"An Evening at Kantemir’s" (1816)

Konstantin Batiushkov’s “An Evening at Kantemir’s” (Vecher u Kantemira, 1816) is unique as a work of literature, a document of Russian intellectual history, and a cultural and artistic manifesto. The “Evening” takes its cue from the popular Enlightenment genre of “dialogues with the dead,” although Batiushkov brings together people who were contemporaries rather than widely separated historical figures, as was usual. In it, the poet Antiokh Kantemir (1708-44) challenges Montesquieu’s argument from The Spirit of Laws that Russia’s harsh climate has resulted in its alleged lack of civilization. Batiushkov was rewriting history with hindsight, and one of the charming aspects of the work is its slightly humorous and lightly ironic play with anachronism, as Batiushkov presents Kantemir as marvelously prophetic of the later successes of Russian literature. Typical is his interlocutor’s statement that “It is easier to believe that the Russians will storm Paris” than that Russia could produce a Lomonosov. Batiushkov himself was with the troops that took Paris in 1814, and the recent Russian victory was surely on readers’ minds as they read this piece. “An Evening at Kantemir’s” attempted to integrate the “new” Russian literature with the eighteenth-century “classicist” literary and Enlightenment tradition. It also illustrates Batiushkov’s faith in poetry as a fundamental way to advance the cause of national progress.

“The Fatherland is not in Geography...”: on the Issue of the Evolution of Traditional Spiritual and Political Values of Russian Civilization*

The article is devoted to the study of Russian traditional basic values. On the basis of the traditionalist-conservative approach, the authors investigate the origin and substantial evolution of the concept of “fatherland” in the public consciousness of the Russian people. The study of a large number of various sources on Russian intellectual history allows to conclude that the concept of “fatherland” began to appear in chronicles, literary and spiritual-political monuments relatively early – already from the 10th century, but then it had the meaning of “hereditary property”, “ancestral possession”. Meanwhile, already in the 12th–17th centuries, the use of the concept «fatherland» in the meaning of “homeland”, “native land” were found sometimes, and since the 18th century the notion “Fatherland” was finally entrenched with the value content of patriotic love and service for the benefit of one's native country. In the 19th century in Russia, the notion of “love for the Fatherland” received a variety of interpretations, enriched with new meanings and contexts, but retained its significance as one of the most important social values and civic virtues. The authors of the article conclude that despite the cardinal transformations of the social, economic and political structure of Russia in the beginning of the 20th century, the concept of “Fatherland” as a value has retained its basic significance for Russian civilization, since it is a fundamental spiritual and political ideal and is directly related to the formation of political identity.

Philosophical Madness

Among the stranger literary products of 1837 was an essay called Apology of a Madman. Together with companion Philosophical Letters, this text represents a fundamental moment in the history of Russian thought and makes its author, Peter Chaadaev, a central figure in Russian intellectual history. For these texts not only played a major role in precipitating a grand debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles about Russia’s place in the world, but also laid the foundations for all subsequent philosophies of history in Russia. And by positing that Russia constituted a blank slate on which virtually anything could be inscribed, the Apology exerted a powerful influence on anyone contemplating Russia’s future. Chaadaev’s interventions in 1836–7 thus gave birth to a particular way of thinking about Russia’s past and future, and the country would not be the same without them.

COMMENT: THE UTILITY OF «CELEBRITY»

Replying to the two contributions in this special issue, this commentary considers the work “celebrity” can do as a concept and topic of inquiry for historians of Russia. The author compares and contrasts “celebrity” (as an angle of vision) with investigations the formation of “public” and “private” life in 19th century Russia. He underlines two uses of the concept: 1) as a reminder of continuities and instabilities that link modern forms of fame with pre-modern systems of reputation; and 2) as a marker of global forces that were pushing beyond nationalized, institutionalized frames of public and private life. The author returns to some earlier work he has done on Russian intellectual history, to consider how discussions of “celebrity” reframe what an older literature might describe as the “making of intelligentsia traditions.” He also highlights several important conceptual contributions made by Konstantin Shneyder’s historiographical analysis, and considers what conclusions can be drawn from Matthew Klopfenstein’s reconstruction of the “operatic” death of Angiolina Bosio.

