Colin Cavendish-Jones, <i>Oscar Wilde and Nihilism</i>

Oscar Wilde's fascination with the figure of the Russian Nihilist -'that strange martyr who has no faith, […] and dies for what he does not believe in'can be traced from his early political poetry, through his first play Vera; or, The Nihilists, to his journalism, essays, and short-fiction.But Wilde always privileged surface over substance: was nihilism, for him, a paradox merely, or was his engagement with the philosophy more profound?In Oscar Wilde and Nihilism, Colin Cavendish-Jones suggests the latter.His book's lucid introduction lays out a taxonomy of nihilism's many formsphilosophical, political, cosmic, moraland identifies a commonality: the proposition that 'the world is absurd and unintelligible, without rules, values, certainty, or any ruler to provide a definitive point of view' (12).Cavendish-Jones sees this idea running through Wilde's works, and it is an idea that is remarkably prescient.Before Wilde, he argues, canonical nineteenth-century authors had nothing to say about nihilism; after Wilde, almost every serious writer does.Wilde, who can often seem more modern than his contemporaries, emerges as a pioneer of this new way of grappling with life's purpose.Cavendish-Jones reads the revolutionaries in Vera as 'active destroyers' in the mould of Yevgeny Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862), figures bent on annihilating the social order without a vision of what might replace it (46).His construal of a czar who declares war against his own people as a nihilist in all but name is innovative (47-8).So too is his identification of Prince Paul with Nietzsche's Übermensch, though it requires that the character be judged brave (for me, Prince