Pyotr Chaadaev

Works

• 1836Philosophical Letters

  Eight letters written in French in 1829–31; the first, published in Russian in 1836, describes Russia as a country without a past or a place in history and set off the debate about Russia and Europe.

• 1837Apology of a Madman

  Chaadaev’s answer after being declared insane: Russia’s lack of history can also be a chance to learn from Europe’s mistakes.

Position

Chaadaev stands at the beginning of modern Russian philosophy of history. Drawing on Schelling and on French Catholic thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, he read history as the work of Providence, carried by the Christian, above all Catholic, West, whose unity had created a continuous tradition of ideas, law and social forms. Russia, by contrast, had received its Christianity from Byzantium, stood outside that unity and so belonged “neither to the West nor to the East”; it had contributed nothing to the progress of the human mind. Herzen called the publication of the first letter a shot that rang out in the dark night. Both camps of the following debate began from it: the Westernisers took over the diagnosis, while Slavophiles such as Aleksei Khomiakov and Ivan Kireevsky answered it with an Orthodox counter-history. In the “Apology of a Madman” (1837) Chaadaev revised his judgement: precisely because Russia was not bound by a past, it might learn from Europe’s mistakes and one day have a task of its own. Critics have pointed to the tension between the two texts and to a Catholicising picture of history that leaves little room for the Orthodox tradition; most of the letters became known only after his death, some only in the twentieth century.

Life & context

Pyotr Chaadaev was born in Moscow on 7 June 1794 (27 May Old Style); orphaned early, he was brought up by an aunt and by his uncle, Prince Shcherbatov. He studied at Moscow University and in 1812 joined the Semyonovsky Guards, fought at Borodino and in the campaigns of 1813–14 and entered Paris with the Russian army. As adjutant to General Vasilchikov he carried the report on the mutiny of the Semyonovsky regiment to Tsar Alexander I at Troppau in 1820 and left the service soon afterwards. A friend of Alexander Pushkin, who addressed poems to him, he was close to the circles of the later Decembrists. From 1823 to 1826 he travelled in Europe and met Schelling in Karlsbad in 1825. Back in Moscow he wrote eight “Philosophical Letters” in French in 1829–31. When the first appeared in Russian translation in the journal Teleskop in 1836, Nicholas I had the journal closed and its editor Nikolai Nadezhdin banished, and Chaadaev was officially declared insane and placed under medical supervision for about a year. He stayed in Moscow, a familiar figure in its salons, and died there on 26 April 1856.

Further main works

• First Philosophical Letter, Russian translation (Filosoficheskoe pis’mo, Teleskop, 1836)
• Selected Works (Œuvres choisies, ed. Ivan Gagarin, 1862)