Reformulating Russia: The Cultural and Intellectual Historiography of Russian First-Wave Émigré Writers

Reformulating Russia

Russian History and Culture VOLUME 7

Editors-in-Chief

Jeffrey P. Brooks The Johns Hopkins University Christina Lodder University of Edinburgh

Reformulating Russia The Cultural and Intellectual Historiography of Russian First-Wave Émigré Writers

by

Kåre Johan Mjør

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011

On the front cover: Portraits of Georgii Fedotov (1914–15, photographer unknown), Georgii Florovskii (1950s, photographer unknown), Nikolai Berdiaev (1938–39, Studios Dorlys, Paris) and Vasilii Zenkovskii (1930s, probably taken by Lev Zander). Information on photos provided by courtesy of Andrei Korliakov, Paris (www.emigrationrusse.com). Back cover: Photograph by Jan Kåre Wilhelmsen, University of Bergen. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mjør, Kåre Johan. Reformulating Russia : the cultural and intellectual historiography of Russian first-wave emigre writers / by Kare Johan Mjor. p. cm. — (Russian history and culture, ISSN 1877-7791 ; v. 7) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-19286-7 (hbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Russia—Intellectual life— Historiography. 2. Russia—Civilization—Historiography. 3. Christian saints— Russia—Historiography. 4. Theology—Russia—Historiography. 5. Philosophy, Russian—Historiography. 6. Fedotov, G. P. (Georgii Petrovich), 1886–1951. Sviatye Drevnei Rusi. 7. Florovsky, Georges, 1893–1979. Puti russkago bogoslovia. 8. Berdiaev, Nikolai, 1874–1948. Russkaia ideia. 9. Zen’kovskii, V. V. (Vasilii Vasil’evich), 1881–1962. Istoriia russkoi filosofii. 10. Russian literature—Foreign countries—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. DK32.7.M56 2011 947.0072—dc22 2011009240

ISSN 1877-7791 ISBN 978 90 04 19286 7 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.” Edward W. Said

CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................. Transliterations and Abbreviations .................................................

ix xi

Introduction ......................................................................................... Texts and Contexts ........................................................................ Historiography and Narrativity ................................................... Research ...........................................................................................

1 2 8 18

PART ONE

CONTEXTS Chapter One Russia Abroad ............................................................ The Émigré Community ............................................................... Exile as Mission ..............................................................................

27 30 39

Chapter Two Writing Russian History .......................................... Varieties of Intellectual History ................................................... Culture and Cultural History ....................................................... Historiography of Imperial Russia ..............................................

53 59 65 72

PART TWO

READINGS Chapter Three Georgii Fedotov and the Saints of Ancient Russia ................................................................................................ Culture, Creativity, Tragedy ......................................................... Resurrecting Russian Sanctity ...................................................... Configuring Russian Holiness ...................................................... Fedotov’s Ancient and Holy Russia ............................................ Detail and Meaning in Russian Holiness ................................... The Workers in the Vineyard ...................................................... From Negative to Positive Liberty ..............................................

91 95 102 108 114 117 122 127

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contents

Difference and Opposition ........................................................... 133 Fedotov’s Tragedy .......................................................................... 138 Fedotov’s Historicism .................................................................... 145 Chapter Four Georgii Florovskii and the Ways of Russian Theology ........................................................................................... Emigration, Eurasianism and Orthodoxy .................................. Florovskii’s Prophetic Eschatology .............................................. The Pseudomorphosis of Russian Thought ............................... Gradual Recovery and New Excitements ................................... Florovskii’s Theology of Creativity .............................................. The Ascetic Way Home .................................................................

153 156 165 174 183 189 194

Chapter Five Nikolai Berdiaev and the Russian Idea ............... Revolution and Exile ...................................................................... Berdiaev’s Paradoxes and Inconsistencies .................................. The Russian Idea or the Idea of Russia? .................................... Chaotic Essentialism ...................................................................... Russians as Schismatics ................................................................. The Martyrology of the Intelligentsia ......................................... Russian Ideas as Ideas of Russia .................................................. Berdiaev’s Messianism ...................................................................

203 207 212 217 220 225 229 238 245

Chapter Six Vasilii Zenkovskii and the History of Russian Philosophy ....................................................................................... Russia and Europe .......................................................................... The Historiography of Philosophy .............................................. Reframing Russian Philosophy .................................................... Philosophy and its Soil .................................................................. Philosophy as a System ................................................................. Vladimir Solovev as a Systematic Philosopher ......................... The Systematic Design and its Content ...................................... The Dialectics of History ..............................................................

251 256 261 268 272 276 282 287 290

Concluding Remarks .......................................................................... 297 Bibliography ......................................................................................... 301 Index ..................................................................................................... 319

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book is a revised version of my PhD thesis, which I defended at the University of Bergen in April 2009. It is a pleasant duty to thank the Faculty of Humanities, University of Bergen, for generously awarding me a three-year research fellowship, which made it possible for me to write this study. Its present publication has been made possible by a grant from the Norwegian Research Council. My thanks extend also to Ivo Romein at the Brill publishing house and to the editorial board of the series Russian History and Culture for their cooperation and interest in my work. I am likewise indebted to the publisher’s anonymous reviewer for several valuable suggestions. Over the last six years my scholarly work has been constantly enriched by my inspiring colleagues at the Department of Russian Studies, University of Bergen, to whom I would also like to express my appreciation. Moreover, I am very grateful to my two opponents at the doctoral defence, Per-Arne Bodin and Pål Kolstø, for having scrutinised my text in such detail. Their supportive and critical responses have no doubt improved the present version. Its publication was likewise prompted by Peter Ulf Møller’s encouraging review of my thesis in Nordisk Østforum. My most recent thanks are due to Ursula Phillips for her expert editing of my text and translations. And finally, I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Jostein Børtnes, for his inspiring engagement in my project, for our stimulating conversations, and, not least, for his attentive and critical readings of my manuscripts. Any errors or omissions in this text are, of course, entirely my own responsibility. Kåre Johan Mjør January 2011

TRANSLITERATIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS Zenkovskii, Zen’kovskii or Zenkovsky? There are different systems and practices for rendering Russian names in English, and this issue is especially complicated in the case of émigrés, who have often used anglicised (or germanised, or francophone etc.) versions that are not always in keeping with present-day standards. Since this is a study focusing on émigré literature in an émigré context—it analyses texts in Russian addressed to Russians—I have decided to render the Russian names and terms in keeping with the Library of Congress transliteration system (diacritics ignored) and not in anglicised (or germanised etc.) forms, apart from when I quote scholars who have used other forms. In the case of personal names, moreover, I have omitted the indicators for soft and hard signs, except in the bibliography and in bibliographical references, hence Zenkovskii and Solovev, but kul’tura. For the sake of consistency, I have even used the forms Tolstoi and Dostoevskii. Names of Ukrainians are transliterated from Ukrainian and not from Russian (hence Mohyla), except when I quote from Russian texts—in these cases names are transliterated from Russian (Mogila). There are several cases, to be sure, where it is difficult to decide whether a person is “really” Ukrainian (or Belorusian) or Russian. And in order for my bibliography not to be unnecessarily confusing, I have used as a rule one form of name for one author, although his or her name may have been spelled differently in a given publication; “Poltoratskii” may have published his actual article under the name Poltoratzky or even Poltoratszky. Names of non-Russian scholars publishing in Russian have not been transliterated back from Russian (Thomas Bohn remains Thomas Bohn, and not Tomas Bon). There are, however, a few exceptions to this pattern: The most wellknown tsars of the Imperial period are referred to as Peter, Catherine, Alexander and Nicholas. And “Gertsen” is too awkward, thus Herzen. Furthermore, émigré scholars who have mostly published in languages other than Russian and are known exclusively by their transliterated names, retain their anglicised etc. names (e.g. Nicholas Riasanovsky, Michael Cherniavsky, Dimitri Strémooukhoff, and others). The attentive reader will surely find questionable certain solutions or deviations, and I apologise for any confusion or irritation that my final decisions may cause.

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transliterations and abbreviations

Although pre-revolutionary orthography was of huge symbolic significance to many first-wave émigrés, all transliterated Russian terms are given in accordance with the new (post-1917) orthography. Obvious misprints in the quoted texts have been corrected. Except where noted, all translations are my own. Bibliographical references to secondary literature are given in footnotes, while I refer to the four primary texts by means of the following abbreviations, inserted in the body of the text in brackets and followed by page numbers: sdr prb ri irf i/ii

Georgii P. Fedotov, Sviatye drevnei Rusi (=Saints of Ancient Russia), Paris 1931 Georgii V. Florovskii, Puti russkogo bogosloviia (=Ways of Russian Theology), Paris 1937 Nikolai A. Berdiaev, Russkaia ideia (=The Russian Idea), Paris 1946 Vasilii V. Zen’kovskii, Istoriia russkoi filosofii (=History of Russian Philosophy), vol. 1/2, Paris 1948/1950

Quotations from the Bible are rendered in accordance with the Revised Standard Version, except for the Psalms, which are quoted from Lancelot Brenton’s English translation of the Septuagint.

INTRODUCTION The present study examines the cultural and intellectual historiography of Russian émigré writers of the so-called first wave (1918–1940). More specifically, I set out to analyse four seminal works by four prominent figures of the Russian diaspora that grew up beyond the borders of what was to become the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. These are Saints of Ancient Russia by Georgii Fedotov (1931), Ways of Russian Theology by Georgii Florovskii (1937), The Russian Idea by Nikolai Berdiaev (1946), and finally the History of Russian Philosophy by Vasilii Zenkovskii (1948–50). As the first truly significant attempts by Russians themselves to describe Russian cultural and intellectual history, these texts have become classics in the field of Russian Studies. They testify to a point made a few years ago by the late Sergei Hackel, namely that “the Russian diaspora in Europe made its impact on the western world by means of scholarship.”1 They have been widely read and still are today not at least in post-Soviet Russia, where they were inaccessible to the wider public until the late 1980s but are now constantly reissued. Meanwhile their image of Russia and their formulations of Russianness have had a deep impact in the West and are now becoming increasingly influential in their authors’ country of origin. This study takes the reader back to the time and place where these texts were written—Paris, the capital of the Russian emigration. The “Russian Paris” was a place of intense cultural and scholarly activity, of which these works were a result. They were all published by the ymca Press in Paris. The books by Fedotov and Zenkovskii were composed from lectures read at the St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute, where Florovskii also taught and in whose activities Berdiaev likewise took an active part.2 These circumstances themselves suggest their situatedness in a particular émigré milieu, and this is one context

1 Sergei Hackel, 2006, “Diaspora Problems of the Russian Emigration,” The Cambridge History of Christianity, volume 5: Eastern Christianity, ed. M. Angold, Cambridge, pp. 539–557, p. 555. 2 Cf. O.D. Volkogonova, 2010, Berdiaev (Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei 1257), Moscow, p. 286.

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with which they interact and within which I shall examine them. The historiography of these authors is exile literature: it is embedded in the Russian exiled community, Russia Abroad (zarubezhnaia Rossiia), whose most conspicuous response to the Bolshevik’s seizure and consolidation of power was not so much political protest and rejection as a self-imposed mission to preserve and transmit Russianness. These four texts are reflections of and responses to the intense preoccupation with Russia that was so central to those who left Russia after the Revolution, the so-called first-wave émigrés. The first two texts stem from the peak of this activity, the 1930s, while the final two, published after the Second World War, also suggest, while reflecting the intense interwar activity of Russia Abroad, a change in the self-awareness of Russian émigrés during and immediately after the war. Texts and Contexts Although the four works analysed here share a canonical status in the body of Russian émigré historical writing and are influential works with large readerships, a reader familiar with this literature is nevertheless likely to ask for other texts by other authors as well, texts that appear to have been “left out” here.3 A major innovative contribution to émigré historiography was made, for example, by the Eurasianist current, above all by Georgii Vernadskii. Paris, however, was not a main centre of Eurasianist thought; Sofia, Berlin, and Prague were more important in this respect. Second, Vernadskii’s works deal only marginally with cultural and intellectual currents, the representation of which is what interests me here. Or rather, his infrequent writings on “Russian culture,” as in the book The Links of Russian Culture (1938), are based on a different, more comprehensive concept of culture that includes both its “spiritual” and “material” aspects.4 In Eurasianist thought, the two aspects are held to form an organic whole, though the main emphasis must be said to have been on the latter one. By implication, Vernadskii’s approach is closer to Pavel Miliukov’s idea of cultural history as social history, founded on an anthropological concept of culture. My

3

Other historical works by the same authors are discussed in their individual chapters. 4 Cf. G.V. Vernadskii, 2005, Opyt istorii Evrazii; Zven’ia russkoi kul’tury (Sfera Evrazii), Moscow, p. 111.

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authors, in contrast, base their work on an idealistic and humanistic notion of culture (see Chapter Two). As to Miliukov’s own Outlines of the History of Russian Culture, this work was originally published in the 1890s and may also be said to be a part of émigré historiography, in that it was republished in Paris in the 1930s, but since only the introduction was new and since it is historiography of a different kind, I have not found it relevant to analyse it here. Besides, both Eurasianist historiography and that of Miliukov have been thoroughly analysed in other studies.5 Closer to the four texts analysed in this study is the History of the Russian Church (1959) by Anton Kartashev, who was professor at the St Sergius Institute and whose book aims to contribute to a “rebirth” of a Russia liberated in the future from the Bolsheviks.6 However, this book is centred on church-state relations—Kartashev’s utopia was a theocracy—and not on culture and intellectual currents.7 Other significant works such as Nikolai Losskii’s History of Russian Philosophy (1951) or Nikolai Zernov’s The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century (1963) have also not been taken into account since my main interest has been in works on Russia written primarily for the Russian émigré audience and thus in Russian.8 Besides, Losskii was not part of the Parisian emigration in the interwar period. For the same reasons, it has not been relevant to include Alexandre Koyré’s La philosophie et le probléme national en Russie au début du XIXe siècle (1929). Although he lived in Paris, Koyré (Koiranskii) is an example of a Russian émigré scholar who became more thoroughly

5 For a study of Vernadskii’s historiography as a response to Miliukov, see A.V. Antoshchenko, 2003, “Evraziia” ili “Sviataia Rus’ ”? (Rossiiskie emigranty v poiskakh samosoznaniia na putiakh istorii), Petrozavodsk, pp. 214ff. For further references to literature on Eurasianism and Miliukov, see Chapter One and Two respectively. 6 A.V. Kartashev, 1960, Ocherki po istorii russkoi tserkvi, vol. 1, Paris, pp. 7, 9. 7 Cf. Antoine Nivère, 2003, “Anton Kartachev, historien de l’Église,” Les historiens de l’émigration russe (Cahiers de l’émigration russe 7), ed. D. Beaune-Gray, Paris, pp. 121–140, pp. 132f. 8 In contrast to Zernov’s’ book, Losskii’s History was initially written in Russian but published during his lifetime in an English translation only. However, this translation was soon translated back into Russian and published in a very limited edition in the Soviet Union as early as 1954. This poor, retranslated version has in fact been reissued several times in post-Soviet Russia, but in 1994 the publishing house Progress launched the Russian original: N.O. Losskii, 1994, Istoriia russkoi filosofii (Biblioteka zhurnala “Put’ ”), ed. M.A. Kolerov, Moscow. Petr Shalimov argues in the foreword that although originally conceived in Russian, Losskii’s book emerged abroad as a work addressed mainly to a “Western reader” (Losskii, 1994, p. 10).

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integrated into French academia, where he emerged as a leading intellectual historian, and engaged little with the Russian émigré milieu in Paris.9 A similar career was made by Dmytro Chyzhevskyi, although he also published frequently in Russian émigré organs. The topic of his most comprehensive study of Russian thought written in the interwar period, Hegel in Russia (Russian edition 1939; first edition in German 1934), is too narrow, however, to fit the profile of this study. In addition, he considered himself to be Ukrainian, not Russian, a fact that would have made it problematic to include him here.10 However, this is not simply a question of selection according to importance and canonical status or of zooming in on a particular field, in this case cultural and intellectual historiography. The issue is also one of representativeness. In this study, these four books are seen neither as representing the Russian emigration as such, nor even a particular current (for instance, “Parisian liberal Orthodoxy”). Rather, the Russian post-revolutionary emigration forms the context in which they emerged and with which they engage. This is the study of a set of texts united by the time, place and circumstances of their origin, and a major focus will be precisely this complex interaction between text and context. As émigré texts they indeed tell us a great deal about the Russian emigration—its character, its quests, what it made possible. But they also do something to this context. Let me therefore outline more precisely the notion of text on which this study is based. I insist on the uniqueness of the texts and thus on their historicity. This is, in other words, a historical study. Its in-depth readings of single texts and analyses of their narration and rhetoric do not, I would claim, preclude seeing them as “historical.” On the contrary, it is precisely by means of a close reading of a text that “history” may be revealed—and not by means of a sweeping survey of a large number of texts or “sources.” A text does indeed reflect something outside of itself but it is also capable of refracting this outside. Or, to adapt a couple of terms from the conceptual history of Reinhart Koselleck, a text is both an indicator of historical change and a fac9 Cf. the translator’s afterword in Alexandre Koyré, 2003, Filosofiia i natsional’naia problema v Rossii nachala xix veka (Issledovaniia po istorii russkoi mysli 10), trans. A.M. Rutkevich, Moscow, p. 290. The philosopher Alexandre Kojève (Kozhevnikov) is similar example. 10 For documentation of his view of himself as Ukrainian, see the various “Autobiographies” as well as Iurii Ivask’s obituary (pp. 492–495) collected in D.I. Chizhevskii, 2007, Izbrannoe v trekh tomakh, vol. 1: Materialy k biografii (1894–1977), ed. V. Iantsen, Moscow 2007.

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tor in historical change.11 A text may intervene in history and is history; it is not simply an external expression of something deeper and essential—although this appears to be precisely what the authors of the texts examined here believed it was when they wrote about Russian cultural and intellectual history. By implication, close readings of these texts provide us with knowledge not only of their unique design but also of the situation in which they arose. To dismiss this double feature of a text necessarily creates theoretical as well as practical problems. As Dominick LaCapra has asked: “Do certain works themselves both try to confirm something or establish something—a value, a pattern of coherence, a system, a genre—and call it into question?”12 This can never be an either-or question. On the contrary, LaCapra’s solution is to “distinguish between documentary and work-like aspects of the text. The documentary situates the text in terms of factual or literal dimensions involving reference to empirical reality and conveying information about it.” In contrast, the “worklike” aspect, a term taken from Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art, is productive by “bringing into the world something that did not exist before in that significant variation, alteration, or transformation.” And he concludes, “one might say that while the documentary marks a difference, the work-like makes a difference—one that engages the reader in re-creative dialogue with the text and the problems it raises.”13 A central task for LaCapra is to call into question the predominance of the documentary approach in intellectual history. It should not be abandoned or expelled entirely, but supplemented by an appraisal of the complexities of a text, in order to avoid the reductionism of simple content analysis. Being historical in this sense, my project is also philological. LaCapra’s ideas appear to find a resonance in the Norwegian scholar Helge Jordheim’s recent proposal for a “new philology.” In his reading of Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge—a work that proposes a philology that involves penetrating reflections on the notoriously difficult and paradoxical relationship between text and history—Jordheim finds a

11 Reinhart Koselleck, 1972, “Einleitung,” Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 1, eds. O. Brunner, W. Conze & R. Koselleck, Stuttgart, pp. xiii–xxvii, p. xiv. To replace “concept” with “text” here is, in my view, unproblematic. 12 Dominick LaCapra, 1980, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” History and Theory 19 (3), pp. 245–276, p. 249. 13 LaCapra, 1980, p. 250.

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fruitful approach to the problem of synchrony and diachrony. The task for a new philology, according to Jordheim (and Foucault), is to read texts in a way that focuses both on the underlying and governing system of which they are a part, and on the text as an unrepeatable event. It should recognise what connects a text to the discourse that surrounds it and what makes it appear unique and singular. This double aspect must be sustained throughout the analysis; it should not be conceived of as an aporia to be overcome through some Hegelian synthesis.14 However, there is never only one context; texts engage with different contexts. I introduced above the Russian Orthodox émigré culture that arose in and around the St Sergius Institute in Paris. Another context which is common to all four and with which they interact is Russian pre-revolutionary historical writing and the way in which Russia had been represented by Russian scholars and writers before the Revolution. The works of Fedotov, Florovskii, Berdiaev and Zenkovskii represent a new phase in the history of Russian historiography, and they actively relate their analyses and narratives to the works of pre-1917 historians and other writers of publitsistika. The exiled writers see their own work as a preservation and continuation of pre-revolutionary traditions.15 And yet, despite their intended continuity, they inevitably represent discontinuity. Exile, Edward Said writes, “is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past.”16 In the first part of my study I try to reconstruct these two contexts with emphasis on aspects considered to be particularly relevant in the case of these four writers. This reconstruction is followed by four extensive and detailed readings of the historical works. Particular attention is paid to their narrativity, since they all dramatise Russia’s past, and more specifically Russian spirituality (Fedotov), Russian theology (Florovskii), the Russian idea (Berdiaev), and Russian philosophy (Zenkovskii) in the form of narratives. These topics all have a history, a history that is incomplete and therefore becomes an issue 14 Cf. Helge Jordheim, 2001, Lesningens vitenskap: Utkast til en ny filologi, Oslo, p. 204. 15 Cf. Frank Boldt, Dimitri Segal & Lazar Fleishman, 1978, “Problemy izucheniia literatury russkoi emigratsii pervoi treti xx veka,” Slavica Hierosolymitana: Slavic Studies of the Hebrew University 3, pp. 75–88, p. 79. 16 Edward W. Said, 2001, “Reflections on Exile,” Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, London, pp. 173–186, p. 177.

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of urgent concern in the here and now of the émigré community to whom the four authors address their works. Herein lies the central agenda of these writers. While the concrete, here-and-now context is of crucial importance to a text which is produced within it, its spatio-temporal setting is at the same time an insufficient means for exhaustively explaining and interpreting it, since a text may incorporate other texts situated outside these immediate surroundings, as well as genres and modes of expression that are not directly related to it but are nevertheless evoked in order to make sense of the given situation. While those contexts mentioned above appear to be the two which they all have in common and which make up the historical contexts, the individual texts may also involve other hermeneutical contexts independently. This may be a certain genre, a particular mode of expression, a particular example or model, in accordance with which Russia is represented. Here we are confronted with the uniqueness of a text. To take an example: The Russian émigrés understood their exile as a rejection of Bolshevism. But the notion that it was also a struggle against the Antichrist was at times equally widespread, or at least emphasised with equal strength. Their interpretation of the Revolution as the final event before the Revelation activated the eschatological rhetoric of these writers. Dmitrii Merezhkovskii’s first article published in exile (January, 1921) bore the title “The Reign of Antichrist: The Bolsheviks, Europe, and Russia.”17 A similar imagery was used by Berdiaev and Florovskii. Another example of how Russian émigrés understood their situation may be found in an article published by Fedotov in 1930, on the occasion of the 2000th anniversary of Virgil’s birth. Fedotov concludes his discussion of the Roman poet as follows: But at the time of a fateful deed, when it is required of us to renounce our ancestry and homeland, beauty itself, we may find inspiration in the works of a hero who wandered across seas and lands in search of his lost homeland. “O my country! O Ilium, home of gods, and you Dardan battlements, famed in war!”18

17 Cf. D.S. Merezhkovskii, 2001, “Tsarsvo antikhrista: Bol’sheviki, Evropa i Rossiia,” Tsarstvo antikhrista: Stat’i perioda emigratsii (Iz arkhiva russkoi emigratsii), ed. A.N. Nikoliukin, St Petersburg, pp. 5–32. 18 G.P. Fedotov, 1952, “O Virgilii: K dvukhtysiacheletiiu so dnia ego rozhdeniia,” Novyi grad: Sbornik statei, ed. Iu.P. Ivask, New York, pp. 215–222, p. 222. Translation of Virgil taken from Virgil, 1999, Eclogues; Georgics; Aeneid I–VI (The Loeb Classical Library 63–64), trans. H. Ruston Fairclough, Cambridge, Mass. & London, p. 333.

