Abstract

The Emancipation Reform of 1861 had inevitably ushered in a groundswell of diverse and increasingly radical public discourse surrounding the reform's polarizing effects, Russia's late arrival to the global arena of capitalist modernity, and the implications of its massive peasant population being elevated out of serfdom to participate in the life of the state. These discussions would in turn themselves become a crucible for ideologies both revolutionary and reactionary that would define Russian politics for the rest of the century in their engagement with a burgeoning Russian nationalism. Although Narodnik (Russian Populist) historiography had largely focused on its commitment to non-Marxist socialism, its ideological filiation from the radical democrat publicism of the 1860s makes Narodnik nationalism an imperative aspect of their politics to contend with and contextualize if we are to understand its historical role in Russia's transition to semi-peripheral status vis-a-vis Europe. Likewise, Fedor Dostoevsky's brief engagement in petty political polemics in his periodical Epoch is often underappreciated for how influential it was in shaping the writer's celebrated literary output - and, crucially, it is uniquely representative of an early attempt at co-opting "populism" for an unofficial yet distinctly conservative mode of politics in Imperial Russia. This article examines Dostoevsky's esoteric philosophy of pochvennichestvo, developed in collaboration with fellow writer Apollon Grigoryev, against the backdrop of their public conflict with the representatives of the 1860s radical intelligentsia, including Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin, and the so-called "schism among the nihilists." The politics of narodnichestvo, emerging as it did in part out of the ruins of the 1860s' radical publicist tradition, is shown to be remarkably more compatible with pochvennik thought than the radical democrats' - in no small part owing to its fundamental raison d'etre in peripheral nationalist anxieties of an industrializing early capitalist society.