Ancient Russia and philosophy. Any philosophy is a special type of rationality. It combines the functions of scientific knowledge of the world and a worldview that cannot be reduced to just reproducing a certain picture of the world, but includes religious, axiological, ideological attitudes in people’s behavior. But philosophy cannot be reduced to moral didactics, the function of which can be performed by both religion and folk wisdom. In philosophical knowledge, a rational attitude to reality prevails. In addition to the general range of philosophical questions – about what is and what should be – philosophy must assume a unity of method and a developed system of concepts.
In European culture, these factors were set by the Greek civilization, which was destined to become the birthplace of philosophy in its European understanding. National philosophies that emerged in Europe after the Greeks inevitably relate to the philosophical canon that was developed in classical antiquity. Despite the fact that philosophy addresses the same issues that are the subject of revealed knowledge and religious tradition, it treats them in a form free from dogmatism, and assumes the right of the thinker to free search and research. The emergence of a national philosophy assumes a certain degree of freedom of spiritual and intellectual search. In traditional culture, world-explaining and axiological functions can be performed by religion, mythology, folk wisdom, and other forms of consciousness. Therefore, philosophy in the strict sense of the word is not an obligatory attribute of every national culture.
The awakening of interest in philosophy in Russia is undoubtedly present in Old Russian bookishness. The high title of one of the enlighteners of the Slavs, Equal-to-the-Apostles Cyril (Constantine), as the Philosopher, the presence in literary sources of the names of Plato and Pythagoras, one of whom “proclaimed with good words, while the other considered it better to remain silent” (“Dioptra”), the Pythagorean numerical symbolism applied to the interpretation of the properties of the universe created by God – all this may testify to the initial philosophical erudition of Old Russian authors. However, Old Russian bookishness, with all its wealth, did not go beyond the limits of church-moral didactics, according to V. O. Klyuchevsky. Having received baptism in Byzantium, Kievan Rus also acquired the opportunity to master the Christian heritage in the national language. “We were baptized in Greek, but we were given the Bulgarian language,” wrote G. G. Shpet. Translations of Greek and Byzantine monuments came to Rus’ from Bulgarian and Serbian monasteries – this is how acquaintance with the Areopagitica, with the “Dioptra” of Philip the Hermit occurs. In the middle of the 11th century, the Kiev Metropolitan Hilarion reveals an excellent knowledge of the best examples of Byzantine homiletics and poetics in the “Word on Law and Grace”. But by the 16th century, there is no one left in the Moscow Kremlin who knows Greek, and the monk Maximus the Greek, invited from Athos, translates the titles of the Greek books stored in the Moscow Kremlin, the legacy of the fallen Byzantium, into Latin – from Latin, translation into Slavic turns out to be possible through the efforts of local interpreters. The flourishing of monastic culture in Rus’, beginning in the 14th century, the era of St. Sergius of Radonezh and Metropolitan Alexy of Moscow, stimulates the flourishing of church architecture and icon painting, which Prince E. H. Trubetskoy will call it “speculation in colors,” but he does not create a school of learned monasticism, characteristic of some Catholic orders in the West. During the rise of Slavophilism, I. V. Kireevsky will characterize monastic science in Rus’ as follows: “… enlightenment that is not brilliant, but profound; not luxurious, not material, aimed at the convenience of external life, but internal, spiritual.” To this enlightenment, one of the definitions of the philosophy of St. John of Damascus is most applicable: “likeness to God to the degree possible for man.” Deification, on the path of which salvation is found, does not necessarily include philosophical reflection, still too immersed in the circle of worldly concerns. In the letter of the elder of the Pskov Eleazar Monastery, Philotheus, to the clerk Misiur Munekhin, we find a very common rhetoric of monastic humility: “I am a country man, I studied letters, but I did not run the Hellenic audacity, and I did not read the rhetorical astronomers, nor did I converse with wise philosophers, – I study the books of the blessed law, if only my sinful soul could be powerfully cleansed of sin.” At the time when Newton and Galileo were breaking the established paradigms in European science, in Rus’ they studied Christian cosmology according to the Hexaemeron of Basil the Great, and geography according to the “Christian Topography” of Cosmas Indicopleustes,When Hugo Grotius was sketching out the outlines of the social idea of a social contract, the priest Sylvester was writing his Domostroy.
The concept of “Old Russian philosophy” is sometimes associated with experiments in philosophical analysis of cultural monuments of Old Rus in the context of the worldview and ideology of the era. Of course, the “discovery of the icon” that occurred at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was associated with the assimilation of philosophical methodology and the acquisition of a special philosophical view of the subject. Such experiments in worldview reconstruction include the iconological studies of P. Florensky in his recently published in full work “Philosophy of Cult”, the books of G. P. Fedotov on spiritual verses and Old Russian holiness, the studies of folk humor culture by D. S. Likhachev and G. Panchenko, etc. In his “Autobiography”, priest Pavel Florensky believed “his own worldview … corresponding in structure to the style of the 14th-15th centuries of the Russian Middle Ages.” But besides the fact that it is possible to analyze philosophically not only philosophical monuments, it should be noted that such an approach sometimes sins by introducing into the culture of other eras of time meanings that came from a later time. Thus, discussing the Sophian attitude to nature, expressed in Russian spiritual verses, G. P. Fedotov speaks of their inherent Sophian deification of nature in the language of the sophiology of Vl. Solovyov and Archpriest Sergius Bulgakov, which has as its sources not only the Old Testament veneration of Sophia, the Wisdom of God, but also the influence of Gnosticism.
The beginning of the study of philosophy. The origins of the study of philosophy in Russia lie in the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy, founded by the Greek brothers Ioanniky and Sophrony Likhud in 1687 within the walls of the Zaikonospassky Monastery in Moscow. They taught courses in rhetoric, logic and metaphysics, compiled in the traditions of the University of Padua in Italy and focused on the interpretation of Aristotle with the help of Thomas Aquinas and the Arab Aristotelians. After the reform of the academy in 1701, professor Feofilakt Lopatinsky of the Kiev-Mohyla Theological Academy came to it, with whose activities is associated the reading of the first professional philosophical course, albeit in Latin. From 1704 to 1706, Lopatinsky taught dialectics, logic, physics, metaphysics and arithmetic. The philosophy course was designed for two years and was taught by the prefect of the Academy, while the rector taught a four-year course in theology. Lopatinsky’s course was circulated among the students of the Moscow and Kyiv academies. He also created the first philosophical dictionary in Russia, which explains 141 terms. However, this dictionary, compiled in Latin, remained in manuscript, so the priority in creating the first philosophical dictionary in Russia belongs to G. N. Teplov, who included a philosophical dictionary of 27 terms in his work “Knowledge, concerning philosophy in general, for the benefit of those who cannot read foreign books on this subject”, published in 1751. Philosophy courses at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy were taught by Stefan Yavorsky (1693-1694, later – protector of the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy) and Feofan Prokopovich (in 1707-1709), the author of the “Spiritual Regulations” and the main ideologist of the Synodal Administration of the Church, subordinating it to the state.
Through Ukraine, including with the assistance of the aforementioned thinkers, ideas of Catholic and Protestant theology penetrated into Rus’. Stefan Yavorsky, who received his education in Polish Jesuit schools, reduced philosophy primarily to ethics, and theology took on the functions of metaphysics. Slavophile Yu. F. Samarin, who studied the polemics of the two largest church dignitaries of the Church of Peter I, drew attention to the fact that the Catholic sources of Stefan Yavorsky’s “Stone of Faith” contradicted the Protestant elements of Prokopovich’s “Theological System”. Original Orthodox theology, much less philosophy, could not be born from this.
A new stage in the professionalization of philosophical knowledge in Russia was the creation of Moscow University by M. V. Lomonosov in 1755, consisting of three faculties: philosophy, law, and medicine. The staff of the philosophy faculty consisted of four professors, and training there lasted three years. All students took a philosophy course, after which they either remained to study at the philosophy faculty, or continued their studies at the law and medicine for another 4 years.
The first course in philosophy at Moscow University was taught by M. V. Lomonosov’s student N. N. Popovsky, who had been transferred from the University of the Academy of Sciences. In defining philosophy, Popovsky compares it to a temple “in which the entire Universe is contained,” in which everything that is in the earth, on the earth, and under the earth is depicted, as in a theater. Popovsky’s course was taught in Russian, but the following year the philosophy course was transferred to Professor I. G. Fromman, who was invited from Stuttgart and continued teaching the philosophy course in Latin until 1765. Returning to Germany, Fromman received the philosophy chair in Tübingen, where he defended his doctoral dissertation, “A Brief Outline of the State of the Sciences and Arts in the Russian Empire,” devoting three pages to a description of the teaching of philosophy in Moscow. The first professor from among the former students of Moscow University was D. S. Anichkov, who almost suffered persecution at the beginning of his teaching career. His doctoral dissertation, “Discourse from Natural Theology on the Origin and Origin of Natural Worship,” which contained a critique of pagan superstitions, almost provoked the condemnation of the Holy Synod. Beginning in 1767, lectures at the university were given in Russian, by order of Catherine II. At that time, the philosophical disciplines included metaphysics, physics, or natural philosophy, logic, and moral philosophy, or ethics. The university courses were based on the treatises of F. H. Baumeister and I. G. Winkler, based on the philosophy of H. Wolff. For a short time, I. G. Schwartz, a native of Transylvania, taught at Moscow University. He was a member of the Masonic lodge “Harmony,” and was associated with the vigorous publishing activity that the Masons launched at Moscow University. In 1779, N. I. Novikov rented the Moscow University Printing House, where he, together with I. V. Lopukhin and other Masons, published 891 volumes, a third of all literature published in Russia during that time. Among Novikov’s publications were translations of European mystical and hermetic literature – L. K. Saint-Martin, V. Weigel, I. G. Gichtel, J. Pordage (the works of the latter, never reprinted in Russia, had a considerable influence on the Russian sophiologists Pavel Florensky and Sergiy Bulgakov), Areopagitica, works of the Church Fathers – Macarius of Egypt, Gregory Palamas, Catholic and Protestant literature of a mystical and pietistic nature. Not a single book by J. Böhme, almost completely translated by S. I. Gamaleya, was published by Novikov, most likely due to the fact that Böhme’s works had the meaning of “secret knowledge” for the Masonic lodges of that time. S. I. Gamaleya’s translations remained handwritten, the first book edition of the translation of Böhme’s work dates back to 1817.
Of considerable importance for the propaganda of philosophy were the magazines published by N. I. Novikov: “Morning Light” (1997-1780), “Moscow Edition” (1781), “Evening Dawn” (1782-1783) (I. G. Schwartz played a major role in the publication), “Supplement to the Moscow News” (1783-1784), “The Resting Worker” (1784-1785). These magazines were mainly anti-Enlightenment in orientation, polemicizing with the philosophy of sensualism and Voltaireanism. However, it should be noted that the share of mysticism in the magazines gradually decreased, and tolerance and even recognition of the relative correctness of the Enlightenment philosophy gained the upper hand.
In the 18th century, philosophy in Russia was generally of an academic nature. Philosophy filled the leisure time of government officials such as A. D. Kantemir, V. N. Tatishchev, and M. M. Shcherbatov, who discussed the “evil nature” of man and the “corruption of morals in Russia,” or retired military men and landowners such as A. T. Bolotov, who wrote “Children’s Philosophy” (parts 1-2, 1776-1779) for the instruction of his young wife and thousands of articles on various fields of knowledge. For M. V. Lomonosov, his scholarly studies in astronomy, chemistry, mineralogy, and other “exact sciences” were also part of his philosophical knowledge, as were the reforms he carried out in linguistics, poetics, the composition of odes, etc. For the 18th century, philosophy was the main source of philosophical knowledge for the Russian people. The ode turns out to be a more preferable genre of philosophical reflection than the philosophical treatise. A. N. Radishchev, summing up the outgoing century, does not accidentally choose the genre of the ode to present his historiosophical views (“The Eighteenth Century”). On the other hand, philosophy is perceived in the context of Western European political ideas, primarily the theory of “natural law” and “natural law” (G. Grotius, S. Puffendorf, T. Hobbes, J. Locke, J.-J. Rousseau, etc.). Society’s fascination with the philosophy of the French Enlightenment brings the ideals of mechanistic materialism and deism to Russian soil. The “Instruction” of Catherine II, a symbol of the ideology of “enlightened absolutism”, is a treatise written by a “philosopher on the throne”; it was preceded by the empress’s communication with French philosophers – correspondence with Voltaire, an invitation to Diderot to the court in St. Petersburg. The reaction to the revolutionary events in Europe in 1789 put an end to this flirtation between the court and philosophy, as evidenced by the dissolution of the commission created to draw up a new code, the arrest of N. I. Novikov and A. N. Radishchev, the cessation of the activities of Masonic lodges, etc.
