Correct Answer - Option 1 : Turgenev
Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. Russian nihilism was both a beginning form of nihilist philosophy and a broad cultural movement.
- However, it overlapped with certain revolutionary tendencies of the era, for which it was often wrongly characterized as a form of political terrorism.
- It centred on the dissolution of existing values and ideals, incorporating theories of hard determinism, atheism, materialism, positivism, and rational egoism.
- It rejects metaphysics, sentimentalism, and aestheticism.
In Russia, Literature is known as realism due to its portrayal of contemporary life, and such literary works show us what was happening in Russian culture during the 1860s, the Nihilism movement.
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Such realist novels which reflect the Nihilism movement include Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev.
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Ivan Turgenev, in his celebrated novel Fathers and Sons (1862), popularized the term through the figure of Bazarov the nihilist.
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The expression of the tension between generations by Bazarov in Fathers and Sons as the rejection of the romantic and idealistic postures guaranteed his position as an icon of the Nihilist movement and the Nihilism movement even owed its name to this novel.
Lets' look at the other famous personalities of Russia:
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Tolstoy was an anarchist and a well-known Russian writer.
- He is best known for his two longest works, War and Peace (1865–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77), which are commonly regarded as among the finest novels ever written.
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Vladimir Lenin was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist.
- Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party.
- Ideologically a Marxist, he developed political theories known as Leninism.
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Prince Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist, socialist, revolutionary, economist, sociologist, historian, zoologist, political scientist, human geographer[12] and philosopher who advocated anarcho-communism.
From the above, it is clear that Turgenev was one of the prominent nihilist thinkers in Russia.
