Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia

6 Doubt after Atheism: Dmitrii Pisarev

6 Doubt after Atheism Dmitrii Pisarev Dmitrii Pisarev is remembered for the enormous influence his writings exerted over succeeding generations of Russian youths from the 1860s on. His articles, said to have been the “Code of Laws” and “Koran” for many young radicals, were passed around well into the 1890s by students at Russia’s universities and secondary schools in “dilapidated tomes of his collected writings along with ancient copies of Russkoe slovo,” the Russian Word, where his work had appeared. Young people, it was said, turned to them for answers to all of their “unanswered questions,” great and small.1 It is ironic that Pisarev would be remembered as an oracle, because the core message he sought to convey was that individuals must liberate themselves from any and every such guide. By advocating atheism, Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov had thrown open the question of how people were to construct meaning and codes of behavior in the absence of God. The answer Pisarev proposed, and for which he became famous, was that individuals must live by and for themselves; they must learn to think and to live according to their own impressions, tastes, and inclinations . Indeed, they must dispense with any and all principles and ideals, orienting themselves entirely in the present without the benefit of hope in the future. In advancing this individualistic view, Pisarev rejected the communal ethic of sacrifice cultivated by members of the revolutionary intelligentsia, as well as the ethics of friendship and cooperation that had become dominant among its members. Pisarev readily admitted that the individualistic code of thought and behavior he proposed would be difficult to sustain. In 1862, amidst 181 increasingly vigorous efforts by the state to curb radicalism, Pisarev was arrested and held in solitary confinement for more than four years. During this time, even he would reject his “nihilist” views. People, he now felt, needed something to believe in, something to live and hope for. They were called on—morally required—to make sacrifices for the good of humanity, which would only be possible if they permitted themselves to embrace this higher cause with “fanatical” devotion. After his release from prison, Pisarev’s thought underwent one final transformation . Rejecting radical “fanaticism,” he came to embrace “doubt” as the only legitimate stance a person could take. His writings sparked enormous controversy not only among liberals and conservatives but among radicals, some of whom regarded them as a threat to the revolutionary movement. Pisarev, they claimed, undermined his young readers’ commitment to the people’s cause by encouraging them to pursue their personal inclinations instead.2 His harshest critics would claim that Pisarev’s individualistic worldview was nothing but the product of his idiosyncratic psychology.3 They found ammunition for their claims in Pisarev’s own writings: in one autobiographical piece, Pisarev had noted that the philosophical and moral prescriptions he issued in the Russian Word in the early 1860s had partly been formed in response to an early mental breakdown in 1859, at the age of nineteen.4 Pisarev’s interest in psychology was not purely autobiographical, however: it was the product of new currents in Russian literature and journalism. As Lidiia Ginzburg noted, psychological prose arose in the mid-nineteenth century out of romantic concerns with the tensions between “dream and reality, the ideal and the real.” In later decades, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy would develop the romantic conception of the divided soul toward a more multifaceted representation of the human mind.5 In journalism, especially radical journalism, interest in psychology was further the product of a preoccupation with science and materialist explanations of the operations of the mind.6 A concern for Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov, psychology became a major preoccupation for Pisarev.7 Fascinated by the confrontation between the ideal and the real in the human mind, Pisarev drew both on literature and on popular science in elaborating his psychological views. Psychology was one of the central grounds on which he would frame his critique of belief in God. One of the most attractive features of Pisarev’s writing was the confidence and ease with which he invariably expressed his views. Yet this display masked fundamental doubts about himself and his relationship 182 Two Modes of Living without God to his readers, as well as to the people to whom he was closest. The only question about which he never expressed any hesitation was the nonexistence of God. To...