Radishchev’s importance is not limited to his role as a social denouncer who absorbed the “air of freedom” during his studies in Leipzig. Resolving the important question for himself about the mortality and immortality of the soul, especially of a person who voluntarily departed this life, “a rebel worse than Pugachev”, exiled by Catherine to the Ilimsk fortress, wrote the treatise “On Man, His Mortality and Immortality” (1790-1792). A. S. Pushkin was not entirely right when he said that Radishchev “more willingly sets out the arguments of “atheism” than refutes them”. Considering the arguments “for” and “against” the immortality of the soul, Radishchev dwells on the arguments of preformism, which assert the incessant improvement of the spiritual, inner man. The first conflicts between “philosophers” and the authorities will steadily link philosophy in the public consciousness with freethinking. The figure of the “Ukrainian Socrates” G.S. Skovoroda stands apart .A graduate of the Kyiv Theological and Academic School, he leaves his teaching career and goes wandering around the cities and villages. Sharing with the Masons the main themes of the era – the doctrine of the inner and outer man, the principles of allegorism in the interpretation of the Holy Scripture, Skovoroda represents the type of folk sage for whom philosophy is first of all not a profession, but the possession of spiritual wisdom, true life in the spirit. The dualistic attitude to the created world, a kind of docetic disgust with respect to matter, fits Skovoroda’s thought into the line of Christian gnosis. The brightness of his stylistic devices, the allegorizing imagery of his thought, the absence of clearly defined concepts testify to him as a thinker who lived in the era when the “baroque” style dominated, exerting a certain influence not only on painting, but also on literature and thought. Skovoroda’s teaching on the “three worlds” – the communal world, or macrocosm, the small world, or microcosm, and the symbolic world, or the Bible – is a philosophical symbolism that will find understanding and interest among the creators of the Russian Silver Age (his philosophical biography, written by V. F. Ern, contributed greatly to this). The hypothetical distant kinship of Vl. Solovyov on his mother’s side with Skovoroda will enter the myth of Russian philosophy, as will the words written on the tombstone of the wandering philosopher “The world tried to catch me, but did not catch me”. Skovoroda is the beginning of the discussion of the originality of the Russian national philosophical tradition. The author of one of the most authoritative studies on the history of Russian philosophy, Archpriest V. V. Zenkovsky, begins his review of philosophical ideas in Russia with him. Without achieving any serious results and having a predominantly academic character, the philosophical literature of the 18th century forms the historical and philosophical canon, the intellectual atmosphere in which further passion for philosophy unfolds. Essential elements of this canon are the influence of the philosophy of Neoplatonism, pre-Chalcedonian Christianity and Gnosticism, Catholic and Protestant mysticism, Pietism and Quietism, Christian Kabbalah and New European Gnosis. Of no small importance is also the vast experience in the assimilation and development of a national philosophical language and terminology.
XIX
Philosophy in the early 19th century The early 19th century is the time when the sowing done at the end of the 18th century begins to bear fruit. The victory over Napoleon’s army brought
glory to Russian arms and transformed the Russian state into a political force that could not be ignored. The romantic upsurge experienced by Russian society was expressed, in particular, in the adoption of the idea of the nation inherent in German philosophy, understood as a spiritual monad, the defining feature of which is the idea of cultural and religious chosenness. Schiller and Jung-Stilling, and then Fichte and Schelling gradually turn the interest of the educated part of society from the French Enlightenment with its rather simplified philosophical baggage to the latest German philosophy. The era of Alexander I is characterized by an increase in mystical sentiments in high society, as evidenced by the creation of the Bible Society in 1816, many of whose members, including the chairman, Prince A. A. Golitsyn, are not averse to practical participation in the activities of mystical circles and sects like the Khlyst ship of Madame Tatarinova or the salon of Madame Krudener. M. M. Speransky, a follower of J. Boehme, who had a great influence on Schelling, is involved in the activities of Masonic lodges. Franz von Baader writes a letter to the Minister of Public Education, Count A. S. Uvarov, “The Mission of the Russian Church in Connection with the Decline of Christianity in the West,” in which he places special hopes on the Russian Church.
A social environment is taking shape that begins to feel the need for philosophy as part of its intellectual and spiritual life. University teaching of philosophy proves unable to meet the philosophical needs of society. Since 1821, lecturing on philosophy at Moscow University has effectively ceased, and the study of philosophy has remained the domain of students at the Theological Academies, although nominally the Faculty of Philosophy remained part of the university. According to the charter of Moscow University in 1835, it was divided into two departments: history and philology, and physics and mathematics. The gap is filled by professors and natural scientists who have visited Europe and become followers of Schelling: D. M. Vellansky, who listened to Schelling in Jena, and M. G. Pavlov, and philologist A. I. Galich. Pavlov would greet a student entering the Moscow University auditorium with the question: “Do you want to know nature? But what is nature? And what is knowledge?” The fascination with Schellingism and, in particular, Schelling’s philosophy of art, makes aesthetics one of the privileged philosophical disciplines. Philosophical and literary circles emerged in Moscow: the circle of S.E. Raich (1823) and the Society of Wisdom Lovers (1823). The chairman of the latter, Prince V.F. Odoevsky, a writer and music critic, wrote in his short novel Russian Nights, which recreates the atmosphere of pre-Decembrist dreams twenty years later: “My youth passed in an era when metaphysics was the same general atmosphere as political science is today. We believed in the possibility of such an absolute theory, by means of which it would be possible to construct all the phenomena of Nature, just as they now believe in the possibility of such a social form that would fully satisfy all human needs.”
The organ of the circle of the Wisdom-lovers, or “archival youths”, as A. S. Pushkin dubbed them, was the magazine “Mnemosyne” published by Odoevsky, the editorial task of which was “to put an end to our passion for French theorists” and “to spread several new thoughts that had flashed in Germany”. It is noteworthy that among the plans of the Wisdom-lovers was the publication of a Philosophical Dictionary, in which all philosophical systems would be derived from the concept of the Absolute, brought together. After the self-dissolution of the circle (following the December uprising of 1825), its members continued to collaborate with the similarly inclined Moskovsky Vestnik, published by M. P. Pogodin, and I. V. Kireevsky, having traveled to Germany, where he saw and heard Hegel, Schelling and Schleiermacher with his own eyes, took on the publication of the journal Evropeets, which he dreamed of turning into an “audience of the German university”. In the programmatic article for the journal, “The Nineteenth Century” (the publication of which was not completed – the journal was closed by the Third Section out of fear of revolutionary ideas), the future Slavophile notes the lack of classical education in modern Russia and calls for turning to the West, the successor of classical Greece, to fill it. (It should not be forgotten that German metaphysics, Protestant in its origin, nevertheless in its original paradigm went back to the Greek, ancient source.) The continuation of the Society of the Wisdom-Made can be considered the activity of the circle of N. V. Stankevich, in which the emphasis somewhat shifted from natural philosophy and Schelling’s philosophy of art to transcendentalism, and the texts of Fichte and Hegel were mastered. Many knots of the future decades were tied in Stankevich’s circle. The romantic paradigm and harmony of the Pryamukhin estate connected the future anarchist and one of the founders of the International M. A. Bakunin, the radical literary critic V. G. Belinsky, the future main ideologist of the counter-reforms of Alexander III and the leader of the conservative press M. N. Katkov, Belinsky’s friend V. P. Botkin, a Westerner who became disillusioned with revolutionary radicalism.
The members of another philosophical circle, created by A. I. Herzen and N. A. Ogarev, also went through a passion for romanticism. They discussed not only Hegel’s texts, but also the socialist ideas of Fourier and Saint-Simon. Hegel’s influence in Russia, as in Germany, had its “left” and “right” sides. Hegel was read and seriously fascinated by both future radicals A. I. Herzen and M. A. Bakunin, and the Slavophiles K. S. Aksakov and I. V. Kireevsky, and N. N. Strakhov, who was close to the conservatives. The publication of A. I. Herzen’s works on the philosophy of science in the Otechestvennye Zapiski, written in the Hegelian spirit – “Dilettantism in Science” and “Letters on the Study of Nature” – is significant. V. P. Botkin would call them a “heroic symphony,” and F. M. Dostoevsky would write about them as the best thing written about philosophy in Russian. The magazine, with a circulation of no less than 10,000 copies, found its way into the Russian hinterland and made philosophical topics the subject of discussion among provincial teachers. The liberalization of admission to higher education institutions, their opening to children who did not belong to the nobility, created an environment of intellectuals from the raznochintsy class, the soil on which new ideas would be assimilated. Chaadayev, whose intellectual paths diverged from his youthful friends who had joined the Slavophile camp, complained in a letter to Schelling in 1841 that it was Hegel’s philosophy that had become the cause of the “national reaction.”
Religious Westernism. The need of Russian culture for philosophical self-awareness is clearly declared in the “Philosophical Letters” of P. Ya. Chaadaev, written in 1829-1831 in French. The publication of the first letter in the magazine “Telescope” in 1836 ended in scandal – its author was declared insane and put under house arrest, and the editor of the magazine, professor of literature at Moscow University N. I. Nadezhdin was sent into exile. The text of the letter, quite acceptable for salon or private reading (remember the rather calm epistolary reaction to it of A. S. Pushkin, who read the first letter in manuscript), having entered the field of official literature, shocked not only the political censorship. Bitter lamentations that “we have given nothing to the world, taken nothing from the world, we have not contributed a single thought to the mass of human ideas, we have not contributed in any way to the forward movement of the human mind,” in a word, that Russia lives outside of history and is something tragically superfluous in the historical process, concealed within itself a pressing need for philosophizing. The paradox is that the least “philosophical” of all the letters was committed to the printing press. While regretting the lack of logic and “consistent development of thought,” necessary for the formation of national self-awareness, Chaadayev was by no means an adherent of the European scientific-rationalistic tradition. In his historical-philosophical panorama, Socrates and Aristotle are clearly inferior to the biblical Moses and the prophet Mohammed. Chaadaev was a religious Westernizer, inspired by the ideas of Catholic traditionalism (L. G. Bonald, J. de Maistre), dreaming of the Kingdom of God on earth, of the social mission of Christianity. The ideas of universal consciousness that followed from his traditionalism anticipated the reflections on the “conciliar nature” of human knowledge by Prince S. N. Trubetskoy.
A graduate of the St. Petersburg University, classical philologist V. S. Pecherin, having studied in Germany, left Russia in 1836 and, having passed through the fascination with the Christian socialism of Abbot F. R. Lamennais, became a Catholic priest and lived in the order of Trappist monks. Pecherin’s national nihilism became a spiritual reaction to the political stagnation of the Nicholas era. He symbolized the generation of “superfluous people” from which the Russian intelligentsia would later be formed.
Slavophilism. Since the early 1930s, the social element has occupied an important place in philosophical research. Very soon, this is expressed in a certain polarization of society, the emergence of two ideological currents, each of which in its own way saw the way out of Russia’s stagnation – Slavophilism and Westernism. Slavophilism also expresses itself as the first Russian philosophical “school” (it is clear that the word “school” can only be used figuratively, since most Slavophile thinkers were not engaged in teaching or academic activities). The Slavophiles will set the task of creating a national philosophy that will be rooted in the Orthodox Tradition (the idea that the nature of the enlightenment of any nation is rooted in its religious faith is one of the key ideas in Slavophilism). The Slavophiles develop a religious philosophy of culture, raise the question of actualizing the moral, spiritual and intellectual potential that is rooted in Orthodoxy and has not yet been fully revealed and realized in Russian history. One of the leaders of the Slavophile camp, I. V. Kireevsky, who by his personal fate threw a bridge between secular and spiritual culture, participating in the publishing activities of Optina Pustyn, sets the task of a new reading of the works of the Holy Fathers and linking them with modern life. Optina Pustyn, a small and previously abandoned monastery on Kaluga land, becomes not only an all-Russian center of eldership, but also a place of productive dialogue and cooperation between secular intellectuals and monasticism. N. V. Gogol, S. P. Shevyrev, K. K. Zederholm (monk Clement), and later K. N. Leontyev will be drawn to the walls of Optina, looking for a nourishing spiritual environment. In search of “new beginnings for philosophy” and in criticism of the rationality of Western speculative philosophy from Aristotle to Hegel, Slavophilism comes to the idea of a “whole” or “believing” mind, realizing knowledge with the help of acts of “life-knowledge”, combining faith, will, reason, love, and aesthetic feeling.
