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Dostoyevski and the religion of suffering 2.

By Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé
Part Two
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Dostoevsky in 1847. Sketch by Konstiantyn Trutovsky.

WE HAVE ALREADY SHOWN what kind of spirit animated the bands of students who after 1840 clubbed together to discuss Fourier, Louis Blanc and Proudhon. About the year 1847 these societies opened their doors to journalists and to officers of the Army. They were all united into one general association under the presidency of Petrashevsky, one of the “old boys,” the author of the Dictionary of Foreign Terms, and an “agitator.”

Of the true story of the conspiracy that passes under his name, like all other history of that period, little is known. This much is certain, however, that the members were divided into two parties. One party united itself to its predecessors, the Decembrists of 1825, whose ambitions were limited to the emancipation of the serfs and to a Liberal constitution. The other party was in advance of its successors, the present Nihilists, and desired nothing less than the complete abolition of existing social conditions, however much hallowed by antiquity.

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