionary novel to appear in Russian, although such a novel had appeared in English in 1889. In the quarter of a century or so that intervened the anti-nihilist novel flourished in a number of bizarre examples during the 1860s⁴⁴ and achieved its greatest expression in one of the finest novels of the century, Dostoyevsky's The Possessed (1871-2). Among the very few novels that can claim to reflect the radicalism of the period only two deserve any attention at all and neither of them has any right to serious consideration as a work of literature.

A. V. Sleptsov's Hard Times (Trudnoye vremya) was published in The Contemporary in 1865.⁴⁵ It concerns the visit of a certain Ryazanov, a man with supposed radical views, to an estate-owner, Shchetinin, a former university friend of his. The object of the novel is to show up the inadequacy of Shchetinin's professed liberalism, the squalor of the ‘difficult time’ that faced both landowner and peasant after the emancipation of the serfs and the pusillanimous hypocrisy of establishment liberalism by contrast with the ostensible intellectual and moral strengths of radicalism. The touchstone is Shchetinin's wife, who begins to question her husband's aims in life under the influence of Ryazanov, though it is far from clear why she didn't do this much earlier. Ryazanov is so strong and silent as to be quite incredible as a character and makes in the end the poorest of successors to the impressive Bazarov.

I. V. Omulevsky's Step by Step (Shag za Shagom) appeared in 1870.⁴⁶ Obviously autobiographical in sections dealing with the hero's boyhood in Kamchatka—the freshest and most vivid passages in the novel—it tells of Svetlov's return to his parental home after some ten years away at university. Priggishly progressive in his views, he delivers sententious diatribes to all and sundry, including his parents, but apparently succeeds in converting many to his views, including a married woman, Lizaveta Prozorova, whose children he is engaged to teach. At the end of the novel she leaves with him for abroad. In the meantime, he has participated in a revolt among the peasant workers at a local factory, has been arraigned before the Governor and has suffered imprisonment for his views. These views, as the title indicates, are concerned with the ‘step by step’ approach to revolutionary change in Russian society. He enunciates his aims as follows:

To go step by step doesn't mean, in my view, that you've got to drag your feet; on the contrary, it means you've got to go firmly and unwaveringly towards your object, without any jumps—at least, that's the sense in which I use the term. The essential thing is not the speed of the steps you take, but their firmness and good sense, it seems to me.

Despite the Siberian setting and the introduction of political exiles into the story, the hero's character and aims are insufficiently interesting to hold the reader's attention and the succession of dialogue scenes makes for tedious, unenlightening reading. The very boredom of the work's characters and manner successfully defuses its revolutionary effect.

The English connection with the Russian revolutionary novel is most clearly apparent in S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinsky's The Career of a Nihilist, first published in English in 1889 and not translated into Russian until 1898. Similarly, the connection with Turgenev is also strongest here, for Stepniak greatly admired the author of Fathers and Children, wrote prefaces to Constance Garnett's translations and was intending to write a scholarly monograph on the writer before he was tragically run over by a train at a level crossing near his home in Bedford Park.⁴⁷ The debt to Turgenev is obvious in many parts of his novel and most particularly in the treatment given to the love story.

Stepniak wrote his novel in English between 1886 and 1889 with the twofold aim of increasing English interest in the cause of Russian freedom⁴⁸ and of explaining, as fully as he was able, the kinds of self-sacrifice and dedication that had inspired the revolutionaries of the 1870s, to whom Stepniak had himself belonged. He stated his aim in the preface:

Having been witness of and participator in a movement, which struck even its enemies by its spirit of boundless self-sacrifice, I wanted to show in the full light of fiction the inmost heart and soul of those humanitarian enthusiasts, with whom devotion to a cause has attained to the fervour of a religion, without being a religion.

In reviewing the novel The Star immediately seized on the novelty of psychology and type to be encountered in it:

The Career of a Nihilist is almost a new study in psychology. The ‘illegal’ people, as they are called, are an entirely fresh type. We all know the conventional Nihilist—many of us, too, know Tourgenieff's Nihilist, who is simply a double of the gentle, interesting, but manqué; character, full of charm but invariably weak—which possesses such a peculiar attraction for the Russian novelist. Stepniak's heroes and heroines are an entirely different order of beings.⁴⁹

In essence this is true. The Career of a Nihilist is the first Russian revolutionary novel, the first work of literature to attempt to explore the experience of being a revolutionary in Russian society and the first to show how nihilism had transformed itself from negation in the name of reform to terrorism in the name of revolution. Or as Evgeniya Taratuta has put it:

In Andrey Kozhukhov Stepniak-Kravchinsky, like a genuine creative artist, introduced a new hero to Russian and world literature.

The images of revolutionaries in all preceding Russian literature cannot compare with Stepniak's heroes. Due to censorship conditions the image of the Russian revolutionary could not appear in its full stature in legally permitted works of literature.