Seeing in philosophy “the general result and the general basis of all sciences and the guide between them and faith”, I. V. Kireevsky proposed “to elevate the very source of understanding, the very method of thinking to a sympathetic agreement with faith”. After the premature death of Kireevsky, A. S. Khomyakov attempted to continue the implementation of his philosophical project, but managed to write only a few short articles specifically devoted to philosophy. Khomyakov’s theological and polemical legacy is more extensive – he discovers the tradition of “secular theology” in Russian culture, and the work of his life is his work on the philosophy of religion and mythology “Notes on World History” (with the light hand of N. V. Gogol called “Semiramis”).
Khomyakov viewed the entire history of mankind as the coexistence and rivalry of two principles – “Iranism” and “Kushitism”, defining two types of religion, one of which is based on the idea of the free creation of the world, and the other on the idea of the necessary birth, or emanation, of the world from the deity. Khomyakov viewed rationalistic philosophy as a kind of manifestation of Kushitism. The Slavophile attempt to offer Western culture an alternative image of philosophy was rooted in the origins of the romantic paradigm, which, however, was significantly supplemented and rethought as a result of the “discovery” of an entire continent of patristic heritage. Similar attempts were made in Western philosophy – for example, in the “philosophy of feeling and faith” of F. G. Jacobi or the “positive philosophy” of F. V. J. Schelling, the exposition of which was closely followed by Russian philosophers. In 1841-42, when Schelling was giving a course on the “Philosophy of Revelation” in Berlin, V. F. Odoevsky and N. A. Melgunov, M. A. Bakunin and Søren Kierkegaard were present at his lectures.
In the 1840s, philosophy, while remaining primarily the domain of amateur nobles, exerted considerable influence on the general intellectual atmosphere. At Moscow University, lectures on the history of law by P. G. Redkin and K. D. Kavelin, on the history of ancient philosophy by M. N. Katkov, on general history by T. N. Granovsky, on Russian history by S. M. Solovyov and M. P. Pogodin, on literature by S. P. Shevyrev gave students considerable philosophical horizons and erudition. A student of the 1840s, and later a professor of civil law and philosopher, B. N. Chicherin recalled Granovsky’s lectures as follows: “The philosophical content of history was for him a common element, penetrating the eternally agitated sea of events, manifesting itself in the living struggle of passions and interests.”
In the 1840s, philosophy developed under the sign of social issues. The dispute between Westernizers and Slavophiles took place in the context of society’s fascination with the concepts of utopian socialists – Ch. Fourier, A. Saint-Simon, R. Owen. Phalansteries based on the ideas of “socialism” were created, like the “Fridays” in the house of M. V. Butashevich-Petrashevsky in St. Petersburg, in whose circle the young Dostoevsky found himself. Both in its radical forms, calling for social revolution and terror (V. G. Belinsky, M. A. Bakunin, N. A. Speshnev), and in more moderate forms of socialist economism (V. N. Maikov, A. I. Herzen, N. A. Ogarev), Russian socialism is usually associated with atheism and materialism of the Feuerbach type. Socialism rarely takes the form of solid philosophical treatises; its environment (however, very influential and penetrating the deep layers of society) remains journalism. One of its main themes is the search for national specifics of the spread of socialism in Russia – it is connected with the question of land and the preservation of the peasant community.
Philosophy and power. Philosophical studies are under suspicion in power. In the capital, A. I. Galich resigns from the University, F. F. Sidonsky from the Theological Academy. A. S. Khomyakov is under special surveillance of the Third Section. In 1849, at the suggestion of the Minister of Public Education, Prince P. A. Shirinsky-Shikhmatov, the tsar ordered the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, moral philosophy and the history of philosophy to be removed from the teaching of philosophy, leaving only logic and experimental psychology in the curriculum. At the same time, the teaching of ancient languages in gymnasiums was abolished. The faculties and departments of philosophy in Russian universities were liquidated, and two independent faculties were formed on the basis of the philosophical faculties – the history and philology and the physics and mathematics. This could not but affect the general intellectual atmosphere – soon the flat ideal of positivism would be established in the humanities and natural sciences for many years. The gymnasium reform of 1871 returned ancient languages to gymnasiums, while the study of philosophy at universities remained nominal for a long time. The neglect of philosophy was discussed in his speech “Reason according to Plato’s teaching and experience according to Kant’s teaching” on Tatyana’s Day in 1866 by Moscow University professor P. D. Yurkevich, who occupied the philosophy department restored in accordance with the university charter of 1863 at the Faculty of History and Philology: “Isn’t the slow transformation of universities into polytechnic schools taking place before our eyes, dear sirs? Does not the spirit of the times destroy the profound idea of knowledge, which demands that specialized scholarship grow and strengthen on the broad basis of a general or integral mental education and that every acquisition on a specialized basis be at the same time an increase in the content of the ideal of the human personality?
Philosophy in theological academies. Professional philosophy in universities and theological academies bears tangible fruit. It is in the spiritual and academic environment that Russian culture first becomes acquainted with Kant, especially with his moral philosophy, which is highly valued. They also accept the ideas of the Kantians – V. Krug, K. L. Reingold, who brought together the philosophy of J. G. Fichte with the philosophy of “faith” of Jacobi. Of no small importance are the ideas of representatives of mystical movements in the West – F. Baader, Saint-Martin, Schubert. Three centers of spiritual and academic philosophy are formed – in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev. Kazan joins them later. The Moscow Theological Academy was left with the traces of V. I. Kutnevich, Archpriest F. A. Golubinsky, Archpriest F. Bukharev, V. D. Kudryavtsev-Platonov, A. I. Vvedensky, in the 20th century — priest P. Florensky and M. M. Tareev, in the Petersburg — F. F. Sidonsky, in the Kiev — V. N. Karpov (who later moved to the Petersburg), P. D. Yurkevich, I. M. Skvortsov, S. S. Gogotsky, in the Kazan — V. I. Nesmelov. For his work “Introduction to the Science of Philosophy” F. F. Sidonsky received the Demidov Prize of the Academy of Sciences in 1836 (sharing it with A. I. Galich, professor at the Petersburg University), V. N. Karpov translated the complete corpus of Plato’s dialogues (except for “Laws”), S. S. Gogotsky compiled a four-volume “Philosophical Lexicon”. The first essay on the history of Russian philosophy appeared in the spiritual and academic environment, written by Archimandrite Gabriel (Voskresensky), a professor at Kazan University (he compiled the sixth part of his “History of Philosophy,” published in Kazan in 1839-1840). Characteristic is the reference to the inclination of Eastern Greek thinkers toward Plato’s philosophy (in contrast to the West, which chose Aristotle), as well as a number of names — the first of which is Metropolitan Nicephorus, followed by Vladimir Monomakh, Daniil Zatochnik, Nil Sorsky, Feofan Prokopovich, and other church writers. There are no strict barriers between university and spiritual and academic philosophy — the best professors of theological academies move to university philosophy departments (which, as a rule, does not happen by the end of the 19th century, not to mention the 20th).
At the center of spiritual and academic philosophy is the problem of spiritual truth, understood as an ontological reality, and the problem of man, considered in the perspective of his deification. The tragic fate of A. M. Bukharev, who raised the question of “the attitude of Orthodoxy to modernity” and decided to justify the “world” and the path of laymen to salvation by leaving the monastery and ending his spiritual career, makes him one of the main predecessors of the Russian religious and philosophical renaissance of the early twentieth century. V. I. Nesmelov gives an experience of constructing anthropological theology in his “Science of Man” (1898-1903), V. D. Kudryavtsev-Platonov creates an original system of “transcendental monism”, Alexey I. Vvedensky publishes significant works on the philosophy of religion and the history of ancient and post-Kantian philosophy.
Materialism, utilitarianism, anarchism. The 1960s were a time of widespread infatuation with vulgar materialism, the rather primitive philosophical program of which was replaced somewhat later by positivistic philosophy, which was anti-metaphysical in its orientation. The term “the sixties” is a household word for Russian social history. It is associated with the birth of the raznochintsy “intelligentsia”, in whose development its “idols” played no small role — publicists and philosophers of the “left camp” N. G. Chernyshevsky, D. I. Pisarev, P. L. Lavrov, P. N. Tkachev, and the journals “Otechestvennye Zapiski” and “Sovremennik”. Vl. Soloviev characterized this time as “the era of the change of two catechisms”: “The obligatory authority of Metropolitan Philaret was suddenly replaced by the equally obligatory authority of Ludwig Buchner”. The readers of Büchner, K. Vogt, J. Moleschott and D. F. Strauss are called “nihilists”. Affirming the high value of natural scientific knowledge and social activity, they were guided by the ideals of utilitarianism and “rational egoism” (Chernyshevsky) and disdained philosophical idealism and “pure beauty”. P. L. Lavrov in “Historical Letters” calls for analyzing the phenomena of history and consciousness using the “subjective method”, putting forward the ideal of a “critically thinking personality” who turns out to be both the goal and the driving force of historical progress. The subjective method of the populists includes an ethical attitude to knowledge: the goal of philosophical quests is truth, understood as truth, i.e., including a moral aspect. N. K. Mikhailovsky in the preface to the 1st volume of his Collected Works speaks of the inseparability of truth-truth from truth-justice. Subsequently, in “Vekhi” N. A. Berdyaev will speak out against such an attitude, defending the epistemological nature of truth. Under the influence of the preaching of the populists in the 70s, a mass “going to the people” begins, which is replaced by a more radical ideology of revolutionary terror by the end of the decade. The texts of Russian anarchists appearing abroad – M. A. Bakunin, P. A. Kropotkin – carry an active anti-religious and anti-metaphysical pathos, are nourished by the ideals of ethical utopias and European socialism.
Vl. S. Solovyov. Yurkevich’s student Vl. S. Solovyov rebelled against the narrowness of the positivist ideal in philosophy in his master’s dissertation “The Crisis of Western Philosophy (against the Positivists)”. The son of the great Russian historian, Vl. Solovyov became an emblematic figure for an entire generation of philosophers who shared his religious-metaphysical direction. Having become a privat-docent at Moscow University at the age of 21, Solovyov nevertheless did not connect his life with teaching, preferring the fate of a free scientist and publicist to a career as an academic professor. According to L. M. Lopatin, Solovyov was the first who began not only to present philosophical problems in Russian, but also attempted to solve them. Having set himself the task of constructing an organic system in which a synthesis of philosophy, science and religion, Western philosophy and Eastern wisdom would be realized, Solovyov came up with the idea of ”critique of abstract principles”. According to the principles of historicism (borrowed from Hegel), each philosophical system, in its relative truth, had to take its place in the fullness of “integral knowledge”. The metaphysics of all-unity, which Soloviev began to develop, will find its continuation and development in the philosophers of the “Russian religious renaissance” – S. N. and E. N. Trubetskoy, S. L. Frank, N. O. Lossky, L. P. Karsavin, A. F. Losev and others. Soloviev actualizes in Russian philosophy the teaching on Sophia, divine Wisdom, which will also be accepted by a number of his successors – priests P. Florensky and S. Bulgakov, brothers S. and E. Trubetskoy, L. P. Karsavin and will become one of the elements of Russian religious metaphysics.
Soloviev’s sophiology is rooted not only in the Old Testament tradition, temple architecture and icon-painting tradition, but also in mystical teachings that have their origins in Gnosticism, Hermeticism and other Middle Eastern religious teachings. In his lecture “Historical Affairs of Philosophy” Soloviev argued that the time of purely theoretical development of philosophy is over, that philosophy has in mind “the vital interest of all mankind”, “makes man completely human”, giving him inner self-awareness. The historical process, according to Soloviev, is the transition from beast-manhood to God-manhood, the process of embodiment in mankind of the absolute idea, the deification of man, however, this deification is not understood in the tradition of the Holy Fathers. Having entered literature as the heir and continuer of the Slavophiles, by the mid. 80s. Soloviev is carried away by the project of uniting churches and creates a theocratic model of a Christian state, attacking the Slavophiles with harsh criticism. Soloviev was one of the first in Russian culture to pay attention to Nietzsche, seeing in his superman an ominous and dangerous parody of his historiosophical project. Man is obscured by humanity, human freedom by divine necessity, action can neither be slowed down nor overcome. Soloviev turns out to be the author of the first integral ethical system in Russian philosophy, built in the book “Justification of Good”. At the end of his life, he comes to a keen sense of the reality of evil in the world and writes the dialogues “Three Conversations on War, Progress, and the End of World History”, in which he turns to a free interpretation of the Apocalypse and paints a picture of the catastrophic denouement of world history, the beginning of which is approaching from the East. The book will be perceived as prophetic among the Symbolists of the early 20th century, especially in light of Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (the coming of the Antichrist, according to Solovyov, will be preceded by an onslaught from the Japanese and Chinese).
