Excerpt from Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin

Excerpt from Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin

Author: Jeremiah Curtin; Alma Curtin

Year: 1890

Excerpt from Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin On proto-communism (1861): In Kewaunee, Wisconsin, and in Chicago I lectured before Bohemian societies, speaking to my audiences in their own language. I spoke before the Popular Science Society of Milwaukee upon Russian Nihilism. Nihilism is, to my thinking, the maimed and disfigured offspring of German philosophy as found in the writings of Hegel, Feuerbach, and Buchner. Students read the books of those materialists and became atheists. Then they went further and declared there was nothing in the social world which did not deserve destruction by reason of the harm it inflicts on mankind. When in 1861 Ivan Turgenev coined the word nihilism , it was at once accepted, both by those whom it described and by society in general. The Nihilists Turgenev described were agitators, simply a band of young men, social units, but not yet a society. About that time a book appeared in which the floating ideas of Nihilism were collected and combined to form a picture of an ideal society (Utopia), a Nihilistic commonwealth. This book was written by Chernishevski and entitled Chto Dyelat What Is To Be Done? . It told how life could be made happy. The existing