‘Those new men of the sixties’: nihilism in the liberal imagination

Abstract

This essay examines the use and understanding of the term ‘nihilism’ in liberal discourse. It argues that this discourse originated in Ivan Turgenev's 1862 novel Fathers and Sons and developed in the series of commentaries on exegesis the anti-revolutionary novel received over time. The essay consists of three parts. After examining the context in which Turgenev wrote his novel, it discusses three historical moments that were central to the development of this discourse: (a) the immediate aftermath of the novel's publication in the 1860s; (b) following the 1905 Revolution; (c) the Cold War liberal discourse that tied the New Left of the 1960s with the Russian prerevolutionary intelligentsia of a century earlier.

Keywords::

• nihilism
• realism
• Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich (1818–1883)
• Frank, Semen L. (1877–1950)
• Berlin, Isaiah (1909–1997)
• Howe, Irving (1920–1993)

Acknowledgements

This essay originated in lively discussions conducted during the academic year of 2009, at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute's Research Group on The Concept of Nihilism and the Limits of Political Critique. I would like to thank the group participants, and in particular Nitzan Lebovic and Naomi Sussmann, for discussing the project with me in its earliest phases. The essay has benefited greatly from the comments and remarks provided by Christopher Stroop, Vivian Liska, Brian Horowitz, Edward Alexander, Michael Kimmage, Peter Holquist, and Yuri Slezkine. All the usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

^1. Quoted in Brumfield (1977, 495).

^2. The very term ‘generation of the 1840s,’ as Andrzej Walicki argued in his classic study (Walicki 1979, chapter 7), is almost synonymous with the Russian fascination with Hegelian philosophy.

^3. The love affair was mutual: Turgenev's novels were well received in Britain, and in 1879 he received an honorary degree from Oxford University.

^4. The quotes are taken from the English translation of the treatise. For discussion, see Frederick Gregory (1977).

^5. Interestingly, the slogan ‘Now, what I want is, Facts’ – taken directly from the opening lines of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times – was the one used by Büchner as a motto, decorating the preface to the book's first edition.

^6. The mixed reception of Turgenev's novel is examined in Schapiro 1978, 183–190 and passim.

^7. For further discussion, see, in addition to Schapiro (1978), Ripp (1980) (esp. Chapter 9) and Seeley (1991).

^8. Schapiro (1978, 187).

^9. See Nechayev ([1871] 1974) and Dostoyevsky (1986). Like Turgenev, Dostoyevsky also identified nihilism with an intergenerational conflict, characterized in the novel by Pytor Verkhovensky and his father, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, and here again, actual occurrences, including an 1869 murder committed by Nechayev's socialist revolutionary group, stood behind the fictional description of nihilism in the novel.

^10. The other six members of the Vekhi group were Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Mikhail Gershenzon, Bogdan Kistiakovskii, Peter Struve, and Aleksandr Izgoev. For discussion, see (in reverse chronological order of publication) Read (1979), Horowitz (1999), Flikke (1994), and Schapiro (1955).

^11. See also Swoboda 1995. Frank's 1904 essay ‘On Critical Idealism’ already clearly shows Frank's serious attempts to import neo-Kantian teachings to Russia.

^12. Frank, ‘On Critical Idealism,’ as translated by and quoted in Swoboda (1995, 269).

^13. The evolution of the text is rather unusual: the two first volumes, originally published in German in Jena in 1913, were translated into English by Eden and Cedar Paul only in 1955. The manuscript of the third volume, focusing on Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, was preserved together with Masaryk's unpublished papers, and was brought to the USA after World War II.

^14. Serialized under the title Signposts, translated by Marshall S. Shatz and Judith E. Zimmerman: see Canadian Slavic Studies/Revue canadienne d'études slaves, from number 2.2 (Summer 1968) to number 5:3 (Summer 1970). The above translations were reprinted under one cover twice, first in 1986, under the title Signposts: A Collection of Articles on the Russian Intelligentsia (Irvine, CA: C. Schlacks, Jr, 1986), and once again in 1994, under the title Vekhi =  Landmarks: A Collection of Articles About the Russian Intelligentsia (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994). Also indirectly involved in the translation project was the Russian-born historian Marc Raeff (1923–2008), who contributed a foreword to the 1994 volume in which the above translations were reissued.

^15. See Frank (1949), as well as Frank's BBC lectures on Solovyov, reprinted in the Listener, 28 April 1949, 5 May 1949, and 12 May 1949. Frank's introduction to the anthology praised Solovyov, describing him as a prophetic genius and a ‘source of spiritual guidance,’ describing national-socialism and communism as the ‘latest expressions’ of the nihilist rebellion against the ecclesiastical tradition and against God.