Philosophical pessimism. An alternative to positivism is the emerging interest in the philosophy of pessimism, the systems of Arthur Schopenhauer and E. von Hartmann. The fascination with pessimism occurs under the banner of the restoration of the rights of metaphysics. It is precisely the justification of the “metaphysical need” of man that gives Vl. Solovyov a reason to see in the systems of the philosophy of pessimism the first signs of an exit from the “crisis of Western philosophy”. In 1874, Hartmann’s “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was translated by A. A. Kozlov, and in 1881, the translation of A. Schopenhauer’s book “The World as Will and Representation” was published by the poet A. A. Fet. Schopenhauer’s ethics, based on the idea of compassion, exerted a strong influence on L. N. Tolstoy. Reading the “lonely thinker” Hartmann brings its own notes to the “Optina Christianity” of K. N. Leontiev, who, in his criticism of European egalitarian progress, became one of the exponents and unrecognized ideologists of the counter-reforms of the era of Alexander III.
“The aesthetic understanding of history”, which, according to the apt remark of V. V. Rozanov, underlies Leontief’s view of history and Tolstoy’s ethical rigorism, which reduces Christianity to the postulates of universal morality, can be presented as two one-sided receptions of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Through the philosophy of pessimism, society’s interest in Buddhism and Eastern philosophy is born. In this context, Vl. Solovyov’s intention “to combine the fullness of spiritual contemplations of the East with the logical perfection of Western form”, expressed by him in the conclusion of his master’s dissertation “The Crisis of Western Philosophy”, does not seem accidental.
Science and religion. The cult of science contained in the positivist ideal exerts a certain influence on religious thinkers. This is expressed in the philosophy of the “common cause” of the librarian of the Rumyantsev Museum N. F. Fedorov, which sets the task of defeating death and “resurrecting the fathers” by “regulating nature” and strengthening man’s power over it. Fedorov’s teachings attract the attention of a number of followers – Kozhevnikov, Peterson, Tsiolkovsky, Gorsky, Setnitsky, Chizhevsky, who are usually united in the direction of “cosmism”. The significance of Fedorov’s ideas was recognized by the figures of the “Russian religious renaissance” S. N. Bulgakov, V. N. Ilyin, etc. For thinkers who went through the school of Marxism, Fedorovism was a kind of alternative to Marx’s philosophy, due to its emphasized ethicism and the requirement that philosophy not be limited to purely theoretical achievements, but actively implemented in social practice. (In the first years of Soviet power there were even attempts to “cross” Fedorov with Marx — an example of this is the Harbin “Letters from Russia” by N. A. Setnitsky, written in 1928). Partly under the influence of Fedorov, but to a greater extent in the perspective of Plato’s philosophy of Eros, the theurgic project of Vl. Solovyov was formed, which had a serious influence on the symbolists and religious philosophy of the early twentieth century. In the early 80s of the XIX century, Solovyov outlined a plan for work on “true science”, which he conceived of as integral knowledge and a real force with the help of which it is possible to transform the world. In the same decade, the book of the district history and geography teacher V. V. Rozanov “On Understanding. An Experience of Studying the Nature, Boundaries, and Internal Structure of Science as Integral Knowledge” appeared, inspired by the same ideal of systematism, the roots of which go back to the scientific “organons” of Aristotle and F. Bacon. Significant philosophical works are sometimes the fruit of amateur or quasi-professional activity of scientists who received a natural science education. Philosophical and psychological issues also penetrate into the works of natural scientists: biologists I. M. Sechenov and I. I. Mechnikov, chemist D. I. Mendeleyev, mathematician N. V. Bugaev.
University Philosophy in the Late 19th Century. If in the 1860s and 1870s positivism prevailed in the teaching of philosophy at the university (Vl. Solovyov’s teaching debut at Moscow University was a short-lived exception; M. Troitsky, a supporter of English empiricism, was appointed to the department), then by the 1880s the spiritualistic line, marked by the influence of G. V. Leibniz, R. G. Lotze, and G. Teichmüller, became prevalent. Brothers Sergei and Evgeny Trubetskoy, who had been keen on reading philosophical classics even in their high school years, were truly depressed by the state of affairs with the teaching of philosophy at the university in the early 1880s. E. N. Trubetskoy later recalled: “At that time, philosophy was everything to me and my brother, so the university immediately made a depressing, even exaggeratedly bad impression on us. We immediately felt that we had no one to learn philosophy from. At that time, there was no professor at Moscow University who knew Kant, Schopenhauer, and Plato better than the two of us, first-year students.” But soon the situation changed noticeably for the better. Returning from Europe in 1889, Vl. Soloviev wrote in a letter to the philosopher D. N. Tsertelev that he had found “an entire philosophical plantation” in Moscow. In 1886, N. Ya. Grot was invited from Odessa to the philosophy department of Moscow University, giving a powerful impetus to the institutional existence of philosophy in Russia. Since 1885, L. M. Lopatin lectured on philosophy at the university as a privat-docent, retaining his chair until 1919. An entire generation of Silver Age figures passed through the school of the spiritualist philosopher: Lopatin examined G. G. Shpet, A. F. Losev, V. Ya. Bryusov and others in philosophy. Lopatin focused on questions of causality and free will, which he resolved within the framework of spiritualistic metaphysics. Vl. Soloviev, whose position by this time leaned toward a kind of rethinking of Kantian transcendentalism, opposing the psychologization of human consciousness (a tendency similar to that which would manifest itself at almost the same time in the founder of the phenomenological school, E. Husserl), polemicized with Lopatin’s teaching on “creative causality” rooted in the substantiality of the human soul. In 1885 he graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology and was left to prepare for the professorial title of S. N. Trubetskoy.Beginning his activity in the mainstream of Slavophilism and Soloviev’s sophiology, guided by the idea of creating an “Orthodox gnosis”, he soon focuses his interest on the history of ancient philosophy, gives courses of lectures on Antiquity, publishes monographs “Metaphysics in Ancient Greece” (1892) “The Doctrine of Logos in Its History” (1900). In his articles, he continues to develop Soloviev’s metaphysics of all-unity, his doctrine of truth as an all-one being. Of great importance was the university historical-philosophical seminar of S. N. Trubetskoy, which in March 1902 grew into the Student Historical-Philological Society, in whose work both professors — P. I. Novgorodtsev, L. M. Lopatin, and students took part, some of them — P. A. Florensky, V. F. Ern, V. P. Sventsitsky, A. V. Elchaninov — would become the creators of the Russian religious-philosophical school. During the revolutionary events of 1905, S. N. Trubetskoy became the first elected rector of Moscow University. For the philosopher, the university was the embodiment of that “cathedral nature of human consciousness”, about which one of his best philosophical articles was written.
At St. Petersburg University, a significant mark in the teaching of philosophy was left by the psychologist and philosopher M. I. Vladislavlev, and in the 80s and 90s by the neo-Kantian philosopher A. I. Vvedensky, who paid great attention to the construction of epistemology on the basis of Kantian criticism.
Philosophical journals and societies. The institutional existence of philosophy was consolidated at the end of the 19th century with the creation in Russia of a professional philosophical environment with its own society and periodicals. In 1879, a number of philosophers and publicists, including A. A. Kireev, T. I. Filippov, N. N. Strakhov, Vl. Soloviev, D. N. Tsertelev, M. I. Karinsky decided to found a philosophical society in St. Petersburg, one of whose tasks would be to expand philosophical education in the country, but they were effectively refused by the Minister of Internal Affairs. The first attempt to create a periodical philosophical journal was undertaken in Kiev by A. A. Kozlov: in 1885-1887 he published “Philosophical Three-Monthly”, and then, after moving to St. Petersburg, in 1888-1898 the philosophical collection “Svoye slo”. In 1885, at Moscow University, on the initiative of M. M. Troitsky, the Moscow Psychological Society was created, in which philosophers played a significant role practically from the moment of its foundation: from 1887 to 1899, the Society was headed by N. Ya. Grot, from 1899 to 1920 by L. M. Lopatin, from 1920 to 1922 by I. A. Ilyin.
The society published a series of “Izdateli” and “Trudy” (Works), and translations of significant works of philosophical classics appeared. Since 1889, with the participation of the Moscow Psychological Society, the journal “Problems of Philosophy and Psychology” (first editor – N. Ya. Grot) was published, which became a regular periodical publication, uniting around itself mainly philosophers of the idealistic trend. The journal became a platform for publishing the minutes of the meetings of the Psychological Society, a large place in it was occupied by a section of reviews of the latest philosophical literature published in the West, publications of a necrological nature appeared, giving a detailed assessment of the philosophical merits of departed thinkers. It was largely due to the journal that the canons of philosophical polemics were formed (the polemics of Vl. Solovyov with B. N. Chicherin and G. F. Shershenevich on issues of ethics, caused by the publication of Solovyov’s book “Justification of Good”, the polemics of S. N. Trubetskoy with B. N. Chicherin on the foundations of idealism, etc.). In 1898, the philosophical society at St. Petersburg University began its work with A. I. Vvedensky’s report “The Fate of Philosophy in Russia”. Philosophical communication continued in an informal, salon environment, where philosophers, psychologists, lawyers, and representatives of various cultural strata met. Such gatherings included “Wednesdays” in the Lopatin house, “Wednesdays” in the apartment of the Katkovsky Lyceum teacher, philosopher and psychologist P. E. Astafyev, and “Fridays” in St. Petersburg at the poet K. K. Sluchevsky’s. Entire layers of philosophical culture ended up outside the framework of university philosophy.
It is quite typical for the end of the 19th century that significant philosophical works are the fruit of amateur or quasi-professional activity of scientists who received a natural science education. Thus, the original theory of cultural-historical types on Russian soil was created by biologist N. Ya. Danilevsky and physician by education K. N. Leontiev. N. N. Strakhov, a literary critic, author of the work “The Struggle with the West in Our Literature”, which expressed the ideology of “pochvennichestvo”, who also received a natural science education, became a Hegelian philosopher and wrote a purely philosophical work “The World as a Whole”. It was as a philosopher under the patronage of Strakhov that V. V. Rozanov entered literature.
Translations. In the second half of the 19th century, systematic work began on translating philosophical classics into Russian: Plato was translated by V. N. Karpov (2nd ed., vol. 1-6, 1863-1879), Vl. S. and M. S. Soloviev (The Works of Plato, vols. 1-2, 1899-1903), Aristotle by V. Snegirev (On the Soul, 1885), V. V. Rozanov and P. Pervov (Books 1-5 of Metaphysics, 1890-1895), Plotinus by M. I. Vladislavlev (1868) and G. V. Malevansky (1898-1900), F. Bacon by P. A. Bibikov (1874), Descartes (Discourses on Method) by M. Skiade (1873) and N. A. Lyubimov (1886), Leibniz by K. Istomin (Theodicy, 1887-1892), Kant by Vladislavlev (Critique of Pure Reason, 1867) and N. M. Sokolov (Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 1896-1898), Vl. S. Solovyov (Prolegomena to the Critique of Pure Reason, 1874), Hegel by V. P. Chizhov (Course in Aesthetics, or the Science of the Fine Arts, 1859-1860; Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, vols. 1-3, 1861-1868). Since the 1860s, volumes of K. Fischer’s History of Modern Philosophy, with which many intellectuals began their acquaintance with philosophy, have appeared in Russian translation.
Russian literature and philosophy. Two literary giants of the 19th century, L. N. Tolstoy and F. M. Dostoevsky, are perceived not just as teachers of society and “secular theologians”, but also as thinkers (in the history of Russian culture, this word usually means a person whose philosophical views did not result in an academic system built according to certain professional canons, but had a great influence on his contemporaries). The novels of F. M. Dostoevsky, in their influence on world and Russian philosophy, are in no way inferior to the works of the most important philosophers and system-builders. According to G. Florovsky, Dostoevsky “widely expanded and deepened metaphysical experience”. Philosophical fatalism and providentialism, expressed in the novels of L. N. Tolstoy, but mainly his ethical writings and his polemics with the Orthodox Church had a great influence on the formation of public consciousness in Russia and beyond. The problems of good and evil, the individual and society, the relationship between the world and the Church, the meaning of history, socialism and new forms of social organization, social violence and quietism, freedom and responsibility, faith and unbelief, posed by Russian literature, gradually form the metaphysics of freedom and the human personality – the core of Russian religious philosophy.
