Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia

4 Atheism as the Predicate for Salvation: Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobroliubov

4 Atheism as the Predicate for Salvation Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobroliubov In the late 1850s and early 1860s, two priests’ sons, Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobroliubov, became Russia’s two most influential journalists. They were also the first to claim in print that God does not exist. Belief in an omnipotent, infinitely merciful being harms people, they argued, by lulling them into a state of torpor and passivity. Censorship prevented them from declaring “there is no God,” as the St. Petersburg merchants had done to their peril only a few years earlier. Yet when Chernyshevsky expounded on the ill effects of faith in an “imaginary humanlike being” who controls the natural world and described a fantasy world in which all human needs would be met, his readers knew exactly what he had in mind.1 The clergy into which Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov were born was a closed estate in Russia, and sons of clergymen who entered the secular world encountered many of the same difficulties as the merchants ’ sons. Divorced from their own community, they were, at best, treated with polite condescension by noble members of the literary world into which they sought entry. Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov discovered this firsthand when they began to write for the Contemporary. This journal had long been an important cultural institution in Russia. Founded by Alexander Pushkin in the 1830s, it had attracted the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen in the 1840s, along with 120 such influential writers as Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev. The Contemporary had stood for a liberal politics in the 1840s and early 1850s. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov transformed it into a radical organ, edging out established contributors. Their articles were read with tremendous enthusiasm by a young audience that included students at Russia’s schools, seminaries, and universities. Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov turned first to literary criticism to attack the ideology of autocracy and the norms of what they regarded as an unjust society. Literary critics, they wrote, must become the mouthpiece of society, expressing its dreams and aspirations. The view Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov articulated, namely that the well-being of the country rested in the hands of educated society, not the state, and that it was the moral duty of every educated Russian to direct the country toward a better future, was the ethos of the intelligentsia , and it was only after their crucial intervention that the word came into widespread use. Aspects of this ethos had been elaborated by earlier generations, beginning in the 1820s, when the Wisdom Lovers made it their task to create a readership capable of literary and philosophical judgment. Yet Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov went much further. They not only encouraged independent judgment—literary, social, and political—but also provoked enormous controversy by asserting that educated society would not assume its responsibility until it had renounced faith in God. To their young acolytes, this proposition became an article of faith. Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobroliubov both renounced faith in God at a young age, in their late teens or early twenties, and both experienced this renunciation as a grave spiritual crisis. Chernyshevsky, born in 1828, was the son of an archpriest from Saratov. Dobroliubov, eight years younger, was born in Nizhnii Novgorod in 1836, and he, too, was the son of a priest. Though each had his particular reasons for rejecting religious belief, they shared one common motivation: both wished to overcome their past. They did not want to deny their origins as priests’ sons but rather to prove to themselves that they could determine their own intellectual development as adults without being limited by their early education. As priests’ sons, Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov received extensive training in theology. Orthodox Christian patterns of thinking would leave a lasting mark on both and manifested themselves in their writings long after they had rejected faith in God. Yet the pair never emphasized Atheism as the Predicate for Salvation 121 their close familiarity with Russian Orthodox theology, and, unlike advocates of atheism in the west, they never explicitly entered into debates with theologians in the many articles they wrote. Though they were Russia’s first journalists qualified to carry out such debates in print, they evidently felt that theology was not the platform on which they wished to do battle with God. The clergy comprised roughly one percent of the total population of European Russia in the...