By Whitney Eggers, Production Dramaturg

“A young man, expelled from the university…
falling under the influence of the strange,
‘unfinished’ ideas afloat in the atmosphere…”
—Dostoevsky

French Utopian Socialism, popular in Russia in the 1840s

One of the primary French Utopian Socialist thinkers was Charles Fourier (1772-1837), a philosopher, socialist, and feminist. According to his beliefs, poverty was the cause of social ills, and he called for a redistribution of wealth through communal living, in planned communities called “phalansteries,” in which members would be paid according to their contribution. Such living did not eliminate the possibility for wealth, but did eliminate destitution. Fourier advocated the equality of women, capable of holding jobs, and believed traditional marriage damaged the rights of women. Important to an understanding of Utopian Socialism is its belief in a peaceful new world which “appeared to the generation of the forties as a continuation of Christianity, as the attainment of evangelical truth. It was a translation of the Christian Apocalypse into contemporary ‘social terms” (Mochulsky). The ideas of Fourier influenced the wave of revolutions across Europe that took place in 1848, beginning in France. Atheism rose up as a reaction against Utopian Socialism, a reaction likely influenced by the fact that the wave of revolutions had little practical effect, and in the 1860s an ideological war rose up between the Utopian Socialist thinkers, considered by this point out of date, and the new Nihilistic thinkers, who used Utilitarian logic.

German Left Hegelians, in Russia a response to Utopian Socialists of the 1840s

A radical, revolutionary interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy that developed after Hegel’s death in 1831, the Left Hegelians valued Freedom and Reason above all else, critiquing religion as irrational, and arguing the story of Jesus was a myth warped by those in power to subdue the masses. Feuerbach (1804-1872), a prominent Left Hegelian, wrote that “God—and Christ—were merely fictions representing the alienated essence of mankind’s highest values. The task of mankind was thus to reappropriate its own essence by reassuming the powers and prerogatives alienated to the divine” (Frank). In other words, Left Hegelians sought to replace God-man [Christ] with man-God. This line of thought led into Marxism (Marx was for a time a Left Hegelian), and influenced the thought of Nihilists and Materialists. Dostoevsky was introduced to Left Hegelian thought through his mentor Belinsky, but ultimately came to reject it, believing as Kierkegaard that religion was not subject to reason, but required a leap of faith.

English Utilitarianism, popular in Russia in the 1860s.

In Utilitarianistic thought, the morality of an action is determined by its usefulness in achieving the greatest good for the greatest number of people. As such, it’s a teleological theory—its interest lies in the end result of action, an idea frequently expressed in the axiom “The end justifies the means.” Prominent thinkers contributing to this line of thought include Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), who advocated establishing a “utilitarian code of law,” through which the goodness or utility of an action was pragmatically calculated, and William Godwin (1756-1836), a utilitarian and anarchist who believed man was not inherently evil, but rather evil was impressed on man from his circumstances. In his 1793 book Political Justice¸ Godwin famously argued that reason would and ought to persuade a man to leave his mother burning in a fire in order to rescue the Archbishop Fénelon, a theologian and defender of human rights, because Fénelon was of more worth to humanity. Feelings such as familial love and other such sentiments are not ruled by reason, and should therefore be disregarded.

Russia experienced a unique and peculiar blend of French Utopian Socialism and Utilitarianism. Two examples of this blend of thought are Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) and Belinsky (1811-1848), two of the most prominent Utilitarian thinkers in Russia. Chernyshevsky was a founder of Narodism, or Russian populism, in which he advocated the overthrow of autocracy in favor of the old Slavic commune living, an idea influenced by the Utopian Socialist Fourrier. In works such as What Is To Be Done? (the title of which Lenin borrowed for his own pamphlet) and The Anthropological Principle in Anthropology, Chernyshevsky argues that man is subservient to nature—in other words, he has no free will, and using Utilitarian theory, rejects traditional Christian values, identifying “good” and “evil” in terms of utility to the greatest number. Taken to its extreme, as traditional morality does not exist in Utilitarian thought, but is completely redefined by utility, the definition of crime is up for debate: murder, if justifiable through Utilitarian logic, is not a crime.

Belinsky, originally a champion of Dostoevsky’s work, eventually subscribed to a similar blend of Utopian Socialism and Utilitarianism. Biographer Konstantin Mochulsky writes that Belinsky, “out of his love for mankind, revolted against God and refused to believe in the creator of an imperfect world. He was a fanatic insofar as his love for people was concerned: ‘Sociality, sociality or death! This is my motto,’ he declared. If to ensure the happiness of the majority, one were forced to cut off a hundred thousand heads—he would cut them off. …Belinsky’s influence was ultimately to determine the fate of Russian socialism: atheistic materialism succeeded in trampling down Christian utopianism; the way was being prepared for Marxist Communism.” Though Dostoevsky was once a follower of Belinsky, he rejected this line of thought after his term in exile. In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky takes Utilitarianism to its extreme, showing how these “half-formed ideas” can, in their advocacy of any action for the greatest good, condone and perhaps inevitably lead to destruction.