The revolutionary heroes of the novels of Chernyshevsky, Turgenev and Sleptsov are only approximate silhouettes.⁵⁰

In fairness to the novel, it should not be compared with the great works of Russian or world literature. The ‘new hero’ that it arguably introduces is new only in relation to a literature that had previously not been permitted to dwell on such facts of Russian life. He is ‘new’ not in being a development of Bazarov or Rakhmetov, though he owes something to their prior example, but in being portrayed as a dedicated revolutionary. To English sensibilities, the first to respond to the novel, the newness of the psychology impressed rather less than the tragic ‘waste of endeavour, this desolating loss of genius and character’, as the reviewer in The Star called it, that was so symptomatic of the ‘frightful crusade’ for freedom in Russia.⁵¹ As a work in English on so specifically Russian a subject the work is also a curiosity. It elicited a kind of wonder at the competence of its English that might be expected, though perhaps rather less from the English readership already used to Stepniak's other, non-fictional works, than from Stepniak's own compatriots.⁵² But Stepniak was no Conrad and the novel was not the success that he had hoped it would be.⁵³

It tells the story of Andrey Kojukhov (the English spelling), a young Russian exile in Geneva, who learns from a coded letter that one of his revolutionary comrades has been arrested by the Tsarist authorities. Consequently he decides to return to Russia. After clandestinely crossing the frontier, he arrives in St Petersburg and meets up with his close friend George, who in turn introduces him to an attractive girl, Tatiana or Tania Repina. Andrey devotes himself to propaganda among the workers and engages in attempts to release revolutionary colleagues from prison. When some of his closest friends are arrested and sentenced to death, he vows to dedicate himself to the final martyrdom of attempting to assassinate the Tsar. Tania, who has become his wife, tries to prevent him, but he is set in his resolve and would no doubt have succeeded had he not foolishly used an unfamiliar gun in making the attempt.

The novel gives a very plausible picture of the harassment that young revolutionaries can expect from the police, the constant fear of the nocturnal tap on the door and the need for continuous vigilance. It also represents the revolutionaries themselves as people fully satisfied with their vocation, generally happy in each other's company, models of right conduct, honesty and sincerity. They appear convinced of their social necessity and the rightness of their cause. ‘Their propaganda’, we are told, ‘its small extent notwithstanding, was very fruitful. They not merely imparted to their men certain doctrines, they educated them in the same high feelings that animated themselves.’ Through such very general statements about their revolutionary aims, we are given only the vaguest of descriptions about the precise political attitudes of the youthful revolutionaries. In part such vagueness must be attributable to the author's desire to cater to the tastes of an English reading public. There is mention of ‘revolutionary socialism’, the Jewish problem, Gambetta and Bismarck, differences between liberalism and revolutionary nihilism, but the essential and central purpose of the fiction is to illustrate the sacrificial heroism that inspires the revolutionaries, as Andrey himself expresses it in a conversation with his liberal father-in-law:

‘… we have shown an example of manly rebellion, which is never lost upon an enslaved country. With your permission, I will say that we have brought back to Russians their self-respect, and have saved the honour of the Russian name, which is no longer synonymous with that of slave.’⁵⁴

Even their most personal relationships are governed by this heroic aim. When Andrey and Tania get married, their love is described in the following exalté; terms:

The dangers which surrounded their path were the torchbearers of their love. What they valued and loved in each other most, was precisely this unlimited devotion to their country, this readiness to give up for its sake everything and at any moment. If they were able to love each other without doubt, division, or restraint, with all the powers of their young enthusiasm, this was because they each found in the other the embodiment of that lofty ideal of heroism after which each of them aspired.

Similarly, when Andrey decides to avenge the public execution of his revolutionary comrades, he describes his intentions to Tania in an exclamatory manner that hardly surprisingly makes her keen to dissuade him:

‘If we have to suffer—so much the better! Our sufferings will be a new weapon for us. Let them hang us, let them shoot us, let them kill us in their underground cells! The more fiercely we are dealt with, the greater will be our following. I wish I could make them tear my body to pieces, or burn me alive on a slow fire in the market place,’ he concluded in a low fierce whisper, his face burning as he looked at her with fixed glowing eyes.

Such shoddy melodramatic rhetoric naturally undermines the veracity of Andrey as a character, and since there are no other revolutionaries portrayed as fully in the novel the overall effect is one of an impoverished, uninspired flatness in the characterisation, despite attempts to poeticise or even glamorise relationships and occasions.⁵⁵ The quality of the writing may not be able to sustain the heroic impulse in the characterisation, yet the novel suggests well enough both the first causes of the heroism and the processes whereby conversions to revolutionary nihilism are made. At the opening of the novel, before his return to Russia to rejoin the revolutionary struggle, Andrey is represented in a particularly Wagnerian passage as undergoing a ‘tumult of emotion’.

