One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, nihilism was born. Its midwife was the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, whose greatest work, "Fathers and Sons," appeared in the spring of 1862 and heaved the immense figure of Yevgeny Bazarov into the world. Doctor by vocation and nihilist by avocation, Bazarov today would scarcely recognize what has become of the philosophy he launched. Nihilism is not what it once was and we are marking the most meaningless of anniversaries.

In his portrait...