Preface: Hegel in Russia

Abstract

The shadow cast by Hegel and Hegelian thought over Russian culture during much of the last two centuries is vast, and much scholarly work has been dedicated to describing it. The articles collected in this special issue extend the earlier scholarship in a number of different directions, exploring the effects of migrating Hegelianism on a wide range of intellectual domains and cultural practices: history of ideas, poetics of everyday behavior, the fashioning of the self in history, mutations of narrative form, aesthetics, historiographic imaginaries of the modern, literary criticism, and more. The issue opens with three articles on early Russian Hegelianism. Victoria Frede examines the highly influential reception of Hegelian thought by Nikolaj Stankevic through the prism of translation, analyzing his little known rendering of an article by the Hegelian philosopher Joseph Willm. Frede lays bare the conservative and theistic dimensions of the early reception of Hegel, soon to be swallowed up by the Russian version of left-Hegelianism of the 1840s. Vadim Shkolnikov focuses on the other major figure in the history of Russian Hegelianism, Vissarion Belinskij. In Shkolnikov’s account, Belinskij discovers himself in the paradoxical position of a