Atheis Add a review

Atheis (English: Atheist) is a 1949 Indonesian novel written by Achdiat Karta Mihardja and published by Balai Pustaka. The novel, using three narrative voices, details the rise and fall of Hasan, a young Muslim who is raised to be religious but winds up doubting his faith after dealings with his Marxist–Leninist childhood friend and an anarcho-nihilist writer.

Mihardja, a journalist-cum-literary editor who associated with the eccentric poet Chairil Anwar and the Socialist Party of Indonesia, wrote Atheis from May 1948 to February 1949. The Indonesian used in the novel was influenced by Sundanese and harkens back to earlier works by Minang writers, as opposed to Mihardja's contemporaries who attempted to distance themselves from the earlier style. Dealing mainly with faith, the novel also touches on the interactions between modernity and traditionalism. Although the writer insisted that the work was meant to be realistic, symbolic representations from subjective meanings to the novel being an allegory have been advanced.

After the novel was published, it caused considerable discussion. Religious thinkers, Marxist-Leninists, and anarchists decried the novel for not explaining their ideologies in more detail, but literary figures and many in the general public praised it; this positive reception may have been influenced by the nascent government's need to promote literature for nation-building. Atheis was translated into Malay before 1970 and into English in 1972; it was also adapted into a film with the same title in 1974. The novel, which received an award from the Indonesian government in 1969, is one of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works.