Nikolai Berdiaev Research Articles

‘Will that great poet come soon?’: messianic themes, religious ideation and Marxist zeal in the 1905 revolution

The concept of messianism is a significant motif in Russian religious philosophy, which becomes more accentuated during times of crises, notably in the revolutionary period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While messianism is often purely metaphysical and abstract, with the personification of a Christ-like figure as its spiritual guide, this philosophy had also played a significant role in the political struggle for social justice, with revolutionary groups from the Narodniks to the Marxists being no exception. Indeed, messianism is significant in the writings of Lev Trotsky in 1905, where the failure of the revolution led him to envisage the coming of a future messiah to ‘revive’ and ‘avenge’ the dramatic end of such a movement. In critiquing the theoretical ideas of Russian Marxists and developing the Russian religious themes of messianism as defined by Nikolai Berdiaev, this article will demonstrate the religious themes and metaphors within Russian Marxist thought and argue for the socio-political interrelation between Marxism and religion that acts as an incitement for revolutionary social change.

Vanessa Rampton. Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia: From Catherine the Great to the Russian Revolution.

Vanessa Rampton’s ambitious book on Russian intellectual history, Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia: From Catherine the Great to the Russian Revolution, explores the evolution of ideas in the liberal band on the political spectrum in Russia during the long nineteenth century. Rampton situates her account in a broad international context, teasing out liberalism’s many strands and identifying the tensions that became apparent in it as political ideas formulated in Europe and America collided with Russian political realities and instability during and after the 1905 revolution. In her introduction, she usefully surveys some of the European philosophical underpinnings of liberalism in the writings of Locke, Kant, Rousseau, Hamann, Herder, Hegel, Constant, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Humboldt. In chapters 1 and 2, she examines the ways in which liberal ideas of Western origin shaped Russian political theory in the period up until the late nineteenth century and in the period around the 1905 revolution, respectively. In chapter 3, she deals with Russian liberals’s reflections on constitutionalism, the rule of law, and democracy in the early twentieth century and discusses their modification of their views on such matters in the light of their experience in 1905 and in the four dumas that functioned in the period 1906–1917. Chapter 4 is concerned with the loss of cohesion in the liberal camp after 1905 and contains a fresh discussion of the epochal Landmarks volume of essays—by Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Mikhail Gershenzon, Aleksandr Izgoev, Bogdan Kistiakovsky, Petr Struve, and Semion Frank—published in 1909. Chapters 5 and 6 delve into the thought of two pairs of important thinkers in the Russian liberal camp whom Rampton characterizes as affected predominantly by idealist philosophical influences, in the case of Kistiakovsky and Pavel Novgorodtsev, and positivist influences, in the case of Maksim Kovalevsky and Pavel Miliukov. In her brief conclusion, she then underlines the topicality of discussion of liberal values in the modern world, in which these values are threatened by the surge of nationalistic populist ideologies, and the continuing relevance—not least for those in the middle of the political spectrum in post-Soviet Russia—of Russia’s encounter with liberalism in the late imperial period.

Inner freedom in Russian philosophy

ABSTRACT This article examines the Russian concept of inner freedom by means of a study of the work of various pre-revolutionary, Soviet, and post-Soviet thinkers, namely Ignatii Brianchaninov, Konstantin Aksakov, Boris Chicherin, Vladimir Solov’ev, Nikolai Berdiaev, Ivan Il′in, Andrei Amal′rik, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Igor′ Evlampiev, and Ol′ga Sedakova. These thinkers have defined inner freedom as obedience to moral imperatives, but an obedience freely chosen, dependent on the elimination of internal and external obstacles that prevent individuals from choosing between right and wrong and acting in accordance with their consciences. The article outlines a conservative liberal tradition within Russian philosophy that has often shown a strong preference for inner freedom over outer freedom. This preference has led some of those within this tradition to be tolerant of authoritarian forms of government, but at the same time to resist totalitarianism on the grounds that the latter intrudes on inner freedom. The result is a political philosophy that to many observers may seem paradoxical, being both liberal and illiberal at the same time.

Evadarea personajelor cehoviene prin religie

In a study that involves the interpretation of such complex characters as those in the sphere of Russian writing, I inevitably reached issues like faith, soul, religion, suffering and aspirations. Considering that mysticism underlies the Russian soul, I tried to understand the human dimension of the characters from Chekhov’s plays, “Three sisters”, “Uncle Vanya”, “The Cherry Orchard” and ”The Seagull”. Thus, I analyzed the abyssal Slavic soul through the ideas of Russian mystical school and its representatives, Paul Evdokimov, and Nikolai Berdiaev, starting from the image of Christ in Russian thinking. For Chekhov, one must be faithful or go in search of faith, otherwise his life will be deserted.

