Petr Chaadaev and the Slavophile–Westernizer Debate

Abstract

Petr Iakovlevich Chaadaev (1794–1856) was one the most important religious thinkers in Russia from the mid-1830s to the mid-1850s. This chapter begins by analysing Chaadaev’s Philosophical Letters (written from early 1829 to mid-1831) as a religious document exploring Orthodox Russia’s special path to fusion with God and to consciousness of ‘the absolute unity of things’. It traces the main themes of the Philosophical Letters: Russia and Europe, faith and philosophy, human and divine intelligence, Christian philosophy of history, and the kingdom of God. The article suggests that the Philosophical Letters reveal Chaadaev as an original religious thinker, a hybrid of three rare types: prophet (the first and last three letters combined the prophetic voice in denouncing Russia for its lack of identity, in admiring great prophets such as Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, and in prophetically predicting the coming of God’s kingdom); mystic (letters two through five posited the fusion of human intelligence and divine knowledge, through theosis); and apocalyptic thinker (the ‘red thread’ running through all the letters is the coming of God’s kingdom, and this advent in the eighth letter is said to resemble a ‘moral cataclysm’, an ‘apocalyptic synthesis’). The remaining sections of the article assess Chaadaev’s influence on the Slavophiles and Westernizers, and suggest that his truest follower may have been the socialist Aleksandr Herzen.