Раскол в нигилистах - раздор в нигилистах. К истории русской революционно-демократической журналистики 1860-х годов

In 1863-1865, two influential Russian revolutionary-democratic journals “Sovremennik” (“The Contemporary”) and “Russkoe Slovo” (“The Russian Word”) debated literary and social issues. In historiography, this debate - the so-called “split among the nihilists” - was an example of political conflicts in Russian press, but the author states that a personal factor was a more important reason for that case. It was not a single occasion of personal conflicts in the journalist community in the middle and the second half of the 1860s. In this period, there were the similar episodes: Maxim Antonovich and Yuly Zhukovsky’s accusation against Nikolay Nekrasov, the conflict between Alexander Herzen and “the young emigrants”, the debates in the periodicals of Mikhail Elpidin’ printing house, etc. They happened during the crisis of the Sixtiers movement (or the revolutionary-democratic movement), when expectations of a revolutionary explosion of the Russian people were not justified, censorship oppression rose, and political disorientation of Russian oppositional community increased. Under those circumstances, discussions did not lead to new ideas and trends, but only aggravated the depressive atmosphere in the journalistic community. Even among the Russian revolutionary diaspora - without censorship and other influence of the Russian government - publicists could not avoid personal conflicts. Many memoirs also confirm that those splits - or, more precisely, that strife - were more personal rather than political conflicts.