Neo-Kantianism, pantheism, and the ego

Abstract

Investigating art, literature, and thought in the Russia of the 1890's means exploring a complex cultural topography that has not yet been charted in detail. Materialism, Positivism, Darwinism, Marxism, Leibnizianism, neo-Kantianism, Nietzscheanism, Decadence, Symbolism, Naturalism, the ideas and esthetics of Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, the Populists, and Vladimir Solov'~v: all these and more crisscrossed and cross-fertilized. Distortion, dilution, and elaboration inevitably occurred. Yet, while no neat topographical chart may ever be achieved, some salient features do emerge. The fin-de-siOcle found many young Russians deeply absorbed by literary and philosophical questions while looking for a breakthrough into 'modernity.' Articles and debates in journals like Vestnik Evropy [Herald of Europe], Severnyi vestnik [Northern Messenger], and Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii [Questions of Philosophy and Psychology], the plays of Ibsen and Maeterlinck, the new French poetry, and the paintings of Boecklin and Vrubel' all fed the sense of its imminence. Some of these people, soon to figure in the Russian Symbolist and Decadent movements, were university students following the lectures of the neo-Kantian Aleksandr Vvedenskii in St. Petersburg and the philosopher-psychologists Nikolai Grot and Lev Lopatin in Moscow. 1 These students' notebooks, diaries, and correspondence often show a deep concern with questions bearing on their understanding of themselves and of the universe. The 'new' ideas coming from the West both sharpened these questions and fueled the search for answers.