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In this passage, we see how Fedotov maps his own emigration onto that of Aeneas. This way of representing and making sense of exile provides an example of a theoretical point made by Rasmus Slaattelid, namely that texts “interconnect in unforeseeable ways irrespective of what immediate socio-cultural context they are surrounded by at the time of their creation.”19 Paradoxically, a historical project that recognises the situatedness of texts must recognise that they also exist outside history, i.e. outside the temporal and spatial situation in which they were created. To my mind, this still does not make an analysis of both dimensions unhistorical. On the contrary, only a patient reading that acknowledges a text’s double nature is able to see how it is historical, that is unique. Historiography and Narrativity At the centre of this study will be the narratives of Fedotov, Florovskii, Berdiaev, and Zenkovskii. Provisionally, I define narrative as the representation of a sequence of events. In the case of intellectual and cultural history, an “event” may be a text, a corpus of texts written by an intellectual, or simply a person (a saint, for instance). Persons and/or texts are taken to embody the historical development. Needless to say, the texts and figures will always have to be interpreted in order to function as an event (or a fact) and conform to a narrative structure. As Iurii Lotman repeatedly proclaims in his discussion of the “problem of the historical fact,” “the historian is condemned to deal with texts.”20 In the following, I will look more specifically into a set of methodological issues related to the kind of representation in question here: the narrative representation of the past in historiography, in the writing of history. Above all, I will be concerned with the function and meaning of narrative and narrativity—i.e. with that which makes a text a narrative—as well as the related notions of events, plot, and emplotment. This is the theoretical framework that I shall use actively

19

Rasmus T. Slaattelid, 1997, “Slavophilism over the Horizon,” Wiener slavistischer Almanach 44 (Sonderband), pp. 87–93, p. 91. 20 Iu.M. Lotman, 1990, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. A. Shukman, Bloomington, Ind., p. 217.

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in my readings, though it will be supplemented by other theories too when necessary. My focus is indebted to the narrative approach to historiography that has gained popularity since the 1970s and also provoked critical responses not at least from many historians themselves. The classic in the field is without doubt Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) and it remains indispensible to a study of narrativity in historiography.21 White was far from being the first to emphasise narrativity as a central feature of the writing of history. By the time he published Metahistory theoreticians such as Arthur Danto, W.B. Gallie, William Dray and Louis Mink had taken various “narrativist” positions in order to reject the positivist attempt of Carl Gustav Hempel and others to elaborate a so-called “covering law model” for the historical discipline.22 These narrativists all see narrative as a form of understanding (Verstehen) that is opposed to nomothetical explanation (Erklären). In accordance with this view, narrative is held to be better suited than direct explanation to the interpretation of unique processes in the past, above all because it allows for contingency, the unintended consequences of human action, a point that was later maintained by Jörn Rüsen.23 The task of the historian, Mink argues, is “in an act of judgment [to] hold together in thought events which no one could experience together.”24 To do so is to perform a configurational act, and narrative is the indispensible tool in this respect for both configuring and representing the past. This suggests, however, that the presence of narrativity in the writing of history may pose problems with respect to referentiality in so far as the connections it creates are not observable. In a later article, Mink makes even more explicit the point that narratives lack the referent that singular recorded events otherwise have:

21

Hayden White, 1973, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe, Baltimore. For its reception history, see Richard T. Vann, 1998, “The Reception of Hayden White,” History and Theory 37 (2), pp. 143–161. 22 For a brief survey of this current, see Narve Fulsås, 1989, “Forteljing og historie,” Historisk kundskap og fremstilling: Oplæg fra den 20. Nordiske fagkonference i historisk metodelære, 23.–27. maj 1987 (Studier i historisk metode 20), ed. C. Kvium, Aarhus, pp. 47–60, p. 49; for a more comprehensive discussion, see Paul Ricoeur, 1984, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer, Chicago, pp. 121ff. 23 Cf. Jörn Rüsen, 1986, Grundzüge einer Historik, vol. 2: Rekonstruktion der Vergangenheit: Prinzipien der historischen Forschung, Göttingen, pp. 37ff. 24 Louis M. Mink, 1966, “The Autonomy of Historical Understanding,” History and Theory 5 (1), pp. 24–47, p. 44.

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“the narrative combination of relations is not subject to confirmation or disconfirmation, as any one of them taken separately might be.”25 And yet it still claims to say something true: The cognitive function of the narrative form, then, is not just to relate a succession of events but to body forth an ensemble of interrelationships of many different kinds as a single whole. In fictional narrative the coherence of such complex forms affords aesthetic or emotional satisfaction; in historical narratives it additionally claims truth.26

The corollary, as later formulated by Frank Ankersmit, is that “the historian projects a unity and coherence onto the past which the past itself does not possess.”27 While Mink might have preferred a more careful formulation, he nevertheless stresses that “narrative form in history, as in fiction, is the product of individual imagination.”28 That only recorded events have referents and narratives do not, is a premise shared by most of those who have reasoned on narrativity in historiography. White’s strategy in Metahistory was, in short, to bracket the question of referentiality of historical narrative entirely in favour of the forms of representation. At the very beginning of Metahistory he writes: “In this theory I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of narrative prose discourse.”29 In his examination of the classics of nineteenth-century historiography, White argues that a historical work becomes meaningful in a way analogous to how a literary text produces meaning. History is not fiction but historians extensively apply for instance certain plot structures in order to represent the interrelatedness of the events of the past. Whereas events are given and “real,” the set of relationships between them are not “immanent in the events themselves; they exist only in the mind of the historian reflecting them.”30 In analysing the forms of representation, White distinguishes between four different modes of representation

25 Louis M. Mink, 1978, “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument,” The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, eds. H. Kozicki & R.H. Canary, Madison, Wisc., pp. 129–149, p. 145. 26 Mink, 1978, p. 144. 27 F.R. Ankersmit, 1989, The Reality Effect in the Writing of History: The Dynamics of Historiographical Topology (Mededelingen van de Afdeling Letterkunde: Nieuwe Reeks 52:1), Amsterdam, p. 30. 28 Mink, 1978, p. 145. 29 White, 1973, p. ix. 30 Hayden White, 1974, “The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact,” Clio 3 (3), pp. 277–303, p. 294.

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and claims that the grounds for choosing one in favour of the remaining are “ultimately aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological.”31 Although Metahistory is first and foremost a study of the masters of nineteenth-century historiography (Michelet, Tocqueville, Ranke, and Burckhardt), the book is probably equally famous for its introductory chapter, where White formulates a “poetics of history.” This consists not only in the typology of four plot types taken from Northrop Frye (tragedy, romance, comedy, satire); the quartet is further combined with and claimed to have an “elective affinity” with Karl Mannheim’s four ideologies (radical, anarchist, conservative, liberal) and Stephen Pepper’s four types of argumentation (mechanistic, formist, organicist, contextualist). Taken together, they form, White claims, four historiographical styles, which he names according to the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, a typology initially invented by Vico and later developed by Kenneth Burke. These styles name different ways of “characterizing the dominant modes of historical thinking.”32 Moreover, they correspond to a deep structural level, referred to as both linguistic and “of consciousness.” “On this level, I believe, the historian performs an essentially poetic act, in which he prefigures the historical field and constitutes it as a domain upon which to bring to bear the specific theories he will use to explain ‘what was really happening’ in it.”33 According to White, the way in which the field is prefigured—one of four—governs the subsequent explanations through plot, ideology and argumentation. In his newly-written introduction to the Russian translation of Metahistory (2002), White refers to its theory as “structuralist” and admits that he would have written it differently today.34 We may note, further, that White appears to have abandoned rather soon the idea of a deep structure as well as its corresponding typology in favour of a more deliberate analysis of narrativity.35 Still, his typology has gained much attention and attempts have been made to apply to a wide range

31

White, 1973, p. xii. White, 1973, p. 38. 33 White, 1973, p. x. 34 Cf. Hayden White, 2002, “Predislovie k russkomu izdaniiu,” Metaistoriia: Istoricheskoe voobrazhenie v Evrope xix veka (Studia humanitatis 8), trans. E.G. Trubinaia, V.V. Kharitonov et al., Ekaterinburg, pp. 7–14, p. 7. 35 Cf. for instance Hayden White, 1981, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” On Narrative, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell, Chicago, pp. 1–25. 32

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of historical works.36 However, it has also provoked criticism. It has been pointed out that the correspondences between tropes, ideology, genres and argumentation are not very well founded. As Jörn Stückrath has convincingly shown, Metahistory presents us with “Typologie statt Theorie.”37 This is a critique I share, and I would also like to add that I find it difficult to understand what the “deep structural level” really consists of. Why should this be more fundamental than, let us say, ideology?38 However, while I find White’s “poetics of history” unconvincing and highly problematic on several points, I do believe he succeeds better in his concrete analyses. This I take as a confirmation of the usefulness of studying historiography as a “narrative prose discourse.” And it is necessary to stress that such an approach by no means represents the isolation of the individual historical work. As evident from the subtitle of White’s book, his narrative analyses aim at unfolding the forms and patterns by means of which the past has been represented and imagined, in this case in the nineteenth century. What his study tells us is that in order to explore how history is conceived, one has to study the rhetoric and form of a work, not only its content. Additionally, of the various explanatory strategies listed by White, I find that of emplotment capable of sustaining its analytical potential beyond the framework of Metahistory. However, this requires a redefinition of the term. Whereas White defines it as the operation in which a set of events is structured so that they confirm to a certain plot structure,39 emplotment is also the English term that has been used to translate Paul Ricoeur’s la mise en intrigue, a central concept in his Time and Narrative. Ricoeur says explicitly that his concept of emplot-

36 Donald Ostrowski, 1990, “A Metahistorical Analysis: Hayden White and Four Narratives of ‘Russian’ History,” Clio 19 (3), pp. 215–236, is an attempt to analyse examples from Russian historiography (Nikolai Karamzin, Richard Pipes, Alexander Yanov, and The Short Course of the Communist Party) on the basis of the structural framework of Metahistory, and includes a stimulating discussion of problems in White’s theory. 37 Jörn Stückrath, 1997, “Typologie statt Theorie? Zur Rekonstruktion und Kritik von Hayden Whites Begrifflichkeit in Metahistory,” Metageschichte: Hayden White und Paul Ricœur: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der europäischen Kultur im Kontext von Husserl, Weber, Auerbach und Gombrich, eds. J. Stückrath & J. Zbinden, BadenBaden, pp. 86–103. 38 This is the view of Ostrowski, 1990, p. 229. 39 Cf. White, 1973, p. 7: “Providing the ‘meaning’ of a story by identifying the kind of story that has been told is called explanation by emplotment.”

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ment is broader that that of White.40 It aims at reflecting a greater heterogeneity in the forms of historical representation, including the non-narrative ones that have been developed in the twentieth-century (cf. the Annales school). Besides, it forms part of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical project of describing our experience of time, to which he holds the writing of history to be an indispensible source. More specifically, emplotment (la mise en intrigue) represents Ricoeur’s interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of mythos. Mythos, according to Ricoeur, is not merely a plot (intrigue) in the sense of a fixed and completed structure. “The Poetics does not speak of structure but of structuration,” Ricoeur writes,41 and it is this dynamic process that he seeks to capture. On the other hand, the plot will always be a reflection of emplotment, and he seems to use the two terms interchangeably. Aristotle, now, defines mythos as the “organization of the events.”42 These events form not only a temporal sequence (one after another). “Recognition or reversal or both,” Aristotle writes, should “emerge from the very structure of the plot, so that they ensue from the preceding events by necessity or probability; as it makes a great difference whether things happen because of, or only after, their antecedents.”43 Thus, “one because of another” implies that emplotment is in itself an explanation, as White also argued. But Aristotle’s definition, although it is formulated as a prescription for the composition of a tragic plot, opens up for a notion of emplotment that extends beyond the archetypal categories of tragedy, comedy, romance, and satire. Ricoeur defines it as a “synthesis of the heterogeneous” that brings together “agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, unexpected results.”44 Emplotment is above all the construction of coherence, in relation to which the singular events and other components become meaningful: By plot I mean the intelligible whole that governs a succession of events in any story. This provisory definition immediately shows the plot’s connecting function between an event or events and the story. A story is

40

Cf. Ricoeur, 1984, p. 163. Ricoeur, 1984, p. 48. 42 Aristotle, 1995, “Poetics,” Aristotle: Poetics; Longinus: On the sublime; Demetrius: On style (The Loeb Classical Library 199) ed. & trans. S. Halliwell, London, pp. 28–141, p. 50: ē tōn pragmatōn sustasis (1450–15); cf. Ricoeur, 1984, p. 33. 43 Aristotle, 1995, p. 65 (1452a15). 44 Ricoeur, 1984, p. 65. 41

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introduction made out of events to the extent that plot makes events into a story. The plot, therefore, places us at the crossing point of temporality and narrativity: to be historical, an event must be more than a singular occurrence, a unique happening. It receives its definition from its contribution to the development of the plot.45

A plot makes scattered events meaningful precisely because they are configured as parts of this significant whole. However “real,” any event is thus not meaningful; it must be “accepted” by the plot. While a single event may be represented, it cannot acquire meaning without being related to some greater whole.46 This definition of the relationship between plot, story and event confronts us with another problem in White’s work, namely the way in which he describes the historian’s manner of working. To begin with, according to White, he or she is confronted with the “historical field,” i.e. the “unprocessed historical record,” out of which certain events are selected and combined into a temporal chain, a chronicle. In turn, this chain is delimited by ascribing to it a beginning, middle, and an end, so that it is given the form of a story. Finally, various explanations are provided so that it eventually becomes a narrative. That historians actually work in this way is highly questionable. Events are hardly ever present as “brute data.” Rather, they are mostly embedded in previous accounts, whether these are texts considered as primary sources or other representations of the same field. This makes White’s concept of an “unprocessed historical record,” with which the historian is confronted at the outset, highly problematic. As Maurice Mandelbaum has pointed out, no historian is ever confronted with such a record or by “raw data,” only by others’ accounts. “Embedded within those accounts will be almost all the data with which he works.”47 Richard Vann observes that “event” is “the most under-analyzed term White uses.”48 One problem with the notion of event is that it aims at an ontological status while it is actually a linguistic one. As

45 Paul Ricoeur, 1981, “Narrative Time,” On Narrative, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell, Chicago, pp. 165–186, p. 167. 46 For a discussion of this point in Ricoeur, see Hayden White, 1984, “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory 23 (1), pp. 1–33, pp. 25ff. 47 Maurice Mandelbaum, 1980, “The Presuppositions of Metahistory,” History and Theory 19 (4), pp. 39–54, p. 43. See also Fulsås, 1989, p. 52. 48 Vann, 1998, p. 154.

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noted by Mink, the scope and character of an event cannot be determined a priori. “An event may take five seconds or five months, but in either case whether it is one event or many depends not on a definition of ‘event’ but on a particular narrative construction which generates the event’s appropriate description.”49 Events are abstractions from a larger whole rather than that which the interpretation takes as its starting point. They are always, according to Mink, events under description. This is especially evident in the case of cultural and intellectual history, where “events,” as noted above, are always the result of an interpreting activity. By the time of Metahistory’s publication, an opposite relationship of plot to events had already been suggested by Paul Veyne, to whom there is no reference in Metahistory. What is given according to Veyne are not events, or facts: “ ‘facts’ do not exist in isolation; the historian finds them organized in wholes in which they act as causes, objectives, opportunities, risks, pretexts, and so on.”50 Such wholes are, in short, plots. It is the plot that determines what should count as a fact or event. And it is the emergence of new plots—through a “lengthening of the questionnaire”—that may make new events come about, make something “eventworthy.”51 Ricoeur’s definition of plot as “the intelligible whole that governs a succession of events in any story” and of events as “variables of the plot” are clearly inspired by Veyne. But he makes a reservation. How can narrative remain the essence of history if it ceases to be of events?52 Veyne’s notion of plot seems to make the notion of emplotment, as outlined by Ricoeur, superfluous. While apparently acknowledging the primacy of the plot, Ricoeur also tries to account for the importance of the event. If the notion of event is dispelled, Ricoeur maintains, history ceases to be narrative and thus history. And, as he demonstrates in his reading of the Annales historian Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean 49

Mink, 1978, p. 147. Paul Veyne, 1984, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, trans. M. MooreRinvolucri, Middletown, Conn., p. 31. “Facts” and “events” are not essentially different concepts in this connection, cf. Lotman, 1990, p. 219: “But a fact is not a concept, not an idea, it is a text, i.e. it always has an actual material embodiment; it is an event which is considered meaningful, and not, like a parable, a meaning which is given the form of an event.” 51 Cf. Veyne, 1984, pp. 220ff. 52 Cf. Ricoeur, 1984, p. 174; for an illuminating discussion of this point, see Hans Kellner, 1987, “Narrativity in History: Post-Structuralism and Since,” History and Theory 26 (4), pp. 1–29, pp. 15ff. 50

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and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, the classic of non-event history, change can only be accounted for as some kind of event. According to an analogical plan, as in the case of civilisations, changes occur as quasi-events. Ricoeur holds that “all change enters the field of history as a quasi-event. [. . .] There is a quasi-event wherever we can discern, even if only very indirectly, very obliquely, a quasi-plot and quasi-characters.”53 This formulation suggests, nevertheless, that it is the plot that creates the notion of an event, and not the other way around. Ricoeur reads Braudel’s text as founded on analogies “between the time of individuals and the time of civilizations: the analogy of growth and decline, of creation and death, the analogy of fate.”54 More specifically, he reads Braudel’s book as a study on transition. At its centre stands the conflict between the occidental and the oriental Mediterranean cultures (Spain and Turkey), and the end of this conflict marks the end of the story and constitutes the main event that frames the plot: “the decline of the Mediterranean as a collective hero on the stage of world history.”55 Thus we can see that Ricoeur’s theory of narrativity, contrary to that of White, involves a “protagonist” in the form of a quasi-character, an (imaginary) agency that is the subject in the narrative. Although White’s idea of emplotment in historiography inevitably testifies to the metaphorisation that takes place when peoples, nations, states, or cultures are dramatised and function like the protagonist in a literary plot, where this protagonist would normally be a human being (a “hero”), this too remains a theoretical problem that White himself unfortunately does not take up. In fact, metaphorisation appears to be a fundamental condition for the emplotment of historical events. Metaphor in this respect is not a trope, i.e. the substitution of a word with a literal meaning by a figurative one. Rather, in I.A. Richards’ formulation, “when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction.”56 A similar idea was later formulated as “projection” (Max Black), “predi-

53

Ricoeur, 1984, p. 224 (italics in original). Ricoeur, 1984, p. 224. 55 Ricoeur, 1984, p. 215. 56 I.A. Richards, 1936, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (The Mary Flexner Lectures), New York, p. 93. 54

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cation” (Paul Ricoeur), or “mapping” (George Lakoff ).57 Despite the differences between these thinkers, they all emphasise how metaphors are constitutive of the object under description and not exchangeable without an alteration in and thus loss of meaning. Consequently, there is no literal meaning behind the figurative. In particular, in the case of abstract concepts or intelligible objects—of which the “past” would be an example—only different figurative representations are possible, capable of achieving not identity but similarity. To summarise, Ricoeur, Veyne, and Mink account more satisfactorily than White for the fact that events, in order to be recognised as such, are dependent on plots. Moreover, they help us to see that it is only on the level of plot that events acquire significance, because it is here that the interconnectedness between them is created. Ankersmit’s model of “narrative substances” seems to be based, similarly, on a simplistic notion of what events are. He operates with a distinction between, on the one hand, singular statements that are individually true or false and, on the other, the narrative substance that consists of the sum of these statements. The narrative substance, taken as a whole, cannot be true or false, Ankersmit convincingly argues, because it represents this sum and, besides, adds a point of view on them.58 However, both Ankersmit and White fail to account for the fact that statements about events may be just as interpretative as narratives. Despite these problems, White and Ankersmit’s notions of narrative do nevertheless take into account its figurative dimension and its meaning-generating capacity, too. In Hans Kellner’s summary, “Ankersmit, Ricoeur, and White stress the figural and figured nature of historical representations; each sees analogic process embodied in tropes as the key to the realism claimed by historical discourse.”59 The idea here is that narrative functions in a way similar to metaphor in so far as it attempts to organise our knowledge by inviting us to see one thing in terms of another. It presents the past as a certain organised story. The meanings inherent in this figurative dimension—in the

57 Cf. Max Black, 1962, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy, Ithaca, N.Y.; 1977, “More about Metaphor,” Dialectica 31 (3–4), pp. 431–457; Paul Ricoeur, 2003, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (Routledge Classics), trans. R. Czerny et al., London; George Lakoff, 1993, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” Metaphor and Thought, ed. A. Ortony, Cambridge, pp. 202–251. 58 Cf. F.R. Ankersmit, 1983, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language (Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library 7), The Hague, pp. 96ff. 59 Kellner, 1987, p. 26.

