What Is Russian Philosophy?

Abstract

When contemplating the question “what is Russian philosophy?,” there are several answers that might come to the non-Russian mind. There are the household names of the philosophical novelists, most notably Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. There are also those well-known philosophers of Russian descent who made their way to the West, such as Mikhail Bakunin, the “father of anarchism,” or literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. There are the Russian existentialists, including Nikolai Berdiaev, Vasilii Rozanov, and Lev Shestov. One might equally recall the schools of Russian materialism and, later, the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet period. “Russian philosophy” could just as well be employed to refer to all philosophers writing in Russian, to all philosophers living in Russia, or even more broadly, to everything philosophical happening in Russia at any given time.