Out of this tumult of emotion—like the cry of an eagle soaring in the eternal calm of the skies, far above the regions of cloud and tempest—there rose in his breast the triumphant, the intoxicating consciousness of the titanic strength of the man, whom no danger, no suffering, nothing on earth, can compel to deviate one hair's-breadth from his path. He knew that he would make a good and faithful soldier of the legion which fought for the cause of their country. Because this is what gives one man power over another's heart; this is what imparts the spell of contagion to his zeal; this is what infuses into a word—a mere vibration of the air—the force to overturn and remould the human soul.

No other passage in any Russian revolutionary novel captures the exultation of revolutionary commitment as powerfully as this. It is, of course, theatrical as well as Nietzschean, Bible-thumping as well as politically propagandist, and the highflown, blowsy rhetoric probably encapsulates as perfectly as one could wish the frankly adolescent, grandly operatic view of the revolutionary that appealed to so many young Russians of Stepniak's own generation. But this vision of the revolutionary as one of titanic strength, undeviating in his commitment, and of the revolutionary word as having ‘the force to overturn and remould the human soul’ is the key to Andrey Kojukhov's meaning as the first true revolutionary hero in Russian literature. The devotion to ‘the cause of their country’ may be ill-defined in its detailed aims, and the activity in support of the cause ultimately ineffectual, but the heroism of being a revolutionary is what the fictional hero demonstrates, and it is this that comprises the unique distinction of The Career of a Nihilist in both English and Russian literature.

The principal heroine, Tania, also undergoes a moment of change in her life. After hearing the story of a revolutionary colleague's self-sacrifice in surrendering himself to the authorities in place of another revolutionary, we are told that:

… she felt her heart swelling with a piercing, overwhelming pity. It was as if she had outgrown in an instant her girlhood and womanhood, her motherly instincts reaching their maturity within her maiden breast … A flush rose to her brow, a rapid something which she had not time to analyse, but which she felt with some surprise was neither hatred nor revenge, sent a flash of light into her eyes, and all was over. The great deed was done. Here, in this out-of-the-way corner of the town, in this poor room, the echo of a noble act had riveted for ever a new heart to the same great cause.

The dreadfulness of the writing can be shrugged off, for although the sexual suggestiveness of ‘a rapid something which she had not time to analyse’ can only invite sniggers, this is the description not of a seduction but of a conversion. Stepniak's insistence that he sought to describe the devotion to a cause which ‘has attained to the fervour of a religion, without being a religion’ is exemplified many times in his novel. When Andrey sees Zina being transported to public execution along with other condemned revolutionary comrades, he experiences what is virtually a form of religious revelation, an epiphany more divine than political:

Neither then nor afterwards could Andrey understand how it came to pass, but in that moment everything was changed in him … Anxieties and fears, nay, even indignation, regrets, revenge—all were forgotten, submerged by something thrilling, vehement, undescribable. It was more than enthusiasm, more than readiness to bear everything. It was a positive thirst for martyrdom—a feeling he always deprecated in others, and never suspected himself to possess—which burst forth within him now … Forgetting the place, the crowd, the dangers, everything,—conscious only of an irresistible impulse,—he made a step forward stretching both his hands towards her. He did not cry aloud words which would have ruined him irrevocably, only because his voice forsook him; or perhaps his words were lost in the noise of the drums, as his movement was in the rush of the crowd which closed in on both sides, swelling the enormous following of the advancing procession.

From this moment Andrey Kojukhov dedicates himself to the martyrdom of attempting to assassinate the Tsar. The author's efforts at suggesting poignancy in the farewell scene between Andrey and Tania have echoes of Turgenev in them but the total effect is verbose and mawkish. In the same way, the unduly verbose preoccupation of Andrey with his own martyr's fate rather than the Tsar's death eliminates tension in the final stages. When the assassination attempt is finally made, the effect is dream-like, containing pre-echoes of Kafka and Nabokov:

The next moment he rushed onward, his brow knitted, his face pale, firing shot after shot. The Tsar, pale likewise, the flaps of his long overcoat gathered up in his hands, ran from him as quickly as he could. But he did not lose his presence of mind; instead of running straight, he ran in zigzags, thus offering a very difficult aim to the man running behind him. That saved him.

And so the story of Andrey Kojukhov ends. He suffers the usual fate of those who attempt to assassinate Tsars, ‘but the work for which he died did not perish’, we are told. ‘It goes forward from defeat to defeat towards the final victory, which in this sad world of ours cannot be obtained save by the sufferings and the sacrifice of the chosen few.’