Nihilism, popular in Russia in the 1860s

Nihilism in Russia was closely tied with Utilitarianism; it can in fact be seen as a logical development from Utilitarianism, and a departure from Utopian Socialist thought, with which it was in conflict in the 1860s. According to Frank, “The most important event in Russian culture between 1863 and 1865 was a public quarrel between two groups of radicals—the old Utopian Socialists, and the new Nihilists.” Whereas Utopian Socialists advocated peaceful means toward a Golden Age, and the power of reason and persuasion to achieve their ends, by 1865 many radicals found this line of thought out of date and ineffective. Using Utilitarian thought and social Darwinism, Nihilists argued that there was a distinction between the weak and the strong, and that in fact the strong had a right to trample over the weak.  

One of the greatest influences on Dostoevsky from the Nihilist camp was Dimitry Pisarev, a “brilliant and volatile” radical young critic (Frank). In his critical defense of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, he held up the character of the Nihilist Bazarov, extolling his extreme personal superiority as the epitome of the radical’s self-image. In his article, Pisarev divides the population into the masses and the small group of superior men, to whom nothing is forbidden, and who recognize no moral law. The masses, he wrote, “in every period have lived contentedly, and with their inherent placidity have been satisfied with what was at hand. …The mass does not make discoveries or commit crimes; other people think and suffer, search and find, struggle and err on its behalf—other people eternally alien to it, eternally regarding it with contempt, and at the same time eternally working to increase the amenities of its life.”

Shortly before writing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky published an article about the battle between the two schools of thought entitled “Schism [Raskol in the original Russian] Among the Nihilists.” Frank links this article, and Pisarev’s influence, to Dostoevsky’s creation of a young student influenced by “strange, incomplete ideas,” whose basis for murder lies in an extreme application of Utilitarian/Nihilist thought. Their ideas of the division between strong and weak, and particularly Dostoevsky’s dramatization of it, influenced Nietzsche and his concept of the Übermensch, the Over- or Superman.  

Existentialism, as practiced by Kierkegaard 

Kierkegaard (1813-1855), often called the “Father of Existentialism,” criticized an overemphasis on logic, arguing experience was more important. Man finds meaning and motivation in subjective forces such as feeling and religion—these are ungoverned by reason. Kierkegaard argued that religion required a leap of faith, an idea with some circularity, since such a leap is done by faith as well as towards it. Dostoevsky came to the same conclusion, struggling all his life with the conflict between reason and faith. Keirkegaard also developed an idea of dread or anxiety, whereby man feels the full terror of his freedom—an example is the simultaneous fear of falling and impulse to voluntarily jump when standing at the edge of a tall building. One’s complete freedom to do anything, good or bad, triggers a “dizziness of freedom,” experienced as anxiety. This dread can lead to either sin or to salvation.  

Marxism and Communism

As noted above, Marxism evolved out of nearly all of the preceding philosophies, particularly French Utopian Socialism and Left Hegelianism, both of which Karl Marx (1818-1883) studied. Along with Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867), in which societal history is argued to be a history of class struggle, with the oppression and exploitation of the common worker as its recurrent theme. Eventually the working class would rise up to replace capitalism with socialism, ultimately arriving at communism, a system in which the idea of social classes would not exist. Marx went farther than Fourier and the Utopian Socialists in his socialist vision, since private wealth was still possible under Fourier’s system, and was to be embodied on a much smaller scale than Marx envisioned; in its omission of a spiritual element, and its materialist bent; and in its mode of implementation, as Utopian Socialists relied on reason and peaceful propaganda, whereas Marx believed in the importance of a revolution.

However, Marxism, as it came to be practiced in Russia, was largely determined by thinkers such as Belinsky and Chernyshevsky. Given the ideological temperament of Russia at the time—with Nihilism and Utilitarianism its predominating modes of thought—Marxism was adapted to fit Russia’s own circumstances in Vladimir Lenin’s pamphlet “What Is To Be Done?” (1902) (from the title of Chernyshevsky’s novel), in which the anticipated a revolution evolved from Marx’s idea of a spontaneous, plebeian-lead uprising to his own vision of a professional revolution lead by a vanguard party of revolutionaries. This group of more advanced thinkers would educate and correct the poorer working classes, who, given the extent of their exploitation, could only be expected to have a capitalistic consciousness. This revolution was achieved in the October Revolution of 1917, which brought the Bolsheviks to power and culminated in the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922. In the years following Lenin’s death in 1924, internal fighting between Trotsky and his followers, who maintained a closer link with Marxism and Leninism, particularly in advocating a worldwide revolution, and Stalin and his followers, who restricted their focus to Russia, ended with Stalin’s rise to power. Rather than the original goal of a dictatorship of the proletariat and a policy of democratic centralism, described by Lenin as “freedom of discussion, unity of action,” Russia saw a movement towards a totalitarian dictatorship and a bureaucracy of terror.