Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/101

Rh says Pisarev, has knowledge and will; he desires to act. What is to be Done is the distinctive title of the nihilistic evangel, which is competent to give a definite answer to the most burning questions.

Many critics of nihilism have referred to the religious character of the movement. Unquestionably this was a new trend, one which involved an attempt, moving forward with logical consistency from its base, to regulate the whole of life anew. The nihilists were quite in earnest in their desire for "new men." Their consistency and their tenacity may be compared with religious endeavour, in so far as religion is employed mainly as a sanction for morality.

It has already been pointed out that the egoism and hedonism of the nihilists must not be taken quite at their face value. The nihilists railed against the unpractical and fanatical rigours of monastic morality and Christianity in general; they rejected the idea of sacrifice; but only too often they were themselves zealots and fanatics, giving their lives with a delight in sacrifice, with a positive desire for victimisation, which frequently reminds us of the morbid love of religious martyrdom. Vladimir Solov'ev wittily remarked of these men of the sixties that their logical inference appeared to be, "Man sprang from the ape, therefore love thy neighbour as thyself."

What does the egoist Černyševskii actually preach? "We recognise nothing higher on earth than the human individuality"; and again, "A positivist man, one who is positivist in the proper sense of the term, cannot be other than loving and noble-minded." Pisarev and Herzen return to love.

The nihilists wish to be consistent; they endeavour to apply in practice, at once and universally, the theories they have so recently acquired; deed and word are to harmonise. In brief, the nihilists are campaigning against the system of conventional lies.

The nihilists wish to escape the consuming tedium from which the unoccupied aristocracy, and above all the landed gentry, suffer; they desire to find practical and genuinely useful work.

Herzen adduces in example Homjakov, who fled to Europe to find refuge from boredom, who there wrote his tragedy Ermak, who held converse with all possible and impossible Czechs and Dalmatians, and then flung himself into the Turkish war; Puškin's Oněgin envied general paralytics; Lermontov's