A reader can hardly fail to be entertained by the image of the Tsar running in zigzags from the assassin's bullet.⁵⁶ As a final bizarre touch it points up the ridiculous element in what is a supposedly sublime purpose. Hardly intentional, perhaps; certainly out of keeping with the unduly serious tone of the preceding narrative. What mattered, though, to many of Stepniak's acquaintances was that his novel should end with regicide as the final martyrdom of a nihilist's career. To Vera Zasulich, the most famous name among the women terrorists of the ‘Land and Freedom’ movement,⁵⁷ a revolutionary struggle conducted not arm-in-arm with revolutionary comrades but in the form of single-handed murder could never attract forces to its cause, no matter how popular it might be; it was ‘too sombre a form of struggle’.⁵⁸ In fact, it celebrated a policy of terrorism that had already been largely discredited by the time the novel appeared in English (1889) and must have seemed politically anachronistic to a Marxist-inclined intelligentsia of 1898 when the novel eventually appeared in Russian.

Stepniak's belief in ‘the chosen few’, an élite of revolutionaries, that is to say, dedicated to changing Russian society by means of terrorism, had its historical justification in the terroristic activity of the élite of ‘The People's Will’, but the ideal of a single revolutionary acting in isolation is one that seems to belong as much to literature as to fact. There is no doubt that the influence of Turgenev is partly responsible for this. To George Bernard Shaw, in a lengthy but little-known obituary notice, Stepniak

was very definitely conscious of the two opposing strains in the Russian character, the fatalist oriental side, and the energetic, creative, critical occidental one, both typified for us by Tolstoy on the one hand and Turgénieff on the other. Stepniak belonged emphatically to Turgénieff's party. He was a man of life, action, change, as against resignation, contemplation, passive beauty of character. He would, I believe, have willingly exchanged a good deal of the charm of his countrymen for some of the less pleasant virtues of the English, a feeling with which I, as an Irishman, was peculiarly qualified to sympathise.⁵⁹

Although such a contrast between Tolstoy and Turgenev has a good deal of Shavian impishness in it, there is a satisfying shrewdness about Shaw's estimate of his friend. Stepniak undoubtedly kept himself aloof from the principal revolutionary organisations of his compatriots and gave the impression that he identified closely with the Turgenevan vision of the isolated, influential intelligent who could change Russia by his words and his example.⁶⁰ Writing of Rudin in his introduction to Constance Garnett's translation of the novel in 1894, he described such a Turgenevan intelligentsia as ‘the brain of the nation’:

Although small numerically, the section of Russian society which Turgenev represents is enormously interesting, because it is the brain of the nation, the living ferment which alone can leaven the huge unformed masses. It is upon them that depend the destinies of their country.⁶¹

Such a ‘brain of the nation’, if unlike Rudin's in being able to implement its ideas through various acts of heroic immolation, had a literariness to it in Stepniak's case that attributed to literature as mighty a role in causing revolution as the heroic act itself. In a brochure of 1892 he stressed quite explicitly, in speaking of the way foreign attitudes toward Russia had changed, the role of literature in achieving this change, and in doing so he must have had his own novel in mind to some extent:

This change of feeling has come about gradually during the last fifteen or twenty years. The way was prepared by a number of serious investigations which acquainted the scientific and literary world with the Russian people and with Russian culture. But the principal forces at work in the accomplishment of this decided transformation were undoubtedly the Russian novel on the one hand and the Russian revolutionary movement on the other: the poetry of form and the poetry of action; the fascination of the genius of creation and of the genius of self-sacrifice.⁶²

The ‘poetry of form’ in his novel The Career of a Nihilist expresses itself chiefly in rhetorical monologues or highflown descriptions of emotional states, but there are one or two exciting episodes and moments when an image can strike a spark of interest. During his night-time ramble along the banks of the Arve in Switzerland, before returning to Russia, Andrey Kojukhov finds his attention attracted by the sight of a cornfield: ‘It was a mere patch, a few score yards square, so that on the vast green turf it looked like a lady's pocket-handkerchief on the carpet of a drawing room.’ The image is neat and exact. Or later, after his return to Russia, Andrey is directed to call on two sisters (whose surname—Dudorov—echoes forward, perhaps by a generation or more, to Nicky Dudorov in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago) and after some difficulty found ‘their grim unplastered hungry-looking red brick house’, an image that for the moment summons up the urban terraces of London that Stepniak himself knew in the 1880s. But always dominating the literary purpose of his fiction was that ‘poetry of action’ which presumed that revolution could be caused by some individual heroic act and celebrated that heroic ideal.

