Russian materialism, which quickly became synonymous with Russian nihilism, developed under the influence of
Left Hegelian materialism from Germany and the delayed influence of the
French Enlightenment. The origins of this followed from
Ludwig Feuerbach as a direct reaction to the
German idealism which had found such popularity under the —namely the works of
Friedrich Schelling,
Georg Hegel and
Johann Fichte. However, it was in fact those among the older generation who were first characterized as nihilists, and it was Left Hegelianism that the
Schellingians began to define as nihilism. After severely struggling in the face of censorship — from which much of its core content is left unclear and obscured — the open academic development of Russian materialism would later be suppressed by the state after an attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1866, and would not see a significant intellectual revival until the late nineteenth century. The
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy states:
Left Hegelians , often regarded as the father of Russian nihilism Left Hegelianism in Russia began with those of the
Westernizer generation who sought to radicalize Hegelian thought and build upon
Ludwig Feuerbach's materialism. Among these were
Alexander Herzen and
Mikhail Bakunin, both sons of noblemen though Herzen had been born illegitimate. Bakunin became a Hegelian in 1838 and an extreme Left Hegelian shortly after visiting Berlin in 1840. That same year, Herzen began work on his own analysis of Hegel interpreted through
August Cieszkowski and Feuerbach. Both Bakunin and Herzen held concerns about the extremes of materialism. Whereas Bakunin is more strictly considered a Russian materialist, Herzen sought a reconciliation between
empiricist materialism and
abstract thought. He saw
universalism as one of the great achievements of idealism which a crude materialism could threaten. In one of the first serious attempts to give a radical left-wing interpretation of Hegelian dialectics, Bakunin wrote his 1842 article "The Reaction in Germany" and essentially foreshadowed later generations of nihilists with his infamous declaration: Bakunin and Herzen began to meet rejection from others in the Westernizer camp for their open embrace of
far-left politics. For Herzen this came with embracing the
anarchist socialism of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose ideas he began circulating among Moscow's radical circles in the 1840s. The first roots of Bakunin's own interest in anarchism can also be traced to around this time. Bakunin was also the one to introduce Hegelian thought to
Vissarion Belinsky. , utopian socialist, a major intellectual force behind nihilism Often considered the first of the ,
Nikolay Chernyshevsky became an admirer of Feuerbach, Herzen, and Belinsky towards the end of the 1840s. It was at this time that he drew towards socialist materialism and was in close contact with members of the
Petrashevsky Circle.
Transition to nihilism It was not until the death of
Nicholas I in 1855 and the end of the
Crimean War the following year that this Feuerbachian materialist trend developed into a broad philosophical movement. Alexander II's ascent to the throne brought liberal reforms to university entry regulations and loosened control over publication, much to the movement's good fortune. The newly emerging generation continued to draw from the Left Hegelians but thoroughly abandoned Hegel and the
German idealists from whom they had drawn their influence. Where those early thinkers such as Bakunin and Herzen had found use of Fichte and Hegel, the younger generation were set on their rejection of idealism and were more ready to abandon politics as well. Historian K. Petrov writes that: German materialists
Ludwig Büchner,
Jacob Moleschott, and
Carl Vogt became new favourites. Further influence came from the utilitarian ideas of
John Stuart Mill, though his bourgeois liberalism was detested, and later from evolutionary biologists
Charles Darwin and
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. , nihilist philosopher In 1855, Chernyshevsky completed his first philosophical work and master's dissertation "The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality" — applying Feuerbach's methods to a critique of Hegelian aesthetics. The mid-1850s also saw the emergence of
Nikolay Dobrolyubov as a budding university activist and poet. As a fellow , he further elaborated the ideas of Russian materialism and is at times seen as a leading nihilist. Dobrolyubov had in fact occasionally used the term
nihilism prior to its popularization at the hands of Turgenev, which he had picked up from sociologist and fellow
Vasily Bervi-Flerovsky, who in turn had used it synonymously with skepticism. Together with Chernyshevsky, of whom he was a disciple and comrade, Dobrolyubov wrote for the literary journal
Sovremennik—Chernyshevsky being its principle editor. With their contributions, the journal became the primary organ of revolutionary thought in its time. The two of them, later followed by
Maxim Antonovich and
Dmitry Pisarev, had taken up the Russian tradition of socially-charged
literary criticism which Belinsky had begun. The discoursing of Russian literature allowed them the vehicle to have their ideas published that censorship would not have otherwise granted. Pisarev himself wrote at first for
Rassvet and then for
Russkoye Slovo—the latter of which came to rival
Sovremennik in its influence over the radical movement. By the late 1850s however, Chernyshevsky had become politically radicalized and began to reject Herzen's social discourse, devoting himself instead to the revolutionary socialist cause. Chernyshenvsky and Sechenov shared the argument that the
natural sciences were wholly adequate to study human and animal life according to a
deterministic model, and Sechenov lent particular influence to Chernyshevsky in this regard. This more subtle argument was favoured since state censorship made no allowance for outwardly challenging its religious doctrines. == Bazarovism ==