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“as”—are what the narrative analysis of historiography should aim at making explicit. At the same time it should examine how this whole is constructed, what its components are. And this is what Ankersmit’s narrative logic aims at, its “empiricism” notwithstanding, namely to study the relation between statements and narrative substances.60 Thus all the theoreticians discussed here emphasise that historical narrative should not only be defined “negatively” because of its lack of referentiality—since narrative is first and foremost a whole that makes its individual parts meaningful. This brings us back to the cognitive function of narrative as described by Mink: “to body forth an ensemble of interrelationships of many different kinds as a single whole.” Narrative as an irreducible form of understanding makes us perceive connections and relations where these are not observable.61 The critical potential of this insight should not be dismissed, and is advocated most strongly, as far as I can see, by White. However, according to Kellner, the theories of Ankersmit, Ricoeur, and White—as well as those of Mink and Veyne, we might add—are first and foremost defensive: they argue against the “post-structuralist critique of historical reason.”62 And I find this point important to stress here, in a study of émigré literature, whose historical narratives may prove easy to deconstruct, but whose purpose was to create relationships in history in order to make exile meaningful. Research As a narrative analysis of Russian émigré historiography, this study has few predecessors. On Russian historiography in general there have recently appeared the inspiring studies by Thomas Bohn, Edward Thaden, Terence Emmons and Ana Siljak among others. Thomas

60

Cf. Ankersmit, 1983, p. 138. Thus I cannot agree with Chris Lorenz who claims that according to Ankersmit and White historical narratives are non-cognitive. Cf. Chris Lorenz, 1998, “Can Histories be True? Narrativism, Positivism, and the ‘Metaphorical Turn’,” History and Theory 37 (3), pp. 309–329, pp. 313, 321. Moreover, it is difficult to see how Lorenz’s alternative metaphorical approach, inspired by Mary Hesse as well as by George Lakoff, may be able to “save” the historical discipline—how it can possibly make histories “true.” 62 Kellner, 1987, p. 14. 61

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Sanders’s compilation of 1999 presents a selection of the most up-todate analyses in article form.63 The historiography of Russian émigré writers has been treated from time to time in scholarship. In 1973, Elisabeth Beyerly published a monograph on Russian first-wave émigré historians active in the United States (Georgii Vernadskii, Michael Karpovich, Michael Florinsky, Nicholas Riasanovsky, and others) and their “Europecentric view” of nineteenth-century Russian history.64 The majority of studies on émigré historians that have appeared to date are of post-Soviet, Russian origin. However, Fedotov, Florovskii, Berdiaev and Zenkovskii are seldom treated as historians by those studies. They are seen mostly as philosophers or writers of non-fiction (publitsistika) and are not considered to be so much a part of “history as Wissenschaft” (istoricheskaia nauka).65 For example, none of them are included in Anatolii Chernobaev’s dictionary Historians of Russia, which has been issued several times in post-Soviet Russia.66 The first study of Russian émigré historians published in Russia, Vladimir Pashuto’s Russian Émigré Historians in Europe (1992), includes the works examined here in the first appendix, which gives a full survey of works by twentiethcentury émigré historians on Russian history before 1861.67 However, they are not discussed in the main chapters of Pashuto’s book. Margarita Vandalkovskaia’s The Historical Thought of the Russian Emigration (1920s and 30s) of 2009 represents in contrast a broader approach than her predecessors, in that she includes “minor forms of historical

63 Thomas Sanders (ed.), 1999, Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, Armonk & London. 64 Elizabeth Beyerly, 1973, The Europecentric Historiography of Russia: An Analysis of the Contribution by Russian Émigré Historians in the USA, 1925–1955, Concerning 19th Century Russian History (Studies in European History 11), The Hague. “Europecentric” does not mean “Eurocentric,” but that Russian history is examined within a Russia versus Europe framework. Thus the Eurasianist Vernadskii figures in this study as well. 65 See for instance S.A. Aleksandrov (ed.), 1998, Istoricheskaia nauka rossiiskoi emigratsii 20–30-kh gg. XX veka: Khronika, Moscow, a chronicle that perpetuates this difference, although it does also include “not only professional historians and politicians, but also jurists, philosophers, literary scholars, theologians, journalists, writers and poets” (p. 5). As examples of the latter group, the names of Kartashev, Florovskii, N. Trubetskoi, and Fedotov are mentioned in the foreword. 66 A.A. Chernobaev (ed.), 2001, Istoriki Rossii: Biografii, Moscow. 67 Cf. V.T. Pashuto, 1992, Russkie istoriki-emigranty v Europe, ed. B.V. Levshin, Moscow, pp. 114–190 (=“Prilozhenie I: Trudy russkikh istorikov-emigrantov po istorii Rossii do 1861 g.”).

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works” and, more importantly, authors such as Fedotov and Berdiaev in the notion of istoricheskaia nauka. These two writers are here seen as representative of the “liberal-conservative current” in historical thinking with which Vandalkovskaia’s book is particularly concerned. Its colophon claims—wrongly, in my view—that this book is the “first examination of this theme,” i.e. of émigré “historical thought.”68 A similar, broader approach to the study of émigré historiography had already been made in 2003 by the contributors to the seventh volume of the French series Cahiers de l’émigration russe, entitled Les historiens de l’émigration russe.69 In this collection works by Berdiaev, Fedotov, Lev Karsavin, Anton Kartashev and Petr Bitsilli are examined alongside those by Pavel Miliukov, Georgii Vernadskii and Petr Struve. This selection suggests a more inclusive notion of what may count as historiography; cultural and intellectual history is at least included. Similarly, Marc Raeff ’s chapter on historians and history in Russia Abroad focuses mainly on Fedotov’s The Russian Religious Mind and Florovskii’s Ways of Russian Theology, which he considers to be the most successful examples of Russian émigré historiography (he compares them favourably with the works of the Eurasianists).70 Both these books have important affinities with my own work. The study that probably comes closest to my own with respect to objectives and methodology, however, is Aleksandr Antoshchenko’s “Eurasia” or “Holy Russia”? Russian Émigrés in Search of Self-Recognition in History published in 2003. On the basis of narrative theory (in particular that of Jörn Rüsen and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht) he explores the works of Nikolai Trubetskoi, Petr Savitskii, Vernadskii, Kartashev and Fedotov. And the questions he poses in relation to the authors and their texts are, above all: how do they interpret the disruption of cultural tradition caused by the Revolution, and how is this reflected in their conceptualisations of history? Antoshchenko sees these texts as a means of overcoming a trauma and coping with a crisis, and in order

68 M.G. Vandalkovskaia, 2009, Istoricheskaia mysl’ russkoi emigratsii: 20–30-e gg. xx v., Moscow. Vandalkovskaia bases her study on Militsa Nechkina’s idea of istoricheskaia mysl’ as a necessary foundation for the interpretation of historical facts and thus as an inevitable part of istoricheskaia nauka. 69 Danièle Beaune-Gray (ed.), 2003, Les historiens de l’émigration russe (Cahiers de l’émigration russe 7), Paris. 70 Marc Raeff, 1990, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration 1991–1939, New York & Oxford, pp. 156–186.

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to examine them as such he pays particular attention to the formal aspects of the texts, not only to their content. Study of the ways in which historical narratives are constructed discloses the temporal orientation and axiological relationship to the past that the authors of the histories of “Eurasia” and “Holy Russia” seek to bring about, maybe not always consciously, in their readers. This allows us not only to trace the process of intellectual coping with the cultural disruption associated with the Revolution but also to reveal the changes in the views on cultural-historical identity brought about by this disruption, against the background of a re-evaluation of the historical fate of Russia.71

While not identical, I find clear convergences between my own approach and that of Antoshchenko. To what extent his reading of Fedotov supports mine will be elaborated in the Fedotov chapter. Unfortunately, Antoshchenko’s theoretically well-founded and reflective approach represents a rarity in post-Soviet Russian scholarship, at least in that part of it that is concerned with Silver Age and émigré philosophical and historiographical writings. In post-Soviet Russia, Fedotov, Florovskii, Berdiaev and Zenkovskii, as well as most other émigré intellectuals, meet with considerable interest and the scholarly literature is growing rapidly. In addition to studies of individual thinkers, which will be referred to in the separate chapters, there exist several monographs devoted to a given theme or subject that was central to Russian émigré thought (including that of the authors dealt with here), and as such these studies complement my work.72 However, with a few notable exceptions, post-Soviet approaches to non-fictional émigré writings often fail to analyse their material sufficiently. This is

71 Antoshchenko, 2003, p. 6 (italics in original). Vandalkovskaia, too, adopts a similar perspective by emphasising “the intensification of creative thinking that is characteristic of non-typical situations of crisis” (Vandalkovskaia, 2009, p. 6) as formative of Russian émigré historical thought. However, her approach is mainly thematically oriented and, unfortunately, less rewarding as to analytical insights. 72 Cf. N.A. Omel’chenko, 1996, V poiskakh Rossii: Obshchestvenno-politicheskaia mysl’ russkogo zarubezh’ia o revoliutsii 1917 g., bol’shevizme i budushchikh sud’bakh rossiiskoi gosudarstvennosti (Sovremennaia rossiiskaia mysl’), St Petersburg; O.D. Volkogonova, 1998, Obraz Rossii v filosofii Russkogo Zarubezh’ia, Moscow; V.Kh. Bolotokov & A.M. Kumykov, 1998, Fenomen natsii i natsional’no-psikhologicheskie problemy v sotsiologii russkogo zarubezh’ia, Moscow; A.I. Doronchenkov, 2001, Emigratsiia “pervoi volny” o natsional’nykh problemakh i sud’be Rossii, St Petersburg; A.V. Prokhorenko, 2003, Vse v imeni tvoem, Rossiia: Osnovnye paradigmy obshchestvennoi mysli russkogo zarubezh’ia, St Petersburg; 2005, Filosofskoe rossievedenie v ideinoi polemike porevoliutsionnoi emigratsii (pervaia polovina xx v.), St Petersburg; 2010, Ocherki po istorii i filosofii kul’tury russkogo zarubezh’ia, St Petersburg.

22

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not only due to the highly referential character of these works, which may seem to be the result of their thematic orientation. In addition, we often encounter an implicit or explicit attempt to make the texts under examination relevant to the ongoing post-Soviet debate about a new Russian identity, a fact that would seem to make a genuine analytical or constructivist approach to the texts difficult.73 Aleksandr Prokhorenko, for example, maintains in his most recent book that the heritage of the Russian emigration represents one of the first attempts at “Russian studies” (rossievedenie), by which he means reflection on the civilisational, state and political, social and economic development of Russia. Such attempts are, he goes on to claim, “particularly important in the contemporary situation of acquiring a civilisational identity for our country, of providing an adequate answer to the challenges of globalisation.”74 Prokhorenko’s study of the past is thus founded on a quest for contemporary relevance, and his reference to a “civilisational identity” must be understood in light of the broader, “culturological” tendency which has characterised the humanities in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and which aims to provide precisely such a new civilisational identity, a new place in the world, for Russia.75 This ambition is even more at the forefront in Efim Pivovar’s The Russian Emigration of 2008, which is not only devoted to the post-revolutionary emigration but to all the phases of a continuous Russian emigration beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. In Pivovar’s ahistorical discourse, this “permanently” existing Russian diaspora emerges as a permanent part of the “Russian World” (Russkii Mir, Pivovar’s capitalisation), i.e. of “Russian civilisation.”76

73 See my case studies on the reception of Fedotov and Berdiaev in post-Soviet scholarship: Kåre Johan Mjør, 2008, “Den aktuelle Fedotov: Fortid, notid og framtid i postsovjetisk humaniora,” Terminal Øst: Totalitære og posttotalitære diskurser, eds. I. Lunde & S. Witt. Oslo, pp. 300–314; 2011a, “A Russian Thinker or a Thinker in Russia? Some Tendencies in the Post-Soviet Reception of Nikolaj Berdjaev,” Scando-Slavica 57 (1), pp. 25–47. Still, the treatment of Berdiaev’s work tends to be more diverse than that of Fedotov, though identity-related issues as a rule prevail here too. On similar as well as other tendencies in the post-Soviet reception of émigré literature, see Marc Raeff, 2005, “Recent Perspectives on the History of the Russian Emigration (1920– 1940),” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6 (2), pp. 319–340. 74 Prokhorenko, 2010, p. 162. 75 Cf. Jutta Scherrer, 2003, Kulturologie: Rußland auf der Suche nach einer zivilisatorischen Identität (Essener Kulturwissenschaftliche Vorträge 13), Göttingen. 76 E.I. Pivovar, 2008, Rossiiskoe zarubezh’e: Sotsial’no-istoricheskii fenomen, rol’ i mesto v kul’turno-istoricheskom nasledii, Moscow.

introduction

23

Given this tendency, however, it is important to take note of those Russian scholars who do contribute significantly to our understanding of the Russian emigration. In addition to Antoshchenko, Olga Demidova’s Metamorphoses in Exile deserves to be mentioned explicitly as a stimulating work on the literary byt of the Russian emigration. It is one of the few Russian studies on the emigration that seriously take into account the exile settings of the analysed texts. A non-Russian parallel to Demidova’s book is Leonid Livak’s How it was Done in Paris, which examines exilic experience in Russian first-wave émigré literature, mainly of the younger generation, as a cultural construct.77 Since Hans von Rimscha’s studies of the 1920s, the Russian emigration has been an object of extensive scholarly research in the West. Rimscha’s books were followed by several minor studies and reports in France in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1950s émigrés themselves began to describe their own achievements more thoroughly,78 and since the 1960s we have seen the emergence of several cultural histories concentrating either on different centres79 or on the entire emigration.80 When we add to the picture a number of dictionaries published in the West and in particular in post-Soviet Russia,81 and not at least the fourvolume Russia Abroad: Chronicle on Scholarly, Cultural and Social

77 Cf. O.R. Demidova, 2003, Metamorfozy v izgnanii: Literaturnyi byt russkogo zarubezh’ia, St Petersburg; Leonid Livak, 2003, How it was Done in Paris: Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism, Madison, Wisc. 78 Cf. G.P. Struve, 1956, Russkaia literatura v izgnanii, New York; P.E. Kovalevskii, 1971, Zarubezhnaia Rossiia: Istoriia i kul’turno-prosvetitel’naia rabota russkogo zarubezh’ia za polveka (1920–1970) (Collection études russes 3), Paris; 1973, Zarubezhnaia Rossiia: Dopolnitel’nyi vypusk (Collection études russes 5), Paris. 79 Cf. Robert C. Williams, 1972, Culture in Exile: Russian Émigrés in Germany, 1881–1941, Ithaca, N.Y.; Robert H. Johnston, 1988, New Mecca, New Babylon: Paris and the Russian Exiles 1920–1945, Kingston; Catherine Andreyev & Ivan Savický, 2004, Russia Abroad: Prague and the Russian Diaspora, 1918–1938, New Haven, Conn. See also Karl Schlögel (ed.), 1994, Der Grosse Exodus: Die russische Emigration und ihre Zentren 1917 bis 1941, Munich, and Bronisław Kodzis, 2002, Literaturnye tsentry russkogo zarubezh’ia 1918–1939: Pisateli, tvorcheskie ob’’edineniia, periodika, knigopechatanie (Arbeiten und Texte zur Slavistik 70), Munich. 80 Cf. Raeff, 1990; Nikita Struve, 1996, Soixante-dix ans d’émigration russe (1919– 1989) (Pour une histoire du xxe siècle), Paris. 81 See for instance V.V. Shelokhaev (ed.), 1997, Russkoe zarubezh’e: Zolotaia kniga emigratsii: Pervaia tret’ xx veka: Entsiklopedicheskii biograficheskii slovar’, Moscow; A.N. Nikoliukin (ed.), 1997–2006, Literaturnaia entsiklopediia Russkogo Zarubezh’ia 1918–1940, 4 vols., Moscow; L.A. Mnukhin, M. Avril’ & V. Losskaia (eds.), 2008–2010. Rossiiskoe zarubezh’e vo Frantsii 1919–2000: Biograficheskii slovar’ v 3-kh tomakh, 3 vols., Moscow.

24

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Life,82 we may conclude—with exceptions of course—that the Russian emigration from 1918 to 1940 has been very well documented, mostly in the form of cultural history. And yet I would like to subscribe to Claudia Weiss’s view that the cultural histories of the Russian emigration do not analyse sufficiently the construction of the émigré community. A similar point has been made by Livak.83 My reference to Weiss and Livak here should not be taken as a dismissal of the achievements of previous scholars; my intention is simply to indicate further tasks for future scholarship. Besides, however different it may be in method, material and scope, I do see my own study as a parallel in this respect to Weiss’s and Livak’s studies of the formation of Russia Abroad, as I shall discuss in Chapter One. The purpose is not only to present the dominant ideas of selected Russian émigrés but to demonstrate how they were made possible, how they were brought about and how they reflect and refract the anatomy of exile.

82 Mnukhin, L.A. (ed.), 1995–1997, Russkoe zarubezh’e: Khronika nauchnoi, kul’turnoi i obshchestvennoi zhizni, 1920–1940, Frantsiia, 4 vols., Paris & Moscow. Four more volumes covering the period up to 1975 have been published since then. 83 Cf. Claudia Weiss, 2000, Das Rußland zwischen den Zeilen: Die russische Emigrantenpresse im Frankreich der 1920er Jahre und ihre Bedeutung für die Genese der “Zarubežnaja Rossija”, (Hamburger Veröffentlichungen zur Geschichte Mittel- und Osteuropas 7), Hamburg, p. 19: “Diese Arbeiten gehen jedoch in Bezug auf die Konstruktion der Exilgemeinschaft nicht über die deskriptive Ebene hinaus”; Livak, 2003, p. 12: “More conference proceedings and collections of articles have appeared, but they have hardly advanced our understanding of émigré literature as a cultural phenomenon and have mostly remained superficially descriptive.”

PART ONE

CONTEXTS

CHAPTER ONE

RUSSIA ABROAD In October 1917 Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, power they managed to consolidate over the next few years during the course of the bloody and exhausting Civil War (1918–1921). These events—the coup d’état, Bolshevik politics, and above all the horrors of the war and subsequent defeat of the White forces—resulted in a vast exodus from those parts of the former Russian Empire that found themselves under Bolshevik control. After the defeat of general Wrangel in 1921, usually regarded as the end of the war between the Reds and the Whites, the mass emigration of refugees decreased, but it was to be followed by a growing scrutiny of intellectual and academic life. One well-known outcome of this process was the 1922 expulsion from Soviet Russia of intellectuals who opposed the new regime—or were simply accused of doing so (including Nikolai Berdiaev, Semen Frank, Nikolai Losskii, Fedor Stepun, Lev Karsavin, Ivan Ilin, and numerous others).1 Emigration from Soviet Russia, voluntary or involuntary, continued until the end of the 1920s. However, when Stalin came to power, people who had been labelled “enemies of the people” were no longer expelled or allowed to emigrate but were dealt with by the secret police of the new Stalinist regime. No exact figures exist for the number of people who fled Russia in these years; during the 1920s and 30s they varied from three-quarter of a million to nearly three million. Today, it is calculated that approximately one million people left Soviet Russia after the Revolution.2 In addition, there were the large numbers of Russians who lived in areas that had gained independence on the dissolution of the Russian

1 There exist several accounts of this event and its significance. The two most recent are Lesley Chamberlain, 2006, The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia, London, and Stuart Finkel, 2007, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere, New Haven, Conn. (see in particular pp. 151ff ). 2 Michael R. Marrus, 1985, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century, New York, p. 61, estimates the number to be “close to a million.”

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Empire (the Baltic States, Poland, parts of Bessarabia), estimated to be eight million.3 Most of the Russians who ended up abroad had fled a Russia in turmoil. They were refugees who were forced to flee because of political and social circumstances. Yet, with the exception of the intellectuals exiled in 1922, they were not directly expelled. This may explain why the preferred terms according to which Russians abroad usually described themselves and their situation, were “émigré” and “emigration.”4 Ivan Bunin (1870–1953) expressed this in his 1924 speech on “the Mission of the Russian emigration.” Here he claims that “we are not exiles (izgnanniki), but émigrés (emigranty),” referring to the émigrés’ resistance to the Bolsheviks as their rationale and emphasising that their exodus was voluntary.5 In 1927 Dmitrii Merezhkovskii (1865–1941), similarly, answered the question “What is emigration?” by stating, “Is it only a journey away from the homeland, exile (izgnanie)? No, it is also a return, a way to the motherland. Our emigration (emigratsiia) is our way to Russia.”6 True, the term izgnanie was also used quite extensively, but mostly as a stylistically exalted synonym for emigratsiia, with biblical associations.7 The notion of “émigré” as used by Russians Abroad evokes the Royalists who fled the French revolution, and with whom several Russian émigrés identified themselves.8 A formulation of this identification may be found at the beginning of Roman Gul’s (1896–1986) memoirs I took Russia with Me.9 This is not to say that there was consensus on this point—as so often with the Russian émigrés, there was not. Petr Struve (1870–1944) did not like the term emigratsiia. In contrast to Bunin he found that it produced the wrong associations and simply preferred to use Zarubezh’e,

3

Cf. Andreyev & Savický, 2004, p. xi. Cf. A.V. Zelenin, 2000, “Emigratsiia glazami emigratsii,” Russkaia rech’ 3, pp. 79–84. 5 Cf. I.A. Bunin, 2000, “Missiia russkoi emigratsii,” Publitsistika 1918–1953 godov, ed. O.N. Mikhailov, Moscow, pp. 148–157, p. 148. I will return to this text below. 6 Merezhkovskii, 2001, pp. 270–311 (“Nash put’ v Rossiiu”), p. 270. “Migrants” (pereselentsy), Merezhkovskii added, could thus be claimed to be a better word than “emigrants” (vyselentsy) in so far as “we” are all “migrants” from the “past Russia” to the “future Russia.” 7 Cf. Zelenin, 2000, p. 81. 8 Cf. Johnston, 1988, p. 7. 9 Cf. R.B. Gul’, 2001, Ia unes Rossiiu: Apologiia emigratsii, vol. 1: Rossiia v Germanii, Moscow, p. 27. 4

russia abroad

29

“Abroad.”10 Likewise, having been reluctant to leave his homeland, Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948) saw himself as expelled (vyslan); he did not want to “emigrate.”11 However, the differences between the terms as well as the phenomena of “exile,” “émigré,” and even “refugee” are in general blurred. While “exile” is mostly associated with forced separation from one’s homeland, it may also be voluntary.12 Moreover, what it actually means to be “compelled” or “forced” in this context is by no means clear (although in the case of Berdiaev and others it was clear in 1922), because these terms do not necessarily refer to external forces. The ambiguity is taken into account in Paul Tabori’s definition of exile, which is worth quoting at length: An exile is a person compelled to leave or remain outside his country of origin on account of well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, or political opinion; a person who considers his exile temporary (even though it may last a lifetime), hoping to return to his fatherland when circumstances permit—but unable or unwilling to do so as long as the factors that made him an exile persist.13

As we can see, this definition of exile includes the notion of emigration, in spite of the fact that “emigration” is mostly associated with voluntary exile (cf. Bunin). In addition, an exiled person (or refugee) may also become an émigré. Tabori refers to the case of Dante, who was first exiled from his native Florence, but later, when it became possible for him to return, he chose to stay away from his native city. He became an emigrant. Thus, as long as the definition of exile includes voluntary exile, the notions of emigration and émigré are also contained in it. But this also suggests, as Tabori observes, that a final, 10 Cf. Richard Pipes, 1980, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905–1944 (Russian Research Center Studies 80), Cambridge, Mass., pp. 336f. For a selection of Struve’s émigré publitsistika, see P.B. Struve, 2004, Dnevnik politika (1925–1935), ed. A.N. Shakhanov, Moscow & Paris. 11 Cf. his use of the terms vyslan and emigratsiia almost as oppositions in N.A. Berdiaev, 1949, Samopoznanie (Opyt filosofskoi avtobiografii), Paris, p. 263. Izgnanie, which figures in the heading of Chapter Ten (“Gody izgnaniia,” changed into “Russia and the Western World” in later editions) appears to be a more acceptable term to him than emigratsiia, to which he attributes mostly negative associations. See also Volokogonova, 2010, p. 257, who observes that in the early 1920s the self-awareness of those émigrés who “emigrated” was different from that of the expelled. On Berdiaev’s reluctance to emigrate, see also Chamberlain, 2006, pp. 30f. 12 Cf. Paul Tabori, 1972, The Anatomy of Exile: A Semantic and Historical Study, London, p. 23; Christine Brooke-Rose, 1996, “Exsul,” Poetics Today 17 (3), pp. 289– 303, p. 291. 13 Tabori, 1972, p. 27.