At the International Socialist Congress in Paris in 1889, within months of the appearance of Stepniak's novel, G. V. Plekhanov declared:

The task of our revolutionary intellectuals … amounts, in the opinion of the Russian Social Democrats, to the following: they must master the views of modern scientific socialism, spread them among the workers and, with the help of the workers, take by assault the citadel of autocracy. The revolutionary movement in Russia can triumph only as the revolutionary movement of the workers. There is not, and cannot be, any other way out for us.⁶³

This declaration sets in relief the absence of any commitment to ‘modern scientific socialism’, i.e. Marxism, in Stepniak's novel or, for that matter, in his political philosophy. Some of the most telling criticism of the political inadequacy of the work emphasised the lack of contact between the revolutionaries and the people. No figures of working people have any prominence, nor is there any depiction of revolutionary workers. Stepniak's revolutionaries are middle-class and intended for what would no doubt prove to be a predominantly middle-class readership, even though when published in Russian the novel appears to have attracted readers from many layers of society. In its basic emphasis on solitary revolutionary endeavour or, at best, the idea of a ‘chosen few’, Stepniak's novel proclaimed a concept of revolutionary and revolution that was already beginning to yield before the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels and the notion that the working class would have a vanguard role in the struggle against the autocracy.

Notes

1. The expression—Zamechatel'noye desyatiletiye—was coined by P. V. Annenkov, whose recollections of the decade 1838-48 provide one of the most vivid and expressive sources for our understanding of its ideas and personalities. See P. V. Annenkov, Literaturniye vospominaniya (Goslitizdat, 1960), pp. 135-374.

2. Alexander Herzen, From the Other Shore, translated from the Russian by Moura Budberg, with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin (O.U.P., 1979), p. 11.

3. Details of the characters and an outline of the three parts of the projected novel have survived, but Turgenev apparently destroyed his first draft of the first part after receiving adverse criticism from some of his friends. See I. S. Turgenev, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, vol. VI (M.-L., 1963), pp. 379, 594.

4. For an enlightening discussion of the many issues involved in the emergence of the ‘positive’ hero at this stage in the evolution of Russian literature, see Part I of Rufus W. Mathewson, Jr, The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, 2nd ed. (Stanford U.P., 1975).

5. N. A. Dobrolyubov, Russkiye klassiki (M., 1970), p. 211.

6. The influence of On the Eve on Chernyshevsky's What is to be Done? is probably greater than Fathers and Children (despite Chernyshevsky's use of the surname Kirsanov). Yelena Stakhova was obviously a model for Vera Pavlovna, in part as a type, in part as a heroine enjoying a central role, while the two suitors Shubin and Bersenev are matched by the two ‘husbands’ Lopukhov and Kirsanov and the revolutionary hero Insarov is matched by the Russian revolutionary hero Rakhmetov.

7. H. T. Buckle, History of Civilization in England, 2nd ed., vol. I (London, 1858), p. 840.

8. Ibid. p. 836.

9. A. I. Gertsen (A. I. Herzen), Sobraniye sochineniy v 30 tomakh (M., 1954-66), vol. XVII, 1, p. 80.

10. I. S. Turgenev, Pis'ma, vol. IV (M.-L., 1962), p. 116.

11. Turgenev, Poln. sobr. soch., vol. XIV (M.-L., 1967), p. 97. All other quotations from his Reminiscences are taken from this source.

12. Turgenev refers to him as ‘D.’, which has been taken to mean Dmitriyev. For a description of this and other possible prototypes (none of them, however, at any time resident in the Isle of Wight), see P. G. Pustovoyt, Roman I. S. Turgeneva ‘Ottsy i deti’ i ideynaya bor'ba 60-ykh godov XIX veka (M., 1964), pp. 80-110.

13. The reference may be to N. Ya. Rostovtsev (1831-97), or it may well have been to his close friend Pavel Annenkov, whose recollections are a principal source of our knowledge of Turgenev's Ventnor holiday.

14. The review was of Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book.

15. One source for this assumption is Turgenev's alleged statement: ‘I was once out for a walk and thinking about death … Immediately there rose before me the picture of a dying man. This was Bazarov. The scene produced a strong impression on me and as a consequence the other characters and the action itself began to take form in my mind’ (Hjalmar Boyesen, ‘A visit to Tourguéneff’, The Galaxy, 17 (1874), 456-66). Quoted from the Russian in ‘K biografii I. S. Turgeneva’, Minuvshiye gody (1908), no. 8, p. 70. See also Richard Freeborn, Turgenev, The Novelist's Novelist (Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 69.

16. See in particular E. L. Rudnitskaya, N. P. Ogaryov v russkom revolyutsionnom dvizhenii (M., 1969). No doubt originating in the ideas of Babeuf, Ogaryov's organisational ideas may have influenced Lenin, as S. V. Utechin has suggested. See in particular his edition of Lenin's What is to be Done? (O.U.P., 1963).

17. The suggestion was made by M. Nechkina when the Prague materials of Herzen and Ogaryov were first published in 1953. See her ‘Novyye materialy o revolyutsionnoy situatsii v Rossii (1859-61 gg.)’, Literaturnoye nasledstvo, vol. LXI (M., 1953), pp. 459-522.