The phenomenon of philosophical reading of literary texts is typical for the end of the 19th century. The tradition was established by V. G. Belinsky and I. V. Kireevsky in the first half of the 19th century: for them, literary criticism became a philosophical genre. The poetry of A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, F. I. Tyutchev began to be understood philosophically. On the other hand, the poetry of A. K. Tolstoy, A. N. Maikov, Count A. A. Golenishchev-Kutuzov, K. K. Sluchevsky was actively nourished by philosophical motives. The articles of V. S. Solovyov, K. K. Sluchevsky, V. V. Rozanov continued the tradition established by critics of the 1930s-40s, according to which literary criticism in Russia became a special genre of philosophizing. In the articles of V. V. Rozanov, a polemic is outlined, which continued in the context of the “new religious consciousness”, about the work of N. V. Gogol and the last years of his life, marked by religious conversion. Russian philosophy becomes literature-centric, which is not only reflected in the work of 20th-century thinkers, but also contributes – through the dissemination of Russian philosophical literature in the diaspora – to the worldwide fame of Russian literature in the 20th century.
Philosophy of Marxism. Social thought of the late 19th century in its liberal and radical directions is characterized by an unshakable faith in social progress. In the question of the methods of historical knowledge, the subjectivism of the populists is opposed by the historical determinism of the Marxists. The Russian translation of the first volume of K. Marx’s Capital, completed by G.A. Lopatin, appears in Russia in 1872, and the spread of Marxism in Russia and the expanding activity of Marxist circles from the mid-80s are associated with the literary activity of G.V. Plekhanov and the Geneva group “Emancipation of Labor” (1883), whose members translated about 30 major works of the founders of Marxism by 1900. Initially, Marxism was perceived as “economism”, as a kind of socio-dogmatic religion providing a universal key to solving social issues. Marxist thought of the early 20th century is very heterogeneous. The attempt to see in Marxism a “religion without God” is characteristic of the so-called God-builders (A. V. Lunacharsky, V. A. Bazarov, P. S. Yushkevich). Striving to adapt the empiriocriticism and empiriomonism of E. Mach and R. Avenarius to the needs of the social philosophy of Marxism, A. A. Bogdanov creates a “general organizational science”, “tectology”, seeing in it a scientific ideology of the future society. V. I. Ulyanov (pseud. – V. Lenin, V. Ilyin) spoke out against the empiriomonists, asserting in the book “Materialism and Empiriocriticism” (1909) dialectical materialism as the only philosophy of Marxism. G. V. Plekhanov defended the idea of philosophy as a methodology of particular sciences, uniting the totality of human experience.
“From Marxism to Idealism”. The ongoing process of “Kantization of Marxism” in Europe – in Stammler, then in social revisionism, for example in Bernstein, aimed at understanding the epistemological prerequisites of social knowledge and practice, at distinguishing between social necessity and ethical obligation, which has its source in the human will and in which there is a person’s consciousness of his own freedom, also influences the development of the so-called “legal Marxism” in Russia. Ethics, as the least developed topic in Marxism, requires for its resolution an appeal to philosophical idealism – the neo-Kantian type, with the idea of the normativity and value of moral judgments (N. A. Berdyaev), the immanentist (V. Shuppe), substantiating moral norms in spiritual substance (P. B. Struve), or to religious metaphysics in the spirit of Vl. Solovyova, who sees in the realm of moral goals – good – the expression of a single absolute origin, other modes of which are truth and beauty (S. N. Bulgakov). Initially, Marxism is perceived as a universal teaching that provides the key to solving all social issues. However, the “philosophical poverty of Marxism” (an expression of B. P. Vysheslavtsev) and its inconsistency with the spiritual needs of the era leads a number of so-called “legal Marxists” under the influence of Kant and Vl. Solovyov to the position of philosophical idealism. In 1902, under the brand of the Moscow Psychological Society, a collection of “Problems of Idealism” was published, originally conceived by its editor P. B. Struve as a publication devoted to the problem of freedom of conscience. The main goal of this collection – to provide a new, idealistic program for the liberation movement in Russia, shows how closely philosophy in Russia was connected with attempts at its modern historical implications. As the publicist A. S. Glinka-Volzhsky stated in 1904, “the understanding of philosophy in Russia is predominantly ethical.” The polemics between P. B. Struve and N. A. Berdyaev on issues of ethics, which was expressed both in the preface of Struve, the former author of the first political program of the Marxist party in Russia, to Berdyaev’s book “Subjectivism and Individualism in the Social Philosophy of N. K. Mikhailovsky,” and in the articles “Problems of Idealism,” asserted the position of “ethical individualism,” the spiritual autonomy of the individual, while N. A. Berdyaev saw the value of the human personality in the fact that it expresses certain universal principles, following the logic of Vl. Solovyov, who believed in his “organic logic” that the most individual is at the same time the most universal. “Problems of Idealism” were understood by contemporaries as “an expansion of the union between philosophical idealism and practical-political idealism”, which was initiated by Vl. Solovyov with his journalism.
In the collection “Vekhi” (1909), which was an important event in the polarization of public consciousness in Russia, the opposition to utilitarianism, economism and eudaemonistic ethics was combined with sharp criticism of the socialist ideal. The authors of “Vekhi”, united by the common pathos of criticism of the radical intelligentsia for its “apostasy” and “groundlessness”, for its separation from the people it defended and their religious faith, occupied very heterogeneous positions in the socio-ethical sense: from the hope of a new religious collectivism and Christian community in Berdyaev and Bulgakov to the preaching of “creative self-awareness” and personal responsibility of man to society in Struve and M. O. Gershenzon.
On the basis of the ethics and social philosophy of Vl. Solovyov, his criticism of nationalism (collection “The National Question in Russia”, issue 1 — 1st ed., 1884; issue 2 — 1891) the social philosophy of Russian liberalism and the liberal school of philosophy of law were formed, linking law with morality, and the problem of the social ideal — with the self-realization of the human personality (P. I. Novgorodtsev, E. N. Trubetskoy, A. S. Yashchenko). In exile, the study of the “spiritual foundations of society”, the religious and moral foundations of law and the state was continued by S. L. Frank, I. A. Ilyin, N. N. Alekseev and others.
The influence of Nietzsche. A special place in the public consciousness of the beginning of the century is occupied by the immorality of F. Nietzsche, his doctrine of the “revaluation of values”, expressed in the idea of the “superman”. The beginning of acquaintance with Nietzsche’s ideas in Russia dates back to 1891, their significance and danger were already noted by Vl. Soloviev. However, the peak of his influence dates back to the first years of the twentieth century. Supporters of the idealistic trend were attracted by the absoluteness of Nietzsche’s ethical ideal, the proclamation of the intrinsic value of the ideal personality, the rebellion against the debasement of man and his belittlement, criticism of the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality. F. Nietzsche’s ethics of “love for the distant” complemented Kant’s autonomous ethics, the “ethics of duty”. The eschatologically colored religious consciousness of decadence coming to the forefront of culture perceives Nietzsche at times as a religious prophet, castigating the sins of historical Christianity, setting a new transcendental ideal. This was largely how Nietzsche was perceived by the creators of philosophical and poetic symbolism (A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov). Nietzsche becomes a paradigmatic figure, they try to find a Russian analogue of Nietzsche in K. N. Leontiev or V. V. Rozanov, L. Shestov undertakes a comparison of the moral philosophy of Nietzsche and L. N. Tolstoy.
Religious and philosophical meetings and societies. The public status of philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century significantly increased, the discussion of philosophical issues went beyond the philosophical departments and salon circles, public lectures and the pages of specialized publications. In 1901-1903, religious and philosophical meetings were held in St. Petersburg, sanctioned by the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod K. P. Pobedonostsev and the St. Petersburg Metropolitan Anthony (Vadkovsky). Against the background of the great public resonance caused by the excommunication of L. N. Tolstoy from the Church on February 20, 1901, the meetings became a forum at which questions were raised about freedom of conscience, family and marriage, the relationship between the Church and the state, gender and the “holy flesh”. The meetings turned out to be the first experience of a meeting between the secular intelligentsia and representatives of the clergy. Despite the fact that the meetings were discontinued (22 sessions were held), they became a search for a common field for secular and religious culture in discussing pressing social issues. The initiators of the meetings were the philosophizing writers D. S. Merezhkovsky, D. V. Filosofov, Z. N. Gippius, V. V. Rozanov, V. A. Ternavtsev. The journal Novy Put (1901-1904) was created to publish the minutes of the meetings, which was later transformed into the journal Voprosy Zhizni (Problems of Life), which became a tribune for the ideologists of the idealistic trend in the year of the First Russian Revolution. Following Vl. Solovyov, especially his early metaphysics, they developed the ideology of the “new
religious consciousness”, in which the chiliastic expectation of a new society based on the principles of Christian society is combined with the expectation of a new Pentecost, a special revelation in history of the Holy Spirit, the third hypostasis of the Trinity. In this teaching, the idea of a third, “eternal” covenant, which must follow the Old and New Testaments, is once again expressed, present in Vl. Soloviev and dating back to the chiliastic interpretation of the Apocalypse by the 12th-century Calabrian monk Joachim of Florus.
Triadic schemes for interpreting history, where universal isolation and egoism are replaced by a society based on “universal love” and the hieratic principle, go back in Russian philosophy, beginning with Solovyov, not only to the triadism of Hegelian philosophy or the corresponding models of German classics. Such utopias, on which they try to build specific social projects in the spirit of Solovyov’s “free theocracy”, are again of an emphatically ethical nature. One of the ideologists of the “new religious consciousness”, N. A. Berdyaev, foresees that the ethics of law and the ethics of love should be replaced by the ethics of creativity. Prophetism becomes one of the functions of religious and philosophical journalism, seeking its foundations in philosophical metaphysical constructions. The metaphysics of all-unity, which absorbed the experience of the Western philosophical tradition from Parmenides to Schelling, was again in demand. In the spring of 1905, the religious-philosophical society in memory of Vl. Soloviev began its work in Moscow. A special role in its creation was played by members of the Christian Brotherhood of Struggle V. F. Ern and V. P. Sventsitsky, with the active participation of P. A. Florensky and A. Bely. The society tried to organize its activities throughout 1905, but at that time no official permission was received. It was officially opened on October 5, 1906 with a report by S. N. Bulgakov (its de facto chairman) “Dostoevsky and Modernity”. Although the charter of the society stated that it “aims to comprehensively develop questions of religion and philosophy”, initially socio-political debates prevailed in the society, using religion as one of the instruments of political struggle against the autocracy. Nevertheless, the significance of the Moscow Religious-Philosophical Society for the philosophical life of the country was enormous. Having existed until 1918, it managed to become a unifying and nurturing environment for Moscow philosophers, not only of a religious-philosophical orientation. The society owed much of its success to the patroness M.K. Morozova, at whose home most of the meetings were held. Religious-philosophical societies arose in St. Petersburg (there were two sections there: a section for the study of questions of the history, philosophy and mysticism of Christianity and a section for the study of the history and philosophy of religion), in Kyiv, Kharkov, Tiflis, Rybinsk. Unlike the Moscow RFS, which did not publish its own minutes, the RFS Notes (1908-1916) were published in St. Petersburg. In Moscow, the Religious-Philosophical Society in Memory of Vl. Solovyova operated in parallel with the actively working Moscow Psychological Society, differing from it in its greater independence (the MPS, existing at the university, depended on the decisions of the academic and board of trustees; in addition, due to L. M. Lopatin’s personal philosophical convictions, it did not welcome religious philosophy and certain directions of modern Western philosophy, for example neo-Kantianism).
Since 1909, the Circle of Seekers of Christian Enlightenment has existed in Moscow, which was also called the Novoselovsky Circle, after one of its members, the publisher of the Religious-Philosophical Library, M. A. Novoselov, an Orthodox writer who had abandoned Tolstoyism. Although the circle’s circle of participants overlapped with the RFO in Memory of Vl. Soloviev, it was narrower and their activities within the Brotherhood were carried out on a more confessional, i.e. Orthodox, basis. The members of the Brotherhood were N. N. Arsenyev, S. N. Bulgakov, S. N. Durylin, V. A. Kozhevnikov, A. A. Kornilov, F. D. Samarin, L. A. Tikhomirov, Princes E. N. and S. N. Trubetskoy, Priest P. A. Florensky, Archpriest I. Fudel, S. A. Tsvetkov, V. F. Ern, and others.