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perfect, or complete definition of exile is impossible, and perhaps not even desirable. Every case of exile is unique. This fact is reflected, in my view, in Marc Raeff ’s definition of a Russian émigré: “A Russian émigré was a person who refused to accept the new Bolshevik regime established in the homeland.”14 In this study, émigrés and exiles, emigration and exile are used interchangeably and are seen as relatively synonymous because all of them apply to the writers whose works are examined here. During the 1920s they had all “become émigrés.”15 At the same time they confirmed one of the most central elements of the “anatomy of exile” as described by Tabori: the belief in an imminent return to the homeland.16 Paradoxically, this expectation remained present among most Russian émigrés in the 1920s and 30s despite the prospect of the collapse of the Soviet Union becoming less and less likely. This paradox was inherent in Russian interwar émigré life and gave rise not only to frustrations but also to a series of remarkably rich and creative works. The Émigré Community The Russian émigrés formed a complex of different groupings from within the former Russian Empire. According to the third wave émigré historians Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Approximately one fourth were officers and soldiers of the White armies, including about 100,000 in Wrangel’s army evacuated from the Crimea to Constantinople. Civilian émigrés came from all classes and professions, but especially from those the Soviet government considered inimical. A substantial number of the émigrés were from the intelligentsia. All political parties were represented, from the extreme right to the extreme left, from the monarchists to the Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists. The varied political complexion of the émigré community was convincing proof that political life inside Soviet Russia had been stifled.17

14

Raeff, 1990, p. 16. Cf. Julitta Sumoela, 2004, Zarubezhnaia Rossiia: Ideino-politicheskie vzgliady russkoi emigratsii na stranitsakh russkoi evropeiskoi pressy v 1918–1940 gg., trans. L.V. Suni, St Petersburg, pp. 34–62 (=“Bezhentsy stanoviatsia emigrantami”). 16 Tabori, 1972, p. 27. 17 Mikhail Heller & Alexander M. Nekrich, 1986, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, trans. P.B. Carlos, New York, pp. 143f. 15

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31

Russia Abroad is the name for this émigré community used both by the émigrés themselves and by scholarly literature to date. It is a translation of the Russian zarubezhnaia Rossiia (literally “Russia beyond its borders”). It has been suggested that this term was introduced in Petr Struve’s daily Rebirth (Vozrozhdenie) founded in 1925.18 In his book, Rußland jenseits der Grenzen 1921–1926 (1927), Hans von Rimscha explains the term that gives his study its title as being a translation of zarubezhnaia Rossiia, which stands for what the émigrés outside the Soviet territory “wished to establish” (“haben errichten wollen”).19 This testifies to an extensive use of this term by the émigrés themselves by 1927 as well as by their observers. The use of the noun Russia instead of the adjective “Russian” signals the widespread idea among Russians abroad that they “took Russia with them,” to paraphrase the title of Gul’s memoirs. Most émigrés strongly believed that they represented the genuine Russia, not the Bolsheviks. The latter, in their view, had destroyed it. In contrast, the term russkoe zarubezh’e, which is the preferred Russian equivalent to Russia Abroad in post-Soviet scholarship on the emigration, may be said to neutralise the Russian émigrés’ idea of themselves as “carrying Russia with them,” in that it indicates that it was Russians and their colony that were abroad, and not Russia. While no less than three monographs entitled Russia Abroad have appeared in English,20 Zarubezhnaia Rossiia is hardly used by Russian scholars today. However, the first-wave émigrés saw it as their task not only to preserve their own Russianness but Russia itself. Russian émigrés created an exile community outside the borders of their homeland. Russia Abroad was not a community limited geographically by clearly defined borders. Rather, it comprised various Russian settlements almost all over the world, above all in the major cities of Europe where the largest and culturally most significant communities were established. Of particular importance culturally were the groupings in Berlin, Prague, and above all Paris.21 There were

18 Cf. Weiss, 2000, p. 198. As noted above, Struve himself still preferred Zarubezh’e, though without Russkoe. 19 Hans von Rimscha, 1927, Rußland jenseits der Grenzen 1921–1926: Ein Beitrag zur russischen Nachkriegsgeschichte, Jena, p. vii. 20 In addition to Raeff, 1990, and Andreyev & Savický, 2004, see John Glad, 1999, Russia Abroad: Writers, History, Politics, Tenafly, N.J. 21 On Berlin, see Williams, 1972; on Prague, see Andreyev & Savický, 2004; on Paris, see Johnston, 1988.

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important differences between the centres, due to the different conditions in the respective host countries. In Prague, Tomáš Masaryk’s “Russian Action,” a programme of financial support to Russian refugees that concentrated in particular on education, provided beneficial conditions for émigré intellectual life. It made possible the founding of several institutions, such as the Russian University and the Research Institute known as the Kondakov Seminar, which focused on Byzantine and medieval Slavic studies.22 The openness of the Czech institutions to Russian émigrés further contributed to the image of Prague as the academic centre of the Russian emigration. Berlin was the most important émigré centre in the early 1920s, but as the situation there became increasingly more difficult as a result of inflation and unemployment, many émigrés decided to move on. There were marked political differences between some of the centres. Belgrade and Sofia were mostly conservative and rightist. This holds true also of the faction of the Russian Orthodox Church based in Sremski Karlovci in Serbia, in contrast to the more liberal clergy and theologians based in Paris.23 In Prague, leftist sympathies prevailed, while Paris was held to be somewhere in the middle.24 A large number of institutions were created in these centres (some even already existed): schools, universities, libraries, museums, newspapers and journals, publishing houses, as well as more informal literary and religious-philosophical circles.25 Among the most important established in Paris during the 1920s were the People’s University, the ymca Press and the St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute.26 These had a significant consolidating impact among the exiles. From the mid-1920s onwards, Paris was considered to be the capital of Russia Abroad, intellectually as well as in terms of population. There were several reasons for its importance. On the most basic level, the need for labour was greater and life was cheaper in the 1920s in France

22 On the Russian academic world in Prague, see Andreyev & Savický, 2004, pp. 110f. 23 On the liberal atmosphere at the St Sergius Institute, see Donald A. Lowrie, 1954, Saint Sergius in Paris: The Orthodox Theological Institute, London, pp. 90ff. 24 Cf. Demidova, 2003, p. 33. 25 The most detailed survey is found in Kovalevskii, 1971; 1973. See also Kodzis, 2002. 26 On the latter two, see A.V. Kartashev & N.A. Struve, 1990, 70 let Izdatel’stva “YMCA-Press”, 1920–1990, Paris, and Lowrie, 1954.

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33

than in Germany. Furthermore, there was already a significant Russian diaspora there at the time of the Revolution with its own press. Zemgor, a Russian civilian organisation established during the First World War and recreated in Paris in the early 1920s, was instrumental in providing help in matters of health and education. But parts of French society were also important in this respect. While the French universities were mostly closed to those without a command of French, Russian émigrés in France were allowed to resist assimilation. “Paris became the capital of the Russian emigration because of its prestige and its indifference to the émigrés. This indifference resulted in a degree of freedom that did not exist in other centres of emigration.”27 Despite these differences, the notion of Russia Abroad nevertheless expresses the conviction that the entire Russian diaspora formed one society. Most Russian émigrés appear to have perceived their fellows all over the world as part of the same community. Marc Raeff points to two factors that created Russia Abroad as a society: First, most classes were represented among the émigrés, as noted also by Heller and Nekrich, a circumstance that safeguards the “cross-representation according to sociological, economic, or cultural criteria.” True, this representativeness was relative in that a large number of the émigrés were of the intelligentsia (academics, writers, and journalists). Nevertheless, although emigration from Russia was by no means a new experience,28 the combination of a large number of intellectuals and the mass character of the more general exodus justified the Russian émigrés in seeing their exile as an unprecedented phenomenon. Second, Russian émigrés apparently tried to adapt as little as possible to life in their host countries. They largely resisted assimilation and felt themselves committed to carrying on a meaningful Russian life. Raeff observes that: They were determined to act, work, and create as part and parcel of Russia, even in a foreign environment. They needed “producers” and “customers” of cultural “goods” and values maintained in exile. Russia Abroad was a society by virtue of its firm intention to go on living as “Russia,” to be the truest and culturally most creative of the two Russias that political circumstances had brought into being. Though it was a somewhat distorted society in strictly sociological terms [. . .] the émigrés did think of themselves as a “country” or society. They strove to act

27 28

Andreyev & Savitský, 2004, p. 172. For an account of Russias Abroad at all times, see Glad, 1999.

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chapter one creatively as if the emigration represented Russia in the fullest cultural and philosophical sense.29

This is what distinguishes the Russian émigrés who left Russia in the late 1910s and 20s, also referred to as the “first wave,” from the second and third waves. The second wave, consisting of refuges who fled the Soviet Union during the Second World War, and the third, consisting of people who emigrated in the Brezhnev period, did not come to form a society to the same extent and became far more assimilated. In fact, this holds true for the children of the first wave émigrés as well, despite the numerous schools established by their parents in order to prevent assimilation and transmit their Russianness to their children. Russia Abroad is unimaginable without its written culture. Claudia Weiss has argued convincingly that the notion of an émigré community among Russians abroad in the 1920s and 1930s is inconceivable without taking into account the wide-ranging Russian émigré press.30 More than a thousand different newspapers and journals were published in the Russian diaspora between 1918 and 1940, most of which were short-lived.31 In addition there were numerous books and pamphlets. Weiss defines, with reference to Benedict Anderson, Russia Abroad as an imagined community, because it was conceived as a union of people with a common Russian origin dispersed across the whole world. Anderson believes the role of the printed word to be the most important factor in the creation of imagined communities such as the modern nation states.32 Weiss, accordingly, sees the press as instrumental in creating collective identity not only within the different parts of the diaspora, but also between them as parts of Russia Abroad. The “other” against which this identity was defined was, on the one hand, the Soviet Union and, on the other, the various host countries.

29

Raeff, 1990, p. 5. Cf. Weiss, 1999, pp. 14ff. 31 Cf. A.N. Nikoliukin (ed.), 2000, Literaturnaia entsiklopediia Russkogo Zarubezh’ia 1918–1940, vol. 2: Periodika i literaturnye tsentry, Moscow, p. 5, with reference to the catalogue of the Russian Historical Archive Abroad in Prague, which lists 1030 journals and newspapers. A.V. Zelenin, 2007, Iazyk russkoi emigrantskoi pressy (1919– 1939), St Petersburg, p. 338, claims that the number of titles of publications (pechatnye organy) exceeds 4000, though the basis for this estimation is unclear. 32 Cf. Benedict Anderson, 1991, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, pp. 37ff. 30

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The émigré press provided a model for self-identification by being a forum for debating topical ideas, attitudes and values, as well as by simply representing émigré everyday life and offering practical help and information. Written media enabled the emigrants to communicate, exchange information and take part in various discussions and debates. The press was the forum in which and by means of which a collective identity was formed and developed. The fact that views on matters under discussion often differed, in particular on matters concerning politics, did not undermine the collective identity; rather, the debates themselves strengthened the feeling of having something in common.33 As suggested in the above quotation from Heller and Nekrich, Russia Abroad was politically very heterogeneous, comprising everything from monarchists to Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, i.e. ranging from the far right to the far left. In addition there were the new, so-called post-revolutionary movements, such as the Changing Landmarks (smenovekhovtsy) and Eurasianists (evraziitsy), which emerged in the early 1920s. Their representatives recognised the Revolution as an important event after which it was no longer possible to return to some prior stage. Predicting that Bolshevik power would collapse, the Changing Landmarks movement even pleaded for reconciliation with the Soviet regime, but its impact was noticeable only in the early 1920s.34 Politically, Russia Abroad was never able to unite against the Bolsheviks despite numerous endeavours from most sides—the last great attempt of any importance was a congress initiated by Pavel Miliukov (1859–1943) in Paris in 1926. As a result, the number of

33

Cf. Weiss, 1999, p. 201. On the first-wave émigré press, see also Suomela, 2004. On the Changing Landmarks movement, see Hilde Hardeman, 1994, Coming to Terms with the Soviet Regime: The “Changing Signposts” Movement among Russian Émigrés in the Early 1920s, DeKalb, Ill. There are numerous scholarly accounts of Eurasianism, and the literature on the movement has been growing considerably in particular since the fall of the Soviet Union. Two classic studies are Otto Böss, 1961, Die Lehre der Eurasier: Ein Beitrag zur russischen Ideengeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Veröffentlichungen des Osteuropa-Instituts München 15), Wiesbaden, and Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, 1967, “The Emergence of Eurasianism,” California Slavic Studies 4, pp. 39–72, while the most recent of which I am aware is Stefan Wiederkehr, 2007, Die eurasische Bewegung: Wissenschaft und Politik in der russischen Emigration der Zwischenkriegszeit und im postsowjetischen Russland (Beiträge zur Geschichte Osteuropas 39), Köln. I return to Eurasianism in Chapter Three. 34

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political writings decreased towards the end of the 1920s, in favour of a more cultural and religious orientation.35 In contrast to the political disputes, there was a widespread consensus among Russian émigrés on the importance of Russian culture as well as on what its main components should be. Although active participation was modest on the whole, hardly any émigré questioned the importance of the Orthodox Church to Russian cultural history and identity.36 Furthermore, support for the pre-revolutionary orthography represented a defence of the Russian classical literary language against the new language culture of Bolshevik Russia, however difficult it was to keep it “pure” abroad.37 Pushkin and Russian classical literature were likewise celebrated. In his book on the history of the Russian emigration from 1919 to 1989, Nikita Struve describes how the “Day of Russian Culture,” celebrated on Pushkin’s birthday from 6 June 1926 onwards and one of the most central commemorative events within Russia Abroad, united émigrés from the far right to the far left.38 While the specific content of “Russian culture” may have been defined in somewhat vague terms,39 it is important to recognise this idea’s consolidating function within the community.40 The notions of Russian Orthodoxy, Russian literature and Russian language were what Margarita Kononova has termed the “cementing ideas” of Russia Abroad.41 As suggested by Olga Demidova, Russian culture played the role of a Home in a tragic situation. Russian culture thus marked the virtual and spiritual “borders” of Russia Abroad, which otherwise lacked

35 Cf. Struve, 1996, pp. 28ff. For a survey of the political life of the Russian emigration, see Sabine Breuillard, 1994, “Vie politique de l’émigration russe, 1919–1945: Un destin,” La première émigration russe: Vie politique et intellectuelle (Cahiers de l’émigration russe 1), Paris, pp. 11–26. 36 Cf. Johnston, 1988, p. 45. 37 Cf. N.I. Golubeva-Monatkina, 2001, “Emigrantskaia russkaia rech’,” Russkii iazyk zarubezh’ia, ed. E.V. Krasil’nikova, Moscow, pp. 8–68; Zelenin, 2007. 38 Cf. Struve, 1996, pp. 109ff. 39 Cf. Raeff, 1990, p. 95: “the émigrés themselves never specified a definition of Russian culture; we can only sort out the discrete elements that, together, were deemed to make up this tradition.” 40 Cf. Weiss, 1999, p. 22, who criticises other scholars for not paying sufficient attention to this fact. 41 Cf. M.M. Kononova, 2007, “ ‘Tsementiruiushchie’ idei Russkogo Zarubezh’ia,” Aktual’nye aspekty istorii i sovremennosti russkogo zarubezh’ia: Parallely i antitezy, ed. M.M. Kononova, Moscow, pp. 142–156.

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a territory, a government, and a juridical and financial system.42 To exceed these borders, i.e. to be indifferent towards Russian culture or to reject the very idea of it, would probably have meant to disqualify oneself from the community. It seems relevant here to invoke Cornelius Castoriadis’s concept of l’imaginaire social. The identity of Russia Abroad is founded on a social imaginary, in which an otherwise fragmentary set of components and connotations is conceived of as a coherent whole: Russia and its culture. This coherent whole, the social imaginary, provides the society with orientation, motives, needs as well as symbolism, tradition and myths.43 In short, it formulates what is meaningful for this society. As defined by Charles Taylor, “the social imaginary is not a set of ideas; rather, it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society.”44 This social imaginary, in turn, is “expressed primarily through the medium of symbolism and signification.”45 The significations provide “referents” that tie a society together and define what is “real.” In the case of Russia Abroad it was above all cultural issues and a particular way of relating oneself to these (in the form of a “mission” or “task,” see below) that achieved an “elusive unity,” to use Robert Johnston’s term: If politics excited divisions among exiled Russians, the will-o’-the-wisp of unity seemed to become more substantial in the common concern of refugees to maintain their national identity. On such matters émigrés might meet as Russians, with political differences never forgotten but at least subordinated to the greater interests. Or so it sometimes turned

42

Cf. Demidova, 2003, p. 239. Cf. Cornelius Castoriadis, 1987, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. K. Blamey, Cambridge, Mass., p. 145: “This element—which gives a specific orientation to every institutional system, which overdetermines the choice and the connections of symbolic networks, which is the creation of each historical period, its singular manner of living, of seeing and of conducting its own existence, its world, and its relations with this world, this originary structuring component, this central signifyingsignified, the source of that which presents itself in every instance as indisputable and undisputed meaning, the basis for articulating what does matter and what does not, the origin of the surplus of being of the objects of practical, affective and intellectual investment, whether individual or collective—is nothing other that the imaginary of the society or of the period considered.” See also John B. Thompson, 1982, “Ideology and the Social Imaginary: An Appraisal of Castoriadis and Lefort,” Theory and Society 11 (5), pp. 659–681, p. 664. 44 Charles Taylor, 2004, Modern Social Imaginaries (Public Planet Books), Durham, p. 2. 45 Thompson, 1982, p. 665. 43

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chapter one out. [. . .] Certainly refugees of all ages shared a common love of Russia and a profound interest in those features of Russian life which contributed most to their country’s and their own unique national identity.46

This national identity may be conceived of in relatively simple terms. According to Edward Said, “Nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage.”47 While exile forms an anomaly with respect to nationalism, since it represents a non-belonging, nationalism nevertheless becomes crucial to the notion of exile. Given their discontinuous state of being, Said continues, “Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people.”48 This tendency, Said claims, is inescapable. And yet, the nationalism of exile may have more positive dimensions than triumph or ethnocentrism. It must also be recognized that the defensive nationalism of exiles often fosters self-awareness as much as it does the less attractive forms of self-assertion. Such reconstitutive projects as assembling a nation out of exile (and this is true in this century for Jews and Palestinians) involve constructing a national history, reviving an ancient language, founding national institutions like libraries and universities.49

Hardly any Russian émigré ever questioned the importance of patriotism, as it was formulated by Nikolai Avksentev (1878–1943), one of the five editors of the leading thick émigré journal Contemporary Annals (Sovremennye zapiski, Paris), in its first number in 1920. Imitating Gottlieb Fichte’s “Reden an die deutsche Nation,” Avksentev called for national self-affirmation (samoutverzhdenie) and national self-preservation (samosokhranenie) among Russians.50 According to Avksentev, it was above all an absence of patriotism that had enabled the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia, and he maintained that patriotism would be instrumental in overthrowing the ruling party and restoring Russian pride and dignity. However, the praxis of Russian émigrés during the next two decades demonstrates that the patriotic stance did not only result in a one-sided preoccupation with self-

46

Johnston, 1988, p. 39. Said, 2001, p. 176. 48 Said, 2001, p. 177. 49 Said, 2001, p. 184. 50 Cf. N.D. Avksent’ev, 1920, “Patriotica,” Sovremennye zapiski 1, pp. 125–135, p. 126. 47

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assertion, as Avksentev’s article might otherwise suggest. Their achievements would hardly have been possible, I think, if self-awareness (Said) in the form of continual reflection on the question “why are we here?” had not been present. Russia Abroad understood as a society in the terms indicated above had dwindled away by the outbreak of the Second World War. Publishing came to an end and institutions closed down. After the war, a few journals and organisations such as the ymca Press and the St Sergius Institute resumed their activity, but the new situation in Europe could not be compared to the interwar period. The émigré centre was no longer Paris but New York, and the leading journal was no longer Contemporary Annals but the New Journal (Novyi zhurnal, founded in New York in 1942). The old émigré elite had already begun to disappear before the war broke out. Surviving prominent figures such as Georgii Fedotov (1886–1951) and Georgii Florovskii (1893–1979) had moved to the United States. However, some still remained in Paris and other European centres, and a few first-wave intellectuals were still able to carry on their activity for a short period. Thus Nikolai Berdiaev’s The Russian Idea and Vasilii Zenkovskii’s (1881–1962) History of Russian Philosophy appeared in the second half of the 1940s. What was about to disappear, however, was Russia Abroad as an imagined community with a distinct collective identity. Too many of its components had been lost and history had taken a turn that made it difficult to sustain its social imaginary. A diminishing population on the one hand, and the Soviet defeat of the Nazis and liberation of Europe on the other, significantly changed the “mental cartography” of the firstwave émigrés in Europe.51 Exile as Mission The gradual emergence of the exile community of Russia Abroad was related to the consolidation of the Soviet Union. The less likely the prospect seemed of returning to a non-Bolshevik Russia, the stronger the sense of an émigré community. At the same time the identity of the community was sustained through the hope of returning home,

51 Cf. Catherine Gousseff, 2008, L’exil russe: La fabrique du réfugié apatride (1920– 1939), Paris, p. 285.

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to Russia.52 Most Russian émigrés never gave up this hope, however unrealistic it became with time. Herein, surely, lies a great paradox: how could this belief in an imminent return be sustained to such an extent? And since much of the activity of Russian émigrés had the character of a preparation for this return, why prepare so extensively for something that was unlikely to happen? First and foremost, I think, because it made exile meaningful and purposeful. The intensive preoccupation with Russia and its culture among firstwave émigrés has often been described as a mission (missiia) or task (zadacha), by themselves as well as by a number of scholars.53 Without doubt, the idea of a mission was, as pointed out by Leonid Livak, part of the émigré mythology that was created in exile. The émigrés by no means left Russia “on a mission.”54 This “self-imposed” mission was nevertheless widely acknowledged. While there may have been some who found it exaggerated and rejected it,55 several article titles by prominent émigrés affirmed its vitality: “The Spiritual Tasks for the Russian Emigration” (Berdiaev, 1925), “Three Tasks for Russia Abroad” (Struve, 1928), “Our Sincere Task” (Zinaida Gippius, 1930), “The Tasks for the Emigration” (Fedor Stepun, 1931), “Why Are We Here?” (Fedotov, 1935). As Stuart Finkel has recently suggested, this tendency may be understood as a continuation of a pre-revolutionary intelligentsia tradition of accepting civic duty, of enlightening and serving. “Most of these philosophers continued to pursue the broader programmatic questions that had traditionally engrossed the Russian intelligentsia, but now adapted their inquiry to the conditions of exile: ‘What is to be done?’ became ‘What is the task of the Russian emigration?’.”56 Meanwhile, the formula “the mission of the Russian

52

Cf. Raeff, 1990, pp. 6, 16. Cf. Raeff, 1990, p. 4: “In these circumstances, exile or emigration also entailed a sense of mission, beyond the mundane task of mere physical survival. The mission was to preserve the values and traditions of Russian culture and to continue its creative efforts for the benefits and ongoing spiritual progress of the homeland—whether one was fated to return or to die in exile.” 54 Cf. Livak, 2003, p. 10. 55 The socialist and later smenovekhovets A.V. Peshekhonov (1867–1933), author of Why I did not emigrate? (Berlin 1923), was one. Cf. I.V. Sabennikova, 2000, “P.N. Miliukov i ideologicheskie techeniia v russkoi emigratsii,” P.N. Miliukov: Istorik, politik, diplomat, ed. V.V. Shelokhaev, Moscow, pp. 384–395, p. 387. 56 Stuart Finkel, 2010, “Nikolai Berdiaev and the Philosophical Tasks of the Emigration,” A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity, eds. G.M. Hamburg & R.A. Poole, Cambridge, pp. 346–362, p. 347. 53

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emigration” was first used, apparently, in public as the title of a meeting which took place in Paris on 16 February 1924 and included lectures by Merezhkovskii, Anton Kartashev (1875–1960) and others. The evening was introduced by Ivan Bunin who read a speech entitled “the mission of the Russian emigration,” which was then published in the newspaper The Rudder (Rul’) two months later. Our mission, Bunin proclaims, is founded first and foremost on our non-acceptance of the life that is now developing in Russia. The Russian emigration, which has demonstrated by its exodus from Russia and by its struggle, by its marching on ice, that it does not accept not only out of fear but also out of conscience Lenin’s cities, Lenin’s commandments, has a mission which consists in the continuation of this non-acceptance.57

The programme drawn up by Bunin in this text may not strike us as very radical. The mission at this stage, as he sees it, is to continue to reject the Bolsheviks who have betrayed Russia. The Russian émigrés, in contrast, are the true representatives of Russia and act on behalf of Russia: Indeed we have been acting, in spite of all our weaknesses and falls, on behalf of our Divine image and likeness. And moreover, on behalf of Russia: not the one who betrayed Christ for thirty silver coins in order to gain permission to plunder and murder, and who wallowed in the abomination of all kinds of evil deeds and moral mischief, but on behalf of that other Russia, oppressed and suffering but still not entirely subjugated.58

A conspicuous feature of this speech is its excessive biblical rhetoric. In addition to the examples just quoted, where the sufferings of Russians at home and abroad are implicitly compared to those of Christ, Bunin draws a parallel between the Russian Exodus and the Old Testament Exodus. The Russians are alone in the world because Western Europe has just established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, a situation that Bunin compares with the seven years of which Pharaoh dreamed (Genesis 41). Leningrad like the rest of Russia is compared to Sodom and Gomorra and to Sidon and Tyre, not only because of the actions of the people living there, but also because God will punish Russia in a similar way. Bunin says that he prays to God 57 58

Bunin, 2000, p. 153. Bunin, 2000, p. 150.

