Left-wing youths now contemptuously rejected Idealist philosophy which had sent their elders into such raptures - at any rate, they rejected it consciously, because unconsciously they retained a great deal of personal idealism and a belief in historic progress which, strictly speaking, could not be justified on empirical grounds. InFathers and Sons, Turgenev depicted this clash of generations in a manner which the protagonists at once recognized as accurate. The young 'nihilists' viewed the world in which they found themselves as a living relic of another, earher phase of human development, now drawing to a close. Mankind stood on the eve of the stage of 'positivism', when all natural and human phenomena would be properly understood and therefore made to subject to scientific management. The immediate task was to smash what was left of the old order, of which Idealism, as a metaphysical doctrine, was part. Dmitry Pisarev, one of the idols of radical youth of the early 1860s, urged his followers recklessly to hit about them right and left, assailing institutions and conventions, on the premiss that whatever fell in the process was not worth saving. Such 'nihilism' was motivated not by a total absence of values, as conservative critics were to charge, but by the belief that the present already belonged to the past, and destruction, therefore, was creative.
Psychologically, the outstanding quality of the new generation of radicals was a tendency to oversimplify by reducing all experience to some single principle. They had no patience at all with complexities, refinements, qualifications. To deny the simple truth or to try to complicate it by introducing caveats was taken by them as an excuse for inaction: it was a symptom of 'Oblomovitis', as extreme sloth came to be known after the hero of Goncharov's novel. Each radical of this era had a formula, the adoption of which was certain radically to alter the entire human condition. Chernyshevskii's vision of a terrestrial paradise was a kind of oleograph of the prophetic writings he must have read in his seminary days; all was simple provided people would only see the truth, and the truth was that only matter existed and nought else.* Perfectly
* The Russian right was not far behind the left in its reductionism. 'Actually, it is all so simple' Dostoevsky wrote at the conclusion of the 'Dream of a Ridiculous Man', 'in one day, in one hour, everything could be arranged! The main thing is to love others as oneself- this is the main thing, and this is all, and nothing more is needed. As soon as you know this, everything will be arranged.'
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reasonable objections to the philosophy of materialism Ghernyshevskii and his allies shrugged off as undeserving of any attention. Needless to say, neo-Kantian criticism of mechanistic science, on which materialism was based, never reached Russian radicals, although they were closely attuned to developments in German thought. Chernyshevskii, on his death in 1889, still faithfully clung to Feuerbach and the other idols of his youth fifty years before, blissfully unaware what confusion was being spread in the field of natural science by recent discoveries. He even rejected Darwin. This selective treatment of science was very characteristic of the radical left, which shielded itself behind the prestige of science, but completely lacked the attitude of free and self-critical inquiry fundamental to genuine scientific thinking.
The radicals of the 1860s wished to create a new man. He was to be totally practical, free of religious and philosophical preconceptions, a 'rational egoist', and yet, at the same time, an absolutely dedicated servant of society and fighter for a juster life. The obvious contradiction between empiricism, which insisted that all knowledge derives from observation, and ethical idealism which has no equivalent in the material world was never faced by the radical intellectuals. The religious philosopher, Vladimir Solovev, once stated their predicament in a pseudo-syllogism: 'Man is descended from the ape, and therefore he must sacrifice himself lor the common good.' Emotionally some o the radical publicists came nearer Christian idealism than the hard-headed pragmatism they claimed to admire. The hero of Chernyshevskii's What is to be Done?, Rakhmetov, is a figure straight from Orthodox hagiology: his ascetism goes so far that he builds himself a bed studded with nails. The other figures in this novel (which exerted deep influence on the young Lenin) resemble early Christians in that like them they break with their corrupted, worldly families to join brotherhoods of those who had renounced the seductions of money and pleasure. The men and women in this book experience affection but not love and certainly no sex. But it is a vacuous religiousness, all zeal and no charity. Solovev, annoyed by claims of an alleged identity of ideals of Christianity and socialism once reminded his readers that whereas Christianity told man to give away his own wealth, socialism exhorted him to expropriate the wealth of others.
The radicals were fully conscious how impotent was their small band confronting the full might of the autocratic state. However, they were not out to challenge the system politically. They were anarchists who had no interest in the state as such, regarding it as merely one of the many by-products of certain ways of thinking and of human relations based on them. Their assault against the status quo was directed in the first place against opinions, and their weapons were ideas, where they felt they enjoyed clear superiority over the establishment. In so far as (according to Comte) the progress of humanity expressed itself in the gradual widening of man's intellectual horizons - from the religious-magical through the philosophical-metaphysical to the positivist-empirical - the spread of the highest, positivist-material way of thinking was of itself a most powerful agent of change. Nothing could stand up to it because it sapped the very foundations of the system. The force of ideas would bring down states, churches, economies, and social institutions. Paradoxically, the triumph of materialism would be brought about by the action of ideas.
Hence, the crucial role of the intelligentsia. Defined by left publicists in the narrow sense to mean only that segment of society espousing the positivist-materialist outlook, the intelligentsia was the thin end of the historic wedge: behind, followed the masses. It was a fundamental tenet of faith of all the radical movements of the time that the intelligentsia was the prime mover of human progress. The Social Democrats, who became popular only in the 1890s, first abandoned this belief and shifted the emphasis to impersonal economic forces. But it is significant that the one offshoot of Russian Social Democracy which in the end attained success, Bolshevism, found it necessary to abandon reliance on impersonal economic forces, whose tendency rather pointed away from revolution, and revert to the traditional stress on the intelligentsia. Lenin's basic theory held that socialism could only be brought about by a cadre of professional revolutionaries which meant nothing else than the intelligentsia, since few workers or peasants could dedicate themselves to full-time revolutionary activity.
Between i860 and 1880, the radical or, as it was then known, 'socialist-revolutionary' movement underwent constant evolution as a result of a frustrating inability to realize any of its goals. The changes concerned tactics only. The goal itself remained constant - the abolition of the state and all institutions tied to it - and so did the faith in positivist-materialist principles. But every few years, as fresh classes entered the university, new battle tactics were devised. In the early 1860s, it was believed that the mere act of breaking with the dying world was enough; the rest would take care of itself. Pisarev urged his followers to drop all other occupations and interests and concentrate on the study of natural science. Chernyshevskii exhorted them to cut ties with their families and unite in working communes. But these methods did not seem to lead anywhere, and around 1870 radical youths became increasingly interested in the newly emancipated peasant. The leading theoretical lights of this period, Michael Bakunin and Peter Lavrov, called on young people to abandon universities and go to the village. Bakunin wished them to carry the message of immediate rebellion. He believed that the