The idea of the close connection of Russian literature of the 1860s
and journalistic and newspaper polemics on socially significant topics has long
been a common place in historical and literary studies. In most cases, however,
this statement, although fair, boils down to the fact that the works of some writers
are characterized as politically biased and connected with the writer’s beliefs
or the program of a literary “party”. In the article, I argue that even writers who
tried to avoid direct statements on political issues could not help but feel the
strong influence of the journalistic polemics that determined the use of separate
words and expressions: the very language of Russian prose of this period was
largely influenced by the expressions used in popular articles, published in
‘thick’ journals.
I analyze a very specific discourse, which was formed in Russian prose and
journal articles of the 1860s and used to discuss nihilism. This discourse included
maximally abstract concepts (“words”, “deeds”, etc.), and reinterpreted scientific
terms (“organism”), as well as symbolic or metaphorical expressions
(“thunderstorm”, “precipice”). It was not intended to convey a specific political
position (it was used both by the “nihilists” themselves and their opponents), but
set certain limits to the perception of social processes: for example, it was impossible
to talk about “nihilism” and not talk about a fundamental gap between
the past and the present, in word and deed, and so on.
I will consider the novel “The Precipice” (1869) by I. A. Goncharov as a
primary source. I’m going to read some of its key episodes against the background
of disputes about nihilism. Although the nihilism is not the most important
topic of Goncharov’s novel, most contemporaries immediately identified
the novel as ‘antinihilistic’. Goncharov usually identified himself as a proponent
of ‘objective’ art, but still could not avoid using elements of ‘nihilistic’ discourse
in his work. Considering both journal articles and fictional works by various
authors of 1860s I pay close attention to the works by D. I. Pisarev, published
on the pages of the journal “Russian word”, which Goncharov as a censor
had to know. Since my goal is to analyze the polemical discourse of the 1860s,
rather than the personal positions of individual authors, I use fragments from the
speech of the narrator and the heroes of fictional prose of this period along with
the journalistic texts: the interest is not how much the quoted fragments express
the author’s position, but how relevant topics and problems could be used in
actual polemics.
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