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that He will fill him to the very end with “intense holy hatred towards the Russian Cain. But my love for the Russian Abel is in no need of prayers in order to be kept alive.”59 In addition to non-acceptance of Soviet Russia, the mission, according to Bunin, consists in preserving a firm belief in Russia and God’s plan for it. “For there is the grave of Christ’s Russia ( grob khristovoi Rossii). And only this grave will I worship, on that day, when an angel takes away the stone from her grave.”60 Just as Christ arose from the dead, so too will Russia. What is needed is belief and patience. Russian émigrés must not yield to temptations or to abuse. Bunin compares the Russian émigrés to the people of Medieval Russia, who upon learning of the murder of the martyr-prince Mikhail Chernigovskii (1179–1246) on his way home from the Golden Horde, simply agreed to wait for the day when God would overthrow the Horde. So the émigrés, too, should just wait. Bunin’s attempt to vindicate exile and suffering was not unique. Several of his compatriots also saw suffering as meaningful in itself. In 1927, Merezhkovskii described exile as a Via dolorosa (krestnyi put’).61 And as Robert Johnston asks rhetorically, “What alternative, other than endurance, did the Russian refugees have as they began their second decade of exile?”62 And yet, while the notion of exile as suffering and even martyrdom was important to many émigrés, this was not the whole picture. As Johnston observes elsewhere, the émigrés took upon themselves the responsibility for Russia and its culture. The validity of this self-imposed mission was confirmed when Ivan Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933.63 This suggests that there were complementary ways of making sense of exile. Only a few months after Bunin made his speech M. Kurdiumov (pseudonym of Maria Kallash) published a piece also entitled “The mission of the Russian emigration” in the short-lived Parisian journal Evening Times (Vechernee vremia), where she called for a “creative construction of a new Holy Russia”64 Russian émigrés should prepare for the day when Soviet power would be overthrown, which would

59 60 61 62 63 64

Bunin, 2000, p. 154. Bunin, 2000, p. 154. Merezhkovskii, 2001, p. 270. Johnston, 1988, p. 82. Cf. Johnston, 1988, pp. 29, 110. Quoted in Weiss, 1999, p. 196.

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also mark the emergence of the Kingdom of God. Her text is also filled with biblical imagery, but at the same time and to a greater extent than Bunin, she calls for creative efforts, conceived in terms of a propitiatory sacrifice. In the case of Bunin and Kurdiumov, biblical narratives as well as Old Russian myths are invoked as a hermeneutical context in order to render exile endurable. The Russian emigration is therefore not seen as a purely political event. Its political aspect may not even be the most important one. The religious significance that Bunin and Kurdiumov invested in the Revolution and in particular in exile became widely accepted and developed by Russian émigrés over the next few years. In the editorial article in the first number (1925) of his journal The Way (Put’), Berdiaev formulated “the spiritual tasks of the Russian emigration.” It should gather strength in order to overcome the “malicious and vindictive conditions of the ordeal sent to earth by God.”65 The mission is not political but spiritual and Christian since the Russian exodus was not caused solely by political events. Bolshevism is only the outer expression of a “deeper malady” suffered by Russia. Berdiaev sees the splitting of the Russian nation as a struggle against the Antichrist. We are placed here, he writes, not because of the Bolsheviks alone but above all because of the will of Providence. Since the disintegration of the Russian nation is conceived of as God’s struggle against the Antichrist, the seemingly imminent collapse of Bolshevik power is implicitly compared to the coming of the Kingdom of God. However, Berdiaev fears that the Russians, after a long period in exile, will be threatened by “atomisation”: dispersion, denationalisation, and loss of their organic bonds with Russia, its soil and people. Each person may end up being concerned exclusively with maintaining his or her own life. It is of utmost importance that this tendency should be prevented. “Only through strengthening spiritual life and through faith in the idea of Russia may the Russian diaspora remain a unified Russian people, organically tied to the Russian people who have remained faithful to the same idea in Soviet Russia.”66 Spiritual culture and religious life, and not politics, are the domains where the mission of the Russian emigration is to be accomplished. Berdiaev

65 N.A. Berdiaev, 1925, “Dukhovnye zadachi russkoi emigratsii (Ot redaktsii),” Put’: Organ russkoi religioznoi mysli 1, pp. 3–8, p. 3. 66 Berdiaev, 1925, pp. 4f.

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does not reject civic activism completely, but it should proceed from spiritual activism. He saw engagement in political combat as a relapse into and thus acceptance of the “petty politics and vengeful spite” of Bolshevism, which in turn were deeper symptoms of a modern, secular disease.67 The cure was to be found in the cherishing of spiritual culture, to which his new journal was meant to be a contribution. “The Russian emigration is called to preserve the continuity of Russian spiritual culture and contribute to its creative development, as far as it is able.”68 Ten years later, Berdiaev summed up the achievements of The Way by claiming that it had continued to preserve the best efforts of the otherwise ambivalent cultural heritage, as Berdiaev saw it, of the Silver Age, by being a journal of spiritual culture. The goal of the journal had been to “continue creatively” (tvorcheski prodolzhit’) the cultural and spiritual “renaissance” of this period, and in this respect it had been successful, Berdiaev believes. It had provided room for creativity and freedom while remaining indifferent to the political and ecclesiastical “passions” that Berdiaev otherwise found characteristic of the Russian emigration. The positive meaning of and justification of the emigration is by no means found in the domain of politics. The positive meaning may be found first of all in the defence of freedom, in the creation of a tribune for free thinking, in the creation of an atmosphere for free creative work (tvorchestvo).69

Although Berdiaev was critical of what he saw as the prevailing tendencies of Russia Abroad, his 1935 article represents an attempt to sum up and make sense of the most valuable émigré achievements to date. More extensive surveys of this kind by other émigrés were published from the 1950s onwards. The most comprehensive and thorough examples are Gleb Struve’s Russian Literature in Exile (1956) and Petr Kovalevskii’s Russia Abroad (1971; supplementary volume

67 Finkel, 2010, p. 361. Finkel contrasts Berdiaev’s (and Semen Frank’s) attitude with that of the more militant émigrés Ivan Ilin and Petr Struve. 68 Berdiaev, 1925, p. 5. 69 Cf. N.A. Berdiaev, 1989, “Russkii dukhovnyi renessans nachala xx veka i zhurnal Put’,” Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3: Tipy religioznoi mysli v Rossii, Paris, pp. 684–708, p. 706.

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1973).70 Georgii Adamovich’s brochure The Contribution of the Russian Emigration to World Culture (1961) should be mentioned too. Here Adamovich (1892–1972) proposes the compilation of a “Golden Book” of the emigration, in order to preserve the émigrés’ achievements for posterity and to show that the émigrés had been “faithful to Russia” despite the unfavourable conditions under which they had worked.71 This book was never published. Nevertheless, the émigrés appear to have become conscious of their achievements at an early stage. The need for an émigré archive was recognised already in the early 1920s, when the Russian Historical Archive Abroad was set up in Prague.72 And in 1930 Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945) proclaimed: Russia Abroad! How has it come about that this name no longer provokes smiles or perplexity? By what ways, from where, came the recognition that the Russian emigration is not “human dust,” a helpless mass, a doomed life living from day to day on foreign handouts, that it is something completely different? I believe this recognition emerged unnoticed from life itself.73

The quotation is taken from her article “Our Sincere Task,” a contribution to the pamphlet What is the Russian Emigration to Do? (1930) which also includes an introduction by Ilia Fondaminskii (1880–1942), one of the five editors of Contemporary Annals, and Gippius herself, as well as an article by the economist and historian Karl Kocharovskii (1870–1940?). The publication represented yet another attempt to unite the emigration as well as reformulate its mission. In his article, Kocharovskii stressed the importance of studying Russia for the sake of a reunited Russia in the future, i.e. as a preparation, but also in order to prevent a denationalisation of the émigré intelligentsia.74

70 Struve, 1956; Kovalevskii 1971; 1973. Cf. also the preliminary study of the latter with the telling title Our Achievements: P.E. Kovalevskii, 1960, Nashi dostizheniia: Rol’ russkoi emigratsii v mirovoi nauke, Munich. 71 Republished in G.V. Adamovich, 1996, “Vklad russkoi emigratsii v mirovuiu kul’turu,” Odinochestvo i svoboda (Proshloe i nastoiashchee), ed. V. Kreid, Moscow, pp. 143–148. 72 Cf. Andreyev & Savitský, 2004, pp. 103f. 73 Z.N. Gippius, 2002, “Nashe priamoe delo,” Chego ne bylo i chto bylo: Neizvestnaia proza 1926–1930 godov (Neizvestnyj xx vek), ed. A.N. Nikoliukin, St Petersburg, pp. 521–531, pp. 521f. 74 Cf. Breuillard, 1994, pp. 22f.

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However, the authors were not only concerned with formulating tasks for the sake of the future. The publication was also an attempt to summarise the efforts for which Russian émigrés had been responsible during the past decade. In addition to a quest for unification, What is the Russian Emigration to Do? was a celebration of the Russian emigration’s huge capacity for creative work, the continuation of which its authors hoped to encourage. According to Clara Solivetti and Mariangela Paolini, this small collection of texts represents an attempt at a paradigm shift within the emigration from conceiving of the present as “exile” (izgnanie) to conceiving of it as “embassy” (poslannichestvo).75 “Russia Abroad [. . .] should recognise its embassy,” Gippius writes with reference to Kocharovskii.76 The concept of embassy presents the émigré community with a positive, active, and meaningful task, on behalf on an imaginary sender. The juxtaposition of these two terms appears to have been introduced by Nina Berberova (1901–1993) in a poem she wrote in 1926, which was immediately approved by Gippius. The latter’s intense engagement in the question “what is the Russian emigration to do?” in the second half of the 1920s is oriented towards this redefinition of Russia Abroad’s mission as “embassy” and not “exile.” This shift meant, according to the Italian scholars, a greater focus on the here and now (in Europe), instead of on only the past and/or future (in geographical Russia). Izgnanie reflects emigration as temporary and always transitional. It is meaningless without the belief in an imminent return home. Although the belief in return to the homeland remains important, poslannichestvo assigns a far greater importance to the émigrés themselves and their efforts in the present, abroad. It follows that one’s identity should not only be based on the past but also on the achievements and choices made in the present, on the life created here and now.77 Five years later, in 1935, under the epigraph “Blessed are those who are persecuted (izgnani) for righteousness’ sake” (Matthew 5.10), Fedotov found it necessary to reply once again to the question “why

75 Clara Solivetti & Mariangela Paolini, 2003, “Paradigmy ‘izgnaniia’ i ‘poslannichestva’: Evropeiskii opyt russkoi emigratsii v 20-ye gody,” L’Europa nello specchio della prima emigrazione russa (1918–1940) (Europa Orientalis 22:2), eds. C. Solivetti & T.V. Tsivian, pp. 145–170, p. 153. 76 Gippius, 2002, p. 525 (italics in original). 77 Solivetti & Paolini, 2003, p. 169.

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are we here?” Fedotov sensed a certain frustration among the émigrés or emigrantshchina, and his major purpose was simply to ensure that the emigration kept up its spirit and did not fall into despair and dissolution. He returns to the question of the historical mission of the Russian emigration and describes it in terms of responsibility and sacrifice for the sake of justice (pravda) for Russia. In attempting to be more specific about what “one should do for Russia and give her from here,” Fedotov arrives at the concept of culture, so central to his thinking. By abandoning the political and military fronts and turning instead to the cultural sphere, Russia Abroad may prove to be the vital link between the Russia of yesterday and that of tomorrow and thus contribute to its revitalisation, even its resurrection: “And so we are here, abroad, in order to be a voice for all those who are silent there, to restore the polyphonic wholeness of the Russian spirit (russkii dukh).”78 This is the cultural mission of Russia Abroad. However, Fedotov takes the opportunity to note that significant achievements have already been made, particularly in the field of the philosophy of history (istoriosofiia) and religious philosophy: “this is what the emigration brings Russia as a living ferment that will raise her huge but numb (omertvevshie) cultural forces and make them ferment (brodit’). This is no small ambition for the poor, homeless, persecuted exiles.”79 Fedotov combines two images of the émigrés: they are both the humiliated and insulted, and they represent a huge creative potential, which has in fact been realised and is still capable of new achievements. On the one hand, Fedotov substantiates the importance of their exile with reference to their future reunification with geographical Russia, of which the émigrés still continued to speak in the 1930s. In 1931, similarly, Fedor Stepun (1884–1965) had concluded his “The Task for the Emigration” as follows: “The task for the émigré public is to create a new ideology for the future Russia.”80 While the emigration has been politically weak, Stepun argues, its cultural significance is high and has already left behind a “noticeable imprint.” On the other hand, however, Fedotov implicitly says that it is possible to create a genuinely Russian culture also abroad. A similar view

78 G.P. Fedotov, 1935, “Zachem my zdes’?” Sovremennye zapiski 58, pp. 433–444, p. 440. 79 Fedotov, 1935, p. 444. 80 F.A. Stepun, 2000, “Zadachi emigratsii,” Sochineniia (Iz istorii otechestvennoi filosofskoi mysli), ed. V.K. Kantor, Moscow, pp. 434–442, p. 442.

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had been put forward two years earlier by the poet Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) in his article “Literature in Exile” (1933). He argues that literature written by Russian émigrés is just as Russian as that written back home. “The nationality of a literature is created by its language and spirit, not by the territory in which its life is passed, not the everyday reality reflected in it.”81 In other words, it is possible to write Russian literature abroad. To summarise, two keywords in the Russian émigrés’ self-imposed mission are preservation and, as far as possible, continuation. A third is preparation for the imminent return, in which they tried to believe and yet had to recognise as being out of reach. This brings us back to the paradox described above. Despite a certain vagueness in these writers’ attempts to define the mission or task of the Russian emigration—they repeatedly insist that it exists, but refrain from defining it properly— these concepts of preservation, continuation, and preparation correspond to how they themselves perceived their role. And yet, there is something in the émigré activity that is missed by this description. While the émigrés gradually lost hope of ever returning to Russia— although many of them continued to insist on its imminence—their minds became more and more set on what Olga Demidova refers to as a metaphysical return. Demidova defines this metaphysical return as the hope that their creativity (tvorchestvo) would be made known in Russia in the future and that a dialogue with Russia would take place.82 However, and here I expand the meaning of Demidova’s term, metaphysical return may also refer to their intense absorption in and life-long devotedness to Russia and its culture. It was this immersion (pogruzhennost’) in their national culture, according to Demidova, that defined their ethos.83 They would return to Russia in their writings by imagining the past of their homeland, from the point of view of exile. This strategy avoids, I believe, the paradox of believing in the impos-

81 V.F. Khodasevich, 1994, “Literatura v izgnanii,” Russkaia ideia v krugu pisatelei i myslitelei russkogo zarubezh’ia, vol. 2, ed. V.M. Piskunov, Moscow, pp. 439–449, p. 440. For a commentary on Khodasevich and his debate with Adamovich on this issue, see Roger Hagglund, 1976, “The Adamovič–Xodasevič Polemics,” The Slavic and East European Journal 20 (3), pp. 239–252. 82 Cf. Demidova, 2003, p. 147. 83 Cf. Demidova, 2003, pp. 16, 54.

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sible return: the return is possible—in the realm of the imaginary and in writing.84 However representative of the genuine Russia and however dependent on the physical Russia the émigrés continued so see themselves to be, the conditions that gradually evolved made it urgent for them to also demonstrate their independence and self-sufficiency. The émigrés were united in a common interest in Russia, not only for the sake of a united Russia of the future but also for the sake of the construction of a new home abroad, here and now. And hence they sought to overcome the aporias of exile in meaningful and creative work centred on the homeland.85 It was not only suffering and belief in future deliverance that made exile meaningful, but everyday creative work, which, it must be stressed, proliferated among Russian émigrés. It is also worth noting that most émigrés were conscious of the freedom of expression with which exile provided them, a fact that is stated in almost all of the articles discussed above. They recognised the “benefits of exile.”86 The activities of preservation, continuation and preparation in the form of commemorative practices as well as scholarly and other intellectual activities may be seen as attempts to construct a collective memory (Maurice Halbwachs), and more specifically a cultural memory (Jan Assmann) of Russia Abroad.87 The role of the intellectuals’ insistence on a canon is of particular importance in the creation and preservation of a cultural memory. The Russian émigré intelligentsia saw, as we have seen, the preservation of Russian culture (above all

84 Cf. Olga Matich, 1994, “Exile as Existence: Russian Literature in Emigration,” For SK: In Celebration of the Life and Career of Simon Karlinsky, eds. M.S. Flier & R.P. Hughes, Berkeley, Calif., pp. 211–222, p. 211, who suggests that “the act of writing may be perceived as a momentary escape from the condition of exile which, in keeping with Camus’ Sisyphean metaphor, always results in a return to status quo.” However, writing centred on Russia (Matich discusses Russian émigré fiction from Nabokov to Limonov) might have represented more than just a momentary escape in that it attempted to construct a meaningful past, present and future. 85 Cf. Andreyev & Savitský, 2004, p. xxi; Demidova, 2003, p. 60. 86 Cf. Frank Göbler, 2005, “Gibt es eine Poetik des Exils?” Russische Emigration im 20. Jahrhundert: Literatur—Sprache—Kultur, ed. F. Göbler, Munich, pp. 151–168, p. 166. 87 Cf. Maurice Halbwachs, 1992, On Collective Memory (The Heritage of Sociology), ed. & trans. L.A. Coser, Chicago; Jan Assmann, 1992, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, Munich. See also the entries for kollektives Gedächtnis by Aleida Assmann and kulturelles Gedächtnis by Dietz Bering in Nicolas Pethes & Jens Ruchatz (eds.), 2001, Gedächtnis und Erinnerung: Ein interdiszipliäres Lexikon, Hamburg, pp. 308–310; 329–332.

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literature, language, religion) as its task. However, the common interest in Russian culture, founded on a belief in its inherent value which was acknowledged at the same time to be threatened, did not result in interpretations that were necessarily in agreement with one another.88 On the contrary, when interpreters had to be more specific, their views often differed significantly. While émigrés would gather for events of commemoration such as the Day of Russian Culture, or agree about their function as a means of preserving Russian culture, the texts examined in this study demonstrate that there was no consensus on how Russian culture should be understood. This may suggest that commemoration was an important but not a sufficient means of making sense of exile as the prospect of return gradually disappeared. By the same token, the four authors discussed here do not only recollect, they also construct new and unique narratives of Russian history. Thus Fedotov, Florovskii, Berdiaev and Zenkovskii all wished to contribute to the making of a collective and cultural memory that would benefit the Orthodox identity of the community. The development of a common memory and identity was one of Russia Abroad’s most fundamental “interests” or “needs” in a world of disruption, to which émigré historiography responded.89 In general, we know little of the extent to which their individual interpretations found support among their fellow émigrés. However, as we shall see, Berdiaev’s harsh response to Florovskii’s work demonstrates that notions of Russianness were not uniform but conflicting. Thus these writers cannot be said to merely transmit and confirm an established canon. In some instances they did do so, but just as often they were formulating or reformulating a canon of their own. Berdiaev’s canonisation and celebration of the Silver Age philosophers, among whom he included himself, is an illuminating example in this respect, especially when compared to Florovskii’s rejection of this very same philosophy. True, 88 This point has also been noted by Sergei Khoruzhii, cf. S.S. Khoruzhii, 2005, Opyty iz russkoi dukhovnoi traditsii, Moscow, p. 329. 89 Cf. Jörn Rüsen’s disciplinary matrix for historiography, where “interests and needs of orientation” form the primary stage: “Dieser Ausgangspunkt [der Bildung des Geschichtbewußtseins und historischen Denkens] liegt bei den Bedürfnissen des Menschen nach einer Orientierung seines Handelns und Leidens in der Zeit. Von diesen Bedürfnissen her läßt sich die Geschichte als Wissenschaft gleichsam aufbauen, d.h. verständlich machen als Antwort auf eine Frage, als Lösung eines Problems, als (geistige) Befriedigung eines (Orientierungs-) Bedürfnisses.” Jörn Rüsen, 1983, Grundzüge einer Historik, vol. 1: Historische Vernunft: Die Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaft, Göttingen, p. 24.

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the Silver Age was too recent a phenomenon to be the proper object of a canonised cultural memory in Assmann’s sense, which passes on an identity-forming heritage that is commemorated as indestructible and thus indisputable. The writings of the last pre-revolutionary generation of philosophers were subject rather to unstable communicative memory and thus negotiation. In émigré historiography, however, not even canonised texts were interpreted uniformly. This is evident in the case of the Eurasianist interpretation of Russian history, which was truly radical and innovatory for its time and probably represented the first serious attempt to break away from what Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866–1934), the most important modern Ukrainian historian, has described as the “traditional scheme of Russian history,” whose main proposition was that it began with Kiev and continued with Moscow.90 Eurasianists such as Georgii Vernadskii, Nikolai Trubetskoi (1890–1938), Petr Savitskii (1895–1968) and others provided a reinterpretation of Russian history as Eurasian, in which the various relations with the Mongol East, above all from the period of the Golden Horde onwards, were held to have played a far more significant role in the development of Russian history than those with Western Europe. Florovskii, who had identified himself with the movement in the early 1920s and contributed to Eurasianist publications, wrote towards the end of the decade, in an article where he disassociates himself from the movement, that Eurasianism had posed the right questions and problems but that its answers and solutions had been incorrect.91 His work in the 1930s, above all Ways of Russian Theology, presents a radically different answer from that of the Eurasianists, as well as from other historical narratives that were formulated by his fellow émigrés, to the commonly posed questions among the émigrés concerning Russia’s existence and essence.

90 Cf. Mychaylo Hrushevsky, 1952, “The Traditional Scheme of ‘Russian’ History and the Problem of a Rational Organization of the History of the Eastern Slavs,” Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the u.s. 2, pp. 355–364 (originally published in 1904). For literature on Eurasianism, see above. 91 Cf. G.V. Florovskii, 1998, “Evraziiskii soblazn,” Iz proshlogo russkoi mysli (Put’ k ochevidnosti), eds. M.A. Kolerov & Iu.P. Senokosov, Moscow, pp. 311–343, p. 311.