18. This is the term used by Ya. I. Linkov to describe the principal revolutionary object of Ogaryov's planning. See his Revolyutsionnaya bor'ba A. I. Gertsena i. N. P. Ogaryova i taynoye obshchestvo ‘Zemlya i volya’ 1860-kh godov (M., 1964), p. 57.

19. See Herzen's corrections to his Letters to an Old Comrade in which ‘apostoly nam nuzhny, a ne … sapery razrusheniya’ is changed to ‘apostoly nam nuzhny prezhde … saperov razrusheniya’ (Gertsen (Herzen), Sobr. soch. vol. XX, pp. 719, 513; quoted from Voprosy literatury, 3 (1977), 274).

20. N. P. Ogaryov, ‘Pis'ma k sootchestvenniku’, Kolokol (1 August 1860). See my article ‘Turgenev at Ventnor’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 51 (July 1973), for a fuller discussion of these and other issues.

21. Turgenev, Poln. sobr. soch., vol. XV (M.-L., 1968), pp. 245-52.

22. Ibid. p. 247.

23. Patrick Waddington suggests as further reasons for Turgenev's interest in education at this time his concern for his daughter's education and the possibility that while in Ventnor he may have encountered Elizabeth Missing Sewell, ‘one of the best English educationalists of the nineteenth century’ (Turgenev and England (London, 1980), p. 120; chs. 6 and 7 of Professor Waddington's book contain an unsurpassed account of Turgenev's stay in Ventnor).

24. Turgenev, Pis'ma, vol. IV, p. 380.

25. For a fuller discussion of the formal and other aspects of the novel, see my Turgenev, The Novelist's Novelist. A reading that emphasises the ‘family’ aspect of the novel is to be found in Victor Ripp, Turgenev's Russia (Cornell U.P., 1980).

26. Turgenev asserted as much in his letter to Sluchevsky (Pis'ma, vol. IV, p. 381).

27. Turgenev, Poln. sobr. soch., vol. XIV, pp. 100-2.

28. Pis'ma, vol. IV, p. 380.

29. Bazarov's insistence on his insignificance echoes Pascal almost word for word. The soliloquy beginning: ‘The little space I occupy …’ (ch. 26) appears to have its—unacknowledged—source in Pensées 68: ‘When I consider the brief span of my life …’ (Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Penguin Classics, 1972), p. 48). For a comprehensive examination of the philosophical problems and sources in the novel, see A. Batyuto, Turgenev-romanist (L., 1972), pp. 38-165.

30. To Isaiah Berlin, for instance, Bazarov in the end exemplifies a new Jacobinism: ‘Turgenev may have loved Bazarov; he certainly trembled before him. He understood, and to a degree sympathized with, the case presented by the new Jacobins, but he could not bear to think what their feet would trample’ (Isaiah Berlin, Fathers and children (O.U.P., 1972), p. 58). Soviet scholarship on Bazarov is inclined to be more cautious. Since the discovery of Annenkov's letter to Turgenev (see V. Arkhipov, ‘K tvorcheskoy istorii romana I. S. Turgeneva “Ottsy i deti”’, Russkaya literatura, 1 (1958)) and the publication of the Paris manuscript of the novel (see A. I. Batyuto, ‘Parizhskaya rukopis' romana “Ottsi i deti”’, Russkaya literatura, 4 (1961)) Soviet criticism has tended to play down the more extreme revolutionary aspects of Bazarov. For a sober, informed assessment, see Pustovoyt, Roman I. S. Turgeneva.

31. ‘Bazarov needs no one, fears no one, loves no one and, consequently, spares no one’ (D. I. Pisarev, ‘Bazarov’ in Bazarov. Realisty (M., 1974), p. 13).

32. Pis'ma, vol. IV, p. 381.

33. Pis'ma, vol. II (1961), pp. 300-1. Chernyshevsky later modified his ideas somewhat.

34. The novel was published in nos. 3, 4 and 5 of The Contemporary for 1863. The journal had been banned for eight months from June of the previous year.

35. Voprosy literatury, 7 (1957), 132. V. I. Lenin (1870-1924) would have been seventeen in 1887 when his elder brother was executed for being implicated in an attempt to assassinate Alexander III.

36. Chto delat'? (M., 1957), Part II, ch. 8; Part III, ch. 2.

37. Her ‘underground’ is not a podpol'ye, as is Dostoyevsky's, but a podval (‘cellar’), but no doubt Dostoyevsky read as far as her first dream (Part II, ch. 12) and created his own ‘underground man’ (Notes from the Underground (Zapiski iz podpol'ya) (1864)) at least in part as a consequence.

38. ‘… the absence of movement is the absence of work, because work is to be regarded in its anthropological analysis as the fundamental form of movement, providing a basis and a content for all other forms’ (Part III, ch. 3).

