Love, Science, and Politics in the Fiction of Shestidesiatnitsy N. P. Suslova and S. V. Kovalevskaia

Abstract

In the 1860s, Russian radicalism evolved from a handful of circles into an independent subculture and the beginnings of a revolutionary movement. 1 The most important recent work on the 1860s attributes this dramatic shift to the emergence of "new principles of behavior," among which a new attitude toward love was the essential element. 2 The nihilists, or shestidesiatniki, as the members of this early radical generation were known, transformed their erotic relationships and the practice of courtship into signs of ideological affiliation. They rejected the eloquence, gentle manners, meticulous grooming, and aristocratic dress of polite society in favor of their own argot, fashion, and social mores. In fact, as a cohort, this generation of radicals was recognizable less for any articulated political program than for cultural politics which called into question traditional forms of social life and were expressed through the medium of everyday life-in clothes, speech, and social conduct. Most notorious were the nigilistki (nihilist women) who traded their hooped skirts and crinolines for black jumpers, wore blue-tinted glasses, smoked cigarettes, cropped their hair, and received men unaccompanied by chaperones. 3 Memoirs, periodicals, police records, and literary sources all suggest that radicals viewed the trans-Research for this project was supported by generous grants from the Luce and Ralston Funds of the College of Wooster. I would like to thank Hilde Hoogenboom for introducing me to the work of Suslova and Kovalevskaia and the two referees for The Russian Review for their thoughtful comments.1 Daniel Brower, Training the Nihilists (Ithaca, 1975); Michael Confino, "On Intellectual Origins and Intellectual Traditions," Daedalus 25 (Spring 1972); Michael Confino, "Révolte juvénile et contre-culture: les nihilistes russes des années 60," Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 31