Publishing houses and publications. With the financial and ideological support of Morozova, the publishing house “Put” was founded in Moscow (1910-1919). Among the 45 books published by this publishing house were the collected works of I. V. Kireevsky, P. Ya. Chaadaev, the series
“Russian Thinkers”, which published intellectual biographies of G. S. Skovoroda, A. S. Khomyakov, A. A. Kozlov, translations of Catholic literature and French works by Vl. Solovyov, a number of works by philosophers who were part of the publishing group “Puti” – S. A. Askoldov, N. A. Berdyaev, S. N. Bulgakov, M. O. Gershenzon, N. O. Lossky, E. N. Trubetskoy, priest P. A. Florensky, V. F. Ern, collections of articles about Vl. Solovyov and L. N. Tolstoy, mystical manuscripts of A. N. Schmidt published by S. N. Bulgakov. The publishing program of “Puti” was an attempt to identify the national philosophical tradition, to revive the Slavophile element in Russian philosophical thought.
A peculiar alternative to Put’ was the circle of the Musaget publishing house, as well as the magazine Logos, published by it in 1910-1914, which was edited by S. I. Gessen, F. A. Stepun, E. K. Medtner, with the participation of B. V. Yakovenko, V. E. Sesemann. The publication was the Russian version of the International Publication on Cultural Issues, which also came out in German and Italian editions. The publishers of the magazine had attended philosophical school in Germany, in Heidelberg. They viewed philosophy as rational, scientific knowledge, free from extra-philosophical influences. Logos published an article by the founder of the phenomenological school, Ed. Husserl, “Philosophy as a Strict Science”, but phenomenology as a general direction was not characteristic of the magazine. Guided by the neo-Kantian paradigm of philosophy, the publishers of Logos were very critical of both the populist, positivist tradition and the Soloviev, religious-metaphysical line in philosophy, seeing in both a dependence on extra-philosophical elements. Nevertheless, Logos provided its pages for publications by representatives of the opposite camp, supporters of the intuitionist philosophy of N. O. Lossky and S. L. Frank, and the Hegelian I. A. Ilyin. The polemical clash of the two trends, in the most general sense symbolized by the names of Logos and the Path, was expressed in V. F. Ern’s collection, The Struggle for Logos. The influence of German philosophy on society noticeably declined with the beginning of World War I and the growth of anti-German sentiments.
The number of periodicals regularly providing their pages for philosophical publications is increasing. Along with the systematically published “Problems of Philosophy and Psychology”, such journals include “The World of God”, “Critical Review”, “Russian Thought”, “Bulletin of Europe”, “Russian Wealth”, and the occasional publications “Problems of the Theory and Psychology of Creativity” (Kharkov, 1907-1923), “New Ideas in Philosophy” (St. Petersburg, 1912-1914; 14 issues were published). At the beginning of the 20th century, the first attempts were made to publish collected works of Russian philosophers: the collected works of Vl. S. Solovyova (in 8 and 10 volumes, respectively), the unfinished collected works of K. N. Leontiev (1911-1914; in 9 volumes) due to the outbreak of war, the collected works of L. I. Shestov (1911; in 6 volumes). The latter was published during the author’s lifetime, who was only halfway through his creative career. All this testifies to the fact that philosophy is gradually but firmly included in the general cultural process in Russia.
University philosophy in the early 20th century. There were philosophy departments in universities in Moscow, Dorpat (Yuryev), Kazan, Kharkov, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Odessa, Warsaw, Tomsk, and in 1909 a department was opened at the newly created Nikolaev University in Saratov. Specialization in philosophy was opened at the historical and philological faculties, which allowed students to receive a comprehensive humanitarian education, combining philosophy with systematic historical and philological education. At Moscow University, beginning in 1906, philosophy was transformed from a general educational discipline into a professional one: on the initiative of G. I. Chelpanov, a special group was created to train philosophers. Among the teachers of the philosophy department were G. G. Shpet, V. F. Ern, P. P. Blonsky, A. I. Ognev, V. M. Ekzemplyarsky. The study of philosophical disciplines also took place at the department of philosophy of law and history of philosophy of law, which was headed by E. N. Trubetskoy, and among the privat-docents were P. I. Novgorodtsev, I. A. Ilyin, N. N. Alekseev and others. In 1911, after the incident with student strikes and the introduction of police at the university, more than 100 professors and associate professors of the university resigned. E. N. Trubetskoy began teaching philosophy at the A. L. Shanyavsky University, founded in 1906, where his seminars were held, dedicated to the philosophy of Vl. Solovyov, which formed the basis of the book “Worldview of Vl. Solovyov” (1913). P. I. Novgorodtsev and S. N. Bulgakov transferred to the Moscow Commercial Institute. In St. Petersburg, the activities of the university philosophy department are associated with the names of A. I. Vvedensky’s students N. O. Lossky and I. I. Lapshin, as well as S. I. Hessen, a student of V. Windelband and G. Rickert. Vl. Soloviev, E. L. Radlov, G. G. Shpet and many others taught philosophy at the Higher Women’s Courses, which opened in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1869. At Kazan University, N. A. Vasiliev created “imaginary logic” – one of the variants of non-classical syllogistics.
Russian religious and philosophical renaissance. The philosophy of the early 20th century is included in the history of Russian culture under the name of the Russian religious and philosophical renaissance. This concept was introduced by the classical philologist F. F. Zelinsky, a translator of Sophocles, an outstanding researcher and popularizer of ancient culture. In Russia, where the Renaissance left no traces and, moreover, there was no period of philosophical classics, the renaissance could mean an appeal to the values of Hellenic culture, classical humanism, rethought on the basis of Orthodox culture, an increased interest in the philosophical understanding of the theme of man, a character of culture similar to Alexandrian syncretism, a diversity of spiritual “searches and wanderings”. In Dostoevsky, who gave the theme of human freedom an unprecedented force to sound, the culture of the Russian Renaissance found its Homer. The Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius appears in Fr. Pavel Florensky both as the heir of Ancient Hellas and as the entelechy-realization of the Russian idea. Russian religious philosophy is only a part of the ideological and philosophical palette of the era, but in its significance it goes far beyond the national culture. It is thanks to it that Russian philosophy becomes an essential and original part of the global philosophical process, the interest in the study of which does not dry up in the world to this day. Far from being reducible in its origins to the Christian Tradition, to the works of the Holy Fathers, and sometimes appearing as “religious heresiology” (in the words of Fr. Sergius Bulgakov), it is nevertheless an attempt to understand the specificity of the Russian mentality, Russian culture and history, based on the system-forming role of Orthodox Christianity in them, with the adoption of which the history of statehood and culture in Rus’ began in the proper sense. The main nutrient medium of the philosophy of the Russian religious renaissance was Christianized Platonism, assimilated on Russian soil in the works of Vl. Solovyov, as well as Leibniz’s monadology and the critically perceived philosophy of Kant. The experience of churchliness would come to many philosophers of the Russian renaissance later, after October 1917. The “Solovyov line” in philosophy is inherited by the greatest Platonist philosopher in Russia, continuing the metaphysical tradition of classical philosophy (perhaps after this tradition had exhausted itself in the West), the “knight-monk” (according to A. A. Blok), who embodied the principles of philosophy in his life work, which is reflected in the principle of “life-building” among the symbolists and decadents. Philosophy is seen not in its purely theoretical, scientific aspect, but in the aspect of practical “life-creation”, where the life of the creator itself receives the status of a philosophical or artistic work.
Sophiology and the philosophy of freedom. Platonic, and to an even greater extent Eleatic in its origins, the “metaphysics of all-unity”, for which the ontological understanding of Truth, the problematic of the Absolute, the existent, the first principle were relevant, sought such a type of ontology in which the subject of philosophical reflection would be the “mediating” being, revealing the absolute in itself. It expressed itself in three modes – sophiology, symbolism and name-worship. Sophiology, which became a kind of modification of Platonism on Russian soil, was characterized by the translation into the language of Christian dogmatics of the cosmological feeling of the “mother of the raw earth” (Dostoevsky), the folk tradition of veneration of the family, fertility, expressed in Russian folklore and ritual piety. From Soloviev, who was fascinated by early Christian Gnosticism and European Gnosis, the sophiological theme passed to Pavel Florensky and Sergius Bulgakov, expressing itself in their desire to explicate it from the Tradition of the Church – iconography, liturgics, etc.
Bulgakov attempts to see in Sophia the transcendental subject of the world economy, to build his “philosophy of economy” on this concept, to see the task of social practice in the “osophy of the world”, in returning nature to its original sophian beauty. Bulgakov ends his creative path in emigration by creating a grandiose system of sophiological theology, in which he claims a new exposition of Christian dogmatics, having solved the problem of the relationship between God and the world through the idea of an inhypostatic nature, one for God and the universe. According to Archpriest A. Schmemann, Bulgakov remains a “philosopher in theology” and meets with condemnation of his ideas from a number of church hierarchs. E. H. Trubetskoy tries to solve her sophiology in a more Orthodox vein, seeing in Sophia Plato’s “world of ideas in God” and rejecting the idea of a created, or fallen, Sophia. In the group of philosophers united around “The Way”, he polarizes his position in relation to S. N. Bulgakov, not being satisfied with his “religious materialism”, which in his opinion justifies and sanctifies natural material existence too radically. After 1917, sophiological issues turn out to be essential for L. P. Karsavin and V. N. Ilyin (in exile) and A. F. Losev, who transformed it in the teaching on the tetractys.
S. L. Frank and N. O. Lossky develop a philosophy of all-unity, avoiding sophiological constructions. Beginning to build a theory of knowledge within the framework of the intuitionist model, having experienced the influence of the then popular in Russia French philosopher A. Bergson, they come to the need for ontological constructions, and Lossky, representing the world as an “organic whole”, is inspired by the spiritualistic model of the Leibniz type, combines his pluralistic metaphysics of “substantial agents” with the metaphysics of freedom, and Frank continues the tradition of Christian apophatics from Dionysius the Areopagite to Nicholas of Cusa and Meister Eckhart, considering reality in direct connection with the spiritual depth of the individual, creates an existential ontology and psychology (albeit already in exile).
N. A. Berdyaev
A special place in the “Soloviev line” of Russian philosophy is occupied by N. A. Berdyaev, who shares the general pathos of Soloviev’s teaching on God-manhood as the meaning and purpose of history, but is wary of the deterministic and impersonalistic tendencies of the metaphysics of all-unity. Inheriting J. Boehme, F. von Baader and Schelling, Berdyaev creates a metaphysics of freedom, in which freedom turns out to be pre-existent, primordial, preceding the Deity itself. Berdyaev opposes sophiology, seeing in it the danger of determinism and the suppression of the creative freedom of the individual. From Berdyaev’s philosophy of freedom follows Christian personalism, a teaching about man that had a great influence on French existentialism (E. Mounier and others) and, more broadly, on European culture.
Philosophy of the name. After the publication of the book of Schema-Hilarion “On the Mountains of the Caucasus” in 1907, the theological movement of Imeslavia arose on Athos, the essence of which is expressed in a special veneration of the Name of God, in the idea that in the Name “Jesus” “God himself” reveals himself. The reaction to the subsequent condemnation of this movement by the Holy Synod in 1913 and the administrative measures that led to the actual dispersal of the monastery, gives rise to a desire among a number of Christian philosophers to theoretically justify the teaching of the Imeslavtsy. This is the beginning of the “philosophy of the Name”, a kind of modification of medieval philosophical “realism” on Russian soil, which, however, accepts the ideological tools of both the European philosophy of language (W. von Humboldt and Schleiermacher) and Russian linguists (A. A. Potebnya). The name of a thing was seen not as a conventional sign, but as a direct expression of its ontological nature; in the spirit of St. Gregory Palamas’s teaching on energies, the name was considered as a special kind of energy that reveals the “thing in itself” to the outside, giving access to its knowledge. The works of P. Florensky and S. Bulgakov, A. F. Losev were created in the mainstream of name-slavery. Their appearance dates back to the period after 1917 and, in the case of S. N. Bulgakov’s “Philosophy of the Name”, is associated with the activities of a commission specially created to examine the name-slavery case at the All-Russian Local Council of 1917-1918.
