Nihilism (from Latin nihil, 'nothing'), designation applied to various
radical philosophies, usually by their opponents, the implication being that
adherents of these philosophies reject all positive values and believe in
nothing. The term was first used to describe Christian heretics during the
Middle Ages. In Russia it was applied in the 1850s and 1860s to young
intellectuals who, influenced by Western ideas, repudiated Christianity,
considered Russian society backward and oppressive, and advocated
revolutionary change. The best-known fictional nihilist was Bazarov in Ivan
Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (1862). Conservatives claimed that
nihilism would destroy all possibility of orderly and purposeful existence
and was directly contrary to real human needs and desires, but the novelist
N. G. Chernyshevsky and other radicals called it a necessary phase in the
transformation of Russia. The Narodniks (Populists), who worked for a
peasant uprising in the 1870s, and the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will)
movement, members of which assassinated Czar Alexander II in 1881, were also
considered manifestations of nihilism.