The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  Just as Dostoevsky had prepared Russia for Nietzsche, so too, Rosenthal says, had the Russian intelligenty, its intelligentsia. This was a movement born in the mid–nineteenth century, composed mainly of the sons and daughters of the nobility who were intent on transforming Russia, then a very backward country in terms of industrialization and urbanization. And although many of them were atheists, they accepted the kenotic values of self-sacrifice, humility and love, believing that ideas imported from more “advanced” Western European countries could transform their land. This was, in effect, says Rosenthal, a surrogate religion, an ideology of salvation.11 Nietzsche was even present, she suggests, in the pseudonyms that certain Bolsheviks adopted, in particular Stalin (born Josef Djugashvili), Molotov (Viacheslav Skriabin) and Kamenev (Lev Rozenfeld), names that stem from the Russian words for “steel,” “hammer” and “stone” respectively, and recall Nietzsche’s injunction, “Be hard!”12

  In more narrowly cultural terms, which may be regarded as surrogate-religious and post-Christian in orientation, Rosenthal focuses on Russian Symbolism, Futurism and Proletkult, and particularly on Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Viacheslav Ivanov, Lev Shestov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Bogdanov and Sergei Eisenstein. “Russian symbolism,” she writes, “started out as a religion of art. . . . Aesthetic creativity gives life meaning . . . art leads to high truths.”

  Symbolism began in part as a rejection of vulgar mass culture. “Symbolist works bypass the intellect to address the psyche directly and were crafted to evoke chains of subliminal associations and a mysterious, otherworldly mood. The poetry suggests rather than states, sometimes in arcane or vatic language.” Merezhkovsky thought that “historical Christianity” was obsolete but argued that people need religious faith as much as they need food. He sought a “new religious consciousness” through the example of such figures as Goethe, Pushkin and Tolstoy, with whom he disagreed on many details but with whom he aligned himself when Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Russian Church. Merezhkovsky helped to found the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Society, which was eventually closed down because the sight of clergymen and lay intellectuals debating on equal terms, as well as openly discussing the role of sex, was too intoxicating for the people, who attended the debates in capacity audiences.13

  SOBORNOST AND CREATIVITY: BREAKING FREE OF GOD

  Viacheslav Ivanov, described by Rosenthal as a “Nietzschean Christian,” was likewise to be understood as a Dionysian, a believer in the “loss of self” that comes about in mystical ecstasy, and in the liberation of the “passions and instincts” repressed by Christianity. Beauty and creativity were for him the dominant virtues, along with “emotional liberation.” Ivanov also embraced what he called a “mystical anarchism,” a doctrine that purported to combine personal freedom with membership of a “loving community.” He had a slogan, “non-acceptance of the world,” which entailed a refusal to accept the world God created, and chose instead to envision a “new organic society” characterized by freedom, beauty and love.

  “Mystical anarchism” was in reality no more than a politicized Dionysianism that emphasized both destruction and creativity, and was therefore recognizably Nietzschean. But Ivanov repudiated Nietzsche’s “will to power,” Rosenthal says; he emphasized instead powerlessness, a new society in which no human being would rule another and “dominance and subordination would cease. The social cement would be the internal and invisible bonds of love, myth and sacrifice.” Ivanov didn’t eschew Christianity entirely but thought it needed adding to and, in some areas, replacing. For example, Dionysian theatre should replace the churches and “inner experience” should replace dogma. In the original Dionysian theatre, he claimed, there were no spectators—each participant took part in the “orgy of action,” which became an “orgy of purification.” “The chorus was a mystical entity, an embodiment of sobornost, in which the participants shed their separateness, to achieve a ‘living union,’ which Ivanov hoped to extend to society at large. The chorus, not the newly created Duma, was the authentic voice of the people.” Ivanov contended that a theatre which directed itself at the unconscious and induced “self-forgetting” in “mystical ecstasy” would foster the “non-egoistic, communitarian psyche required in a society without coercion.”

  Dionysian theatre didn’t catch on as much as it might have, or as Ivanov and others hoped, though people did talk about the “will to theatre” and Dionysian theatre-cafés were created, which abolished the stage and experimented with author-audience dialogue. Later still, Ivanov came around to the view that “Dionysus in Russia is dangerous.”

  Lev Shestov made his name with books offering new interpretations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. His core idea was that we must “struggle with God,” meaning dogma should never be accepted without being thoroughly examined, and sometimes it should not be accepted at all; likewise, he attacked philosophical systems (Christianity included) because, he said, they tried to impose a nonexistent unity on the world and, in the main, glossed over the horrors of life (which Dostoevsky and Nietzsche didn’t do, but Tolstoy did). Shestov didn’t believe in Utopia, or in community—suffering, he said, was always individual, and he therefore argued, scandalously for the time, that philosophy must abandon its search for eternal truths and instead “teach people to live in uncertainty.”14

