Dostoevsky (28 page)

⁴
Cited in A. G. Tseitlin,
I. A. Goncharov
(Moscow, 1950), 62.

⁵
V. G. Belinsky,
Selected Philosophical Works
(Moscow, 1948), 478.

⁶
Yu. M. Proskurina, “Povestvovatel’-rasskazchik v romane F. M. Dostoevskogo
Belye nochi
,”
Filologicheskie Nauki
9 (1966), 133.

⁷
Pis’ma
, 1: 103; November 26, 1846.

⁸
V. G. Belinsky,
Izbrannye pis’ma
, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1955), 2: 369–370.

⁹
Ibid., 388.

¹⁰
Ibid.

¹¹
Pis’ma
, 1: 104; December 17, 1846.

¹²
Ibid., 89; April 1, 1846.

¹³
Ibid., 104; December 17, 1846.

¹⁴
Cited in
ZT
, 52.

To the public and literary aspects of their involvement must be added the asserted direct influence of the renowned critic on the formation of the young man’s convictions and beliefs. Thirty years later, Dostoevsky published two articles about Belinsky in his
Diary of a Writer
, and their burden is that Belinsky was the ideological mentor responsible for having placed Dostoevsky’s feet on the path leading to Siberia.

Dostoevsky’s account provides an irresistibly hagiographic version of the great drama of his conscience. Before meeting Belinsky, he had been a young, pure-hearted, idealistic, naïvely devout believer in the God and Christ of his childhood faith. It was Belinsky, the revered idol of Russian radical youth, who had succeeded in converting him to Socialism and atheism. The result had been his participation in subversive activity, and then his arrest, conviction, and exile to Siberia. There he rediscovered God and Christ through the Russian people, and came to realize that atheism could lead only to personal and social destruction. Dostoevsky’s articles of 1873, however, do not quite jibe with what we know of his life.

Belinsky’s name had become a slogan and a banner to successive generations of Russian radicals, and it is about this mythical or symbolic Belinsky that Dostoevsky was really writing in the 1870s. In a letter of 1871 to Nikolay Strakhov, who had objected to the violence of Dostoevsky’s language about Belinsky, Dostoevsky replies: “I insulted Belinsky more as a phenomenon of Russian life than as a personality.”
¹
The portrait Dostoevsky sketched of him two years later is dominated by this impersonal perspective, and the result, as we shall see, is that he integrates his own personal history—even when the facts do not quite fit—into the general image he wishes to create of Belinsky’s baneful effect on Russian culture as a whole.

By the time the critic and the young writer met in 1845, Belinsky’s point of view had evolved in a manner that took Dostoevsky by surprise. When Belinsky
converted to French Utopian Socialism in 1841–1842, he accepted a doctrine strongly informed by Christian moral-religious values. Saint-Simon had entitled the last work he wrote
Le nouveau Christianisme
, and all of French Utopian Socialism may be summed up under the same title. The Utopian Socialists directed their attention to the morality of the Gospels, and they saw Christ (much as Dostoevsky had done in 1838) as a divine figure come to prescribe the laws governing earthly life in the modern world and whose teachings, freed from centuries of perversion, were at last to be put into practice.

The “new Christianity” of Utopian Socialism was based on an opposition between the true religion of Jesus Christ—a religion of hope and light, of faith in the powers of man as well as in the beneficence of God—and a false religion of fear and eternal damnation that distorted Christ’s teaching. Victor Considérant makes this contrast explicit in his
La destinée sociale
, one of the most widely read of all Socialist treatises in Russia during the 1840s. “Take care!” he warns the supporters of the old religion of fear, “you who condemn God to desire the humiliation and misery of man here on earth, . . . man in his strength and intelligence . . . will know that he has nothing to fear from [God], but everything to hope for.”
²
A devout adherence to the new Christianity went hand in hand with fierce opposition to the established Church as a source of ignorance and obscurantism and as an ally of political reaction. Hence, in the same letter to V. P. Botkin announcing his conversion to a Socialism in which “Christ will pass His power to the Father, and Father-Reason will hold sway once more, but this time . . . above a new world,” Belinsky scoffs at a friend who retains “his warm faith in the
muzhik
with the little beard who, sitting belching on a soft cloud surrounded by a multitude of seraphs and cherubims, considers that his might is right and his thunders and lightnings rational demonstrations.”
³

Meanwhile, however, the ideas of the German Left Hegelians had begun to penetrate into Russia almost simultaneously with those of the Utopian Socialists. Left Hegelianism was primarily a critique of religion, and the effect of its influence was to call into question the religious foundation of Utopian Socialist convictions. D. F. Strauss’s
Life of Jesus
considered the New Testament to be not divine revelation but a mythopoetic expression of the historical aspirations of the Jewish community of the time. It was only a historical accident, Strauss maintained, that these myths had crystallized around the figure of Jesus Christ, who was merely one of the many self-proclaimed prophets of the period. Feuerbach’s
The Essence of Christianity
was even more radical in its secularization of the divine, and argued that, instead of God having created man in his own image, exactly the opposite was true. The human species had divinized its highest
attributes by projecting them onto supernatural beings and, in doing so, had alienated its own essence. The task of mankind was now to reclaim from the transcendent all the qualities that rightfully belonged to humanity, and to realize them on earth by incorporating them into social life.

