The Greek Cynics were similarly astute critics of everything about their "present society".
Joel
On Wed, Dec 30, 2015 at 8:22 PM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>
> I would point out that the tern Nihilism in those days meant something a
> bit different from what we mean by the term nowadays. The Russian Nihilists
> of the mid-19th century were militant materialists and positvists, who
> promoted science and reason, while rejecting religious superstition and
> political autocracy.
>
> BTW many of the statements that the character Bazarov makes in Turgenev's
> famous novel, Fathers and Sons, were lifted almost word for word from
> editorials that Turgenev's erstwhile friend, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, had
> published in the magazine, The Contemporary, which Turgenev sometimes wrote
> for as well. Chernychevsky, who was then an important writer and editor,
> was the author of the novel, What is to be Done?, which despite the fact
> that it was panned by most critics, influenced several generations of
> Russian revolutionaries including the young Lenin who borrowed the novel's
> title for a famous political tract of his own.
>
> The popularity of Nihilism among Russia's intellectual youth during the
> mid-19th century both intrigued (and in some cases appalled) Russia's
> finest writers of the time. Turgenev devoted his novel, Fathers and Sons,
> to this issue, while Nihilism figured in several of Dostoevsky's novels
> including, Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground, The Brothers
> Karamazov, and The Possessed.
> Ultimately, Nihilism, by popularizing the ideas of such materialistic and
> positivist thinkers from the West such as Feuerbach, Comte, Darwin, and
> J.S. Mill, opened the door for the later introduction of such doctrines as
> Marxism and anarchism, which ultimately had a profound effect on Russian
> politics. Chernychevsky himself was a socialist and is considered to be the
> father of revolutionary socialism in Russia. He often corresponded with
> Karl Marx, who had a high opinion of him. As an enemy of the Russian
> autocracy, he was eventually sentenced to prison by the Czarist regime, and
> later was released in broken health to live in exile in Siberia.
>
> Another important Nihilist writer was Dmitry Pisarev, who died at the age
> of 27 while imprisoned in a fortress. His writings, like Chernychevsky's,
> were quite influential too. They, for example, inspired the young Ivan
> Pavlov, the son of a Russian Orthodox priest, to lose his religious faith
> and to switch from studying for the priesthood in a seminary to attending
> medical school, instead. He then went on to become a physiologist and one
> of Russia's foremost scientists.
>
>
> Jim Farmelant
> http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
> http://www.foxymath.com
> Learn or Review Basic Math
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