Philosophical symbolism. Philosophical symbolism, proceeding from the existence of two planes of reality, mediated by a special kind of “double being”, the symbolic reality of “primordial phenomena” (J. W. Goethe) is closely connected with the literature and poetry of the beginning of the century. The symbol as being, which is “greater than itself” (Florensky) became the subject of theoretical reflection of both poets and theorists of poetic symbolism A. Bely and V. I. Ivanov, and theologian and philosopher P. Florensky, for whom the symbol is the central concept of his “concrete metaphysics”, and A. F. Losev, who knew Ed. Husserl and Cassirer very well, for whom the name-symbol reveals itself in the most refined absolute dialectic, identical to absolute mythology (moreover, myth is understood, following Schelling, as a concrete, becoming, historical being).
G. G. Shpet
The problems of name and symbol turn out to be essential for the “positive philosophy” of G. G. Shpet. A student of Husserl, who began in the pre-revolutionary years as a popularizer of his ideas in Russia, he creates an original phenomenological hermeneutics, in which the problems of word and symbol are solved in the mainstream of Husserl’s eidetic method, semantic and symbolic reality turns out to be “closed” on itself, not requiring transcendence to the Absolute, which is characteristic of religious philosophy. Having left behind valuable works on logic, hermeneutics, the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and a number of elegant critical essays, Shpet was removed from philosophical work at the end of his life and was forced to engage in translations. In the “Alexandrian” in spirit culture of the religious and philosophical renaissance, a whole spectrum of philosophical teachings arose that did not claim to create a philosophical school, but were the product of personal ideological attitudes: the meonism of H. M. Minsky, the mystical anarchism of G. I. Chulkov, the philosophy of gender of V. V. Rozanov, etc.
The philosophical situation in Russia after 1917 The first five years after the October Revolution of 1917 qualitatively changed the philosophical situation in Russia, but the intensity of the philosophical process did not decline at all. In 1918, I. A. Ilyin defended his doctoral dissertation “Hegel’s Philosophy as a Teaching on the Concreteness of God and Man”, bypassing the master’s defense (soon academic degrees were abolished by decree of the Council of People’s Commissars). After the death of L. M. Lopatin, he became chairman of the Moscow Psychological Society. In the winter of 1918-19, Berdyaev created the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture (VADC) in Moscow, where A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov, S. L. Frank, and F. A. Stepun gave lectures. N. A. Berdyaev came to Moscow University, where the Faculty of Social Sciences was created in 1919, and in 1920 became a professor and lectured on Dostoevsky’s worldview and the philosophy of history. In 1917, S. L. Frank became the dean of the Faculty of History and Philology at Saratov University. In 1921, having returned to Moscow, he gave part-time lectures at Moscow University. G. G. Shpet and G. I. Chelpanov continued teaching at the university until 1923. Shpet headed the Institute of Scientific Philosophy at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Moscow University, where classes were taught on the logic and methodology of science, ethics, psychology, and the history of philosophy. A group of students formed around Shpet, assimilating the ideas of phenomenology and hermeneutics: A. S. Akhmanov, who later became a professor of philosophy at Moscow University, N. I. Zhinkin, A. G. Tsires, who successfully worked in the USSR in the field of aesthetics and art history.
In 1918, L. P. Karsavin, a well-known medievalist historian, became a professor at the university in Petrograd. He entered the field of philosophical activity in the first post-revolutionary decade. He participated in the work of the Petrograd Philosophical Society and the Free Philosophical Association (Volfila). The experience of social upheavals prompted reflection on the themes of culture, values, and humanism. A. Blok read a report entitled “The Collapse of Humanism” in Petrograd, and the theme of the coercive nature of objectified cultural forms became central to the “correspondence from two corners” of the Bolshevik health resort on Plyushchikha in Moscow between Vyach. Ivanov and M. O. Gershenzon. A number of cultural and religious works by M. O. Gershenzon were published, the problems of which had been thought through even before the revolution. A number of philosophical and philosophical-political almanacs and collections appeared: in Moscow, From the Depths (1918), in which the Vekhovites gave the first understanding of the revolution that had taken place, the philosophical annual Thought and Word (1917-1921) edited by G. Shpet, in Petrograd, the journal Thought (1922), the organ of the Philosophical Society at the Petrograd University, the almanacs Phoenix (Moscow) and Strelets (Petrograd). However, many were forced to leave the capitals. S. N. Bulgakov, who became a priest in 1918, ended up in the Crimea, E. N. Trubetskoy died of typhus in 1920 in Novorossiysk. Vyach. Ivanov moved to Baku, where he became a professor at the local university. V. V. Rozanov, escaping from hunger, moves from Petrograd to the walls of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius and dies of hunger and disease in 1919. In fact, for the same reason, L. M. Lopatin passes away in 1920. Not everyone manages to adapt to the new conditions of life. It was in the first post-October five-year period that several works were published in which an attempt was made to give a systematic description of the history of Russian philosophy. A. F. Losev wrote an essay “Russian Philosophy” (1919) for the Swiss magazine “Russland”. “Essay on the History of Russian Philosophy” by E. L. Radlov, the first part of “Essay on the History of Russian Philosophy” by G. G. Shpet (Pg., 1922), “Essays on Russian Philosophy” (Berlin, 1922) by B. V. Yakovenko were published.
In the summer of 1922, on Lenin’s orders, lists were drawn up for the expulsion from Russia without the right of return of about 200 representatives of the intelligentsia, including philosophers, writers and scientists. The formal reason for the expulsion was the publication of the collection “Oswald Spengler and the Decline of Europe” (Moscow, 1922) with articles by Berdyaev, Ya. M. Bukshpan, Stepun and Frank. The route of most of them went through Petrograd, from where they were delivered to Hamburg by steamship. N. A. Berdyaev, B. P. Vysheslavtsev, I. A. Ilyin, I. I. Lapshin, N. O. Lossky, L. P. Karsavin left Russia; after the Bolsheviks occupied Crimea, S. N. Bulgakov was arrested there and exiled to Constantinople. Together with the philosophers who left Russia for various reasons before the revolution (L. L. Kobylinsky (Ellis), L. I. Shestov, B. V. Yakovenko), as well as those who managed to emigrate from the regions occupied by the Bolsheviks, mainly from Ukraine and Crimea (N. N. Alekseev, N. S. Arsenyev, G. D. Gurvich, S. I. Gessen, V. V. Zenkovsky, V. N. Ilyin, G. P. Fedotov, G. V. Florovsky), they formed the Russian philosophical environment in the diaspora.
Philosophy in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s. Since 1923, the course towards suppressing the pluralism of philosophical schools and trends and establishing philosophy in the form of “dialectical materialism” as a handmaiden of party ideology has been finally established in Soviet Russia. The leader in this process was the journal Pod Znamenem Marxizma (1922–1944), published from 1926 to 1930 under the editorship of A. M. Deborin. In 1918, the Socialist Academy of Social Sciences was created, renamed in 1924 as the Communist Academy under the Central Executive Committee of the USSR (the Bulletin of the Communist Academy was published, 1922–1935), where lectures on the philosophy of Marxism were given. In 1921, the Institute of Red Professors was opened to train teachers of social sciences, and in 1922, the first textbooks on dialectical and historical materialism by N. Ya. Bukharin, S. Ya. Wolfson, and V. N. Sarabyanov were published. However, the study of philosophical disciplines did not imply the professional training of specialists in philosophy until the end of the 1920s, when the specialty of “philosophy” was opened at Moscow University. After the death of V. I. Lenin in 1924, the image of the leader-philosopher began to form, which was facilitated by the publication in 1924 of A. M. Deborin’s book “Lenin as a Philosopher”, and the publication in 1929-1930 of Lenin’s notes on German philosophy, which were not specifically intended for publication (“Philosophical Notebooks”; the fragment “On the Question of Dialectics” was published in 1925). In 1931, the Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature (IFLI) was created in Moscow, where lectures were given on the history of philosophy and a number of philosophical disciplines. The study of philosophy was subordinated to Lenin’s scheme of “three sources and three components of Marxism”, which included classical German philosophy, with emphasis on the materialistic, Feuerbachian line.
Having become an ideology, Russian Marxism of the 1920s is immeasurably lower in its theoretical level than the philosophical quests of the ideologically “left” philosophers of the beginning of the century. Practice turns out to be the criterion of truth, and the creator of the “general organizational science” A. A. Bogdanov dies during an experiment on blood transfusion at the Blood Transfusion Institute he founded. In the 1920s, a new canon of philosophical discussion is created, which has a political subtext of searching for enemies. An example of such a discussion is the debate on the relationship between philosophy and natural science, inspired by the book by I. I. Stepanov (Skvortsov) “Historical Materialism and Modern Natural Science”. The disputing parties were called “mechanists” and “dialecticians”. The “mechanists” believed that the laws of dialectics cannot replace the conclusions of particular sciences, that philosophical laws are only a generalizing conclusion of particular scientific research. The dialecticians insisted on the irreducibility of higher forms of movement to lower ones, on the significance of philosophical methodology as a synthetic form of knowledge. Despite the convergence of the positions of the disputing parties, both were pushed aside by the official “party” line in philosophy, which was expressed by M. B. Mitin, P. F. Yudin, F. V. Konstantinov, who received a mandate from Stalin to suppress philosophical quests. After the publication of the “Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)” in 1938, the teaching of philosophy in higher educational institutions was reduced in fact to the study of the second paragraph of the 4th chapter “On Dialectical and Historical Materialism”.
Despite the ideological dictate of Marxism and the departure from Russia of most professionally trained philosophers, the philosophical impetus received at the beginning of the century was not reduced to zero. In 1923-1929, G. G. Shpet (in 1927, Shpet became vice-president of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences, and in 1928, he was not elected to the department), G. I. Chelpanov, A. F. Losev, V. P. Zubov, A. G. Gabrichevsky worked at the State Academy of Artistic Sciences; in 1921, Pavel Florensky was elected professor in the department of “Analysis of Spatiality in Works of Art” at VKHUTEMAS. He was soon to reorient himself to work as a materials scientist and electrical engineer. The most significant achievements of Russian philosophy of this period include eight books by A. F. Losev on the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and the theory of music. After the publication of his last book, The Dialectics of Myth, in 1930, Losev was arrested on charges of involvement in the name-worshipping rebellion in the Caucasus and spent two years building the White Sea-Baltic Canal. A prominent role in the formation of the modern philosophical picture of the world was played by V. I. Vernadsky’s doctrine of the biosphere and noosphere. V. I. Glivenko and A. N. Kolmogorov made an important contribution to the development of the foundations of intuitionistic logic. I. I. Zhegalkin was the first to implement the arithmetization of classical symbolic logic. The philosophical potential of L. S. Vygotsky’s works, which analyzed the higher mental functions of man, the role of words and language in their formation, is significant (most of his works were published only starting in the second half of the 1950s).
M. M. Bakhtin
The 1920s marked the beginning of M. M. Bakhtin’s creative path, influenced by the neo-Kantian school while studying at the St. Petersburg University. Having moved to Leningrad in 1924, Bakhtin took part in the activities of the Voskresenye circle, which included philosophically minded writers and literary scholars L. V. Pumpyansky, A. A. Meyer and others. M. M. Bakhtin’s book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Work, published in 1929 after his arrest, marked the beginning of a dialogical interpretation of Dostoevsky’s novels and the philosophy of dialogue, which brought Bakhtin worldwide fame. In 1929, the publication of Hegel’s collected works in Russian translation began. Literary forms of philosophy continued to exist outside the literary officialdom – in the work of the literary association OBERIU, which included Ya. S. Druskin, L. S. Lipavsky (both graduates of the philosophy department of the Petrograd University, students of N. O. Lossky, who received an offer to stay at the university), D. Harms, A. Vvedensky, N. Zabolotsky, N. Oleynikov. In the paradoxical style, the bold combination of everyday and metaphysical themes in the OBERIUTS, one can discern a distant echo of the literary and philosophical work of V. V. Rozanov. Undoubtedly, the influence of the latter on the formal school in literary criticism (B. M. Eikhenbaum, V. B. Shklovsky, R. Jakobson), which absorbed the philosophical spirit of the Silver Age. A vivid trace of philosophical studies in the pre-revolutionary years, first within the walls of the Kyiv University and then in the cities of Europe, is borne by the philosophical prose of the 1920s and 1930s by S.D. Krzhizhanovsky, an author who was virtually unclaimed in Soviet literature. The motifs of the “philosophy of the common cause” of N.F. Fedorov are present in the novels of A. Platonov. The traditions of Russian philosophical prose are continued by M.M. Prishvin. The work on mastering the Russian philosophical heritage continues unabated, having risen to a new qualitative level thanks to the work of such historians of thought and social consciousness as M.O. Gershenzon. Thus, in the “Literary Heritage” created on the initiative of M. Gorky, “My Literary Destiny” by K.N. Leontiev (with detailed commentary by S.N. Durylin) and translations of the previously unpublished “Philosophical Letters” by P.Ya. Chaadaev are published.
