"Or rather who respects nothing," said Paul Petrovitch.
"A man who looks at everything from a critical point of view," said Arcadi.
"Does not that come to the same thing?" asked his uncle.
"No, not at all. A nihilist is a man who bows before no authority, who accepts no principle without examination, no matter what credit the principle has."...
"Yes, before we had Hegelians; now we have nihilists. We shall see what you will do to exist in nothingness, in a vacuum, as if under an air pump."
Koscheleff, writing in 1874, gives a similar explanation of nihilism. "Our disease is a disease of character, and the most dangerous possible. We suffer from a fatal unbelief in everything. We have ceased to believe in this or in that, not because we have studied the subject thoroughly and become convinced of the untenability of our views, but only because some author or another in Germany or England holds this or that doctrine to be unfounded. Our nihilism is a thing of a quite peculiar character. It is not, as in the West, the result of long falsely directed philosophical studies and ways of thinking, nor is it the fruit of an imperfect social organization. It is an entirely different thing from that. The wind has blown it to us, and the wind will blow it from us again. Our nihilists are simply Radicals. Their loud speeches, their fault-finding, their strong assertions, are grounded on nothing. They borrow negative views from foreign authors, and repeat them and magnify them ad nauseam, and treat persons of another way of thinking as absurd and antiquated people who continue to cherish exploded ideas and customs. The chief cause of the spread of this (I will not say doctrine, for I cannot honour it with such a name, but) sect is this, that it imparts its communications in secret conversations, so that, for one thing, it cannot be publicly criticised and refuted, and, for another, it charms by the fascination of the forbidden."
The same view precisely is given by Baron Fircks ("Schedo Ferroti") in his very elaborate and thoughtful account of nihilism in his L'Avenir de la Russie. It was merely, he said, the critical spirit—the spirit of intellectual revolt—carried to an extreme and running amuck against all accepted principles in religion, in politics, in domestic and social life. It was a common infirmity of contemporary society, and was in no way peculiar to Russia; but while that may be true, it has undoubtedly—as perhaps the Baron would admit—been carried into more extravagant manifestations in Russia than elsewhere.
Nor are the reasons of this extravagance far to seek. First, the Russians are, in national character, singularly impressionable, volatile, and predisposed to run to extremes. Diderot says they were rotten before they were ripe. Second, they are mere children in political experience, and even in intellectual training. Their education is in general shallow, and they are liable to the vagaries of the half educated. Third, both Baron Fircks and Koscheleff think nihilism was largely due to the arbitrary government of the country. The Czar and the bureaucracy have themselves had much to do with destroying respect for law and authority by their capricious habits of administration. Laws were proclaimed to-day and repealed to-morrow, or even broken by the very officials engaged in administering them. Even in the days of Nicholas, Herzen complained bitterly of this constant inconstancy of the law; he said the Russian Government was "infatuated with innovation," that "nothing was allowed to remain as it was," that "everything was always being changed," that "a new ministry invariably began its work by upsetting that of its predecessors." Russia being a Functionary State, not a Law State, to employ a useful German distinction, the decrees of officials take the place elsewhere filled by fixed laws established by legislative authority; and where these decrees are continually changing, reverence for the law is impossible.
But in all this there was no practical political disaffection before the Emancipation Act. The nihilists had as yet a vague belief in the Czar and the coming reforms; they felt that the Russian people were at last to have a chance of showing the rich genius that lay in them, and their whole anxiety was to have the people adequately trained for this great destiny. It was the common talk that the future belonged to Russia; and that she was already beginning to outshine all other nations in literature, in art, in science, in music. "Some young people among us," says Turgenieff, "have discovered even a Russian arithmetic. Two and two do make four with us as well as elsewhere, but more pompously, it would seem. All this is nothing but the stammering of men who are just awaking."