Curtis , Jim Stalin's Soviet Monastery: A New Interpretation of Russian Politics (review)

REVIEWS 585 The author is the Senior Historical Adviser for the UK Holocaust Educational Trust, so unsurprisingly the generic term ‘Holocaust’ is scattered throughout whenever Jews and the Jewish Question are discussed. Often, that becomes unnecessary as a cover to historical Nazi practices which should be sufficient to be named in their own right, to the extent that on page 240 an egregiously ahistorical (misleading) point is committed, viz: when Hans Frank, the former Governor of the General Government (GG), was asked at the Nuremberg Trials on 18 April 1946 ‘if he had ever participated in the Holocaust, Frank, answered in the affirmative’. Yet the words of his Nuremberg interrogator, his defence counsel, Dr Alfred Seidl, were not those given in this book. In fact, Dr Seidl asked Frank: ‘Did you ever participate in the annihilation of Jews?’ This historical record — and not fanciful myth-making — is in volume 12, page 13 of the official Nuremberg trial volumes. London John P. Fox Curtis, Jim. Stalin’s Soviet Monastery: A New Interpretation of Russian Politics. Peter Lang, New York, Bern and Oxford. 2020. xviii + 250 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $99.95: €83.30: £67.00. In this book, Jim Curtis sets himself an ambitious task to propose a new method for studying Soviet politics and culture and a new conception of Stalinism. The method is a ‘holistic’ approach to Russian culture, when (to cut it short) politics is explained by cultural stereotypes transmitted mostly through literature (p. 113). Curtis’s conception of Stalinism is that it was founded on the principles of Russian monasticism. The dictator interiorized these principles during his years in the Tiflis seminary and became firmly established in them thanks to Dostoevskii (pp. 75–82, 151–68). Indeed, Curtis claims, Stalin identified himself with Father Zosima (from The Brothers Karamazov), a paradigmatic elder whose duty (and right) was to educate novices (p. 171). According to Curtis, the vision of society as based on eldernovice relationships was also typical of other Russian revolutionaries: most of them were popovichi (priests’ sons) and shared ‘a set of mental attitudes derived from religious practices’ (p. 71). The author claims that tserkovnost´ (‘churchiness’) was crucial to ‘the attitudes of the popovichi’, which ‘subsequently informed the mentality of the Bolshevik party’ (p. 72). Curtis finds the elder-novice archetype at work in young Lenin’s idealization of Plekhanov and in his later cult (pp. 119–23). Stalin inherited and developed this tradition. Acting as a ‘sadistic elder’, he brought ‘monastic principles out beyond the wall of the monastery’ and ‘imposed the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on the Soviet Union’ (pp. xiii, 2–3). Stalinism SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 586 was ‘a perverted version of […] starchestvo, or elderhood’ (p. 3). Stalin’s only goal was to humiliate people around him (p. 158). But he humiliated them by love, following Father Zosima’s precepts: ‘He seems to have persuaded himself that in creating the gulag he was acting out of love for people’ and that ‘bringing zeks [gulag prisoners] to humility’ was a way to make them happy (p. 160). The notion of Soviet communism’s religious roots is not new. Curtis claims to further develop Nikolai Berdiaev’s understanding of the ‘Russian idea’ as ‘an eschatological idea of the Kingdom of God’ (p. xv). What he adds to Berdiaev’s theory is what he believes is a historico-anthropological approach: the Russian classics of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii ‘tell us much more about the inner working of power in Russian society than people have generally realized’ (pp. xv–xvi). Curtis dismisses as ‘irrelevant abstractions’ Marxist notions of basis and superstructure and class struggle (pp. 6, 22) and claims that ‘Marxist ideology [does not offer] any particular help in understanding Soviet history’ (p. 72). Neither economy nor ideology were important for the development of Soviet society. Instead, he develops a ‘non-ideological [that is, cultural] interpretation of Stalinism’ (p. 6). Stalin, according to Curtis, was ‘more interested in art than in economic policy’ (p. xiii). More than that, he pursued no pragmatic goals at all, often ‘acted against his own best interest’, and cared only about his own inner freedom (p. 158...