39. As a sceptical pre-revolutionary commentator put it: ‘Chernyshevsky's heroes jump over moral contradiction and social incongruities like circus riders clearing hurdles’ (K. F. Golovin-Orlovsky, Russkiy roman i russkoye obshchestvo, 3rd ed. (Spb., n.d.), p. 191).

40. Chto delat'?, Part III, ch. 31. Chernyshevsky's claim, made here and elsewhere in his novel, that he had personally known the people he describes, has led to a search for possible prototypes. The most likely candidate for Rakhmetov was a certain Pavel Alexandrovich Bakhmetev who sold his Saratov estate to his uncle and in 1857 emigrated. Before leaving Russia he had a meeting with Chernyshevsky, whom he had known earlier in Saratov, Chernyshevsky's birthplace. In London Bakhmetev met Herzen and transferred to him 20,000 francs for use on revolutionary propaganda. This money formed the basic capital of a ‘common fund’ that Herzen announced on 15 May 1862 in The Bell. There is some hearsay evidence to support the view that Bakhmetev was a model for Rakhmetov, but as one commentator has put it: ‘Bakhmetev … served as a model for Rakhmetov only in part. Creating in Rakhmetov the image of a revolutionary activist, Chernyshevsky combined in him different elements of revolutionary feeling which had manifested themselves variously in different people’ (A. P. Skaftymov, Stat'i o russkoy literature (Saratov, 1958), p. 173). The assumption that Rakhmetov is a composite figure simply emphasises the artificiality of his portrait.

41. For a succinct account, excellently annotated, of the oft-told tale of Russian revolutionary manifestations in the period, see James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men (London, 1980), ch. 14.

42. Many novels followed in the wake of Turgenev's Virgin Soil in offering multi-faceted studies of Populism. For example, N. N. Zlatovratsky's Hearts of Gold (Zolotyye serdtsa) (1877-8) and The Foundations (Ustoi) (1878-82), N. A. Arnol'di's Vasilisa (1879), K. M. Stanyukovich's Two Brothers (Dva Brata) (1880) and other novels by Kovalevskaya, Zasodimsky, Ertel' and Dmitriyeva. For an assessment of Zlatovratsky's work, see R. Wortman, The Crisis of Russian Populism (C.U.P., 1967), ch. 4. For a discussion of Turgenev's influence on these novelists, see L. N. Nazarova, Turgenev i russkaya literatura kontsa XIX—nachala XXv (L., 1979), pp. 151-92.

43. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Sobraniye sochineniy v 6 tomakh, 2nd ed., vol. VI (Frankfurt, 1973), p. 359.

44. These novels are expertly examined in Charles A. Moser, Antinihilism in the Russian Novel of the 1860s (The Hague, 1964).

45. V. A. Sleptsov (1836-78), of noble family, earned a reputation for himself as the author of sketches and stories drawn from peasant life, several of which, especially ‘The Foster-Child’ (‘Pitomka’), are works of considerable power. Closely associated with The Contemporary, and responsible for organising one of the communes that sprang up in the wake of Chernyshevsky's novel, he was arrested in 1866 after Karakozov's attempt to assassinate the Tsar and imprisoned—an experience that gravely impaired his health. For a sympathetic appraisal of his hero Ryazanov, see William C. Brumfield, ‘Bazarov and Rjazanov: The Romantic Archetype in Russian Nihilism’, Slavic and East European Journal, 21, 4 (1977), 495-505.

46. I. V. Omulevsky (1836-83), born in Petropavlovsk-on-Kamchatka; he was brought up and educated in Irkutsk but went to St Petersburg for his higher education, where he soon began to associate with radicals of the younger generation and started publishing poetry on civic themes in The Contemporary. Arrested in 1873 after publishing part of a second novel, he began to experience great difficulty in finding work and eventually died in St Petersburg penniless and alone.

47. S. M. Kravchinsky, who took the pseudonym Stepniak for his published work as a mark of his own origins in the steppelands, was born in Poltava in 1851, became associated with the Populists, participated in the ‘going to the people’ (khozhdeniye v narod) of 1874, later in the 1870s became associated with the underground and terrorist activity of ‘Land and Freedom’ and was then forced to emigrate to England where he actively promoted an interest in the Russian struggle for freedom through his published works (Underground Russia, The Russian Peasantry, etc.) and through such organisations as the English Society of Friends of Russian Freedom. His accidental death late in 1895 was oddly consonant with his bizarre reputation as a terrorist revolutionary. He achieved spectacular notoriety in 1878 when he stabbed the Chief of Gendarmes Adjutant-General Mesentsev to death while the latter was out walking in the centre of St Petersburg. The assassination was undertaken as an act of revenge for the shooting of I. M. Kovalsky, an Odessa student, who had offered armed resistance to police arrest. In his pamphlet ‘A Death for a Death’ Stepniak claimed that he was not acting against the government as such but only against government interference in the rightful struggle of the people (narod) against the hated bourgeoisie. For a detailed study of his life and work, see Evgeniya Taratuta, S. M. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, revolyutsioner i pisatel'; (M., 1973). For other studies of Stepniak, see T. P. Maevskaya, Slovo i podvig: zhizn' i tvorchestvo S. M. Stepnyaka-Kravchinskogo (Kiev, 1968); N. I. Prutskov, Russkaya literatura XIX veka i revolyutsionnaya Rossiya (L., 1971), pp. 135-44.