ANGELOLOGY IN THE RUSSIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY. SEVERAL PAGES

Reflections on the nature of angels in Russian religious philosophy are inseparable from political theology and reflection on scientific and technical achievements. Based on the works of N. Boldyrev, A. Losev and S. Averintsev, the article proves that the doctrine of angels was to spiritualize technical progress and not less to preserve humanitarian culture in the field of symbolic-mathematical speculation. Therefore, Russian angelology is dialogical and controversial: it relies on the hermeneutics of a symbol, while symbolism is considered as part of intellectual production parallel to technical invention. It is proved how exactly the reception of ideas related to the parameters of perception and a certain style of intellectual reasoning made it possible to single out questions about angels into a separate area of philosophical problematization. Accordingly, the study of how exactly the questions were thought of as autonomous, makes it possible to clarify how Russian thought could assert the autonomy of orders of philosophical reasoning

Another outlook on Russia. Letters from the “Russian Archive”

The article presents previously unpublished letters written by Andrzej Walicki (15.05.1930–21.08.2020), a worldly renowned Polish historian of Russian thought, to Professor Michael Maslin, the head of the Department of the History of Russian Philoso­phy at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Walicki’s letters (1997–2019) together with books, articles and other materials formed his gift to the abovementioned Department. Walicki himself referred to these materials as “my small Russian archive”. The letters are written in excellent Russian and require no additional revision or stylistic improvement. This publication retains the letters in their full originality including some phrases of Pol­ish origin. These unique epistles reveal Walicki’s individual creative worldview. The let­ters contain new information about the details of Walicki’s biography and his work in Poland, Russia, USA, Great Britain, Japan, Australia. The letters provide a unique per­spective on the “flow of ideas”, which was Walicki’s personal conception of understand­ing and interpretation of the Russian intellectual history from the Enligh­tenment through the Russian religious and philosophical Renaissance of the twentieth century. The letters discuss his interactions with Sergei Gessen, Isaiah Berlin, Leszhek Kolakowski, Czeslaw Milosz, George Kline, James Scanlan, Leonard Shapiro, Martin Malia, Richard Pipes, Nicholas Riasanovsky, James Billington etc. A special attention is paid to the critique of the Western and especially Polish Russophobia based on various superstitions and stereo­types about Russia as well on a lack of knowledge, various kinds of bias and blunders. Of considerable interest are Walitsky’s expert assessments of the ge­neral state of the scien­tific historiography of Russian philosophy, its fundamental diffe­rences from Soviet dog­matic Marxism, of which the Polish scientist was a consistent critic.

A New Perspective in Russian Intellectual History: Russian Political Thought in Early Modern Times

G. M. Hamburg, Russia’s Path Toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500–1801. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016, 912 p. ISBN: 9780300113136

The Way, The Journal of the Russian Emigration (1925–1940)

The Way: A Journal of Russian Religious Thought, a journal in the Russian language, was published quarterly in Paris from 1925 to 1940 by the Academy of Religious Philosophy, directed by Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev. Scholars ranging from the French Slavist Pierre Pascal, who described the sixty-one issues of The Way as ‘uncommonly substantial’, to the American-based historian of the Russian emigration, Marc Raeff, who stressed its ‘high level of erudition’, have agreed that the journal is one of the most brilliant in all Russian intellectual history. The Way was intended to be the direct heir of the Put’ publishing house, founded in Moscow in 1909 by Berdyaev and other writers. Thus, The Way set itself the task of carrying the intellectual and spiritual renewal of the Silver Age forward. We can distinguish three main periods in the evolution of The Way: a modernist period (1925–1930), a non-conformist period (1930–1935), and, finally, a spiritual period (1935–1940). This evolution corresponds to that of an entire intellectual generation that was compelled by historical circumstances to think through the encounter between Western and Eastern intellectual and spiritual traditions and to seek a synthesis (thus ‘modernist’) between East and West. For all their internal differences, this intellectual generation evolved in a non-conformist direction, taking an equally critical stance towards liberalism and socialism and preferring personalism to both, moving towards a spiritual rationality that was simultaneously conscious of the limits of an excessively apophatic spirituality and of an exclusively positivist rationalism.

Letters of Yuri Fedorovich Samarin to Countess Maria Fedorovna Sollogub (1864–1876)

The present publication with comments includes the letters of Yuri Fedorovich Samarin to Countess Maria Fedorovna Sollogub (nee Samarina, the correspondent’s sister) in the period of 1864–1876. The special interest to the published materials is called for by the three circumstances: first, Samarin’s epistolary heritage of 1960– 1876 has been published only partially, in contrast to his correspondence of 1840–1850; second, due to family and spiritual kinship Samarin’s letters to his sister touch upon all aspects of his activities in the period, including his work in zemsky and city self-government bodies and preparatory work for foreign publications; third, due to the systematic character of the correspondence, the reader can see a kind of Samarin’s diary supplemented in the comments with extensive quotations from the letters to his younger brother Dmitry Fedorovich, with whom Samarin was especially close. In that way, Samarin’s letters to Countess Sollogub are important both as example of Russian intellectual history and as material on the history of Russian nobility daily life in the post-reform period that allows us to have a view of the life of one of the most well-known Russian families of that period.