DOSTOEVSKY'S SOCIALISM
413
was regarded as a cunning priestly device for keeping the poor con–
tented with their lot. But the early Utopians were anything but
atheistic or anti-Christian in principle; on the contrary, they were all
profoundly religious both in inspiration and aspiration.
Saint-Simon, at the end of his life, had baptized his doctrine a
"New Christianity" based on the Christian principle of love; and
the Saint-Simonian school had attempted to found a new religion
which, however its doctrines might clash with official morality, was
still considered the direct result of divine inspiration. Fourier believed
in the immortality of the soul; and the axiom to which he constantly
appeals, as the foundation for all his reasoning, is that a loving God
would not have endowed man with certain drives if He had not wished
them to be satisfied. The ex-Saint-Simonian Pierre Leroux, whose
mystagogical ideas received the widest diffusion through the novels
of his disciple George Sand, believed in a "religion of humanity" whose
fundamental dogma was "equality" and which purported to synthesize
the teachings of Jesus Christ and Robespierre. Dostoevsky himse!f
correctly comments tllat, during the early forties, the "Socialism which
had only just then been born was compared to Christianity even by
some of its leaders, and considered at most as a modification and
improvement of this latter in conformity with the century of civiliza–
tion." This was the Socialism with which Dostoevsky was already
familiar, the Socialism he had embodied in
Poor Folk)
and the Social–
ism he unquestionably expected to find endorsed by Belinsky heart
and soul.
II
Between 1841 and 1845, however, another intellectual influence
had begun to make itself felt among the small group of Russian radical
intelligentsia whom Dostoevsky had not yet met, and of whose private
discussions and cogitations he was almost certainly completely ignorant.
This new influence was that of German Left Hegelianism, which began
its influential career, culminating in the historical materialism of Karl
Marx, by a ruthlessly penetrating critique of religion.
The opening gun in this Left Hegelian campaign was fired in
1835 by D. F. Strauss's
Lite at Jesus;
one of the ' few books that
Dostoevsky borrowed from the library of Petrashevsky. For Strauss,
Christian dogmas lacked any claim to historical veracity and could
