Boris Sadovsky – Traditionalist Thinker of the Silver Age

Abstract

In the article the author examines the creative legacy of B.A. Sadovsky (1881–1952) as a traditionalist thinker. The author singles out four essential elements that make the legacy valuable and relevant for our time and for the future. They include, fi rstly, a personal ascetic path through repentance and churching, which brings Sadovsky closer to Gogol, Dostoevsky and K. Leontiev; secondly, a high artistic gift as a poet, critic and literary historian; thirdly, the creation of a valuable philosophy of culture and historiosophy, which brings him closer to European traditionalists – his contemporaries (R. Guenon et al.), although this philosophy, due to the conditions of his life, remained only in sketches and was not expanded into treatises, in its depth it is not inferior to them; fourthly, a vivid artistic embodiment of his philosophy in late poetry and prose, created in the “underground” and returned to modern culture as the most relevant and prophetic legacy. This philosophy ia based on the strictly evangelical view of culture and history, for which “from the height of Golgotha even Goethe is nought”.