^16. A similar characterization of Frank as liberal can be found in Flikke 1994; although Flikke suggests that Frank was predominantly influenced by Peter Struve's ‘attempt to fuse the spirituality of the Slavophile tradition with a legal order,’ thus developing a position he defines as ‘neo-Slavophile’ (Flikke 1994, 78, 100). For a different (and in my opinion less convincing) analysis, drawing on Gramsci's typology of intellectuals, which defines the Vekhi platform as ‘counter-revolutionary liberalism’, see Burbank 1996, esp. 109–110.

^17. Such trans-generational comparisons were explicitly made by a number of contributors to Canadian Slavic Studies, who published their papers in the same numbers in which Vekhi translations appeared. See in particular Mathes (1968) and Weinstein (1969).

^18. Berlin's text is based on the Romanes Lecture for 1970, given at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, 12 November 1970 (Berlin 1972). The lecture was later reprinted in Berlin 1979; the quotes from Berlin's text that appear hereafter are taken from the 1979 edition.

^19. ‘Marxism is in relative eclipse,’ wrote Edmund Wilson in the ‘Summary as of 1940’ with which he concluded his book.

 I have above, at risk of banality, discussed it [Marxism] in terms of its historical origins, because it seems to me that the shifting generalities to which the liberal mind is addicted still need to be constantly corrected by the facts of socialist history. Wilson 1953, 475 & 483, (emphasis added)

Clearly this atmosphere shifted by the late sixties, and people were no longer as confident that liberalism had triumphed. Noteworthy is also the fact that in his extended essay ‘Turgenev and the Life-Giving Drop,’ which originally appeared with The New Yorker in October 1957, Wilson neither pays attention to the generational gap nor discusses the concept of nihilism in any significant way. Critical of Constance Garnett's English translations of the Russian prose classics, Wilson insisted that her Bazarov ‘sounds more gentlemanly than Turgenev quite means him to be: he seems to have come from English Cambridge rather than from Petersburg medical school’ (Wilson 1972, 140). But on this point, his analysis of the novel also ends.

^20. Given the fact that Frank was living in London at the time, this is not surprising. It seems that in his interview with Frank's biographer, Berlin mentioned Frank's philosophical Idealism, contrasted with his own empiricist anti-Idealism, as the main reason why a real dialogue between them could not have developed. Lampert, who studied under Bulgakov in the 1930s at the Russian Theological Academy in Paris and who published his first book on Berdayev, was probably the one with the best knowledge of the Idealist-religious philosophical discourse that Frank was a part of. However, he had distanced himself from their teachings by the time he immigrated to England.

^21. Berlin used this expression in a letter to Maurice Bowra, in reference to Thomas (‘Tony’) Hynderman (1911–1980) and Giles Samuel Bertram Romilly's (1916–1967) fighting in the international brigades in Spain. See ‘Supplementary Letters, 1928-1946’, 23 in the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library.

^22. Berlin's essay was originally entitled ‘Literature and the Crisis,’ but was published under the title ‘A Sense of Impending Doom’ in Berlin 2001. According to Cherniss (2013, 33 nt. 167) Berlin ordered a book of photographs of Turgenev around that time.

^23. Howe's essay first appeared in The Hudson Review 8.4 (1956): 533–551. It was reprinted in Politics and the Novel under the slightly different title, ‘The Politics of Hesitation.’ I would like to thank Edward Alexander for providing me the original reference. Howe is referred to in some of Berlin's letters from the late sixties and early seventies that make it clear that the Oxford don was familiar with the essay.

^24. Howe's ‘This Age of Conformity’ first appeared in Partisan Review 21 (January–February 1954): 1–33. His reputation as the éminencegrise of American radicalism remained undeniable in the late sixties. For discussion and analysis, see Alexander (1998, chapter 5), Sorin (2002, chapter 7) and Bloom (1986, 280–289, 348–350) and passim.

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Arie M. Dubnov

Arie M. Dubnov is a Senior Lecturer at the School of History at the University of Haifa, Israel. His fields of expertise are modern Jewish and European intellectual history, with a subsidiary interest in nationalism studies. Dubnov is a past George L. Mosse Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught for four years at Stanford University's Department of history. He is the author, most recently, of Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and also edited the collection [in Hebrew] Zionism – A View from the Outside (The Bialik Institute, 2010), seeking to put Zionist history in a larger comparative trajectory. In addition, Dubnov has published essays in journals such as Nations & Nationalism, Modern Intellectual History, History of European Ideas, The Journal of Israeli History. His current research project deals with the genealogy of the idea of partition in the British interwar Imperial context.