DeBlasio, Alyssa The End of Russian Philosophy: Tradition and Transition at the Turn of the 21st Century (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 745 lifetime. Hopp presents an overview of the translated material together with a detailed review of Mulatságos napok, as Mme de Gomez is titled in Hungarian. The final two essays look at the Hungarian literary scene after Mikes’s death. The manuscript of the Letters was found among his effects and in 1789 came into the hands of István Kulcsár of Szombathely. The criminality (in Habsburg eyes) of its author, its association with Ferenc Rákóczi and the kuruc tone of numerous passages might have prevented publication in the Habsburg Empire, but in the reign of the enlightened Joseph II (1765–90) censorship eased. Kulcsár, in association with Sándor Kisfaludy and others, took advantage of this, and the Letters received the imprimatur in July 1792, early in the reign of Franz II and I (Hopp deals with the complexities of all this in some detail, but in one point is in slight error: there was no interregnum between Joseph and Franz, but the brief reign of Leopold II from December 1790 until March 1792). Had Kulcsár not been fortunate in this respect the Letters would, at best, not have been published for a long time, as repression was resumed under Franz. (The Letters were first published in 1794 and the manuscript itself is now in the library of the Esterházy Károly Főiskola in Eger.) Lastly, there comes a short piece on the concept of the ‘Early Enlightenment’. It is generally agreed that in Hungary the Enlightenment came into effect in the second half of the eighteenth century, rather later than in the West, and some scholars have used the term Frühaufklärung to denote a quasi-preliminary period preceding this. Hopp rejects this imprecise usage, but finds in Mikes’s ‘Letter 51’ of 1723 a foreshadowing of the thinking of the Enlightenment, halfway between past and future, but promising a social philosophy. This small anthology is, therefore, a vastly informative and thoroughly scholarly addition to the study of both the period as a whole and the work of Kelemen Mikes in particular. Hopp spoke French but did not publish in that language, so much credit is due to his anonymous translators and to the editors for establishing an eminently readable text. The editors should, however, have seen that footnote 14 on p. 174 might be more helpfully worded. Zánka Bernard Adams DeBlasio, Alyssa. The End of Russian Philosophy: Tradition and Transition at the Turn of the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2014. xi + 216 pp. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. In 1922, Lenin expelled about sixty-nine presumed anti-Soviet intellectuals and their families from Russia. The intellectuals were placed on two steamships, the first of which left on 28 September, the second on 16 November, that is, a few weeks before the official creation of the Soviet Union in late SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 746 December. Although there were in fact two steamers, and even though not all of the intellectuals on board were philosophers, the whole thing is conjointly remembered as ‘the Philosophy Steamer’. The two ships carried away, amongst others, the philosophers Iulii Aikhenval´d (translator of Schopenhauer), Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Semen Frank, Ivan Il´in, Lev Karsavin, Ivan Lapshin, Nikolai Losskii and Boris Vysheslavtsev. This event, which has been compared to the medieval inquisition, marked the end of an era for Russian philosophy — the end of what is sometimes called ‘prerevolutionary Russian Philosophy’, ‘Russian religious philosophy’, or ‘Russian idealism’. Prerevolutionary Russian Philosophy is a tradition that more or less began with the philosophy of Vladimir Solov´ev — who is often regarded as the first great Russian philosopher — and that was developed further by his followers, such as the brothers Trubetskoi, Ernest Radlov, Sergei Bulgakov, Semen Frank, Nikolai Losskii and others. This tradition is characterized as a Christian NeoPlatonism and is said to reach back to Plato and Plotinus through the Byzantium Eastern Fathers (Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor). The religiosity, mysticism, idealism (i.e., Platonism), bourgeois preoccupation with speculative metaphysical issues and sentimentalism of this tradition was perceived as reactionary to the anti...