Two newly coined words dominated Russian discussions in the early 1860s: intelligentsia and nihilism. The first referred not to educated people generally but to those professing a new radical ideology formulated by the critic Nicholas Chernyshevsky. The “new people,” as Chernyshevsky called his young followers, advocated materialism, determinism, utilitarianism, free love, and rude (they said “frank”) manners. In his great novel Fathers and Children, Ivan Turgenev called them “nihilists.” Although many young radicals first deemed this term slanderous, they soon adopted it with pride. When the assassin and writer Sergei Stepniak published a novel in 1889 celebrating terrorism, he entitled it The Career of a Nihilist.

Even Dostoevsky, who cherished a lifelong hatred for Turgenev, regarded Fathers and Children as a masterpiece. Turgenev had perfected the novel of ideas, the genre that, over the next two decades, was to include not only all Dostoevsky’s greatest works, but also Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina as well as two more important Turgenev novels, Smoke and Virgin Soil. The glory of Russian fiction, this genre later inspired works by Pasternak, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn reflecting, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, on the ultimate questions of life.

Many Russian novels of ideas have adopted Turgenev’s device of describing intellectual dispute as a conflict of generations.

Many Russian novels of ideas have adopted Turgenev’s device of describing intellectual dispute as a conflict of generations. Turgenev’s “fathers,” represented by the brothers Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov and Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov, profess