RUSSIAN CULTURE IN THE 1880S

The failure of Populism either to stir the masses in the mid 1870s or to achieve any useful results through terrorism at the end of the decade and at the beginning of the 1880s combined with the hardening of the government's conservatism to produce a general sense of despondency and pessimism in the radical intelligentsia in the 1880s. The Narodovoltsy of the 1880s, it is true, continued to find inspiration in the heroic example of their predecessors and were borne along by their enthusiasm for acts of terrorism, even if they were no longer in a position to perpetrate such acts. Other revolutionaries and their sympathisers, though, were deeply affected by the prevailing gloom and their more patient activity and modest ambitions need to be seen against the general cultural background.

As it happened, the onset of crisis in the revolutionary movement and the implementation of more blatantly reactionary official policies coincided with the end of the golden age of classical Russian literature. Nekrasov had died in 1877, Dostoyevsky early in 1881. Tolstoy, after the completion of Anna Karenina in 1877, entered an artistically unproductive phase; and Turgenev, who in his late years was much feted by the young generation as a courageous opponent of autocracy, died in 1883. A sense of loss and even senescence therefore combined with the consciousness of the collapse of Utopian dreams and with official policy to demoralise the intelligentsia.