Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/237

 and relations of Nihilism are made evident. To begin with, the popularity of Mill's Essay on the Emancipation of Women led to the formulation of the so-called "free-love" ideas of the Nihilists: married life should continue only as long as love does,—otherwise, marriage is a bondage. It is, however, the new attitude to history that is of special interest to-day, for the Nihilistic conception of history is gaining unconscious adherents in our own universities. As we have seen, the starting-point of Nihilism is a denial of the past. This rejection involves a disbelief in continuity and development, in gradual evolution. The present no longer unfolds from the past. Chernyshevsky sums up the new attitude to history when he says, "Each new generation starts its life anew." In present-day philosophic speculation, this same conception is gaining ground, largely because of a natural reaction against the mechanical and uninspired interpretations of Darwinian evolution.

The notion of art that prevailed in the "sixties" is only the recurrent attempt to wed art to ethics and morality. The great critic of the time, Pisarev, expresses this view with all the impatient dogmatism of earnestness: "A poet must be either a Titan who shakes to the very foundations mountains of evil, or else a worm crawling in the dust. There is nothing between, except clowns to amuse fools."

Coming to the period of the "seventies," we are among a number of writers who have been called the Narodnichestvo, the "populists," (narod means the mass, the people). In the most important dogma of the "populists," we return to the basic idea of the Slavophile movement: Russian socialism should be agricultural. This again led to opposition to Western influence. In 1861, Mikhailov, a critic, and a disciple of Chernyshevsky, wrote against imitating England and the English economists, for he held that the economic organization of Russia is not that of the West.

In many of their ideas, the Narodnichestvo hark back to the theories of the "thirties" and "forties." The past comes again into its own, and the Nihilistic denial is negatived. In the writings of this period we hear much of the public good, the People are again idealized, and the effort is toward simplification in all things, and for a vigorous re-assertion of the absolute truths of life and morality. As a matter of fact, it may be said that the chief concern of many of the writers of the day is ethical and religious.