Work · Russian Religious Philosophy
The Russian Idea
An interpretation of Russian thought from the Slavophiles to the religious renaissance as a search for the Kingdom of God and for social justice.
Introduction
“The Russian Idea” appeared in Paris in 1946 with the subtitle “Fundamental Problems of Russian Thought of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”. Berdyaev surveys Russian intellectual history from Chaadaev, the Slavophiles and the Westernisers through Herzen, the radicals of the 1860s, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Solovyov to the religious renaissance of the early twentieth century. His thesis is that Russian thought is religious and eschatological at heart: it seeks the Kingdom of God, an integral truth and social justice rather than a culture of measure and form, and this explains both its achievements and the communist revolution. The book is personal and is read as a document of émigré self-understanding; historians of ideas have criticised its picture of a single “Russian idea” as essentialist.
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