420
JOSEPH
FRANK
crossroads where so many of the great figures of nineteenth-century
European culture finally had to choose their path; and the effed!
of this encounter with Feuerbach, through the medium of Belinsky,
were to be of momentous consequences for Dostoevsky's work.
For
when Dostoevsky's protagonists reject Christianity, they
inviriab~
engage in the impossible attempt to transcend the limits of the human
condition, and literally try to incarnate Feuerbach's dream of replacing
the God-man by the Man-god.
IV
It
has
seemed permissible, for purposes of exposition, to
discU91
the question of Dostoevsky's religion independently of his social con·
victions; but such a separation
is
entirely unhistorical in the context
of
the early nineteenth century. Religion and politics, as we have already
indicated, were intimately intertwined; and any shift in religious
opinion immediately brought in its wake a corresponding shift in
socio–
political attitude.
The abandonment of Saint-Simon's "New Christianity" and
Pierre Leroux for Feuerbach thus immediately led to
a
sharp decline
in the prestige of all social doctrines based on Christian ideals, and
inspired with reverence for the sublime figure and example of Christ.
Belinsky's letters during 1847 show him abusively critical of
his
erstwhile idols, Pierre Leroux and George Sand, and inclining rather
toward Comtean positivism and materialism. Both Marx, under the
influence of Feuerbach, and Proudhon, probably independently, were
rejecting the French Utopians exactly at this moment; and it is
likely
that Belinsky was influenced by their ideas through the writings and
correspondence of his friends. P. V. Annenkov, who knew
Marx
personally and corresponded with him about Proudhon, wrote a series
of
Paris Letters
for Belinsky's magazine
The Contemporary
during the
fall of 1846 which were largely a review of current Utopian Socialist
doctrines. Here he refers pityingly to the "fantasmagorias" of Cabet
and the Fourierist Victor Considerant; calls the theories of Leroux
"the farthest extreme of madness to which a noble and virtuous heart
can go"; and praises Proudhon for investigating the economic laws
of modern society rather than dreaming up impossible Utopias.
Belinsky, then, was rejecting religion
and
the Utopian Socialism
it had inspired exactly at the period when he was arguing about