  Nikolai Berdyaev proposed a religion of creativity, outlined first in The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916). In this work he explained that creative experience is a new kind of experience, and that “creative ecstasy” is an “out-breaking into another world.” Creativity was for him the ultimate free act and the act in which humans finally break free of God, or Christ. Creativity, freedom and individuality were one, a kind of post-Christian trinity, and all three involved sacrifice and suffering. “Formal freedom,” as he called it, political freedom, was empty and negative, unlike creativity, which was positive freedom. In the new world “‘living dangerously’ would be regarded as a virtue and living in beauty as a commandment . . . beauty is a great force and it will save the world.”15

  The Nietzschean Marxists, a term coined by the American philosopher George Kline, despised both bourgeois and Christian morality. They also had what Kline called a “voracious will to the future,” which involved “a readiness to reduce living individuals to instruments or means to a future goal, and to sacrifice their well-being and even their lives, for the sake of this goal.” Aleksandr Bogdanov believed that in a truly scientific society people would follow “expediency norms” voluntarily, much as an engineer follows similar norms when designing a bridge. These norms would reflect the “new society” values of labor, egalitarianism, collectivism and “comradely cooperation.” Bogdanov listed his “Ten Expediency Norms” to replace those other “Thou shalts” and “Thou shalt nots,” among them:

  There shall be no herd instinct (number 1).

  There shall be no absolute norms (number 5).

  There shall be no inertia (number 6).

  There shall be no violation of the purity of purpose (number 7).

  He contrasted “creativity” with “inertia” because he was worried by Nietzsche’s criticism of socialism as being, like Christianity, a “slave morality.”16

  THE PLAN: THE IDEAL “AHEAD,” NOT THE IDEAL “ABOVE”

  Anatoly Lunacharsky, another of Kline’s Nietzschean Marxists, argued that the idea of a just and harmonious society is an aesthetic ideal and that the ideal ahead was more of a motivating force than the ideal above, which only fosters “passive mysticism and self-absorption. . . . The task of the political activist is to develop people’s confidence in their power to achieve a better future and seek a rational path to it. The task of the artist is to depict that future and to inspire people to struggle for it, to imbue them with the ‘feelings of tragedy, the joy of struggle and victory, with Promethean aspirations, stubborn pride, implacable courage, to unite hearts in a common rush of feeling for the
Superman.’” Lunacharsky even understood Wagner’s operas in Nietzschean terms, believing “that beautiful illusions are necessary now that ‘God is dead, and the universe is without meaning.’” In his essay “Art and Revolution,” he endorsed Wagner’s view that art and social movements have the same goal, “the creation of a strong, beautiful [new] man, to whom revolution shall give his strength and art his beauty.”17

  Fine-sounding words, but the Nietzschean Marxists also subscribed to the view that against the class enemy “all will be permitted,” even actions “ordinarily considered criminal.” In Lunacharsky’s book Religion and Socialism (two volumes, 1908 and 1911), one of the characters says: “We have got to change our God. . . . It is necessary . . . to invent a new faith; it is necessary to create a God for all.” That new faith, that new ideal, for Lunacharsky, was a plan by which man would reconstruct the world. “In labor, in technology [the new man] found himself to be a god and dictated his will to the world.” Lunacharsky distinguished five stages of religion: cosmism (animism), Platonism, Judaism, Christianity and socialism. Socialism was the “religion of labor” and “progress.”

  Maxim Gorky, the third of the Nietzschean Marxists, “Writer Number 1” in the Soviet Union and a great favorite of Stalin, distinguished himself by including the “new woman” in all this. For him, she, too, could be heroic and independent, and in Bogdanov’s utopian science-fiction novels Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1913) the women are almost indistinguishable from the men, with equal access to employment, information and the pleasant suicide rooms where they can choose, as Nietzsche counseled, to “die at the right time.”18

  The Futurists—the new man-artists—specifically affirmed life on this earth, concreteness and an emphasis on the individual. They were famously obsessed by the new technology, not just in physics but in aircraft, which seemed to underlie the accelerated pace of change, which in turn fostered a belief in “the transience of all things as a permanent condition.” The Futurist opera Victory over the Sun (Pobeda nad solntsem, 1913) was both Wagnerian and Nietzschean in concept. “The subtext of the opera, and of the futurist aesthetic in general, is Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God and its consequences—a world with no inherent order or meaning.” The sun of the title is Apollo, the god of rationality, clarity and logic, and consequently the archenemy, as Rosenthal puts it, of “utopians and visionaries.” “Its capture liberates humankind from the constraints of necessity. The chorus sings: ‘We are free / broken sun . . . / Long live darkness!’ The juxtaposition of discordant images underscores the lack of inherent meaning, order, or purpose in the world.”19

  The Futurists’ “new men,” who capture the sun, are invariably variants of Nietzsche’s “barbarians,” male or androgynous “but definitely not female.” They are of enormous size, of great strength, robust, healthy and hard. Their names are generic (“aviator,” “sportsman”) and their facial features never specified—a sharp break with Orthodox theology, “which regards the human face as the epitome of Christian personhood.”