Such ideas burst like a bombshell among the Russian Westernizers, already well schooled to appreciate them from their previous training in Hegel’s thought. A copy of Feuerbach arrived in Russia in January 1842, and Annenkov remembers this book as having been “in everybody’s hands” in the mid-1840s. “Feuerbach’s book,” he writes, “nowhere produced so powerful an impression as in our ‘Western’ circle, and nowhere did it so rapidly obliterate the remnants of all preceding outlooks. Herzen, needless to say, was a fervent expositor of its propositions and conclusions.”
⁴
Belinsky, however, was not won over as quickly as Annenkov implies. He had, as he confessed himself, a congenital need for religion, and he was still arguing about God with Turgenev—just freshly returned from the philosophical Mecca of Berlin—in the spring of 1843.

Reporting on one such interminable colloquy, the novelist recalls Belinsky saying reproachfully to him, “We haven’t yet decided the question of the existence of God . . . and you want to eat!”
⁵
By 1845, though, just a few months before meeting Dostoevsky, Belinsky had come to the conclusion, as he writes Herzen, that “in the words
God
and
religion
I see darkness, gloom, chains and the knout, and now I like these two words as much as the four following them.”
⁶
These phrases mark the moment when atheism and Socialism fused together in Russia into an alliance never afterward to be completely dissolved. Not all the Russian Westernizers, to be sure, were willing to accept atheism as a new obligatory credo. T. N. Granovsky—a famous liberal historian at the University of Moscow, who was one day to sit for the portrait of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky in
Demons
—refused to give up his belief in the immortality of the soul, and in the summer of 1846 he broke with Herzen over the issue—a rift that occurred almost simultaneously with Dostoevsky’s first meeting with Belinsky.

Even though Left Hegelianism was militantly antireligious, at first it attacked only the historicity and divinity of God and Christ; the moral-religious values that Christ had proclaimed to the world were left untouched. Feuerbach in particular declared Christian moral-religious values to be the true essence of human nature; his aim was not to replace such values by others but to see them realized in the love of man for man rather than for the God-man. Soon, however, the
rejection of the divinity of Christ led to a questioning of the moral-religious ideals that Christ had proclaimed, and this was greatly aided by the appearance of the last and most sensational of the Left Hegelian treatises, Max Stirner’s
The Ego and His Own
. Stirner argued that the acceptance of
any
abstract or general moral value was an impediment to man’s freedom and alienated the human personality as much as a belief in supernatural beings did. Of no group was he more scornful, no antagonist did he attack more mercilessly, than the Socialists and liberals still clinging to their general ideal of “humanity.” What is fundamental for the individual ego, according to Stirner, is simply the satisfaction of its
own
needs, whatever these may be; his philosophy is that of a totally subjective and totally amoral self-aggrandizement.

From Annenkov we know that Belinsky was quite concerned with Stirner’s book during the summer of 1847. “It has been proved,” Annenkov reports him as saying, “that a man feels and thinks and acts invariably according to the law of egotistical urges, and indeed, he cannot have any others.” To be sure, Belinsky did not take the word “egoism” in Stirner’s narrowly selfish sense, and believed that individuals could eventually be made to realize that their own “egotistical interests are identical with that of mankind as a whole.”
⁷
What is important, though, is Belinsky’s evident willingness to accept Stirner’s nonidealistic view of the roots of human behavior, the critic’s desire to search for a new, more “practical” and “rational” foundation for his values. We find the same impulse at work in his attraction for the physiological Materialism of Emile Littré, and he now refers privately to the starry-eyed Utopian Socialists, with contemptuous obscenity, as “those insects hatched from the manure heaped up from the backside of Rousseau.”
⁸

Belinsky’s important manifesto in the first issue of
The Contemporary
, defining the ideological line of the rejuvenated periodical, bears unmistakable evidence of the change in his ideas. “Psychology which is not based on physiology,” he announces, under the influence of Littré, “is as unsubstantial as physiology that knows not the existence of anatomy.” He foresees the day when “chemical analysis” will “penetrate the mysterious laboratory of nature” and will “by observations of the embryo . . . trace the
physical
process of
moral
evolution.”
⁹
The Soviet historian of the journal, Evgenyev-Maksimov, remarks that “the recipes proposed by Utopian Socialism had already (1847) lost credit in the eyes of the majority of the contributors to
The Contemporary
. Skeptical and even contemptuous utterances concerning this tendency in Western European social thought are by no means rare.”
¹⁰
These influential articles ridiculed such pillars of Utopianism as Pierre
Leroux, Cabet, and Victor Considérant and praised Proudhon’s just-published
Système des contradictions èconomiques
for having abandoned fantasy and devoted itself to the study of economic laws governing existing society. In the last three years of his life, Annenkov observes, Belinsky “was concerned . . . with the new truths proclaimed by economic doctrines which was liquidating all notions of the old, displaced truth about the moral, the good and the noble on earth, and was putting in their place formulas and theses of a purely rational character.”
¹¹

A feature of Utopian Socialist “religion” had been, as Maxime Leroy writes, “a divinization of the people,”
¹²
who were considered morally superior to their upper-class oppressors; and Belinsky also quickly abandoned this idealization of the oppressed masses. At the beginning of 1848 he defends Voltaire in a letter to Annenkov, even though the great Frenchman had “sometimes called the people ‘vile populace.’ ” Belinsky justifies this insulting phrase “because the people are uncultivated, superstitious, fanatic, bloodthirsty, and love torture and execution.” He adds that Bakunin (now an ardent revolutionary) and the Slavophils, by their excessive idealization of the people, have “greatly helped me to throw off a mystical faith in the people.”
¹³
Such is the atmosphere of the last period of Belinsky’s thought, which began shortly after Dostoevsky met him in 1845 and was certainly apparent in 1846. There is every reason to believe that Dostoevsky was familiar with its manifestations.