Liberal-minded relatives in her tight family circle introduced her to the heady ideas common among prosperous liberal Russians at the time. A chance reading of an article about the first, Swiss-trained, female physician led to her choice of a medical career. In an early display of feminine resolve, Figner persuaded her young lawyer husband to abandon his career so that she could study medicine in Zurich. There, she became rapidly alienated from her more conservative husband -notwithstanding his having given up his career for her – and so sceptical about her new-found vocation that she failed to qualify. Under the impact of radical student groups, she ‘came to see in the practice of medicine only a palliative for an evil which could be cured only by social and political means’. Vera had fallen for the myth of deep causes. She wrote to her husband renouncing any further relations with him and his future financial support. She consciously disavowed her own narrow ambitions, and the ‘egotism’ of the family that had encouraged them, in favour of the life of denial and sacrifice practised by revolutionaries in Russia. She returned to the – disillusioning – chaos of the revolutionary underground in Moscow. This seemed squalid, for nothing in Figner’s genteel background had prepared her for bribing policemen or consorting with gnarled criminals. Deeply depressed, she left to continue the work of propaganda in the countryside, after qualifying as a midwife. She would return to the city as a terrorist.3
Figner was an example of the many young upper-class women who engaged in terrorism. Why did they get involved? Apart from the keen sense of altruism many of them felt, terrorism was one of the few areas where women could play an active role, with their views being accorded equal respect to those of men and their lives exposed to the same hazards. Vera Zasulich, who became a revolutionary at the age of seventeen when her elder sister inducted her into radical student circles, regarded this as a way to escape the dismal fate of being a governess in a gentry household, the only future open to poor relations of rich people such as herself: ‘Of course it would have been much easier if I had been a boy; then I could have done what I wanted … And then, the distant specter of revolution appeared, making me the equal of any boy; I too could dream of “action”, of “exploits”, and of “the great struggle” … I too could join those “who perished for the great cause”.’4 Much of the inspiration behind Populism was a form of guilt on the part of the leisured educated and upper classes – for, instead of ruthlessly espousing their own selfish interests as Marxism avers, many members of Russia’s elites were only too eager to repudiate themselves. As Figner discovered in the villages, ‘only there could one have a clean soul and a quiet conscience’. Despite its outward espousal of atheism, Populism was an essentially Christian vision, in which redemptive virtue was ascribed to the lowest of the low, and paradise would dawn after their consciousness had been raised to revolutionary levels. Towards the end of her twenty-two years in prison, Figner told her family of a dream she had had:
I dreamed we four sisters were riding in a sleigh, over a perfectly black road, bare of snow, and that we were driving through a village, now uphill, now downhill. We passed rows of fine peasants’ houses, with sloping stone steps for pedestrians built everywhere, squares with leafless trees, and arbors with golden-yellow roofs. In the centre, on a hillock, rose a white church, a mass of stone, with many graceful, golden cupolas. And when I looked up, suspended from the sky, I saw over the church and the whole hill a crystal canopy which amazed me by its beauty, and for some reason reminded me of the Northern Lights. When we had left the village there spread before us a limitless field, covered with tender green, and above it shone a hot sun in a blue sky. For some reason it reminded me of a picture I saw some time ago: tired pilgrims are walking; and ahead of them in the distance, as though hanging in the clouds a fine outline of a city is visible, with an inscription: ‘hail, ye who seek the city of the Lord!’5
Where did the bit about the glass canopy come from? And were all terrorists as benign as Vera Figner? It is necessary to review briefly some of the ideas which tantalised the Russian intelligentsia, a species of being that requires comment in itself.
They are not to be confused with the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists, for as a count and a Christian living in seclusion on his estates Tolstoy was not some hack Moscow or Petersburg journalist possessed of a single big idea but otherwise lacking in humanity. Dostoevsky wrote his best novel about this self-selecting group, or rather, about the destruction they had wrought on society and themselves. He committed the heresy of submitting the intelligentsia to the sociological and psychological investigation from which they regarded themselves as exempt, cloaked as they were in the fashionable uniformed ideas of the age – a bit of Comte, Darwin, Feuerbach and so on.
Nor did the intelligentsia coincide with those who might have known a lot about a little, such as professors of ancient history, law, medicine or physics, dispassionately pursuing their subject to the bemusement of radicalised students who worshipped newer foreign gods like Marx and Nietzsche. Rather, the intelligentsia were a sub-set of the educated classes, encompassing those who talked about books they had never read, distinguished both by a disavowal of a class or occupation, such as bureaucrat or soldier, and by their conformist subscription to such supposedly progressive ideas as atheism, socialism and revolution. They were kept afloat like some speculative fraud, on a bubble of liberal good taste, for among an older generation corrupted by liberalism it was not done to challenge youth or its progressive causes until the example of the renegade Dostoevsky gave birth to a right-wing intelligentsia late in the day. The intelligentsia also exercised their own informal censorship, more insidious and pernicious than some minor government bureaucrat blundering around with the prose of Dostoevsky. As Chekhov wrote: ‘I do not believe in our intelligentsia, which is hypocritical, false, hysterical, ill-bred, and lazy. I do not believe in it even when it suffers and complains, for its oppressors come from the same womb.’ There was another hazard there, brought forth in a hellish light by Dostoevsky, namely that self-styled victims could become the worst oppressors if given the chance. As Shigalev says in The Possessed: ‘I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is a direct contradiction of the idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at absolute despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no solution of the social problem but mine.’ He foresees the death of ‘a hundred million’ to realise a utopia that involves total spying designed to eliminate the private realm. In order to achieve human equality, ‘Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned.’6
Nihilism was the philosophy of choice for the younger generation of Russian radicals benignly caricatured in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and rendered demonic in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Strictly speaking, nihilism is the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless. In that form it is usually the philosophy of choice for adolescents who have read a bit of Camus, but the appeal seems to have seeped across cultures and religions too.7
In nineteenth-century Russia, nihilism meant an inordinate credulity towards any number of ‘isms’, notably positivism, materialism, ethical utilitarianism and, inevitably, terrorism. Generational conflicts were involved. A liberal older generation of well-to-do gentry, with their love of art for art’s sake and peregrinations between their Russian estates and German casinos and spas, faced rude competition from earnest plebian intellectuals, many the sons of humble clerics, who thought that the only point of a seascape was to inform those who had never seen the sea, while a novel was merely a didactic means of reforging moral personality in the service of political goals. Any complex social institution could be taken apart and examined for evidence of its utilitarian reasonableness, with the same clinical detachment that a biologist brought to cutting up a frog. In addition to ill-digested ideas, there was a mode of conduct for those who could not be bothered to think. A contrived boorishness was obligatory as well as a conforming nonconformity in long hair, spectacles and slovenly dress. Like the Fenians, who adopted American manners to betoken cultural independence from the British, the nihilists dismissed social graces out of ‘the same