Испытание философией. Философия в императорской России перед «Великими реформами» 1860-х гг.

Abstract

The article is devoted to the state of philosophical knowledge in tsarist Russia in the first half of the XIX century – during the reign of emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I. The author notes the presence in Russia of a kind of “cultural pendulum”: periods of impulses to Enlightenment on European models are re­placed by retrogressions to obscurantism and self-isolation. Accordingly, there was a split of the ruling elite into two “macroparties”, which some observers (from the Decembrist A. Ulybyshev to A. Herzen) called the confrontation of “enlighteners” and “extinguishers”. The author of the article shows how in the late Alexander’s and Nicholay’s times, the initiators of the new “Extin­guishing” in Russia were often the official “ministers of Enlightement”, or even the first persons of the State. The first victim of counter-reforms in the field of education and culture (the author of the article calls them re­lapses of the “new barbarism”) has always been Philosophy, including that taught at Uuniversities. The author examines two periods of active cultural counter-reforms, the victim of which was the Russian Philosophy: the early 1820s, associated with the names of Magnitsky and Runich; and the late 1840s – early 1850s, when the conservative (but generally moderately enlightening) line of Count Uvarov was replaced by the openly reactionary policy of the new “minister of Enlightement” Prince Shirinsky-Shikhmatov.