Coates , Ruth Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905–1917 (review)

REVIEWS 337 another draft or buy another horse. One is inclined to second Blaisdell’s suspicion that ‘Tolstoy had more vitality while depressed than most of us do when we’re fine’ (p. 190). University of Exeter Muireann Maguire Coates, Ruth. Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905–1917. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2019. xi + 232 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £65.00. In the fall of 2011, as I was trying to settle on a topic for my first monograph, I mentioned to two colleagues that I might write a book about the idea of deification in late imperial Russia. My colleagues gently warned me away from the topic, suggesting that deification (obozhenie, sometimes obozhestvlenie) was too pervasive and too deeply ingrained in Russian Orthodox thought and culture to be captured in a single volume. Although I heeded their advice, Ruth Coates’s excellent new study, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905–1917, demonstrates that such a book can be written well, succinctly, and to great effect. But that is not all that Coates accomplishes here. By focusing on ‘the deification narrative’ (passim) of Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov and Pavel Florenskii, Coates establishes a historical fact that had escaped me a decade ago. Far from being pervasive and deeply ingrained, the concept and practice of deification became meaningful to a handful of Russian thinkers only in the last decades of the imperial period — that is, at a moment when Russian literary and intellectual culture was being reconfigured by a ‘diverse range of [modernist] sources’ (p. 4), such as Marxism, Symbolism and the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, by renewed interest in Christian mysticism and philosophical idealism, and by millenarian and eschatological expectations that old Russia was coming to ‘a catastrophic end’ (p. 2), all of which, in the context of war and revolution, informed what Coates calls ‘the deification spectrum’ (p. 14) of Russian religious thought. This emphasis on historicity, contingency and variety is complemented by Coates’s awareness that deification had a fitful, almost accidental, provenance in imperial Russia, despite the fact that it had long resonated in patristic and Byzantine theology (ch. 1). It was some time in the mid nineteenth century, as part of a much larger translation and exegetical project spearheaded by the Metropolitan of Moscow, that the Greek term theosis entered the vernacular, and then only sporadically. The idea of deification initially remained within the confines of ecclesiastical and academic Orthodoxy, where it found some traction in sermons, speeches and studies about Christology, liturgy, SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 338 sacramental theology and Christian anthropology, as well as in monastic practices of hesychasm, eldership (starchestvo) and asceticism (pp. 56–63). It also occasionally informed Russian myths about a sacred ruler (pp. 64–68). This exclusivity began to dissolve in the 1870s, when Fedor Dostoevskii and Vladimir Solov´ev deployed variants of the deification narrative to resolve what they considered to be a host of social, political, epistemological and moral problems generated by philosophical materialism and revolutionary atheism (pp. 68–81). It was from this broad, highly variegated context that Merezhkovskii, in concert with Zinaida Gippius and Dmitrii Filosofov, developed his understanding of deification as the erotic practice of creative celibacy and the political practice of anarchic theocracy (ch. 3); that Berdiaev formulated an extra-ecclesial, mystical reading of deification as the creative task by which humans spiritualize material existence (ch. 4); that Bulgakov interpreted economic activity as the eschatological practice of deifying nature and matter (ch. 5); and that Florenskii grounded his eschatological vision of deified humanity in Orthodox asceticism and mysticism (ch. 6). What bound these divergent currents together were ‘their commitment to Christ as the risen Saviour of humankind’ (p. 14) and their shared desire to overcome biological death. It is difficult to find fault with Coates’s impressive account of how and why deification took the various forms it did in late imperial Russia. Nor can a brief review do justice to the vitality and complexity of the deification narrative developed by Merezhkovskii, Berdiaev, Bulgakov and Florenskii. Instead, I want to draw out some of the implications of Deification in Russian Religious Thought...

Universalising idealism: the cross-cultural case of Russian religious thought

ABSTRACT The article analyses the idealist dimension of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian religious thought as it appears in key works by Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900), Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944) and Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948). Under the impact of Schelling in particular, these thinkers took religious experience and human consciousness as a starting point for their projects. On the one hand, the article shows that this had a very significant impact also on the way in which they approached classical religious themes. More specifically, it examines how the transmission of idealist philosophy from Western Europe to Russia led to a reinterpretation in the works of these thinkers of certain themes of the Orthodox heritage as well as everyday cultural practices. On the other hand, it points to significant parallels between Russian religious idealism and idealist theology in the West, most notably Paul Tillich. Thus, the transfer of ideas from its Schellingian origin to Russia becomes, the article claims, an example of universalisation, in this case of Shellingian idealism, through the active use and application of ideas and concepts in new contexts.

Two Hundred Years Together

This essay is a translated excerpt from the first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s controversial history of Russian-Jewish relations, Dvesti let vmeste: 1795 – 1995, which was first published in Russian in 2001 and 2002. Solzhenitsyn writes from explicitly nationalist positions, ascribing defined identities and “fates” to disparate peoples, and seeks to offer a “two-sided and equitable” account of the “sins” and historical “guilt” of both Russians and Jews. He seeks to establish “mutually accessible and benevolent paths along which Russian-Jewish relations may proceed” on the basis of an honest and full accounting of history. In this excerpt he treats the immediate prerevolutionary period of the early twentieth century, drawing on the writings of a number of prominent commentators of that period, both Jewish and Russian. He argues that a combination of, on the one hand, the investments of the progressive Russian intelligentsia in atonement for anti-Semitic policies and social violence, and, on the other, Jewish assimilation to Russian cultural life led to an identification of Jews with revolutionary and anti-tsarist culture. Among the figures treated here by Solzhenitsyn are Vladimir Jabotinsky, Lev Tolstoi, Nikolai Berdiaev, and Pyotr Struve.