Philosophy in the Russian Diaspora. In the Russian Diaspora abroad, philosophy is forced to defend its right to an independent existence with no less persistence. Some people from Russia join the pan-European and world philosophical process (philosophers A. Kozhev and A. Koyre, sociologists P. A. Sorokin, G. D. Gurvich), but most of them strive to preserve their identity, not always striving for an intensive philosophical dialogue with Western philosophy. Constantinople, Prague, Belgrade, Berlin, Sofia, Paris, and Harbin become the centers of the Russian Diaspora. Understanding the historical uniqueness of Russia and outlining the prospects for internal overcoming of Bolshevism, a group of young intellectuals creates the Eurasian movement, the manifesto of which is the collection Exodus to the East. Premonitions and Accomplishments. The Establishment of the Eurasians (Sofia, 1921). The participants of the collection G. V. Florovsky, P. N. Savitsky, P. P. Suvchinsky, N. S. Trubetskoy enter into polemics with the previous generation of Vekhovites, see the future of Russia in the Orthodox ideocracy, which must inevitably replace Bolshevism, postulate the alienness of the cultural type of Western Europe, based on Latinism, to Russia. L. P. Karsavin enters into cooperation with the Eurasians, participating in the development of their philosophical program, creating the theory of “symphonic personalities” and reviving the ideologeme of the “Russian idea”. Internally contradictory, this movement ceases to exist by the beginning of the 1930s. Gradually, the center of intellectual, and in any case, philosophical activity moves to Paris. This is associated with the beginning of the publication in 1925 of the journal “Path. Organ of Russian Religious Thought” (Paris, 1925-1940, No. 1-61) edited by. N. A. Berdyaev with the participation of B. P. Vysheslavtsev and G. Kulman. The Orthodox Theological Institute of St. Sergius, which opened its work in the same year, gathered under its roof a number of famous philosophers – Archpriest S. Bulgakov, who reoriented himself primarily to theological issues, V. V. Zenkovsky, G. V. Florovsky, B. P. Vysheslavtsev, G. P. Fedotov, L. A. Zander, V. N. Ilyin.
The idea of Christian socialism is inherited by the magazine Novy Grad (1931-1939, issues 1-14), edited by I. I. Bunakov, F. A. Stepun and G. P. Fedotov. The works of Russian philosophers, which contain subtle reflections on the general atmosphere of European civilization and culture in the short period between the two world wars, acquire the greatest fame among Western readers – N. A. Berdyaev’s essay “The New Middle Ages”, which prophetically predicted the emergence of fascism on the European stage, “Correspondence from Two Corners” by Vyach. Ivanov and M. Gershenzon are translated into many languages, and V. V. Veidle’s book “The Dying of Art” is published in French. In Germany, S. N.’s “The Tragedy of Philosophy” is published in German translation.
Bulgakov (the Russian text of this work was published only in 1993), chapters from his “Philosophy of the Name”, “Dostoevsky: Tragedy – Myth – Mysticism” by Vyach. Ivanov, the studies of the work of Vl. Solovyov written in French by D. Stremoukhov (1935) and M. Erman (1941) are of interest, the Society of Friends of Lev Shestov translates and publishes in French a number of his books. Significant for the mutual enrichment of ideas are the contacts of Russian thinkers with their European colleagues: the meeting of Russian personalism in the person of N. A. Berdyaev with Christian thinkers G. Marcel and E. Mounier leads to the creation of the Catholic magazine “Esprit”, L. I. Shestov communicates with Ed. Husserl, becoming acquainted with the works of S. Kierkegaard thanks to him, S. L. Frank is in correspondence with the prominent representative of psychoanalysis L. von Binswanger, E. K. Medtner experiences serious influence of psychoanalysis and translates into Russian the works of K. G. Jung, F. A. Stepun introduces German intellectuals, including G. G. Gadamer, to Russian literature. I. A. Ilyin makes an attempt to create an Orthodox existential ontology, based on the concepts of spiritual evidence and religious act.
Philosophy in the USSR in the 1940s-1980sIn December 1941, during the evacuation to Ashgabat, among others, the philosophy department of Moscow State University was restored, where A. F. Losev and B. A. Fokht, who were later dismissed, gave lectures for a short time, V. F. Asmus, P. S. Popov, A. S. Akhmanov taught logic, and prominent Russian psychologists S. L. Rubinstein and A. N. Leontiev worked. In the general structure of education in Soviet higher education, philosophy occupied a key place among social disciplines. At the same time, the main purpose of philosophical education in the USSR was to be a “forge of philosophical personnel” providing both the teaching of Marxist-Leninist philosophy in higher and secondary schools, and ideological work at various levels. Ideological oppression hampered creative philosophical work, which continued primarily in the field of the history of philosophy, philosophy of science, and logic. Access to contemporary philosophical literature of non-Marxist and unorthodox Marxist schools was strictly regulated by restricting access to special collections. However, creative philosophical activity in the USSR still continued, primarily in the field of the history of philosophy, philosophy of science, and logic. In the post-war period, the Russian school of constructivism in logic and mathematics (A. A. Markov, N. A. Shanin, and others) emerged, gaining worldwide recognition. In the 1960s and 1970s, discussions on the nature of the ideal (E. V. Ilyenkov, D. I. Dubrovsky), the relationship between the physical and mental in man, and the relationship between dialectics, logic, and epistemology received wide resonance. S. L. Rubinstein, who received a philosophical education in Marburg, created a philosophical and psychological concept of man and his psyche, and studied human thinking as a process. The activity-based approach to thinking is characteristic of the school of thought that emerged in the early 1950s. Moscow Logical (later Methodological) Circle, headed by G. P. Shchedrovitsky since 1957. The participants of the circle formed the methodology of organizational and activity games, developed the methodology of collective thought activity. The problem of ascent from the abstract to the concrete in K. Marx’s Capital was analyzed in the works of E. V. Ilyenkov and A. A. Zinoviev. Formal logic developed in close interaction with mathematical logic (S. A. Yanovskaya, A. A. Markov), primarily as symbolic logic. In the 1960s, differentiation of philosophical knowledge was outlined, the identification of directions relatively independent of the prevailing officialdom. The application of modern logic to the analysis of scientific knowledge leads to the formation of the logic of science. The syntactic approach to the logic of the language of science is supplemented by an appeal to its semantics (V. A. Smirnov), identifying its various types (the language of observation, the language of empirical and theoretical constructs). An analysis of the ideals and norms of description and explanation, the relationship between theoretical schemes and experience is carried out, and the methodological principles of physics, biology, medicine and other sciences are studied.The application of modern logic to the analysis of scientific knowledge leads to the formation of the logic of science. The problem of non-classical rationality is discussed, the methodological principles of physics, biology, medicine and other sciences are studied. Schools of scientific methodology arise in Kyiv (P. V. Kopnin), Minsk (V. S. Stepin), Novosibirsk. The problem of consciousness was considered in the works of M. K. Mamardashvili; his lecture courses devoted to ancient philosophy, R. Descartes, M. Proust, became a noticeable phenomenon in the intellectual life of the 70-80s. The semiotic approach to culture, developed in the Moscow-Tartu school (Yu. M. Lotman et al.), found its application in the study of science (M. K. Petrov). V. S. Bibler developed the concept of thinking as a dialogue of different logics, studied the problem of cognition within the framework of the theory of culture. In the post-war period, a number of philosophical journals appeared that are still being published: Voprosy filosofii (since 1947), Philosophical Sciences (since 1958), Vestnik MGU. Series “Philosophy” (since 1966), etc. An important event was the publication of the Philosophical Encyclopedia in 5 volumes (1960-70). In the Philosophical Heritage series, Mysl publishing house published more than 130 volumes, including works of European, Russian and Eastern philosophy. The print runs of some volumes, for example, the works of Aristotle, exceeded 200 thousand copies. Since 1989, by decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the publication of the series “From the History of Domestic Philosophical Thought” was launched, which lifted the de facto ban on the publication of works by philosophers of the Russian diaspora in Russia. In 1971, the Philosophical Society of the USSR (now the Russian Philosophical Society (RPO); since 1997, the Vestnik RFO has been published) was created under the USSR Academy of Sciences, uniting researchers and teachers of philosophy on a voluntary basis.By decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the publication of the series “From the History of Domestic Philosophical Thought” was launched, which lifted the de facto ban on the publication of works by Russian diaspora philosophers in Russia. In 1971, the Philosophical Society of the USSR (now the Russian Philosophical Society (RPO) was created under the USSR Academy of Sciences; since 1997, the “Vestnik RFO” has been published), uniting researchers and teachers of philosophy on a voluntary basis.By decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the publication of the series “From the History of Domestic Philosophical Thought” was launched, which lifted the de facto ban on the publication of works by Russian diaspora philosophers in Russia. In 1971, the Philosophical Society of the USSR (now the Russian Philosophical Society (RPO) was created under the USSR Academy of Sciences; since 1997, the “Vestnik RFO” has been published), uniting researchers and teachers of philosophy on a voluntary basis.
Philosophy in Modern Russia. After the lifting of ideological bans caused by the collapse of Marxist ideology and the disintegration of the USSR, philosophy in Russia found itself in a situation of choice. While preserving the generally established structure of philosophical education, the process of mastering that part of the philosophical heritage from which Soviet philosophy was artificially cut off is taking place. New disciplines of the philosophical cycle have emerged and are developing – political science, cultural studies, religious studies, philosophical anthropology, sometimes arising “on the ruins” of Marxist branches of philosophy. The idea of the “dialogue of cultures” developed by V. S. Bibler is becoming popular. The amount of translated philosophical literature in the last decade of the twentieth century exceeds all that was published in the previous years of the century. New philosophical journals have been revived and have emerged – “Stupeni” (St. Petersburg, since 1991), “Logos”, “Nachala” (both – Moscow, since 1991), “Put” (Moscow, since 1992). In 1993, the 19th World Congress of Philosophy was held in Moscow. The question of the possibility of resuming the interrupted philosophical tradition, returning to the heritage of Russian religious philosophy and the philosophy of the Russian emigration was raised. An attempt was made to create a philosophical anthropology based on the mystical and ascetic tradition of hesychasm and Palamism (S. S. Khoruzhy). Specialization of philosophical knowledge occurred, caused by the desire to join a certain direction developing in Western philosophy – phenomenology, analytical philosophy, structuralism and post-structuralism. Philosophical postmodernism enjoyed a certain popularity. Attempts to actualize philosophical knowledge by including it in a certain ideological context are not uncommon – from reviving Bolshevism to recreating an Orthodox (or Eurasian) monarchy. The development of a national ideology, or “Russian idea” is also sometimes seen as the task of modern philosophy. However, the main result of the first post-Soviet decade for philosophy in Russia can be considered the return of Russia to the world philosophical process.
Literature
1. Vvedensky A. I., Losev A. F., Radlov E. L., Shpet G. G. Essays on the history of Russian philosophy. Sverdlovsk, 1991.
2. Zenkovsky V. V. History of Russian philosophy. Leningrad, 1991.
3. Lossky N. O. History of Russian philosophy. Moscow, 1991.
4. Florovsky G., Archpriest. Paths of Russian Theology. K., 1991.
5. Russian Philosophy: Philosophy as a Specialty in Russia / Comp. Yu. N. Sukharev. Moscow, 1992. Issue 1.
6. Russian Philosophy: Small Encyclopedic Dictionary. Moscow, 1995.
7. Russian philosophy: Dictionary / Ed. M. A. Maslina. M., 1995.
8. History of Russian philosophy. Moscow, 2001.
9.
Evlampiev I. I. History of Russian Philosophy. St. Petersburg, 2002.
10.Masaryk Th. Towards Russian Geography and Religious Philosophy: Sociological Studies. Jena, 1913. Bd 1-2.
11. Russian Philosophy / Ed. by J. M. Edie, J. P. Scanlan, M.-B. Zeldin with the collaboration of GL Kline. Knoxville, 1976. Vol. 1-3.
12.Walicki A. A History of Russian Thought from The Enlightenment to Marxism. Oxf., 1980.
13. Goerdt W. Russian Philosophy: Concepts and Backgrounds. Freiburg; Munich, 1984.
14. Copleston F. Philosophy in Russia: From Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev. Notre Dame [Indiana], 1986.
