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Introduction
- University of Wisconsin Press
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Introduction Youngsters like us,” Ivan Karamazov tells his brother Alesha, “must first and foremost resolve the eternal questions; that is our concern. The youth of Russia speaks of nothing but those timeless questions right now.” Alesha, the hero of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, agrees that the two most important are the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.1 In nineteenth-century Russia, educated people came to view these questions as central to defining their identity and believed it was the moral obligation of every thinking person to attempt to answer them. This book is about why that mode of inquiry became laden with such meaning and how atheism—disbelief in the existence of God—came to be regarded by one segment of Russia’s youth as the only viable answer. The question of the existence of God, though a problem central to modern Western philosophy, took on a peculiarly intensive, existential quality in Russia. Whereas in France, Great Britain, and Germany, metaphysical doubt could and did resolve itself into polite agnosticism by the end of the nineteenth century, in Russia, by contrast, it deepened into a struggle for the salvation of both the individual and the country as a whole. What were the circumstances that leant these questions such intensity? The explanation lies in the unique relationship of Russian writers and thinkers to an autocratic state that founded its ideology on Orthodox faith, the way that relationship intersected with and became infused by new thinking from beyond imperial borders, and the changing social composition of Russian educated society over the course of the century. Finally, there was the small size of the Russian intelligentsia, with its tightly defined codes of comportment, in which actions and reactions could take on their own motive force. 3 At one level, this investigation offers a linear account of how a negative stance, centering on doubt, unfolded in the first half of the nineteenth century, changed under the influence of new intellectual traditions, and was replaced by the positive assertion of an atheistic worldview. At another, deeper level it is about why the question of the existence of God became the crucible in which the identities of educated Russians were formed and allegiances defined. The question was all the more contentious because many members of educated Russian society continued to believe that there could be no morality and no reason for living without faith in a transcendent God. The Brothers Karamazov (1880) neatly illustrates this dilemma in its analysis of the proposition that, without faith in the immortality of the soul, “everything is permissible.” Ivan Karamazov is the one to pose it, provoking uproar in the provincial town where the novel is set by telling a group of ladies that a person who does not believe is not only free but obliged, to commit the most heinous acts conceivable.2 In exploring this idea, Dostoevsky drew on views that prelates of the Russian Orthodox Church had been pressing ever since the mid-eighteenth century. Senior clergymen responded to the rising importation of Western philosophical and theological tracts by warning that many of these were dangerous texts, which could all too easily lead the reader astray—into unbelief. It was in their sermons that the terms ateizm, deizm, and naturalizm first entered Russian-language print.3 Loss of faith, they claimed, could not but devastate the individual and must be accompanied by debauchery, insanity, despair, and suicide. Their message—that there could be no middle course between Orthodox faith and depraved godlessness— quickly found its way into the secularized sphere of high culture in the second half of the eighteenth century. Every leading writer, from Sumarokov and Derzhavin to Kheraskov, Emin, and Fonvizin, joined the choir, decrying atheism or godlessness to demonstrate that they had not been corrupted by contact with Western ideas but maintained their piety (however vaguely defined). By the time Dostoevsky wrote his best-known novels, atheism had become a very real phenomenon. Yet the view that atheism could only led to despair and self-annihilation remained influential. In Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1872), the would-be atheist, Aleksei Kirillov, found that suicide was the formula by which he must overcome God: “God is the pain of the fear of death. Whoever triumphs over pain and fear, shall become God. [. . .] Whoever dares to kill himself is [a] god. Now anyone can ensure that there shall be no God and nothing shall be.”4 4 Introduction [54.166.223.204...