Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev (aka Nicholas Berdyaev) (1874-1948) is the twentieth-century Russian philosopher best known in the West. Upon his expulsion from Russia in 1922, he lived briefly in Berlin and then in Clamart, at the outskirts of Paris. He was personally acquainted not only with the leading Russian thinkers of his generation such as Lev Shestov, Petr Stuve, and Sergei Bulgakov, but also some important German and French philosophers such as Max Scheler, Gabriel Marcel, and Jacques Maritain. The works he considered to be his most important ones were written in France in the interwar period. He published forty-three books and about 380 articles. Thirty-five of his books were monographs of varying length, the rest were collections of his articles. Twenty-seven of his monographs have been translated into over twenty languages: twenty of them into English. In Russia his first book, a collection of articles, appeared in 1901. After his banishment his works were banned in Russia for almost seventy years. They began to appear only in 1989 and by now twenty of his major works are available to the Russian reader.