Aspects of Schelling’s influence on Sergius Bulgakov and other thinkers of the Russian religious Renaissance of the twentieth century

ABSTRACTThis paper deals with the appropriation of Schelling’s ideas by Sergey Bulgakov, one of the most renowned twentieth century Orthodox theologians. Bulgakov’s appropriation of Schelling’s themes is sometimes mediated through his Russian predecessors Vladimir Soloviev and Pavel Florensky. Moreover, Bulgakov was in constant dialogue with other contemporaneous Russian thinkers influenced by Schelling, in particular with Nikolai Berdiaev. Brief sketches of Schelling’s presence in the thought of such important Russian thinkers as P. Florensky and N. Berdiaev will set the historical context of Bulgakov’s works.Both Schelling and Bulgakov have attracted considerable interest in recent scholarship. Despite the fact that Bulgakov provides a fair number of references to the German philosopher in his works and draws on his ideas extensively, no single study exists dedicated entirely to Bulgakov’s appropriation of Schelling. This paper aims to fill this gap in modern scholarship and offer a detailed analysis of Bulgakov’s texts in regards to their dependence on Schelling’s ideas. This seems particularly telling in the light of the ongoing re-evaluation of Bulgakov’s sources.

Integral humanisms: Jacques Maritain, Vladimir Soloviev, and the history of human rights

Today both the history and philosophical grounding of human rights are matters of great controversy. One prominent figure in the debate is Samuel Moyn, professor of law and history at Harvard University. He argues that universal human rights are a relatively recent concept, dating from the 1940s and that they are, more specifically, a product of the Catholic philosophy of that era. The Catholic thinker who reinvented human rights was Jacques Maritain. He was among the founders of the French philosophical movement known as personalism, which he fashioned into his own Christian (or “integral”) humanism. By 1940, he was turning integral humanism into an explicit and robust defense of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights followed in 1948, and Maritain was one of its intellectual architects. Decades before Maritain, however, another tradition of Christian personalism had already developed into a theory of human rights. This tradition was Russian neo-idealism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it combined Orthodox Christian personalism with a Kantian conception of human dignity to produce a theoretically sophisticated defense of human rights. The leading figure in this development was Russia’s greatest religious philosopher, Vladimir Soloviev. After the Russian Revolution, the intellectual legacy of Soloviev and Russian neoidealism was transmitted by Nikolai Berdiaev and the Russian philosophical emigration to interwar France, where it helped form the milieu in which Maritain’s thought took shape. Indeed, Maritain’s “integral humanism” is strikingly similar to Soloviev’s Christian humanism.

Nikolai Berdiaev and the “boundless spaces” of Russia

The article analyses the ways in which the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev understood Russian space and geography, beginning with the texts that he wrote during the First World War and ending with his book The Russian Idea (1946). It was characteristic of Berdiaev to extensively recycle passages from his own texts, not least those that put forth the claim that there was a correspondence between Russia’s vast and wide-open spaces and the “Russian soul.” However, the article argues that Berdiaev’s seemingly similar phrases had different meanings in different contexts. In the 1910s, his perspective was predominantly critical, if speculative, positing that the acquisition of large territories had prevented the Russian “self-organization” in thought and culture. After the 1917 revolutions and his own emigration in 1922, by contrast, Berdiaev gradually became more essentialist in his approach to Russian space, seeing the vast territories as perfectly matching the strivings and quests of the Russian people. The article contextualises Berdiaev’s understanding of space both in relation to nineteenth-century traditions of interpreting Russian geography and to the political upheavals that took place during his lifetime.

Nikolai Berdiaev and the Origin of Russian Messianism

Previous articleNext article No AccessNikolai Berdiaev and the Origin of Russian MessianismAna SiljakAna SiljakQueen’s University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 88, Number 4December 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/688982 Views: 760Total views on this site © 2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

DeBlasio, Alyssa The End of Russian Philosophy: Tradition and Transition at the Turn of the 21st Century (review)

