Nihilism

Nihilism (from Latin nihil, “nothing”), designation applied to various radical philosophies, usually by their opponents, the implication being that adherents of these philosophies reject all positive values and believe in nothing.

The term was first used to describe Christian heretics during the Middle Ages. In Russia it was applied in the 1850s and 1860s to young intellectuals who, influenced by Western ideas, repudiated Christianity, considered Russian society backward and oppressive, and advocated revolutionary change. The best-known fictional nihilist was Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (1862). Conservatives claimed that nihilism would destroy all possibility of orderly and purposeful existence and was directly contrary to real human needs and desires, but the novelist N. G. Chernyshevsky and other radicals called it a necessary phase in the transformation of Russia. The Narodniks (Populists), who worked for a peasant uprising in the 1870s, and the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) movement, members of which assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, were also considered manifestations of nihilism.