the teachings of literature. The nihilists were the heirs of Russian literature and literary criticism.
Turgenev rightly presented Bazarov as an enemy of the aristocracy, as a revolutionary, as a pendant to the followers of Pugačev. The democratic hostility to aristocracy was enhanced and concreted in the social sphere by the proletarian position of the literary rasnočinec. The nihilist felt proud of his contrast with the aristocrat; he was class conscious; he was in revolt against oppression, theoretically at first, but before long practically, ethically, and politically as well.
The nihilist was opposed to the political doctrines and ideals of the aristocrats. He renounced state and church, and he renounced the aristocrat's nationalism. When his adversaries closed their ranks against him, when they reproached him with atheism, materialism, and russophobia, the nihilist, cynically enough in many cases, admitted all these counts in the impeachment. Nevertheless the nihilist, the nihilist above all, loved Russia, in his own peculiar manner; he loved in Russia that which seemed to him loveworthy and sacred.
The nihilist was radical to the extreme; he was the sworn foe of political liberalism and of the bourgeoisie. He spoke of himself as a democrat and a socialist.
Nihilist sentiment was to a large extent anarchist. Thus, as we have seen, Pisarev's realist did not shrink even from crime. He recognised no objective authority competent to forbid murder and robbery, competent to restrain him from crime. To the nihilist, all things were lawful. Such had been the doctrine of Bakunin, such had been the doctrine of Herzen and Bělinskii. The problem of crime occupied his mind from the first appearance of nihilism. Initially, the interest was theoretical, when he discussed the moral implications of Byron's Cain, discussed them in association with the metaphysical doctrines of subjectivism and solipsism, but soon the interest became practical and the nihilist developed into the revolutionary and the terrorist.
vi. Intimate analysis discloses several distinct varieties of nihilism, and the literary presentation of nihilism created several distinct types of nihilist. The nihilists themselves disputed which type was the model, some seeing in Bazarov, some in Rahmetov, etc., the correct and genuine incorporation of nihilism.
