Russian radical journalists elevated materialism to the status of a worldview that contained the answers to the country’s most pressing political and social problems. From 1858, the two leading radical journals, The Contemporary and The Russian Word, became synonymous with materialism. Articles by its most famous representatives, Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Dobroliubov, Maksim Antonovich, and Dmitrii Pisarev, had an experimental quality and were not free of contradictions. The debate about the relationship between body and mind has always tended to center on two positions. Ideas may be formed in an immaterial soul; or, as materialists insist, they are produced by the body. Pamfil Iurkevich began from an idealist perspective by critiquing Chernyshevskii’s materialist claim that thoughts are produced by matter. Ivan Turgenev showed, then, that materialism did not necessarily heighten respect for dignity in other people; still less did it enable people to manifest the “divine spark” of their own humanity.