REVIEWS 745 lifetime. Hopp presents an overview of the translated material together with a detailed review of Mulatságos napok, as Mme de Gomez is titled in Hungarian. The final two essays look at the Hungarian literary scene after Mikes’s death. The manuscript of the Letters was found among his effects and in 1789 came into the hands of István Kulcsár of Szombathely. The criminality (in Habsburg eyes) of its author, its association with Ferenc Rákóczi and the kuruc tone of numerous passages might have prevented publication in the Habsburg Empire, but in the reign of the enlightened Joseph II (1765–90) censorship eased. Kulcsár, in association with Sándor Kisfaludy and others, took advantage of this, and the Letters received the imprimatur in July 1792, early in the reign of Franz II and I (Hopp deals with the complexities of all this in some detail, but in one point is in slight error: there was no interregnum between Joseph and Franz, but the brief reign of Leopold II from December 1790 until March 1792). Had Kulcsár not been fortunate in this respect the Letters would, at best, not have been published for a long time, as repression was resumed under Franz. (The Letters were first published in 1794 and the manuscript itself is now in the library of the Esterházy Károly Főiskola in Eger.) Lastly, there comes a short piece on the concept of the ‘Early Enlightenment’. It is generally agreed that in Hungary the Enlightenment came into effect in the second half of the eighteenth century, rather later than in the West, and some scholars have used the term Frühaufklärung to denote a quasi-preliminary period preceding this. Hopp rejects this imprecise usage, but finds in Mikes’s ‘Letter 51’ of 1723 a foreshadowing of the thinking of the Enlightenment, halfway between past and future, but promising a social philosophy. This small anthology is, therefore, a vastly informative and thoroughly scholarly addition to the study of both the period as a whole and the work of Kelemen Mikes in particular. Hopp spoke French but did not publish in that language, so much credit is due to his anonymous translators and to the editors for establishing an eminently readable text. The editors should, however, have seen that footnote 14 on p. 174 might be more helpfully worded. Zánka Bernard Adams DeBlasio, Alyssa. The End of Russian Philosophy: Tradition and Transition at the Turn of the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2014. xi + 216 pp. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. In 1922, Lenin expelled about sixty-nine presumed anti-Soviet intellectuals and their families from Russia. The intellectuals were placed on two steamships, the first of which left on 28 September, the second on 16 November, that is, a few weeks before the official creation of the Soviet Union in late SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 746 December. Although there were in fact two steamers, and even though not all of the intellectuals on board were philosophers, the whole thing is conjointly remembered as ‘the Philosophy Steamer’. The two ships carried away, amongst others, the philosophers Iulii Aikhenval´d (translator of Schopenhauer), Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Semen Frank, Ivan Il´in, Lev Karsavin, Ivan Lapshin, Nikolai Losskii and Boris Vysheslavtsev. This event, which has been compared to the medieval inquisition, marked the end of an era for Russian philosophy — the end of what is sometimes called ‘prerevolutionary Russian Philosophy’, ‘Russian religious philosophy’, or ‘Russian idealism’. Prerevolutionary Russian Philosophy is a tradition that more or less began with the philosophy of Vladimir Solov´ev — who is often regarded as the first great Russian philosopher — and that was developed further by his followers, such as the brothers Trubetskoi, Ernest Radlov, Sergei Bulgakov, Semen Frank, Nikolai Losskii and others. This tradition is characterized as a Christian NeoPlatonism and is said to reach back to Plato and Plotinus through the Byzantium Eastern Fathers (Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor). The religiosity, mysticism, idealism (i.e., Platonism), bourgeois preoccupation with speculative metaphysical issues and sentimentalism of this tradition was perceived as reactionary to the anti...

Arjakovsky, Antoine. Jerry Ryan John A. Jillions and Michael Plekon. (review)