48. As Stepniak pointed out in a letter of 14 April 1890 to Robert Spence Watson (in the very same month that the English Society of Friends of Russian Freedom was founded), he considered that his novel ‘could do more for our cause’ than serious scientific works. For a survey history of the English society, see Barry Hollingsworth, ‘The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, 3 (1970), 45-64.

49. The Star (Friday, 6 December 1889). George Bernard Shaw, music critic of the newspaper and personal friend of Stepniak, had wanted to review the novel, but the review was in fact the work of Massingham, assistant editor of The Star. Several reviews appeared in other parts of the British press—none, however, as enthusiastic as the review in The Star—and in some cases fears were expressed that the novel might encourage revolutionary nihilism in its English readers.

50. Taratuta, S. M. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, p. 505. Andrey Kozhukhov was the title given to the Russian translation of the novel.

51. The Star review concluded by declaring:

    ‘No words that were ever written in print are too bad to describe the loathsome cancer in European life which calls itself the Russian government … The Tsar has been impeached before Europe; and there is and can be no answer to the impeachment. The afflicting part of the business is—and Stepniak's novel entirely confirms the impression—that popular Russian politics seem now to have got into the mere savage brutal state of blind retaliation, the excuse for which, perhaps, is that Russian reformers do not know really where to begin. It all seems a hopeless business.’

52. A friend, Zina Vengerova, writing from Paris in May 1890, congratulated Stepniak on the excellence of his English: ‘I had the chance of talking about your style with some Englishmen, who were astounded that the book was written not by a genuine Englishman (sic)’ (Taratuta, S. M. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, p. 400).

53. Fanny, Stepniak's wife, admitted to a correspondent in 1923 that it had been ‘a big mistake’ to write the novel in English (ibid. p. 393).

54. The passage echoes—whether intentionally or not, it is hard to say—Herzen's words to Turgenev in his letter of 1863 justifying the activity of the London exiles: ‘We have saved the honour of the name of Russia—and for this we have suffered from the servile majority’ (Gertsen (Herzen), Sobr. soch., vol. XXVII, 2, p. 455).

55. Evgeniya Taratuta would not agree. Her enthusiasm for Andrey appears to have begun as a child and to have become a lifelong influence. ‘Most likely’, she writes, ‘even now, behind some of my convictions and hard and fast rules of life, it would be possible to find, if you scratched me, the figure of Andrey Kozhukhov’ (S. M. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, p. 405). This suggests that for some readers the character must have had the appeal of a successfully realised hero, though for a Soviet writer such as D. Granin the character has less appeal: ‘In essence Andrey Kozhukhov is a pretty schematic, flat character’, he writes, but in attempting to define the powerful effect of such heroes as Rakhmetov, Bazarov and Kozhukhov he adds: ‘What was it about them that attracted such attention? What was their real strength? It was that they provided examples of active morality (deyatel'naya nravstvennost';). It was that their lives contained a clear revolutionary idea’ (‘Roman i geroy’, Voprosy literatury, 5 (1976), 110).

56. Tsar Alexander II in fact ran in zigzags from the assassin Solovyov's bullets in 1879.

57. In 1878 Vera Zasulich attempted to assassinate the Governor-General of St Petersburg. Her trial became an event of national importance and her acquittal a cause of rejoicing in the ranks of the Populist revolutionaries. Her pistol shot helped to initiate the terrorism of the ‘The People's Will’ (‘Narodnaya volya’), which culminated in the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881. Significantly, in her review of Stepniak's novel published in Sotsial-demokrat in 1892 she attributed the action of the novel to late 1878, early 1879.

58. V. I. Zasulich, Stat'i o russkoy literature (M., 1960), p. 114.

59. Bernard Shaw, ‘A Word about Stepniak’, To-Morrow, I (1896), 105.

60. His close friend and admirer, Prince P. Kropotkin, said of Stepniak at his funeral: ‘He could not live in the narrow feeling of party worship—he stood much above that’ (G. Woodcock and I. Avakumović, The Anarchist Prince (London, 1950), p. 255).

61. Rudin, A Novel by Ivan Turgenev. Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett (London, 1894), p. xi.

62. S. Stepniak, Nihilism as it is (London, n.d.), pp. 65-6. Taratuta dates it 1892 (S. M. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, p. 428).

63. G. V. Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, vol. I (M., 1974), p. 399.