Their sacred watchword was: To The People. This great movement—which Turgenev[14] named Nihilism—spread rapidly. Many schools were established and enormous numbers of peasants flocked to them. The old sat on the benches with their grandchildren and did their best to learn. Teachers and the taught were enthused with the great idea. Leaders and the led were comrades. The youths did not spend a couple of hours with the peasants and then run off to indulge in an abnormal orgy prepared by a pathic Grand Duke. Altho several were heirs to fortunes, they refused to accept any money from their parents. They lived exactly like the peasants, several in a room, ate black bread and dressed in boots and sheepskin. Many of the girls formerly owned a trunkful of jewels and a houseful of servants, but now they dispensed with chignon and crinoline. They cropped their hair close and put on blue spectacles so they might not be fair in the eyes of men. They wanted no love affairs. They wanted to educate the ignorant. Children of the rich, offsprings of aristocrats, scions of nobility, brought up in luxury, encouraged in idleness, unused to manual work, unaccustomed to physical labor, they now toiled fifteen hours a day in the factories. To look peasant-like, the prettiest maidens rubbed their cheeks with grease and steeped their hands in brine. All the woes of the commoners they accepted for themselves. Were there ever before such luminous sons, such divine daughters? Ask history for a parallel, and Clio's scroll is blank!
Let this statement stand—indeed not even the twisted intellect of the perverted W. T. Stead[15] could demolish it—had the autocracy permitted these young teachers to continue their educative work among the peasants, Russia to-day would not be a nation of illiterate muzhiks, and millions who are now hopelessly blind would have eyes that see.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] "This court is worse than a house of ill-fame; there they sell only bodies, but here you prostitute honor and justice and law."—Ippolit Mishkin.
[13] If the reader has not read Stepniak's "Underground Russia" he should do so without delay.
[14] See his "Fathers and Sons," but avoid the abominable translation by Eugene Schuyler. To the eternal honor of the nihilists it must be said that they instantly and emphatically repudiated the hero of this novel, the brutal Bazarov. I myself have no hesitancy in saying that I prefer even the perfumed dandy Paul Petrovitch, to this harsh, coarse, repulsive, insulting individual who treats his loving parents like dogs, and who refers to a beautiful woman by exclaiming, "What a magnificent body! How fine it would look on a dissecting table!" Here is one of the curiosities of literature: a great artist conceives a great admiration for a great type, and yet he produces—a caricature! But Kropotkin seems to have a somewhat higher opinion of Bazarov, for in a letter which I received from him, he says, "Those Nihilists who understood Bazarov as Pisarev did, were right. Those who reproached Turgenev for Bazarov's scorn to work for mankind were right again. Turgenev has not succeeded in representing the man of action whom he admired well enough to excite the uninitiated admiration of the reader." For a correct representation of a nihilist in a novel—which the nihilists themselves heartily accepted—see the character of Rakmetov in Chernishevsky's wonderful "What is to be done?" Among those who enthusiastically praised this work was Sophia Perovskaya.
[15] The English eulogist of Russian officialism, the hypocrite who is intimate with Nicholas II., the scoundrel who praises Trepoff, and yet speaks of uplifting humanity!! He has written a lying book, "The Truth About Russia."