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 526 literature’ (p. 114). Such occasional infelicities are understandable given the unfortunate absence of the author during the final editing stages, and they can be easily corrected in the second edition (which Slobin’s insightful study certainly deserves). UCL SSEES Maria Rubins Arjakovsky, Antoine. The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925–1940. Translated by Jerry Ryan, edited by John A. Jillions and Michael Plekon. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, 2013. xiv + 766 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00 (paperback); $45.50 (e-book). Antoine Arjakovsky’s The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and their Journal, 1925–1940 is a valuable work of remarkable erudition on a topic of considerable importance — the significance and legacy of the development of Russian religious thought outside the Soviet Union, which has important implications that extend well beyond Slavonic and East European Studies. At a time in which the humanities and social sciences are undergoing a religious turn, the notion of the post-secular is preoccupying a substantial number of philosophers and sociologists, and the relevance of religion to modern history and contemporary global society is more evident than it has been in decades, one can only welcome the translation into English of a work such as The Way. Arjakovsky’s main primary source base is the journal The Way (Put´), edited by Nikolai Berdiaev and published by the Academy of Religious Philosophy with YMCA support, and his ambitious task consists of situating and assessing the journal and its contributors — the ‘generation’ of The Way — in their own historical context, as well as exploring the contemporary memory and continuing relevance of this generation. Arjakovsky brings truly impressive theoretical sophistication and breadth of context to bear, turning to archival collections housed in Russia, France and the United States in addition to numerous print sources. He divides the journal’s existence into three distinct periods, ‘modernist’ (1925–29), ‘nonconformist’ (1930–35) and ‘spiritual’ (1935– 40), demonstrating the utility of this periodization through his analysis of how the key events and shifting concerns of the interwar period were reflected on the pages of The Way and in the lives and activities of its contributors. Moving human portraits of many of the latter — Berdiaev, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, Lev Shestov, Fr. Georges Florovsky, Mother Maria Skobtsova and others — emerge as Arjakovsky examines the ‘mytho-logical’ character of their thinking, tracing the external challenges and internal divisions they faced as REVIEWS 527 they grappled with theological, liturgical and jurisdictional questions, social and political issues and institution building in a tense and turbulent time. Arjakovsky’s narrative is rich in detail and illuminating analysis of important episodes (the Sophiology dispute, the Fedotov affair, Orthodox Action). One of the book’s most valuable contributions is its thorough cataloguing and assessment of the ways in which the Russian Orthodox intellectuals at its centre interacted with and influenced Western individuals and institutions. It will undoubtedly be required reading for those interested in such interactions or in tracing continuity and break across the Silver Age/émigré divide. In terms of flaws, however, within each long subsection devoted to one of the journal’s three periods, the text meanders to the point of losing a clear overarching narrative logic. All the while, Arjakovsky introduces a dizzying array of sometimes overlapping analytical terms without adequately defining them, probably a product of insufficient distance from his sources. These organizational issues hinder readability, particularly in light of the book’s considerable length. In the afterword to the English translation, Arjakovsky laments that the reception of the French and Russian editions of the book ‘remained confined to a narrow circle of specialists’ (p. 571). It is thus regrettable that the English translation does nothing to remedy this situation, which might have been addressed by turning the translation into a revised, updated and possibly abridged edition. As things stand, the only audience the English translation is likely to reach that would not be capable of reading the book in Russian and/ or French probably consists of a subset of English-speaking theologians with at least some pre-existing interest in Russian religious...

Nationalist War Commentary as Russian Religious Thought: The Religious Intelligentsia's Politics of Providentialism

Exploring the prominent role that the concept of Providence played in the worldview of Russian religious philosophers including Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Ern, Prince Evgenii Trubetskoi, and the Symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov, this article demonstrates that their Christian Providentialist thinking was inherently political. One significant expression of these intellectuals' “politics of Providentialism” was the controversial commentary they produced on the First World War, which must be confronted and construed as operating within the discourse of Russian religious philosophy. Examining the concept of Providence represents a new approach to the study of Russian religious philosophy as Christian ideology, one that highlights the social significance of Russian religious philosophy in late imperial Russian civil society and that allows us to situate Russian religious thought in international and interconfessional comparative perspective, as one part of a broader twentieth‐century European and American manifestation of politicized traditionalist Christianity that arose in response to the perceived cultural threat of nihilism.

Amnesia and the Externalized Personality in Early Dostoevskii

By tracing a pattern through Fedor Dostoevskii's early stories–especially The Double, “The Landlady,” andNetochka Nezvanova–in which characters are bound to each other as interacting aspects of a larger personality, Yuri Corrigan explores the problem of individual identity. Entering into debate with classical studies of the self in Dostoevskii from Mikhail Bakhtin to Nikolai Berdiaev, Corrigan explores how the active suppression of memory and interiority in Dostoevskii's early characters gives rise to the mechanism of intersecting selves, in which the inner architecture of one personality is extended throughout numerous consciousnesses. Through an analysis of these relationships, Corrigan examines how Dostoevskii synthesizes two traditions of doubling in his early writing–the “cognitive” dualism of self-consciousness and the “psychic” dualism of the unconscious–to form a tripartite model of personality that will be important for his later novels.

Разреженность и недовоплощенность материи в русском авангарде (Хлебников – Гуро – Чекрыгин)

This article discusses the years of the great theurgic experiment in Russian culture. Nikolai Berdiaev characterized these years as “the transparent stone age”. My focus is on the interaction between the literary and visual arts from 1906 to 1922. How did the artists rework their media of expression in order to grasp the transcendental behind the physical world? In their own words, they strived to “pierce through the universe with the gaze”. Khlebnikov looked at the world from the macrocosmic perspective of his utopic vision of a perfectly “transparent” language, while Guro adopted a microcosmic perspective to penetrate into the prenatal life of beings. Chekryginʼs metaphysical vision implied restoration of the world in its original Edenic state.

