them, frightened timid Liberals and gave the Reactionaries, who had hitherto remained silent, an opportunity of preaching their doctrines with telling effect.  The celebrated novelist, Turgeneif, long the idol of the young generation, had inadvertently in “Fathers and Children” invented the term Nihilist, and it at once came to be applied as an opprobrious epithet, notwithstanding the efforts of Pissaref, a popular writer of remarkable talent, to prove to the public that it ought to be regarded as a term of honour.

Pissaref’s attempt at rehabilitation made no impression outside of his own small circle.  According to popular opinion the Nihilists were a band of fanatical young men and women, mostly medical students, who had determined to turn the world upside down and to introduce a new kind of social order, founded on the most advanced principles of social equality and Communism.  As a first step towards the great transformation they had reversed the traditional order of things in the matter of coiffure:  the males allowed their hair to grow long, and the female adepts cut their hair short, adding occasionally the additional badge of blue spectacles.  Their unkempt appearance naturally shocked the aesthetic feelings of ordinary people, but to this they were indifferent.  They had raised themselves above the level of popular notions, took no account of so-called public opinion, gloried in Bohemianism, despised Philistine respectability, and rather liked to scandalise old-fashioned people imbued with antiquated prejudices.

This was the ridiculous side of the movement, but underneath the absurdities there was something serious.  These young men and women, who were themselves terribly in earnest, were systematically hostile not only to accepted conventionalities in the matter of dress, but to all manner of shams, hypocrisy, and cant in the broad Carlylean sense of those terms.  To the “beautiful souls” of the older generation, who had habitually, in conversation and literature, shed pathetic tears over the defects of Russian social and political organisation without ever moving a finger to correct them—­especially the landed proprietors who talked and wrote about civilisation, culture, and justice while living comfortably on the revenues provided for them by their unfortunate serfs—­these had the strongest aversion; and this naturally led them to condemn in strong language the worship of aesthetic culture.  But here again they fell into exaggeration.  Professing extreme utilitarianism, they explained that the humble shoemaker who practises his craft diligently is, in the true sense, a greater man than a Shakespeare, or a Goethe, because humanity has more need of shoes than of dramas and poetry.