In Russia the lesser bourgeoisie was not so numerous as in Europe, but here it was the greater bourgeoisie which followed in the footsteps of the aristocratic leaders. Mihailovskii was never weary of attacking the European leaders of decadence, symbolism, magianism, and the rest, so that he might inflict shrewder blows upon their Russian imitators. He adopts from Nordau a few references to these types of degeneration, and analyses the ideas of Sacher-Masoch.
Pessimism is the upshot of such ethics. The readers of the "Journeaux des Cochons" become gloomy and melancholic; tedium and melancholia drive them to a voluntary death. Works dealing with the problem of weltschmerz did not escape Mihailovskii's literary attention, and he did not fail to point out the false individualism of the chief exponents of weltschmerz. Mihailovskii enters the lists against Stirner and Nietzsche as apostles of arbitrariness. Nietzsche, it is true, opposed the decadent movement, and therefore occupied higher ground than his Russian imitators, against whom Mihailovskii protects their teacher; but Nietzsche's superman is, after all, no more than the expression and the advocacy of eccentric dehumanisation.
Thus Mihailovskii is led to attack Darwinism with peculiar energy, and unceasingly to oppose its aristocratic master morality.
The ethics of free competition unchains the war of all against all. To Mihailovskii, Byronic "gloom" seems the ultimate result of this development. It is only a dog that remains faithful to its dead master.
The bourgeois is subject to the dominion, not of the state alone, but also of chauvinistic nationalism, For this reason Mihailovskii is even more averse to the new slavophilism than to the old, and for this reason he attacks the chauvinist narodniki. He continues his campaign against all the decadent phenomena of the day, disregarding accusations that he is aiding sanctimonious humbug and police rule. He knows well enough that the obscurantists opposed Darwinism, declaring Darwinism to be a sign of the times. In a vigorous satire, Darwinism and Offenbach's Operettas (1871) he shows that Darwin's doctrine may very well be compared with Offenbach's music, in that here and there Darwinists and Offenbachians misuse science and art for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. Beyond question Offenbach with his cynical mockery of the old gods
