Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia

3 Atheists of 1849: Katenev’s Tobacco Store Circle and Petrashevsky’s “Fridays”

3 Atheists of 1849 Katenev’s Tobacco Store Circle and Petrashevsky’s “Fridays” One Thursday night in the spring of 1849, at the Golden Anchor tavern in St. Petersburg, a young man named Vasilii Katenev began arguing with another customer and “asserted that there is no God and that religion is invented.” Pressed on this point, Katenev again “denied the existence of God” as well as the divinity of Jesus Christ.1 Speeches of this kind were unheard of in St. Petersburg or anywhere else in Russia at this time, and Katenev’s fellows at the tavern were shocked. They warned him several times that he should stop talking because he might be denounced to the police; blasphemy still constituted a crime in imperial Russia.2 Indeed, an agent of the Ministry of the Interior was present and copied down his words verbatim. Katenev was only nineteen years old when he made his speech at the Golden Anchor on Vasilievskii Island, a popular watering hole among students. The son of a wealthy merchant, he was registered as an auditor at St. Petersburg University, though he attended lectures infrequently. Katenev had two friends, Petr Shaposhnikov and Aleksei Tolstov, who shared his radical views. They belonged to the same burgeoning social category, the amorphous estate of urban inhabitants (gorodskoe soslovie), which itself comprised numerous legal subcategories: merchants, petty traders, artisans, and others. In the mid-nineteenth century, roughly 7 percent of all Russians belonged to this category.3 Of the three, Shaposhnikov , twenty-eight, was the only one actively engaged in trade. The 89 tobacco store he owned furnished their regular meeting place, and it was located on St. Petersburg Side, a neighborhood heavily inhabited by tradesmen. Tolstov, about twenty-three years old, was a registered student at the university. Tolstov had attracted the attention of the Ministry of the Interior well before Katenev made his speech in the Golden Anchor; as a police agent noted, his “thoughts are extremely free and his manners are wild as can be.”4 The reign of Nicholas I was a period of marked economic growth, and as Russian industry expanded, so did the number of urban dwellers. Wealthy merchants had long resisted Westernization, but some now began to encourage their sons to attend secondary schools and university and to adopt Western manners of dress, to exchange their bowlshaped haircuts, full beards, and long cloaks for top hats, a clean shave, and fashionable clothing. Yet sons of merchants and petty traders were met with unease at gymnasia and universities, which they entered in rising numbers. The 1840s were a period of growth at these institutions: enrollments at universities doubled in less than one decade. Nicholas I and his minister of education, Sergei Uvarov, however, were fearful of the consequences. Not only would these young men compete with the nobility for civil service positions, but education itself might exert a corrupting influence on them, introducing an element of instability into Russian society and politics. New measures restricting nonnoble access to gymnasia and universities were instituted in the 1840s, though the administration refrained from banning merchants’ sons entirely: practical considerations prevailed.5 Once they had graduated, Westernized merchants’ sons entered the world as social outsiders. They were greeted with suspicion by fellow members of merchant society—these young “gentlemen” were criticized for rising above their station and embracing Western ideas of dubious moral value. When they entered the bureaucracy , they garnered little respect among noble officials.6 The literary elite, too, regarded them as outsiders who sought upward mobility through education.7 All the while, merchants, their sons, and other urban dwellers became the subject of increasing literary attention in the 1840s. Merchants entered the stage as characters in plays by Alexander Ostrovsky. Writers of the “natural school” also painted sentimental portraits of humbler figures: organ grinders, yard keepers, cabdrivers, low-ranking civil servants, and their despairing wives. They were portrayed as vulnerable but gritty survivors attempting to eke out an existence in the imperial capital.8 Fedor Dostoevsky best captured the humility, resignation, desperation, and vengefulness of St. Petersburg’s lowly inhabitants, who oscillated 90 Atheism between an attitude of abject humiliation and pride. Whether drunken reprobates or saints, they were uniformly demeaned in public by their social superiors. Returning to their hovels to nurse their wounds, they comforted and abused one another, cursed their fate, and awaited a better turn of fortune. Katenev, Shaposhnikov...