CHAPTER TWO

WRITING RUSSIAN HISTORY In 1932, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Russian historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii’s (1841–1911) seminal The Boyar Duma, Georgii Fedotov published an article in the leading Russian émigré journal Contemporary Annals entitled “Kliuchevskii’s Russia.” Here, Fedotov gave an intellectual portrait of Kliuchevskii and his Wirkungsgeschichte. He opens the article by reminding the reader of how groundbreaking Kliuchevskii’s “completely new scheme of Russian history” had been. Although also present in The Boyar Duma, this scheme found its most famous expression in the historian’s Course in Russian History, which he began to deliver at the University of Moscow in 1879, but which was published only towards the end of his life. Since then Kliuchevskii’s scheme has reigned almost unchallenged. This is not one of many but the only Russian History on which two generations of Russians have been brought up. Specialists might voice their disagreements. Russia and its history are given to us in the way they were conceived by Kliuchevskii.1

Fedotov continues by listing and discussing the features of Kliuchevskii’s Russia, as well as discussing the latter’s complex relationship with the populist current from the 1860s onwards. Fedotov’s portrait is full of praise but towards the end of the essay a critical tone is clearly felt. The main reason is Kliuchevskii’s omission of “spiritual culture” (dukhovnaia kul’tura). “The most striking thing in this course is the exclusion of all spiritual culture in the attempt to provide a complete explanation of a ‘process’.”2 It is not that Kliuchevskii was ignorant of spiritual culture. Fedotov reminds his readers of the fact that Kliuchevskii had written his first thesis on the lives of the Early Russian saints (1871). It was a conscious

1

G.P. Fedotov, 1992, “Rossiia Kliuchevskogo,” Sud’ba i grekhi Rossii: Izbrannye stat’i po filosofii russkoi istorii i kul’tury, vol. 1, ed. V.F. Boikov, St Petersburg, pp. 329– 348, p. 329. 2 Fedotov, 1992, 1, p. 339.

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choice to omit it from the course. He did so, Fedotov is convinced, first and foremost in order to save the scientific character (nauchnost’) of his work, in keeping with the latest achievements of contemporary sociology. As Fedotov sees it, Kliuchevskii’s school came to completely dominate Russian historical science until the Revolution. Consequently, spiritual culture remained outside the focus of Russian historians and was dealt with only in more specialised disciplines, such as the history of art, literature and the church. Thus, the educated Russian reader could not find a satisfactory treatment of his own culture in classic works by Russian historians, or an “answer” to its “questions.” Until this day no one has yet tried to take into consideration the huge volume of accumulated material in these specialised disciplines in order to raise the general questions of Old Russian culture. [. . .] Kliuchevskii’s school is not able to tell [the educated reader] what Russia lived by and for. Separately preserved material from its old culture speaks directly of the values of the buried treasures: Rublev’s icons, Avvakum’s Life. Their meaning, however, remains enigmatic.3

And so Fedotov concludes his article by making explicit the task that has been implicit in his criticism of Kliuchevskii: Only by resolving [Russia’s] enigma, or at least by embarking on the way leading to its solution, can the Russian intelligentsia participate fruitfully in the spiritual rebirth of the Motherland. [. . .] Our generation is faced with the necessity of breaking free from the magic circle of Kliuchevskii, from his “local,” narrow, social, everyday thematics, and entering the global fields (mirovye prostory) of the forties.4

In the case of Fedotov, there is a clear convergence between this programme and his own historical works from his exile period. As will become clear in the next chapter, there are obvious resemblances between the opening of Saints of Ancient Russia and the programme quoted above in their insistence on the need for a cultural rebirth of Russia and the relevance of history for this purpose. At the same time, the fact that he published the article “Kliuchevskii’s Russia” immediately after Saints of Ancient Russia and made it end with the proposal of a vocation, makes it clear that the programme he formulated had not yet been fulfilled.

3 4

Fedotov, 1992, 1, p. 348. Fedotov, 1992, 1, p. 348.

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The other writers analysed in this study—Georgii Florovskii, Nikolai Berdiaev, Vasilii Zenkovskii—did not explicitly comment, as far as I know, on Fedotov’s ideas,5 but their works themselves represent the emergence of a new genre in Russian historiography, devoted to Russian cultural and intellectual history. Although they base themselves heavily on pre-revolutionary scholarship, their perspective is different. Texts are read and interpreted as sources to and thus revealing of an entire culture (not only of its separate branches), a point that holds true even for Zenkovskii’s History of Russian Philosophy. While its title may suggest a narrower complex of themes, Zenkovskii’s study relates philosophy to a wider cultural and intellectual frame, which is decisive for his argument.6 In addition to being devoted to Russian culture in its entirety, this new cultural history as outlined by Fedotov was to aim at formulating the meaning of this culture, not simply surveying it, and should have a certain “global” orientation. In other words, historiography should also be culturosophy. “Culturosophy,” in German Kulturosophie or kulturosophisches Denken, is a term of recent origin that has been used in particular by German Slavists such as Igor Smirnov, Rainer Grübel and Dirk Uffelmann.7 Supplied with the adjective “Russian” it denotes a discourse on Russia and Russian culture, led by Russians themselves,

5 Florovskii, however, did say something similar in 1912. See Chapter Three. In the early 1940s, another émigré, Michael Karpovich, presented both a similar critique of Kliuchevskii and a similar task for future scholarship, though without referring to Fedotov. See Michael Karpovich, 1943, “Klyuchevski and Recent Trends in Russian Historiography,” Slavonic and East European Review: American Series 2 (1), pp. 31–39, in particular pp. 38f. 6 In his review of the first volume of Zenkovskii’s history, Semen Frank argued interestingly that Zenkovskii had not written a “history of philosophy” but a “history of Russian thought,” above all because he had included so many figures who could not possibly qualify as “philosophers,” cf. S.L. Frank, 1949, “[Review of ] Prot. V.V. Zen’kovskii: Istoriia russkoi filosofii, tom 1,” Novyi zhurnal 22, pp. 294–298, pp. 295f. Similar objections were voiced to Losskii’s History of Russian Philosophy (cf. Losskii, 1994, p. 11). See my further reflections on this and similar issues below and in Chapter Six. 7 Rainer Grübel & Igor Smirnov, 1997, “Die Geschichte der russischen Kulturosophie im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” Wiener slavistischer Almanach 44 (Sonderband), pp. 5–18; Dirk Uffelmann, 1999, Die russische Kulturosophie: Logik und Axiologe der Argumentation (Slavische Literaturen 18), Frankfurt am Main. The term Kulturosophie seems to have been introduced by Renate Lachmann, 1985, “Text und Gedächtnis: Bemerkungen zur Kulturosophie des Akmeismus,” Epochenschwellen und Epochenstrukturen im Diskurs der Literatur- und Sprachhistorie, eds. H.U. Gumbrecht & U. Link-Heer, Frankfurt am Main, pp. 283–301. The culturosophy of the Acmeists, however, was not “Russian.”

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which is not only descriptive but also axiological and based on dichotomies.8 This binary and axiological description of cultures intends to highlight differences between them, not similarities or common features. Moreover, Uffelmann emphasises that the culturosophical discourse is a heterogenic discourse (Mischdiskurs), where philosophical, religious, and political issues are discussed alongside those more specifically related to cultural studies.9 Culturosophy may thus be found also in texts that primarily deal at first sight with other questions. The most famous Russian culturosophical debate is arguably the one to which Fedotov appears to be referring in his final sentence above as “the global fields of the forties”: that between the Slavophiles and the Westernisers that developed from the 1840s.10 To Fedotov this debate assumes an exemplary character. The central issue in these discussions was the role and place of Russia in relation to the West as well as to World History, and was initially provoked by the Russian publication of Petr Chaadaev’s (1794–1856) infamous first philosophical letter (1829), where Russia was conceptualised as the West’s Other.11 While the question of Russia and the West was not at the forefront of “official” academic Russian nineteenth-century historiography from the successors of Karamzin up to and including Kliuchevskii’s pupils, it was nevertheless implicitly present, mostly with a westernising stance, as in the case of Sergei Solovev, Kliuchevskii, and Pavel Miliukov. The works of these historians are likewise founded on an axiological framework that informs what Russia is and should be—as a rule, a part of Europe—but they do not discuss it as openly as Fedotov suggests that the new cultural history should do.

8 Cf. Grübel & Smirnov, 1997, p. 5: “Unter Kulturosophie wird im Unterschied zur Kulturologie ein Herangehen an die Kultur verstanden, das sich auf ihr Zerlegen in axiologische Dichotomien gründet.” 9 Cf. Uffelmann, 1999, p. 28. 10 The literature here is enormous, but Andrzej Walicki, 1989, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, trans. H. Andrews-Rusiecka, Notre Dame, Ind. (first published in 1964), remains the most comprehensive study to this day. 11 On Chaadaev’s conceptualisation of Russia and its Wirkungsgeschichte, see Groys, 1989, “Rossiia kak podsoznanie Zapada,” Wiener slavistischer Almanach 24, pp. 199–214; 1992, “Poisk russkoi natsional’noi identichnosti,” Voprosy filosofii 1, pp. 52–60; Robin Aizlewood, 2000, “Revisiting Russian Identity in Russian Thought: From Chaadaev to the Early Twentieth Century,” Slavonic and East European Review 78 (1), pp. 20–43.

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From this quest for a “global orientation” it follows that spiritual culture, that is Russian cultural history, is of fundamental importance to a new Russian identity. The writers see it as their task to single out what characterises this Russian culture, and it is thus inevitably contrasted with other cultures. However, while such reasoning and speculation on Russia is necessarily relational, it is rarely recognised as such within this discourse. Culturosophy is not oriented towards relational definitions and descriptions of cultures. Rather, it is marked by a tendency towards essentialism. Still, an Other is required in such an identity discourse, and this Other has mostly been, since Russia was proclaimed an empire in the early eighteenth century, (Western) Europe, or more precisely an idea of (Western) Europe.12 Furthermore, all four texts examined in this book are culturosophical in their approach to Russia in that culture is seen as possessing a particular, deeper value, to which the topic of, for instance, the state or “material” social life cannot amount. Hence these writers may be said to continue their reaction against the positivist and radically minded pre-revolutionary intelligentsia and its alleged denigration of spirituality, a reaction that found its first serious expression in the collection Landmarks (Vekhi, 1909), to which Berdiaev and several other émigrés contributed. In Christopher Read’s formulation, “the vekhovtsy were united in their desire for a revaluation in the Russian intelligentsia based on a concern for deeper spiritual and cultural values than those which the intelligentsia currently possessed.”13 In their historiography, Fedotov, Florovskii, Berdiaev, and Zenkovskii attempt to write the history of such values and to demonstrate the existence of an indigenous tradition of spirituality, of which modern contemporary Russia was not sufficiently aware. Finally, the axiology of these texts is revealed in their presumption that the past possesses an inherent meaning, a belief that implies, in turn, that the purpose of historiography is to provide directions also for the future, i.e. so that the vocation that is believed to be produced by the course of a Russian history infused with meaning may be 12 Cf. Iver B. Neumann, 1996, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations (The New International Relations Series), London, and Vera Tolz, 2001, Russia (Inventing the Nation), London. Fedotov’s book is an exception; his “other” is Byzantium. 13 Christopher Read, 1979, Religion, Revolution, and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1900–1912: The Vekhi Debate and its Intellectual Background, London, p. 120. See also Chapter Five.

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fulfilled. The past should be usable. As authors of usable history they seek, in Bernhard Lewis’ words, to “achieve a new vision of the past better suited to their needs in the present and their aspirations for the future.”14 Lewis terms this “invented history,” “history for a purpose,” which may be “devised and interpreted from remembered and recovered history where feasible, and fabricated where not.”15 While Lewis’ agenda in applying these distinctions is a critical defence of modern, truthful scholarship free from interests, my purpose is not so much to criticise the émigré historians for writing invented history as to point out that the need to provide guidance in a present, tragic situation may affect the way in which they conceptualise the past. This is a result not only of their explicit adherence to the culturosophical tradition but also to the situation of being in exile. The writing of Russian intellectual and cultural history in exile, I would like to claim, constitutes a blend of the pre-revolutionary academic tradition, which it attempts to correct but to which is also remains indebted, on the one hand, and the culturosophical on the other. While it possesses a scholarly style that distinguishes it from Russian culturosophical publitsistika, it makes the axiological dimension more explicit, not least because all authors share a belief in Orthodoxy, which often pervades their historical works. This Orthodoxy is not that of the official Russian Orthodox Church as it developed in Imperial Russia, but rather their own interpretation of it, developed outside of the official dogmatic framework and in close dialogue with the “secular world,” for instance with German idealist philosophy. Hence they all belong to the tradition of Orthodox lay theology that Konrad Onasch has termed “die alternative Orthodoxie.”16 This holds 14 Bernhard Lewis, 1975, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented, Princeton, N.J., p. 55. 15 Lewis, 1975, p. 12. “Remembered history” is collective memory; “recovered history” is, in short, scholarship. In keeping with Jörn Rüsen’s “disciplinary matrix” of historiography (cf. the previous chapter), however, these clear-cut distinctions are not so unproblematic, since historical knowledge as well as historical studies are always related to practical human life and its need for orientation in the present. Cf. Rüsen, 1983, pp. 20ff. 16 Cf. Konrad Onasch, 1993, Die alternative Orthodoxie: Utopie und Wirklichkeit im russischen Laienchristentum des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts: 14 Essays, Paderborn. See also Paul Valliere, 2000, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key, Edinburgh. A.V. Cherniaev, 2010, G.V. Florovskii kak filosof i istorik russkoi mysli, Moscow, p. 84, refers to it as “secular theological thought” (svetskaia bogoslovskaia mysl’) and argues that this was Florovskii’s background as well.

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true for Florovskii and Zenkovskii as well, although they were later (in exile) ordained priests. An urgent concern for these Orthodox thinkers was deliberate reflection on the place and meaning of Orthodoxy in the modern secular, differentiated world, the engagement with which they saw as imperative. “Lay theology” in this context is thus synonymous by and large with religious or religiously inspired philosophy, and is characterised by openness towards non-Orthodox thought as well as non-theological modes of thought (philosophy, publitsitika, fiction). As a rule, such Russian Orthodox thinkers had their background in other disciplines (in this case, history and philosophy), from which they turned to theological issues. Although he increasingly came to oppose this “alternative Orthodoxy,” Florovskii too shared this background. Varieties of Intellectual History In the following, I shall try to situate the cultural and intellectual historiography of these four Russian émigrés in relation to other kinds of history as well as to the prevailing tendencies in Russian prerevolutionary historiography, in order to provide the background to its development. I shall begin with a few terminological considerations relating to the conceptualisation of the historical field in question. Although Fedotov examines material from periods earlier than those examined by the other three, they all aim ultimately at bringing out the same thing: the deepest characteristics of Russian culture and thought. This is their most important common feature. Thus these texts constitute a genre in keeping with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “speech genres.” Bakhtin defines such genres as relatively stable forms of utterances, in which there is a unity of thematic content, style and composition; to my mind the content, emphasised by Bakhtin as “thematic,” is common across all these works.17 So is the narrative form, according to which they are all composed, while most adhere to a scholarly style (stylistically, Berdiaev’s book is the exception). It is nevertheless possible, and necessary, to characterise these works by means of different terms. Fedotov’s Saints of Ancient Russia is a history of Early Russian culture, or, as he would term it himself, a 17 Cf. M.M. Bakhtin, 1979, “Problema rechevykh zhanrov,” Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, Moscow, pp. 237–280, p. 237.

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history of Russian spiritual culture. Zenkovskii’s History of Russian Philosophy is a history of philosophy situated within different cultural frameworks, whereas Berdiaev and Florovskii refer to their subject as Russian “thought” (mysl’)—Berdiaev even in the subtitle of his book. Between the different terms just listed we have what Wittgenstein describes as family resemblances.18 They are not interchangeable but have a clear affinity to each other, and may provide different conceptualisations and different framings of the same historical field. In so far as the term “intellectual history” may cover history of thought and of philosophy (though the latter is narrower), the number of categories covered by these four works may nevertheless be reduced to two: intellectual and cultural history. They are not identical but overlapping, as are the open fields to which they refer. In the following, I shall discuss these two concepts in more detail. I shall begin with intellectual history. “Intellectual history” in its widest sense is widely used today in the English-speaking world for a heterogeneous body of historiography “devoted to mental life,” as it is defined in a modern dictionary of historical concepts.19 Defined in this way, it may also include emotions and feelings, something that Leo Spitzer complained in the 1940s that it did not do, in contrast to Geistesgeschichte.20 The term “intellectual history” now tends to replace more and more “history of ideas,” with reference both to a mode of historiography, i.e. to its texts, and to a discipline. In its early phase, intellectual history was associated with the works of Perry Miller (1905–1963) while the history of ideas, as a programme as well as a discipline and even institution, was developed by Arthur Lovejoy (1873–1962).21 Although Lovejoy and Miller were active at approximately the same time, Felix Gilbert observed in 1971 that “intellectual history had not entered the Oxford English Dictionary.”22 In other words, the term “history of 18 Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, 2001, Philosophische Untersuchungen: The German Text, with a Revised English Translation, Oxford, § 67. 19 Harry Ritter, 1986, Dictionary of Concepts in History (Reference Sources for the Social Sciences and Humanities 3), Westport, Conn., p. 232. 20 Cf. Leo Spitzer, 1944, “Geistesgeschichte vs. History of Ideas as Applied to Hitlerism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 5 (2), pp. 191–203, p. 191, n. 1. 21 Cf. Roger Chartier, 1987, “Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,” Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, eds. D. LaCapra & S.L. Kaplan, Ithaca, N.Y. & London, pp. 13–46, p. 13. 22 Felix Gilbert, 1971, “Intellectual History: Its Aims and Methods,” Daedalus 100, pp. 80–97, p. 80.

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ideas” was for a long time the dominant one. The reason that it now seems less appealing is not simply that it may appear to be a narrower concept than “intellectual history”; Lovejoy’s belief in the existence of a “great chain of being,” i.e. of certain “unit-ideas” that remain constant throughout history, has become an easy target for criticism today. It should be remembered, however, that the “history of ideas” does not necessarily evoke such Lovejoyan associations outside the Englishspeaking world, where “intellectual history” is not used to the same extent. Histoire intellectuelle, as Gilbert observes, is not used by French scholars, neither is intellektuelle Geschichte used in Germany; Germans prefer Geistesgeschichte and Ideengeschichte.23 Similar observations have later been made by Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier.24 In Norway, we speak almost exclusively of idéhistorie, without necessarily referring to scholarship in accordance with Lovejoy’s programme and methodology. Moreover, the term itself was not invented by Lovejoy. It appears to have been used first by the German historian of philosophy Johann Jakob Brucker (1696–1770) in his early work Philosophical History of the Theory of Ideas (1723), and from whom it was immediately taken over by Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). In his groundbreaking New Science (first edition 1725), Vico defined his new discipline as a “history of human ideas” (“una storia dell’umane idee”).25 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the notion occurred infrequently in various kinds of historical scholarship.26

23

Cf. Gilbert 1971, pp. 80f. Cf. Robert Darnton, 1980, “Intellectual and Cultural History,” The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. M. Kammen, Ithaca, N.Y. & London, pp. 327–354, p. 330: “Europeans do not speak of intellectual history in the American manner but rather to [sic] the history of ideas, histoire des idées, Geistesgeschichte, storia della filosofia—different names that denote different traditions.”; Chartier, 1987, p. 13: “in Germany, Geistesgeschichte dominates; in Italy, Storia intellectuale does not appear, even in the work of Delio Cantinori. In France, histoire des idées hardly exists, either as a notion or as a discipline.” Darnton and Chartier disagree, it seems, in the case of France. 25 Giambattista Vico, 1999, New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, trans. D. Marsh, Harmondsworth, p. 128. See also Donald R. Kelley, 2002, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History, Aldershot, p. 1, and Peter Burke, 1997, “Origins of Cultural History,” Varieties of Cultural History, Ithaca, N.Y., pp. 1–22, p. 11. On Brucker and the history of philosophy, see Chapter Six. 26 For the history and the suggestion of a prehistory of intellectual history, more specifically the tradition of “eclecticism” from Diogenes Laertius (second century ad) via Brucker to Victor Cousin (1792–1867), see Kelley, 2002. 24

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Russian pre-revolutionary scholarship, too, presents us with examples of intellectual history. In the late 1890s, Arsenii Kadlubovskii (1867–1920) stressed the importance of studying the lives of the saints since they provided material for the “history of ideas and opinions” (istoriia idei i vzgliadov).27 However, the predominant term in Russia has been istoriia mysli, “history of thought.” While “history of thought” is seemingly synonymous with “intellectual history,” it usually occurred in pre-revolutionary Russia with the adjective “social” (obshchestvennaia).28 A classic example in this respect is IvanovRazumnik’s (1878–1946) History of Russian Social Thought published in 1911. In 1915, Georgii Plekhanov (1856–1918) started to publish a work with exactly the same title, of which three volumes altogether appeared over the next few years. A third work from this period that uses this phrase in its title is Aleksandr Lappo-Danilevskii’s (1863– 1919) History of Russian Social Thought and Culture, left unfinished by his death and published posthumously only in 1990. In addition, certain works that do not have this phrase in their titles nevertheless conceptualise their field in a similar way: Mikhail Gershenzon (1869– 1925) describes the subject of his History of Young Russia (1908) as an “episode in the history of Russian social thought” (epizod iz istorii russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli).29 When Florovskii and Berdiaev refer to the subject of their works as mysl’, this is thus not just their individual choice. Although they omit “social,” there exists a series of historical works to which they relate their own studies. To adopt a distinction suggested by Hans-Jørgen Schanz, we could say that while the discipline of intellectual history is of the twentieth century, the genre is older. As Schanz points out, one may easily identify “intellectual history” as individual works or, in particular, as parts of other works as far back as Herodotus and Thucydides. Herodotus included in his Histories a description of the religious mindset and self-understanding of the Persians, while Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War contains a comparison between the Weltanschauung of Athens and that of Sparta. Schanz suggests that “intellectual history”—although it was not termed as such—had had, in one form

27 Cf. A.P. Kadlubovskii, 1902, Ocherki po istorii drevne-russkoi literatury zhitii sviatykh, Warsaw, p. viii. On Kadlubovskii, see Chapter Three. 28 Cf. Isaiah Berlin, 1966, “Introduction,” Russian Intellectual History: An Introduction, ed. M. Raeff, New Jersey & Sussex, pp. 3–11, p. 4. 29 M.O. Gershenzon, 1923, Istoriia molodoi Rossii, Moscow, p. 1.

