JOSEPH FRANK
only be accepted as "myth." Ludwig Feuerbach's
The Essence of
Christianity
caused an even greater furore in 1841 , and was far more
radical in its secularization of the divine. Taking his departure from
Hegel's concept of "alienation," Feuerbach maintained that the idea
of God and the dogmas of religion were the expression of man's own
essence as a species (not as this or that isolated individual), seen under
the aspect of perfection and objectified as a supposed Supreme Being.
Religion for Feuerbach was thus positively maleficent, since it con–
cealed the true perfections of man's nature from himself and prevented
him from working to attain the real fulfillment of his divine poten–
tialities.
Belinsky heard about Feuerbach's book in March, 1842, almost
immediately on its publication (this shows with what close attention
the Russian avant-garde were following European developments), and
a few chapters were translated for his especial benefit. Herzen, then
very close to Belinsky, learned of the book around the same time and
immediately became its enthusiastic champion. P. V. Annenkov,
in
The Remarkable Decade,
places the zenith of Feuerbach's Russian
influence around 1845, the very year in which Dostoevsky met Belin–
sky. "It may be safely affirmed," he writes "that nowhere did Feuer–
bach's book have such a shattering effect as in our 'Western' circle,
nowhere did it so quickly eliminate all traces of the views preceding it.
Herzen, of course, was an ardent interpreter of its ideas and 'con–
clusions, linking the revolution it declared in the realm of ideas with
that announced by the Socialists in politics-in this respect coinciding
with Belinsky."
During the summer of 1845, a crisis occurred among the little
group of Moscow Westerners precisely because of disagreements over
Feuerbach's atheism. The liberal historian T. N. Granovsky, who later
served as model for Stepan Trofimovitch Verkhovensky in
The Devils,
refused to surrender his belief in the immortality of the soul despite
Feuerbach and despite all of Herzen's slashing irony; and this caused
a rift between the two friends that was never completely healed.
Belinsky had made his own position clear in a letter to Herzen in
January, 1845-a letter in which we can see how his attitude toward
religion had hardened as a result of Feuerbach's teachings.
Shortly after his conversion to Utopian Socialism, under the
intellectual auspices of George Sand and Pierre Leroux, Belinsky had
