Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Career of a Nihilist: A Novel
TO first write on politics, and then come forward as a novelist has its inconveniences, as I had to learn at my own expense. It is like appearing in two different characters in the same play: the spectators will always have some difficulty in discarding the impression they may have received from the first whilst looking at the second.
I have nothing but thanks to offer to my English and American critics, whose reception of my novel as a novel was so cordial, whose censure was so mild, and whose praise so free and generous.
But almost all of them have persisted in viewing my novel as a sort of political pamphlet in the guise of fiction. They assumed it to be the summing up of the Nihilists' programme, both theoretical and practical, and very naturally reproached it for being exclusively negative in theory, and narrowly violent in practice.
Be it permitted to me to say a word Of explanation to my future readers. If they want to know what are the Nihilists as a political party: their very modest, sensible, and practical demands, the causes which called them into existence, etc., they must seek all this elsewhere. Here they will see the Nihilists as men, and not as politicians.
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