  Kazimir Malevich thought that Cubism had freed humankind from being “slavish” in its imitation of nature—the new world, he said, would be created out of new forms. With Suprematism (a Nietzschean coinage if ever there was one), his idea was to create in a way that was “unbounded” by nature, by reason, by content even, “in order to depict a purely spiritual reality beyond the world of nature and objects, a breakthrough to the fourth dimension, a realm beyond death.” His Black Square (1915) symbolized “formlessness, the abyss,” whereas White on White (1918), in representing purity, was intended to herald the dawn of a new world “to be constructed by artists.” He went so far as to call Suprematism a “New Gospel.”20

  Early Nietzschean alternatives to orthodox religion did not fulfill the promise. Mystical anarchism was a doctrine “concocted” (says Rosenthal) by Georgy Chulkov (1879–1939) that sought to combine personal freedom within a loving community, but was in fact a “mish-mash” of Nietzsche, Alexander Herzen, Bakunin and Merezhkovsky, Ibsen, Byron, utopian socialism, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It involved a refusal to accept the world God was held to have created, and was allied to a political Dionysianism that emphasized the link between destruction and creativity. All tradition had to be destroyed and a “new organic society” created based on an idea of the “mystical person” who seeks union with others, as opposed to the egoistic “empirical person” who insists on his rights and interests. “God-building” involved turning people from passive spectators into active participants in all matters. It embodied the idea that creativity was within everyone, that “life-creation” was the purpose of existence and that, within a loving, democratic community, liberation for all would be possible.

  GOD DEFIED

  These tendencies were aided by the Great War, which seemed to indicate that the critics of the Enlightenment had been right—man is not naturally rational or good. In such a situation, material and spiritual revolution went together. In 1918, Lenin decreed a number of “monumental propaganda” projects, including what were known as “God-defying” towers and other structures (Tatlin’s Tower was the most famous, although it only ever existed in model form and was never built). Lunacharsky and Ivanov regarded mass festivals as unions of the artist and the people, not only making the experience of living more vibrant but also inculcating among them a “will to power” without which the new society and the new spiritualism could not come into being. This particularly applied to the Communist Youth League (Komsomol). Hardness, daring and will became the watchwords in the fusion of Marxism and Nietzschean thought forged by Lenin, Bukharin and Trotsky. “Cruelty to enemies became a sacred duty.”21

  Was Lenin a closet Nietzschean? He was certainly a personification of the will to power, as Rosenthal says. He kept a copy of Zarathustra in his Kremlin office and The Birth of Tragedy in his personal library; and though Hegel, Clausewitz, Darwin and Machiavelli were more direct influences, his revolutionary immoralism, and his elitism, were classic Nietzschean positions.

  In this he was supported by Nikolai Bukharin, the most erudite of the Bolsheviks, who had lived in Germany and Austria. Bukharin was enthusiastic about creating a new society and a new man; he thought that “communist mankind” could be “forged” out of the “human material left from capitalism,” reconceived the proletariat as the “Promethean class,” and the new culture as the “proletarian avant-garde.” In particular, he endorsed Nietzsche’s view that “we should reconsider cruelty and open our eyes. . . . Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.” Communism, he was convinced, was going to lead to a higher culture than bourgeois culture. These were “cruel times,” and peace between the social classes was impossible. Trotsky was a more obvious post-Nietzschean, much influenced by the “superman” idea, that the contemporary age was an age of chaos out of which the triumph of collectivism would reflect the “will” of the people.

  “A HIGHER SOCIAL-BIOLOGIC TYPE”

  We need now to discuss a number of rather distinct cultural developments that are also directly related to our theme. One was the emergence of the Scythians, followers of an ideology conceived by Ivanov-Razumnik (real name, Razumnik Vasilievich Ivanov, 1891–1981), essayist and poet, who helped to found the Free Philosophical Association of Petrograd (a successor to the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Society), which became home to many followers of the occult doctrine of anthroposophy, founded by Rudolf Steiner, a former Theosophist.

  The Scythian ideology distinguished between “revolutionary socialism” and “philistine socialism.” The Scythians thought of themselves as a new type, “as man-artists who, like the original Scythians, would never settle down into some sort of bourgeois order” as had occurred in France after the Revolution. The Scythians, as envisaged by Ivanov-Razumnik, comprised a “horde” galloping wildly across the steppes. These “peasant-poets emphasized the dominance of the countryside
over the city and were adamantly anti-intellectual.” They praised the “barbaric potential of the people. They did not exalt cruelty, but they accepted it as part of a process of spiritual purification and cultural renewal. Their writings are studded with ‘will to’ formulations such as the ‘will to cross the abyss.’”22

  Proletkult was a more general coalition of workers’ clubs, factory committees, workers’ theatres and educational societies. Numbering half a million adherents at its peak in 1920, Proletkult’s mission was plainly to create a new man and a new culture. Its unofficial theoretician was Bogdanov, though Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife) sat on the central committee. Pavel Kerzhentsev, a man of the theatre and a publisher, defined the “task of the proletkults [as] the development of an independent proletarian spiritual culture, including all areas of the human spirit—science, art and everyday life.”23