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or another, a natural place in general historiography for a long time, but, and this is the crucial point, in the nineteenth century, when history was institutionalised as an academic discipline, it was excluded.30 As a consequence, it seems to me, it was not only the discipline of “intellectual history” that had to be established. Despite its prehistory the genre had to be recreated on the basis of other genres. This relatively late emergence of the discipline and genre of histoire des idées has been described succinctly by Michel Foucault in his Archaeology of Knowledge. Contrary to most established histories of literature or philosophy, he detects something indefinable and unstable here. History of ideas is the account of imperfect, ill-based knowledge, which could never in the whole of its long, persistent life attain the form of scientificity [. . .] The history of those shady philosophies that haunt literature, art, the sciences, law, ethics, and even man’s daily life; the history of those age-old themes that are never crystallized in a rigorous and individual system, but which have formed the spontaneous philosophy of those who did not philosophize.31

Foucault sees this discipline as an in-between literature, which emerged in the aftermath of other disciplines: “the history of ideas sets out to cross the boundaries of existing disciplines, to deal with them from the outside, and to reinterpret them.”32 The boundaries that are transgressed in intellectual history are, to supply Foucault with two terms introduced by Maurice Mandelbaum, those that exist between “general history,” on the one hand, and the narrower “special histories” of literature, art etc. on the other.33 While special histories deal with a special form of human activity, general histories seek first and foremost—at times by means of the same material—to say something about the societies surrounding it. They have different “directions,” as Mandelbaum puts it.34 Several scholars who have examined intellectual history as discipline as well as genre have noted the fact that it appears to form a crossover which, as such, necessarily emerges afterwards. Schanz claims 30 Cf. Hans-Jørgen Schanz, 2001, “Intellektuel historie som genre og disiplin,” Quentin Skinner og intellektuel historie (Slagmark 33), pp. 67–78. 31 Michel Foucault, 2002, Archaeology of Knowledge (Routledge Classics), trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, London, p. 153. 32 Foucault, 2002, p. 153. 33 Maurice Mandelbaum, 1965, “The History of Ideas, Intellectual History, and the History of Philosophy,” History and Theory 5 (Beiheft 5), pp. 33–66, pp. 42ff. 34 Cf. Mandelbaum, 1965, p. 46

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that the discipline idéhistorie has been created in opposition to what is held to be a “decline in knowledge.” To counteract this tendency it advocates a new “transhistorical genre.” However, its field of knowledge (vidensfelt), according to Schanz, is not new.35 Consequently, as Donald Kelley remarks, intellectual history “is located at the juncture of a number of disciplines. Despite claims for ‘autonomy’ this field must be approached in the first instance through these more established disciplines [i.e. general history, history of literature, of philosophy, KJM].”36 The dialogue with an enormous volume of scholarly literature that does not necessarily belong to the same discipline seems to be a characteristic feature of intellectual history, and this holds true for Russian intellectual historiography as well. I would like to emphasise, however, that intellectual history makes up more than the “sum” of established disciplines and special histories. It also provides a shift in perspective, or what Paul Veyne has called a “lengthening of the questionnaire.”37 “The only possible progress of history is the widening of its vision,” Veyne claims.38 This implies that “progress” in historical writing, as Terence Emmons states paraphrasing Veyne, has been the “extension of those areas of human experience that are deemed eventworthy, rather than a matter of attaining deeper levels of explanation or a more perfect metaphysics—a horizontal, not

35 Cf. Schanz, 2001, p. 73: “Disciplinen idéhistorie opstår derimod dels som opposition imod vidensmessig indskrænkning (og altså ikke udvidelse) og dels under intuitiv eller direkte appel til den nærmest transhistoriske genre idéhistorie. Der er således tale om en ny disciplin, der i og for seg ikke refererer til et nyt vidensfelt.” 36 Donald R. Kelley, 1990, “What is Happening to the History of Ideas?” Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1), pp. 3–25, p. 4. It should be noted here that while the observations of Kelley, Mandelbaum and others suggest that “history of philosophy” is a special history, Zenkovskii’s history as well as other examples from Russian historiography of philosophy is of a wider kind in several respects (cf. my remarks above and in particular Chapter Six). On the other hand, history of philosophy does have a distinguishing relationship to intellectual history. Kelley, 2002, p. 4, describes it as the “tap root of intellectual history.” Lovejoy, similarly, sees it as the “common seed-plot of the greater number of the more fundamental and pervasive ideas [. . .] which manifest themselves in other regions of intellectual history.” Arthur O. Lovejoy, 1938, “The Historiography of Ideas,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 78 (4), pp. 529–543, p. 537. Kelley had previously described “history of ideas” as having a “mixed heritage, but most obviously it appears as an offshoot of the history of philosophy” (Kelley, 1990, p. 4). For an “archaeology” of the historiography of philosophy—a field that overlaps, as it turns out, with those of cultural and intellectual history (cf. also my next footnote)—see Ulrich Johannes Schneider, 1990, Die Vergangenheit des Geistes: Eine Archäologie der Philosophiegeschichte, Frankfurt am Main. 37 Cf. Veyne, 1984, pp. 213ff. 38 Veyne, 1984, p. 228.

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a vertical process.”39 This view provides us with a way of looking analytically at Fedotov’s programme. On the basis of his own axiological view of culture Fedotov would definitely have seen the emergence of a new history of spiritual culture if not in terms of progress, then at least of probing deeper into some central principle underlying history. His programme for a history of spiritual culture is a quest for a method to cover a field, i.e. a “content,” that had so far been neglected. However, none of the works examined in this study present readers with hitherto unknown historical fields. It would be more to the point to say that they provide a new interpretation of mostly well-known texts. They may be understood by means of Veyne’s unorthodox comparison between the history of King David as related in the Bible (The Books of Samuel) and by Ernest Renan (1823–1892): The most conspicuous difference does not lie in the content, and interests the historian less than the philologist; it relates to the art of narration, to the conception of the account, to the choice of style, to the richness of the vocabulary—in a word, it is due to the evolution of forms.40

Although some of the thinkers introduced in particular by Florovskii and Zenkovskii had hardly been presented before, the central issue for them, just as for Fedotov and Berdiaev, was not so much to reveal an undisclosed part of Russian culture as to frame it and narrate it in a way believed to be more congenial to its essence. This was the novelty of their works. Culture and Cultural History Fedotov maintained that the history of spiritual culture should transcend the specialised disciplines. Meanwhile, since its emergence in late eighteenth-century Germany, cultural history has attempted to mediate in a fashion similar to intellectual history between disciplines that already have a more established form and position. Peter Burke’s attempt to define a prehistory of cultural history consists of identifying special histories of language and literature, of artists, art and music, of doctrines, disciplines, and modes of thought—all works that 39

Terence Emmons, 1999a, “Kliuchevskii’s Pupils,” Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, ed. T. Sanders, Armonk & London, pp. 118–145, p. 135. 40 Veyne, 1984, p. 227.

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are not labelled “cultural.” And when Burke eventually comes to the subheading “The History of Culture,” he defines this phenomenon as the attempt to “fit them together,” i.e. the histories of the arts and sciences.41 The major achievement of early cultural historians (Johann Christoph Adelung, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn and others from the late eighteenth century), according to Burke, was the “idea that a culture is a totality, or at least that the connections between different arts and disciplines are extremely important.”42 In the nineteenth century, cultural history was developed first and foremost in Germany, where it became a minor but still clearly defined discipline. It was regarded as complementary and not antithetical to political history, though culture never came to rival the position and prestige of the state in nineteenth-century historical writing from the Napoleonic wars on.43 According to Felix Gilbert, cultural history in the first half of the nineteenth century had two functions: first, to record the daily life of a society and all its groups, including the niedere Volk, i.e. what today we would rather call social history; and second, in keeping with the popularity of the notion of Zeitgeist, “to distinguish epochs of history from each other and to describe the stages of development through which the leading nations of the world had passed.” However, this second task suggests a shift in emphasis, Gilbert continues, “to the pre-eminent classes of society, to literature and art, and to education and scholarly activities.”44 This was the state of cultural history in Germany when Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) began his career. Burckhardt’s studies on the age of Constantine the Great and particularly his subsequent two on the Italian Renaissance and on Greek cultural history represent an even greater emphasis on the second task outlined above, though without the focus on stages of development. In Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, where cultural history is studied in a synchronic perspective, the description of the daily life of a period gave way to

41 Burke, 1997, p. 17. Burke’s account is strikingly similar to Kelley’s history of intellectual history; it even contains several of the same works, such as Brucker’s history of philosophy. 42 Burke, 1997, p. 19. 43 Cf. Georg G. Iggers, 1968, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, Middletown, Conn., p. 42. 44 Felix Gilbert, 1990, History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt, Princeton, N.J., p. 48.

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an analysis of high culture.45 The reasons for this change are complex; they are found in Burckhardt’s own pessimism, which gave cultural history the task of revealing “permanent standards,” as well as in the inner logic of his work, which assigns a particular role to the “modern” educated man of the Renaissance.46 The preoccupation with high culture remained present within the discipline until the appearance of the next undisputed classic in the field, Johan Huizinga’s (1872–1945) The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919). Huizinga saw the “task of cultural history,” which was the title of an essay he published in 1929, as “determining the patterns of life, art, and thought taken all together.” He stressed that this was more than just the sum of the specific parts of the historical discipline, its “philological parts” as he called them. Cultural history should transcend the various special histories.47 It was only later in the twentieth century that a new kind of cultural history came about, based on an anthropological notion of culture as a total complex of a way of life, or as “human activity,” as cultural history is defined in the aforementioned dictionary of historical concepts.48 As demonstrated above, there were tendencies towards conceptualising an anthropological cultural history before Burckhardt, and the anthropological concept of culture was not alien to him either. However, the prevailing notion of culture in Burckhardt’s work, as well as in classic cultural history in general, seems to be the so-called humanistic one, which is normative and tends to focus on the arts and intellectual life. Cultural history emerged in Germany and it is necessary to see this discipline in relation to the German concept of culture, which, moreover, has a deep affinity with the Russian one (cf. below). The German Kultur came into use in the eighteenth century.49 The term derives from the Latin cultura, where it means “cultivation,” and it

45

Cf. Gilbert, 1990, p. 69. Cf. Gilbert, 1990, p. 91. 47 Cf. R.L. Collie, 1964, “Johan Huizinga and the Task of Cultural History,” The American Historical Review 69 (3), pp. 607–630, pp. 608f. 48 Ritter, 1986, p. 88. 49 On the Begriffgeschichte of “culture,” see A.L. Kroeber & Clyde Kluckhohn, 1952, “General History of the Word Culture,” Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 47:1), Cambridge, Mass., pp. 9–38. See also Raymond Williams, 1976, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London, pp. 76–82, and Ritter, 1986, pp. 93–98. 46

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was primarily an agricultural notion. That Cicero in the Tusculum Disputations speaks of the “cultivation of the mind” (cultura animi) and compares this to cultivated fields that bear fruit, was a—prophetic— exception. The projection of the initially agricultural notion of culture onto human beings as a reference to the development of intellectual faculties became commonplace in early seventeenth-century French and English. Culture here was always the culture of something. A decisive change, however, took place with Johann Gottfried Herder (1744– 1803). Herder uses culture not only as a reference to a “progressive cultivation” and “development of faculties,” which was the common meaning at this time and which made Cultur (as it was spelled) synonymous with the French civilisation (in use from the mid-eighteenth century on); he also speaks of cultures in the plural. Herder’s idea of parallel cultures and his emphasis on variety implied a rejection of the notion of universal history as a unilinear progression. Culture now became an independent noun. It was seen as something objective, an idea that also made a science of culture possible. Herder invented the anthropological or ethnographic concept of culture, which, however, was generally adopted only in the mid-nineteenth century. Of greater immediate importance was perhaps the gradual separation of the concept of culture from that of civilisation, which took place after Herder. This differentiation, which can be found for instance in the writings of the historian Leopold von Ranke (1795– 1886), was unknown at that time in French and English. Within this dichotomy, culture is seen as the “spiritual” domain; civilisation as the “technical,” “artificial.” In addition, individual “cultivation” was now usually described as Bildung. Still, this “spiritual” concept of culture applies in principle to both human beings and societies, as well as to the arts in general. This development marks the emergence of the humanistic concept of culture, which is held to be normative and selective, in contrast to the descriptive “anthropological” concept that derives more directly from Herder. While nineteenth-century cultural history seems to oscillate between different notions of culture, it displays an overall tendency to conceive of culture as an object that is not only material but above all intelligible and spiritual, and thus also pre-eminently intellectual. Culture reflects the domain of mind and spirit. This did not necessarily imply an exclusion of popular culture; the culture of the people, when taken into consideration, was also assumed to possess a deeper meaning that was not immediately revealed, and was often referred to as spirit

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(Geist) or ideas (Ideen).50 As observed by E.H. Gombrich, nineteenthcentury cultural and intellectual history (Geistesgeschichte)—and even political history, we may add51—is deeply indebted to the contemporaneous philosophical and historiographical idealism, which sees culture (literature, the arts, society, ideas) as a unit. This was taken over from Hegel by Burckhardt as well, even though he was otherwise quite hostile to the philosopher’s ideas. Postulating the unity of all manifestations of a civilization, the method consists in taking various elements of culture, say Greek architecture and Greek philosophy, and asking how they can be shown to be the expression of the same spirit. The end of such an interpretation must always be a triumphant Euclidian q.e.d., since Hegel had bequeathed to the historian that very task: to find in every detail the general principle underlying it.52

As this study intends to demonstrate, a similar belief in an underlying principle governing all cultural manifestations is central to the historical writing of Fedotov, Florovskii, Berdiaev, and Zenkovskii. Important in this respect are the fundamental similarities between the German Kultur and the Russian kul’tura. The opposition of material to spiritual culture, or of culture to civilisation, is clearly felt in the Russian concept of kul’tura, which came into use relatively late (second half of the nineteenth century).53 Previously, Russian had used prosveshchenie or obrazovanie in places where one would later expect kul’tura (or tsivilizatsiia). In the first 50 Cf. Palle Ove Christiansen, 2000, Kulturhistorie som opposition: Træk af forskellige fagtraditioner, København, p. 17; Friedrich Jaeger & Jörn Rüsen, 1992, Geschichte des Historismus: Eine Einführung, Munich, p. 47. 51 The Hegelian belief in a coherence behind the phenomenal world was present also in the anti-Hegelian historian Ranke, cf. Georg G. Iggers, 1995a, “Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1), pp. 129–152, p. 131. 52 E.H. Gombrich, 1969, In Search of Cultural History (Philip Maurice Deneke Lecture 1967), Oxford, pp. 24f. 53 On the history of the Russian kul’tura, see Klaus Städtke, 1995, “Kultur und Zivilisation: Zur Geschichte des Kulturbegriffs in Rußland,” Kulturauffassungen in der literarischen Welt Rußlands: Kontinuitäten und Wandlungen im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. C. Ebert, Berlin, pp. 18–46; Peter Grzybek, 1995, “Zum Aufkommen des Kulturbegriffs in Rußland,” ibidem, pp. 47–75. See also Alfred G. Meyer’s “Appendix A: Historical Notes on Ideological Aspects of the Concept of Culture in Germany and Russia,” in Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952, pp. 207–212. For its recent history, see S.N. Zenkin, 1998, “Reflektsiia o kul’ture v sovetskoi nauke 70-kh godov: Ideologicheskie aspekty,” Semidesiatye kak predmet istorii russkoi kul’tury (Rossiia/Russia 1 (9)), ed. K.Iu. Rogov, Moscow & Venice, pp. 197–212.

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Russian translation of Chaadaev’s first philosophical letter—the one that provoked such a huge scandal in 1836—the French civilisation is mostly rendered as obrazovanie.54 The most common word in Russian for civilisation in the early nineteenth century, however, seems to have been prosveshchenie. It appears to have had a wider meaning than it has today; in addition to “enlightenment” it could stand for “civilisation” and “culture,” as well as Bildung. A telling example is the title of Ivan Kireevskii’s (1806–1856) article “On the Character of European prosveshchenie and its Relationship to the Russian prosveshchenie” (1852). His notion of prosveshchenie is deeply indebted to French historian François Guizot (1787–1874) and his Eurocentric (and even Francocentric) ideas of civilisation, which Kireevskii sought to reformulate.55 Interestingly, however, prosveshchenie as used by Kireevskii has often been rendered as “culture”/Kultur in English and German, not least because of the collective spirituality he claims to be the differentia specifica of the Russian mentality.56 The first truly significant occurrences of kul’tura in Russian are to be found in the theory of “cultural types” put forward by Nikolai Danilevskii (1822–1885) in his Russia and Europe (1869). At approximately the same time, i.e. during the post-emancipation period, the narodnik Petr Lavrov (1823–1900) introduced a “humanistic” concept of culture. As Danilevskii uses it, however, culture is still synonymous with civilisation; a cultural type, according to him, comprises four different fields: religion, art/technology/science, politics, and socio-economic organisation.57

54 Cf. the Russian version of 1836 as published in P.Ia. Chaadaev, 1991, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis’ma, vol. 1, Moscow, pp. 641–676, pp. 646, 659, 661, 665 (obrazovannost’), 668. Prosveshchenie does also occur in some phrases for civilization in this translation (pp. 658, 659, 660). 55 See Catherine Evtuhov, 2003, “Guizot in Russia,” The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789–1991, eds. C. Evtuhov & S. Kotkin, Lanham, Md., pp. 55–72. 56 Cf. the translations of Kireevskii’s text in Marc Raeff (ed.), 1966, Russian Intellectual History: An Anthology, New York, pp. 174–207, and in Dieter Groh & Dmitrij Tschižewskij (eds.), 1959, Europa und Russland: Texte zum Probleme des westeuropäischen und russischen Selbstverständnisses, Darmstadt, pp. 248–298. 57 See in particular the seventeenth and final chapter, “The Slavic Cultural-Historical Type: In Place of a Conclusion,” of his Russia and Europe: N.Ia. Danilevskii, 1995, Rossiia i Evropa: Vzgliad na kul’turnye i politicheskie otnosheniia slavianskogo mira k germano-romanskomu (Literaturnoe nasledie russkikh myslitelei), ed. A.A. Galaktionov, St Petersburg, pp. 398–431.

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That the Russian word for “culture” functioned as a synonym for “civilisation” is confirmed by the entry in volume 17 of Brockhaus and Efron’s Encyclopedia, published in 1896. Under kul’tura we read that “the use of the term came to us from German scholarly literature; the French and English use the word civilisation instead of culture.”58 However, other usages were soon to evolve as well. In pre-revolutionary Russia, the introduction of the German notion of culture did not generate any works on cultural history. Here it was used mainly for political and ideological purposes. While culture in both states was seen as an expression of the nation’s self-consciousness, in Russia it remained a utopian concept that applied above all to the future and less to the past and present. It was widely used by both the radical left and by Silver Age religious philosophers from Vladimir Solovev (1853–1900) to émigrés such as Berdiaev and Fedotov, i.e. by highly differentiated groups that were nevertheless united in their opposition to the westernised Russian state and aristocracy. Thus the distinction between culture and civilisation came to be seen by many as corresponding to that between Russia and the West, although Solovev formulated his idealistic concept of culture as an alternative to Danilevskii’s nationalistic and even imperialistic vision of Russian (i.e. “Slavic”) culture as the imminent last stage of world history. Correspondingly, this speculative concept was introduced with the purpose of changing the Russian state and Russian society in favour of, as in the case of Solovev, the utopia of a Christian state. In this utopian concept of culture, features that belong to the domain of “civilisation” (organisation, politics, economy, everyday life) were largely absent. Culture is distinguished markedly from civilisation. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, other notions of kul’tura appeared in Russia as well, as is evident from Pavel Miliukov’s comprehensive Outlines of the History of Russian Culture.59 Klaus Städtke argues that Miliukov’s “sociological” concept of culture in this work was a reaction against the prevailing idealist and speculative ideas of culture. Miliukov rejects the simple opposition of culture to civilisation, which he found useless for the historical discipline. He sees spiritual culture not as a purely self-preserving entity but as embedded within a larger frame, in social life. Although Miliukov’s

58 59

Quoted from Städtke, 1995, p. 29. Cf. Städtke, 1995, pp. 38ff.

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notion of culture never superseded the “humanistic” one, it forms an important background to Fedotov’s quest for a new cultural history. Miliukov’s ideas might explain why Fedotov had to add the adjective “spiritual” (which would otherwise seem redundant in this respect). What culture, and Russian culture in particular, was and should be, was subject to negotiation in the first decades of the twentieth century just as it was in exile (Miliukov’s work, as mentioned in the Introduction, was republished in Paris in the 1930s). Fedotov formulates a programme for a cultural history based on a humanistic concept of culture, a kind of history which this concept, introduced into Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, had so far failed to bring about. While this would mean, according to Fedotov’s programme, a shift in emphasis towards a more factual past (and not a predominantly utopian or mythological one), the utopian flavour of Russian kul’tura is nevertheless sustained in his historiographical practice, as I will demonstrate in Chapter Three. Historiography of Imperial Russia After its secularisation in the eighteenth century, when the primary force in history was no longer held to be divine providence but human will and reason, Russian pre-revolutionary historiography saw at least two major “lengthenings of the questionnaire” (Veyne): Enlightenment historical writing was replaced in the first half of the nineteenth century by Historicism, whereas Historicism was sidelined in turn towards the end of the century by what Thomas Bohn describes as an “historical sociology.”60 Historicism, according to Edward Thaden, dominated Russian historical science from the successors of Karamzin up until Kliuchevskii.61 What these changes amounted to

60 Thomas M. Bohn, 1997, “Historische Soziologie im vorrevolutionären Rußland,” Historisches Zeitschrift 265, pp. 343–372. For a short but concise overview of Russian historiography up to 1917, see Nathaniel Knight, 1998, “Russian Historiography (to 1917),” A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 1809), vol. 2, ed. D.R. Woolf, New York, pp. 794–798. 61 Cf. Edward C. Thaden, 1999, The Rise of Historicism in Russia (American University Studies Series 9: History 192), New York; 2004, “Historicism, N.A. Polevoi, and Rewriting Russian History,” East European Quarterly 38 (3), pp. 299–329. Thaden and Bohn disagree, seemingly, as to when Historicism was replaced; Thaden holds that Kliuchevskii, despite all his innovations, remained too indebted to the schemes of Sergei Solovev to be regarded as representing a break with historicism (Thaden, 2004,

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more specifically will be elaborated in the following account of Russian pre-revolutionary historiography. This is not an exhaustive analysis; my intention has been to discuss a set of issues that I regard as relevant background to my subsequent analyses of émigré cultural and intellectual historical writing. The main emphasis here will be on the different patterns that have been attributed to Russian history during the imperial period. Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826) is primarily regarded as the last Enlightenment historian in Russia. This view has been widely accepted since Miliukov referred to him as the last representative of the “practical or ethical” period in Russian historiography, which was succeeded by a phase in which history, according to Miliukov, was conceived of as a science. Miliukov argues that the basic principles of these two periods differ crucially.62 Karamzin’s work is penetrated by the didacticism and pragmatism that were central to eighteenth-century ideas of history. According to Joseph Black, “Karamzin was like most of the European historians of his time when he insisted that it was his duty to make moral judgements about the past.”63 Furthermore, Karamzin sees Russia’s essence as defined throughout history by the principle of autocracy. The Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo had been there from the beginning, and from this very beginning autocracy had been the form of

p. 306, which refers directly to Bohn, 1997). Bohn (1997, pp. 354f ), on the contrary, sees Kliuchevskii’s works, in particular his The Boyar Duma, as a combination of institutional and social history, i.e. as having inaugurated an “historical sociology,” which was further developed by Miliukov. See also Thomas M. Bohn, 2000ª, “Istoriia kul’tury v Germanii i Rossii v trudakh Karla Lamprekhta i Pavla Miliukova: sravnitel’nyi analiz,” P.N. Miliukov: Istorik, politik, diplomat, ed. V.V. Shelokhaev, Moscow, pp. 225–235; 2000b, “Istorizm v Rossii? O sostoianii russkoi istoricheskoi nauki v xix stoletii,” Otechestvennaia istoriia 4, pp. 121–128; 2005, Russkaia istoricheskaia nauka 1880 g.–1905 g.: Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov i Moskovskaia shkola, trans. D. Toritsin, St Petersburg; Zenonas Norkus, 1996, “Historismus und Historik in Rußland (1865– 1933),” Historismus in den Kulturwissenschaften: Geschichtskonzepte, historische Einschätzungen, Grundlagenprobleme, eds. O.G. Oexle & J. Rüsen, Köln, pp. 369–386. 62 Cf. P.N. Miliukov, 2006, Glavnye techeniia russkoi istoricheskoi mysli, Moscow (first edition 1896), pp. 11f. On Karamzin’s historical writing, see also Joseph L. Black, 1975, Nicholas Karamzin and Russian Society in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Russian Political and Historical Thought, Toronto, pp. 99–128; Volkmar Dietsch, 1981, “Interdependenzen von historischem Diskurs und Geschichtskonzeption: N.A. Polevojs ‘Istorija russkogo naroda’ und ‘Kljatva pri grobe Gospodnem’ im Kontext der zeitgenössischen Geschichtsschreibung,” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 28, pp. 17–204, pp. 65–72 (=“Karamzins Geschichtauffassung”); Ulrike Brinkjost, 2000, Geschichte und Geschichten: Ästetischer und historiographischer Diskurs bei N.M. Karamzin (Slavistische Beiträge 390), Munich, pp. 143–208. 63 Black, 1975, p. 99.