Le Studio Franco-Russe 1929-1931. Toronto Slavic Library, I by Leonid Livak (review)

342 SEER, 87, 2, APRIL 200g excruciating nostalgia forherfamily. Finally, inspiteofthefactthatinBerlin she receivesa numberofmarriage proposals(one ofthemfromthewriter BorisPil'niak),she finally marriesher second cousinFrederick Pasternak, twenty yearshersenior, whomshehad knownsinceearlychildhood. Finally,one of the unique aspectsof the memoirisJosephine's idea of memory. Memoirists usually tendtoprofess absolutememory, thisbeingone ofthereasonsand evenjustifications oftheirpresumption to engagein this typeofwriting. Josephine, however, often claimsto haveforgotten detailsof events andevenwhena particular eventhappened.Thisquality ofherwriting createsan almoststream-of-consciousness impression; we feeldrawnintothe innerworldofthenarrator rather thanobserveitobjectively. This is an interesting book forthosewho wantto knowmoreabout the writers and artists depicted, and also aboutthelifeofMoscow intelligentsia in theyearsbeforeand after theRevolution. However,italso has meritas an exploration of a complex,sometimes contradictory, personality of a young girl, an individual in herownright. Department ofLiterature, Theatre, andFilmStudies A. Vernitski University ofEssex Livak,Leonid(ed.).Le Studio Franco-Russe ig2g-igji. TorontoSlavicLibrary, 1. Toronto Slavic Quarterly,Departmentof Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, 2005. 623 pp. Illustrations. Notes.Appendices.Index. CANftgo.oo: US$70.00: €50.00 (paperback). This publication in book format of a set of materials, previously available onlyonpoor-quality microfiche attheBibliothèque Nationalede France,considerably facilitates thetaskofresearchers who studythecultural history of theRussianParisiandiasporaoftheinter-war periodand,morespecifically, itsinfrequent attempts to integrate intotheFrenchintellectual and literary context. The Franco-Russian StudiowascreatedbyRussianémigré journalist and minorliterary figure Vsevolodde Vogtand Frenchnovelist and literary criticRobertSébastienin orderto providean appropriate environment for meetings and thefreeexchangeofideasbetweenFrenchand Russianwriters and thinkers. The Russiancommunity in Francehad a higher percentage of creative intellectuals thanothercentres oftheRussiandiaspora.Atthesame time,duringthe 1920s,it existedin relativeisolationfromcontemporary WesternEuropean influences, especiallyin the area of verbal art. Older Russianémigré writers, wholargely defined cultural politics in thediaspora, believedfora longtimethattheBolshevik regime wouldsoon falland they would subsequently returnto theirhomeland.Therefore, theyproclaimed as theirchief'mission'the preservation of the Russian classical(i.e. preRevolutionary ) tradition, presumably eradicatedat homebythenewrulers, in orderto transmit it to theyoungergeneration and eventually to revive it on Russian soil. In the course of the 1920s,this dominantdiscourse discouraged cultural and artistic assimilation. Writers cultivated retrospective, reviews 343 conservative aesthetics at theexpenseofan interest in either Western avantgardeorSovietliterature . Bytheendofthedecade,however, itbecameclear thatthefallof theBolsheviks was not imminent and thatthe exileperiod would be longerthan expected.The professional conditionsforRussianlanguagewriters in emigration wereextremely harsh,as thecircleofRussian readersprogressively narrowed.Therefore, therewas an obviousneed to establish contactswithFrenchpublishers and to reach out to non-Russian readersthrough translations. In addition, theyounger generation ofRussian writers, whohad left Russiaas teenagers during theCivilWar,weremaking their first inroadsintoliterature aroundthistime.WhilemostchoseRussian as theirlanguageof artistic expression, theydid not necessarily sharethe attitudes of theirolderpeersand soughtto establish creativecontactswith their Frenchcounterparts. The Franco-RussianStudio was expectedto respondto the needs of Russian émigréwriters, while also offering theirFrenchcolleaguesdirect exposureto a foreign intellectual community thatwas livingin theirmidst. BetweenApril1929and April1931,theStudioorganizedfourteen meetings, each dedicatedto a specific, previously selectedtopic,including'anxiety' in literature, the novel since 1918, Soviet literature, Frenchand Russian brands of Symbolism,spiritualrevivalin France, East and West, and Frenchinfluences on Russianliterature. Separatesessions werededicatedto discussions ofwriters suchas Dostoevskii, Tolstoi,Proust,Gide and Valéry, as well as philosophers Descartesand Péguy.Two speakers,one French and one Russian,wouldfirst present their paperson thesubject, and thenthe floor wouldbe openedfora generaldiscussion. AmongtheRussianspeakers, besides de Vogt, figuredGeorgii Adamovich,Nikolai Berdiaev,Georgii Fedotov, Boris Vysheslavtsev, Kirill Zaitsev, Nina Berberova,Vladimir Weidlé,Nadezhda Gorodetskaia and Iulia Sazonova. The languageofthese meetings wasFrench.Stenographic recordings ofthemeetings werepublished inthejournalCahiers dela Quinzaine. The sessions oftheFranco-Russian Studio attracted a wide audience,including, on the Russianside,Mark Aldanov, Nadezhda Teffi,Boris Zaitsev,Gaito Gazdanov, Nikolai Otsup, Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Pozner, Ilia Zdanevich, Mikhail Tsetlin, Mikhail Osorgin,Pavel Muratov,Mark Slonim,as well as the former ambassador of the Russian Empire in France, Vasilii Maklakov,and many others. Attendance by Russianwriters, philosophers, publishers and publicfigures indicates theimportance thattheémigrécommunity attributed to thisseries ofevents. The numberofreports on varioussessions in theRussianpressof thetimeprovidesadditionalevidenceof the Studio'ssignificance. Some of thesearticles,notablyby Iuri Felzen, VladimirWeidlé, GeorgiiFedotov, BorisZaitsevand others, are reprinted in theoriginal languageintheappendix to thepresentvolume.Equally usefulare the briefbiographies of the participants and theintroduction, whichrecreates thehistorical and literary context oftheStudiomeetings. Although thedominant toneinrarelaterreferences totheStudiobysome of its Russian members(e.g. V. Veidle, Tranko-russkie vstrechi', Russkii al'manakh, Paris,1981)isthatofregret attheunrealized potential ofthisforum, whichapparently failedtoestablish a morepermanent collaboration between 344 SEER, 87, 2, APRIL 200g émigré writers and theliterary worldofFrance,themeetings had atleasttwo important results. One is of...

