DOSTOEVSKY'S SOCIALISM
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expounded his new ideal in terms that clearly reveal their derivation
from the "religion of humanity." "There will be neither rich nor poor,
neither kings nor subjects," he wrote in September, 1841, to V. P.
Botkin, "there will be brethren, there will be men, and, according
to the word of the apostle Paul, Christ will pass his power to the
Father, and Father-Reason will hold sway once more, but this time
in a new Heaven and above a new world." Much different are
his
remarks four years later: "In the words 'religion' and 'God,' " he says,
with his usual fanatic extremism, "I see darkness, gloom, chains and
the knout-and now I like these first two words as much as the
four following them."
Dostoevsky thus encountered Belinsky exactly at the moment
when the latter was under the strongest influence of Feuerbach's
atheism, and when this influence was beginning to replace the re–
ligiously inspired doctrines of the French Utopian Socialists. It is
interesting to see that Dostoevsky accurately notes
this
confluence of
competing currents in one of
his
articles. He reports a conversation
in which Belinsky begins by arguing that, if Christ were to return
to earth, he would be considered in the nineteenth century the most
ordinary and insignificant of men. But when a third person present
(tantalizingly unnamed, but perhaps Herzen) objects to this deprecia–
tion of Christ, and insists that the latter would immediately take his
place at the head of the Socialist movement, Belinsky concedes the
point and agrees.
"The movers of mankind whom Christ was predestined to join,"
Dostoevsky writes, "were then the French: especially George Sand,
Cabet (today completely forgotten), Pierre Leroux and Proudhon who
had just then only begun his career.... There was also a German that
he bowed down to then-Feuerbach (Belinsky, never having been able
to master a single foreign language in his life, pronounced it Fierbach) .
Of Strauss he spoke with reverence." Dostoevsky's judicious phrasing
-both the conjunction and separation of these names-is quite signi–
ficant: Christ belongs with the French, not the Germans. And Belin–
sky's own state of mind clearly emerges from the oscillation between
his initial contempt for Christ as "insignificant," and then
his
willing–
ness to agree with the Utopian Socialist opinion that Christ would, in
the modem world, have become a leader of the Socialists.
That Dostoevsky disputed vigorously with Belinsky over religion,
