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26 - Nineteenth-Century Russia

from Part V - Classical Modernity: Social and Political Currents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2021

Michael Ruse
By
Victoria Frede
Edited by
Stephen Bullivant
Michael Ruse
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Stephen Bullivant
Affiliation:
St Mary's University, Twickenham, London
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Summary

In this chapter, atheism is treated as the acceptance of the proposition that God does not exist. In Imperial Russia, where piety remained a powerful social and political norm well into the nineteenth century, individuals who accepted this proposition were forced to contend with three entangled problems. One was the relationship between piety and morality: the possibility of articulating secular norms of good and evil and of behaving according to such norms in the absence of faith in God and the afterlife. Denying God’s existence hence entailed asserting one’s capacity to set oneself rules. A second recurring theme was the denial of God’s status as a providential being, creator of the natural world, whose will structures human destinies. In Russia, the assertion that God does not exist was also an assertion of the power of the individual to shape his or her own fate, or to cast aside the concept of fate altogether.

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The Cambridge History of Atheism , pp. 482 - 499
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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Suggestions for Further Reading

Dostoevsky, F. 2000. Demons, trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Frede, V. 2011. Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia. Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press.Google Scholar
Paperno, I. 1988. Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Read, C. 1979. Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1900–1912: The Vekhi Debate and its Intellectual Background. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Vucinich, A. 1988. Darwin in Russian Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar

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