An Attempting at Encapsulating the Conundrum of Russian Soul: History and Evaluation

The theme of the Russian soul or Russian national character has long been a subject for historians of Russia; however, it does not allow either many Western or Korean scholars to interpret and cope with easily. The question of the Russian soul has never fully been answered. In short, to date no comprehensive study has been made. On the basis of this retrospective view, my article overviews four books by Nikolai Berdiaev (1947), Ronald Hingley (1977), Michael Cherniavsky (1961), and James Billington (1970), all of whose works have long been considered standard classics for Russian history, culture, and literature. The primary purpose of this article is to demonstrate those fundamental questions: What are these studies addressing in their main points, what are the critical junctures between them, and in what ways is the theme of Russian national character closely related to other research topics.

Der Begriff des Politischen in der russisch-orthodoxen Tradition. Zum Verhältnis von Kirche, Staat und Gesellschaft in Rußland (review)

Der Begriff des Politischen in der russisch-orthodoxen Tradition. Zum Verhaltnis von Kirche, Staat und Gesellschaft in Rusland. By Konstantin Kostjuk. [Politik- und Kommunikationswissenschaftliche Veroffentlichungen der Gorres-Gesellschaft, Band 24.] (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh. 2005. Pp. 409. euro55.00 paperback.) Kostjuk's ambitious goal is analysis of the specific political understanding of the Russian Orthodox cultural crisis in post-Soviet Russia's transition from the premodern to the modern social order (p. 12).The book, originally a dissertation for the Catholic University of Eichstatt-Ingolstadt, builds on the author's extensive earlier sociological, political, and philosophical studies of contemporary Russian Orthodoxy, but now from a broad historical perspective. The first part of the book is a chronological survey of key ideas of church, state, and society from classical antiquity and the Old and New Testaments through the Church Fathers and the Byzantine Empire, to Russia from Kievan times until the present. Part 2 covers the same ground using systematic philosophical and theological categories, such as the image of man, the idea of freedom, the church and the world, the Byzantine concept of symphony, what the author calls the theology of total power, and sobornost', a uniquely Russian concept denoting at once community unity, and universality. Parts 1 and 2 provide the basis for an extensive analysis in Part 3 of the Russian Orthodox Church's stance in the post-Soviet era, particularly as expressed in its Social Doctrine, officiaEy adopted after extensive discussion in the summer of 2000. Some comparisons are made with Western thinkers such as Augustine ,Aquinas, and Montesquieu. Kostjuk's broad historical perspective is impressive, and he effectively shows how Orthodoxy's ideas and attitudes were influenced by the political context, for example, how in Byzantium and Russia, church thought followed Eusebius of Caesarea's dictum that one God, the one king in heaven, the one royal Nomos and Logos corresponds to the one king on earth (p. 225), or how the church's exclusion from the secular sphere after Peter the Great shaped the course of religious thought. In addition to explaining the political implications of such key concepts as tradition, symphony, kenosis, and sobornost', Kostjuk clearly summarizes the thought of a wide range of figures, from Church Fathers like John Chrysostom and Gregory of Nyssa, to such Russian churchmen as Joseph of Volokolamsk and Feofan Prokopovich, nineteenth century Slavophiles, religious philosophers like Nikolai Berdiaev and Sergei Bulgakov, and, more recently, Fathers Aleksandr Men' and Aleksandr Schmemann. …