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government that had conditioned its well-being. To use Frank Ankersmit’s terminology, this is the historian Karamzin’s “substantialism.” Substantialism corresponds to natural-law philosophy, where “reality is made up of entities essentially remaining the same in the course of time.”64 As in Ankersmit’s paradigmatic example, Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789)—“that undisputed chef d’oeuvre of Enlightenment historical writing”—Karamzin’s history is a narrative without beginning or end, as well as without incisive caesuras: “The permanent presence of the unchanging substance excludes origins, terminations, and radical discontinuities.”65 By defining Russia in this way, Karamzin remained in agreement with other eighteenth-century Russian historians, to whom the justification as well as idealisation of autocracy was a major concern. Cynthia Hale Whittaker points out that in this age, “Russians wrote history en philosophe, which demanded the formulation of an idea of progress, the demonstration of secular causation, and the display of interpretive sweep and didactic intent.”66 The idea of progress indicates that they were not reluctant to recognise change. The accomplishments of Peter the Great were in general acknowledged and praised. However, their main purpose was to guide progress by means of examples, not to document it in the past in terms of development. Mikhail Lomonosov’s (1711–1765) progressive history was first and foremost cyclical, since its fortunes “rose and fell depending on the strength of dynastic leadership. Each stage arose from the ashes of the previous, more glorious than before.”67 Vasilii Tatishchev (1686–1750), similarly, sought to demonstrate that autocracy was the most “rational” and thus “natural” form of government in Russia. It would warrant stability, grandeur and progress in Russia at all times.68 And finally, Karamzin would represent Russia’s past as a cyclical movement, “a pendulum-like pattern of times of strength, decline, and the resurgence to a stronger, more 64 F.R. Ankersmit, 1995a, “Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis,” History and Theory 34 (3), pp. 143–161, p. 146. See also Georg G. Iggers, 1995b, “Comments on F.R. Ankersmit’s Paper ‘Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis’,” ibidem, pp. 162–167; F.R. Ankersmit, 1995b, “Reply to Professor Iggers,” ibidem, pp. 168–173. Thaden, 2004, largely accepts Ankersmit’s view, and his observations on Karamzin vs. Polevoi are “Ankersmitian,” cf. below. 65 Ankersmit, 1995a, p. 148. 66 Cynthia Hyle Whittaker, 1996, “The Idea of Autocracy among EighteenthCentury Russian Historians,” Russian Review 55 (2), pp. 149–171, p. 152. 67 Whittaker, 1996, p. 158. 68 Cf. Whittaker, 1996, p. 159.

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highly developed form.”69 For each time the cycle is repeated, Russian autocracy is improved. The first truly critical reaction to Karamzin’s conception of Russian history appears to have been an article published by Nikolai Polevoi (1796–1846) in 1829.70 Polevoi’s criticism, as Thaden suggests, is the first formulation of historicist ideas in Russia.71 Karamzin’s main fault, according to Polevoi, was precisely to see the Russian state as present throughout Russian history. The “forms of history,” Polevoi believes, “are endlessly diverse.”72 Karamzin, however, “does not take note of differences.”73 Polevoi presents the reader with a survey of Russian history that is intended to be more receptive of significant differences. It begins with the meeting of “awesome pirates,” i.e. the “terrible Normans,” with the half-savage tribes of Slavs and Finns. With time this meeting results in the peculiar feudalism of the early East Slavic principalities. Subsequent events such as the introduction of Christianity or the Mongol invasions represented further changes in the course of Russian history. The despotism of Ivan the Terrible and the Time of Troubles inspired the awakening of a national spirit, out of which emerged the first formation worthy of the designation “state”: the Romanov dynasty. With Peter the Great Russia becomes a European state.74 Polevoi even attempted to write a History of the Russian People in accordance with these ideas. The work published in 1830 was dedicated to the German historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831), and its introduction repeats several ideas from his Karamzin article. Its title is similar to that of Karamzin, only that “state” is replaced by “people.” The main thing for Polevoi, however, was not this replacement in itself (though Karamzin’s ignoring of the “people” was also seen as a fault), but the fact that a proper Russian state came into being only with the Romanovs. The relatively modern Russian state represents, according 69 Black, 1975, p. 102. See also Ostrowski, 1990, pp. 217f, who uses the metaphor “smile curve” for this cyclical pattern. 70 On Polevoi, see Dietsch, 1981. 71 Cf. Thaden, 2004. Here Thaden finds support for the juxtaposition of Enlightenment with historicism in Ankersmit, 1995a. In his monograph of 1999, however, he stressed continuity to a greater extent. 72 N.A. Polevoi, “Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo. Sochinenie N.M. Karamzina,” N.A. Polevoi & Ks.A. Polevoi, 1990, Literaturnaia kritika: Stat’i i retsenzii 1825–1842, eds. V.G. Berezinaia & I.N. Sukhikh, Leningrad, pp. 32–52, p. 39. 73 Polevoi, 1990, p. 45. 74 Cf. Polevoi, 1990, pp. 44f.

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to Polevoi, only a phase in the more pervasive history of the Russian people. The forms of government have thus been continually changing, while the “Russian people” is the category that provides Polevoi’s narrative with coherence. Polevoi’s ideas for a new historiography thus aim at the “historicization of the substance,” to return to Ankersmit’s terminology, by presenting us with “a set of statements with different subject-terms.”75 The main challenge for Polevoi and historicist thought in general becomes, by implication, to achieve a coherent diachrony. Ankersmit’s central point is that coherence (Zusammenhang) had to be made in the texts; historicist writing had to construct narrative substances. A narrative substance is “more” than all the individual statements; it is an intelligible whole that is projected onto the individual entities in order to guarantee their coherence. The historicists themselves referred to this whole as the historische Idee and believed it to be an entelechy present in the past, which had to be “found.”76 Characteristic of historicism was a “derhetoricizing” (Ankersmit) of the inherited traditions of Enlightenment historiography in favour of “mere presentation.” The historicists rejected the rules of classicism and tried to create a style that was believed to be appropriate to the field under description. The moralism and didacticism characteristic of Enlightenment historiography, in which the author’s tone became evident, gave way to a discourse free of judgements of this kind. The “eigentlich” in Ranke’s oft-quoted “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” may be understood as a general critique of measuring the past from the perspective of the present, so widespread among his Enlightenment predecessors.77 According to Friedrich Meinecke’s classic study of 1936, historicism represented a rejection of the Enlightenment belief

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Ankersmit, 1995a, p. 152. See also Ankersmit, 1983, pp. 96ff. 77 On this process, see Peter Hanns Reill, 1996, “Aufklärung und Historismus: Bruch oder Kontinuität?” Historismus in den Kulturwissenschaften: Geschichtskonzepte, historische Einschätzungen, Grundlagenprobleme, eds. O.G. Oexle & J. Rüsen, Köln, pp. 45–68; Horst Walter Blanke, 1996, “Aufklärungshistorie und Historismus: Bruch und Kontimuität,” ibidem, pp. 69–97; Gerrit Walther, 1996, “Der ‘gedrungene’ Stil: Zum Wandel der historiographischen Sprache zwischen Aufklärung und Historismus,” ibidem, pp. 99–116. On the dissolution of the didactic topos Historia Magistra Vitae at the end of the eighteenth century, see Reinhart Koselleck, 1967, “Historia Magistra Vitae: Über die Auflösung des Topos im Horizont neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte,” Natur und Geschichte: Karl Löwith zum 70. Geburtstag, eds. H. Braun & M. Riedel, Stuttgart, pp. 196–219. 76

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in universal norms common to all periods and all people, and called instead for a focus on individuality or uniqueness and on the development of this individual entity in the study of its history.78 Historicism in this sense means that a phenomenon worthy of being a subject of historical representation—a nation, a culture, but first and foremost in the nineteenth century, the state—is always unique and can only be adequately understood in its becoming, as it unfolds, i.e. “historically.” To historicism, “a meaningful interpretation or adequate evaluation of any historical event involves seeing it as part of a stream of history.”79 To be sure, “derhetoricizing” is an illusion, and what became particularly characteristic of historicist historiography was the construction of narrative substances, or simply the use of story as narrative form. Whereas some kind of narrativity is implicit in virtually all forms of historical writing,80 historicism tends, to use a distinction put forward by Hayden White, to “narrativize” reality, i.e. “to impose upon it a form of story.” The distinction made here is “between a discourse that openly adopts a perspective that looks out on the world and reports it [i.e. to narrate, KJM] and a discourse that feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story [i.e. to narrativize, KJM].”81 Although White does not associate narrativisation with any specific period or names, I believe that it applies in particular to historicist writing, as he himself had analysed it in his Metahistory of 1973.82 Moreover, such narrativisation, or emplotment, presupposes the prefiguration of the past as possessing a development typical of dramas 78 Friedrich Meinecke, 1959, Werke, vol. 3: Die Entstehung des Historismus, eds. H. Herzfeld et al., Munich, p. 2: “Der Kern des Historismus besteht in der Ersetzung einer generalisierenden Betrachtung geschichtlich-menschlicher Kräfte durch eine individualisierende Betrachtung”; p. 5: “Als Entwicklungsstufe des abendländischen Geistes also wollen wir den Hergang seiner Entstehung darstellen. Denn entwickelnde und individualisierende Denkweise gehören unmittelbar zusammen. Im Wesen der Individualität, der des Einzelmenschen wie der ideellen und realen Kollektivgebilde, liegt es, daß sie sich nur durch Entwicklung offenbart.” 79 Maurice Mandelbaum, 1971, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in NineteenthCentury Thought, Baltimore & London, p. 43 (italics added). 80 Cf. Kellner, 1987, p. 12; Fulsås, 1989, p. 47. 81 White, 1981, p. 3. 82 Cf. White, 1973, p. 143: “And, in fact, that ‘historism’ of which Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt are now recognized to have been equally representative can be characterized in one way as simply the substitution of emplotment for argument as an explanatory strategy. When, in the manner of Ranke, they purported to be simply ‘telling what actually happened’ and to be explaining the past by telling its ‘story’, they were all explicitly embracing the conception of explanation by description but were actually practicing the art of explanation by emplotment.”

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and narratives about human fate. History, according to this view, is not only a teleologically limited process of organic growth, but above all a scene of dramatic reversals: the rise and decline, strength and weakness, perfection and failure of nations, states, or cultures.83 This kind of metaphorisation based on the individual human being is clearly present in Meinecke’s definition of historicism as a representation of the past with emphasis on “individuality” and “development.”84 A seminal figure in the history of historicism is Herder, to whom “the nations, too, possess the characteristics of individuality to a greater extent than individual persons.”85 Polevoi’s history has generally been considered unsuccessful, and later historians did not follow his attempt.86 The historicism that emerged in Russia remained—just like German historicism—preoccupied more with the “state” than the “people,” while at the same time it fully acknowledged that the form of government had been constantly subject to change. The most common designation for what is described here as historicism is thus the so-called “state school” of Russian historiography.87 In the final decades before the Revolution, it was referred to as the “juridical school,” a term introduced by Miliukov in 1886 to describe the scholarship of Konstantin Kavelin (1818–1885), Boris Chicherin (1828–1904), Vasilii Sergeevich (1832–1911) and Sergei Solovev (1820–1879). Later, the prerevolutionary Marxist historian Boris Syromiatnikov proposed labelling it the “state school.” This became the preferred term in Soviet scholarship and has remained so in Russia today.88

83 Cf. Narve Fulsås, 1990, “National-Historical Synthesis as a Function of Narrative ‘Emplotment’ in J.E. Sars’ ‘Udsigt’,” Die Hanse und Nordeuropa: Handel—Politik— Kultur: Synthesekonzepte in der Geschichtsschreibung: Bericht über das 4. deutschnorwegische Historikertreffen in Berlin, Mai 1989, Oslo, pp. 122–138, p. 127. 84 On the human metaphor in historicism, see Alexander Demandt, 1978, Metaphern für Geschichte: Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historisch-politischen Denken, Munich, pp. 72–79 (=“Das Geschichte als Entwicklungsprozeß im Historismus”). 85 Iggers, 1968, p. 38. 86 Cf. David B. Saunders, 1984, “The Political Ideas of Russian Historians,” The Historical Journal 27 (3), pp. 757–771, p. 760. 87 For an introduction in English, see Joseph L. Black, 1973, “The ‘State School’ Interpretation of Russian History: A Re-Appraisal of its Genetic Origins,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 21, pp. 509–530. 88 See for instance R.A. Kireeva, 2004, Gosudarstvennaia shkola: Istoricheskaia kontseptsiia K.D. Kavelina i B.N. Chicherina (Natsiia i kul’tura: Novye issledovaniia), Moscow. On the history of the term, see Gary M. Hamburg, 1999, “Inventing the ‘State School’ of Historians, 1840–1995,” Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Pro-

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The concept of the “state school,” however, is misleading in that it suggests that the state had been existent throughout Russian history, which was precisely what they rejected. According to Gary Hamburg, “what bound together Kavelin, Solov’ev, Chicherin, Sergeevich, and Gradovskii was not the conviction that the state was the ‘fundamental creative element of history and its motive force’, but a scholarly interest in certain questions about Russian development.”89 Since this includes above all the study of Russia’s various political institutions in the past, Hamburg proposes describing it either as political history—in contrast to the dynastic history of Karamzin and the socio-economic history of the late nineteenth century—or as the liberal current in Russian historiography. I believe, however, in agreement with the studies by Thaden, that historicism is an equally appropriate alternative that is not in conflict with Hamburg’s description. What is “historicist” about these historians is precisely their emphasis on historical development, as evident in Kavelin’s article “A Look at the Juridical Way of Life in Ancient Russia” (1847). His theoretical points recall those of Polevoi mentioned above. Our history presents a gradual change of forms, not their repetition; consequently, it contains development—not like in the East, where everything has so far repeated itself almost identically from the very beginning, and if from time to time something new appeared, then it died out or developed as a result of European initiative. In this sense we are a European people, capable of perfection, of development; we do not like to repeat ourselves or to stand on the same spot for centuries on end.90

The essence of the Russian pre-Petrine development, Kavelin continues, is an enigma that has so far remained unsolved; herein lies the secret meaning of Russian history. Consequently, the task of the new historical science is to solve this riddle. It should represent Russian history as a developing organism (razvivaiushchiisia organizm), a living whole, penetrated by one spirit, by the same principles (nachala). Its manifestations should be understood as diverse

fession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, ed. T. Sanders, Armonk & London, pp. 98–117. 89 Hamburg, 1999, p. 109. 90 K.D. Kavelin, 1989, “Vzgliad na iuridicheskii byt drevnei Rossii,” Nash umstvennyi stroi: Stat’i po filosofii russkoi istorii i kul’tury (Iz istorii otechestvennoi filosofskoi mysli), ed. V.K. Kantor, Moscow, pp. 11–67, p. 13 (italics in original).

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Again we encounter the combination of difference and diversity, on the one hand, and unity on the other, where the latter is what makes the historical field the subject of a coherent narrative. This dual belief in diversity and unity is a distinguishing feature of historicist thought. Kavelin finds it useless to compare Russian history to the history of other peoples in order to find the “key to the right view of Russian history.” However, as indicated in the first quotation, he is ambiguous here, since he also proclaims that “we are a European people.” In fact, this ambiguity is found in much Russian nineteenth-century historical writing. To use the terminology of Meinecke, it appears that development was a more important category than individuality. In contrast to German historicism, Russian nineteenth-century historians believed in a common, but not uniform, universal history.92 Development was assumed to contain certain “nomothetical” features, an idea that positions Russian historicism at the intersection between German historicism and French and English positivism (Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer).93 As observed by Terence Emmons: In Russia, the classic Enlightenment belief that the story of mankind has a single plot, and that men are everywhere basically the same, survived the challenge of Romanticism in the second quarter of the nineteenth century intact and was still something like an article of faith among professional historians of the late nineteenth century. For the Westernizing intelligentsia as a whole, liberal and radical, reformist and revolutionary, the belief in progress and Russia’s European destiny, their rejection of the idea of Russian “exceptionalism,” depended on an idea of universal history.94

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Kavelin, 1989, p. 15. Cf. Thaden, 1999, p. 179: “Solov’ev by no means insisted on the importance of the individuality of Russian historical development in the manner of the Slavophiles or Germans historicists.” 93 According to R.G. Collingwood, 1946, The Idea of History, ed. T.M. Knox, Oxford, p. 131, there was a marked opposition between these two currents: “nineteenth-century historiography [i.e. German in particular, KJM] accepted the first part of the positivist programme, the collection of facts, even if it declined the second, the discovery of laws.” 94 Terence Emmons, 2003, “The Problem of ‘Russia and the West’ in Russian Historiography (with Special Reference to M.I. Rostovtsev and P.N. Miliukov),” The Cultural Gradient: The Transmission of Ideas in Europe, 1789–1991, eds. C. Evtuhov & S. Kotkin, Lanham, Md., pp. 95–108, p. 98. 92

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A clear example in this respect is Solovev’s History of Russia from the Earliest Times in twenty nine volumes, the first of which appeared in 1851. Solovev believed in the existence of “laws” common to all nations that govern the course of history, and that these “laws” were first and foremost the stages of social organisation through which the history of every society and state had to pass. The primary stage consists of the clan (rod) and clan life (rodovoi byt), and is in turn succeeded by the emergence of a militia (druzhina), which challenges the dominance of the clan. The third phase is the creation of a state or “a state principle” (pravitel’stvennoe nachalo).95 What has been characteristic of Russian history, is that the last transition happened relatively late in Russia. In Ana Siljak’s paraphrase of Solovev, “Russian history was thus the struggle to conquer both the clan and druzhina principle in government and society, and the struggle was not an easy one.”96 Solovev’s notion of world history, i.e. of an historical structure common to all nations, was indebted above all to Hegel and Guizot. It was Solovev’s fundamental conviction that Russia was an organic European country, and it became a major task for him to demonstrate that it was an integral part of European history. However, as Mark Bassin points out, he was also faced with the task of demonstrating “exactly what had gone wrong in the development of the national organism, which meant identifying that factor or factors in Russian history that had obstructed it from following the normal evolutionary course of the other European states.”97 For how could the “laws of history,” which in principle were uniform, produce such different results? Solovev found the answer in geography: “the open and empty spaces of the East European plain insured that constant movement and resettlement would be fundamental characteristics of the society that developed here.”98 When Solovev defined the history of Russia as one of colonisation, this was meant to explain why the transition to the more complex level of state took place so relatively late. The

95 Cf. Ana Siljak, 1999, “Christianity, Science, and Progress in Sergei M. Solov’ev’s History of Russia,” Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession of Writing History in a Multinational State, ed. T. Sanders, Armonk & London, pp. 215–238, pp. 224– 227. 96 Siljak, 1999, p. 227. 97 Mark Bassin, 1993, “Turner, Solov’ev, and the ‘Frontier Hypothesis’: The Nationalist Signification of Open Spaces,” The Journal of Modern History 65 (3), pp. 473–511, p. 490. 98 Bassin, 1993, p. 498.

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“curse” of these empty spaces was that Russia remained on a quasisedentary level for a longer period than the peoples in the West. Thus it was above all geographical factors which retarded development and progress in Russia, as compared to Western Europe, and which temporarily separated Russia from the West. The idea of retardation reoccurs in Miliukov’s Outlines of the History of Russian Culture, though in the first edition of 1896 his main task was to explain the “complete peculiarity” (sovershennoe svoeobrazie) of Russia’s past and present, on the basis of his fundamental conviction that Russia belonged to Europe and was subject to the same law of progress.99 As Miliukov saw it, the reasons for Russia’s exceptionality were above all lack of economic development and sparse population, due, in turn, to geographical factors as well as to external enemies. As a consequence, the state had come to be the creator of society, from the top down, in contrast to how this relationship had developed in Western Europe. As argued by Melissa K. Stockdale, the state as a creator of society was, according to Miliukov, the single most important fact of Russian history.100 In the edition of the Outlines published in exile in the 1930s, Miliukov came to stress the unity of Russia and the West even more strongly. Now he argued that Russia passed through the same stages as other European countries, only more slowly. He modified the topdown thesis of state versus society and reformulated the relationship of Russia to Europe in even more moderate terms by replacing the notion of “peculiarity” (svoeobrazie) with “slowness” (medlennost’). By implication, there is a continuum and no divide between Russia and Europe.101 Provoked by the Eurasians’ attempt to see him as a theoretician of “Russian peculiarity,” Miliukov, in his new introduction to the third part of the Outlines (1930, this part was published first), stresses “commonality” (obshchnost’) as being equally as important as “peculiarity,” and claims furthermore that “Europeanism” is inherent in Russian “developmental space” (mestorazvite), thereby refuting Eurasianism by means of its own concept.102 In the foreword to the first 99

Cf. Emmons, 1999b, p. 166. Cf. Melissa K. Stockdale, 1999, “The Idea of Development in Miliukov’s Historical Thought,” Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, ed. T. Sanders, Armonk & London, pp. 262–285, p. 275. 101 Cf. Emmons, 1999b, pp. 175ff. 102 Cf. P.N. Miliukov, 1930–1964, Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul’tury, vol. 3: Natsionalizm i evropeizm, Paris, p. 6. 100

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volume, the first part of which appeared in 1937 and which required the most extensive reworking (part two appeared posthumously in 1964), Miliukov noted that in earlier editions he had taken a “conciliatory position” between the Slavophile and Westerniser stances, while at the same time stressing peculiarity more sharply than similarity. In 1937, he no longer saw any reason for doing this.103 In addition to the attitude towards him of the Eurasianists, Miliukov’s shift of emphasis was provoked by Stalin’s “revolution from above,” which he saw as a regression that was clearly at odds with Russian development up until this point.104 The belief that Russia was progressing in the same direction as Western European countries was shared by Solovev and Miliukov. However, the forms in which they represented their views were different. The historian, according to Solovev in his introduction to the first volume of his History, “should not divide or split Russian history into separate parts, periods, but unite them and look principally for the connection between phenomena, for the immediate succession of forms.”105 History, to Solovev, was the “the narrative of continuous development, improvement, and ‘progress’.”106 This belief is reflected in the strictly chronological and at times even mechanical composition of the work.107 Solovev’s linear, epic narrative presents us, to borrow a formulation from Hayden White, with a discourse that “feigns to make the world speak itself and speak itself as a story.” Whereas Solovev’s discourse narrativises the material in the form of a story, Miliukov narrates it by providing an account that examines different fields separately. He divided his three-volume work into material culture (socio-economic factors, political organisation), spiritual culture, and the emergence of a “national idea.” His separation of state from society marks a contrast to the historicist idea of an organic relationship between state and nation.108 Miliukov’s work was founded on a positivist programme where history was “explained” by means of the construction of causal connections, and not “understood” by means

103 104 105

Miliukov, 1930–1964, 1 (Part One [1937]), p. 29. Cf. Emmons, 1999b, p. 175. S.M. Solov’ev 1959–1966, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, vol. 1, Moscow,

p. 55. 106 107 108

Siljak, 1999, pp. 216f. Cf. Thaden, 1999, pp. 186f. Cf. Bohn, 1997, p. 370.

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of an epic narrative.109 On this level, it was anti-narrative. However, it presupposes the fundamental narrative idea that Russia was progressing towards becoming a European state. It relies on a narrative understanding of history.110 The dominant figure between Solovev and Miliukov was Kliuchevskii, pupil of the former, teacher of the latter. In contrast to both his predecessor and successor, however, Kliuchevskii tones down the importance of universal history and universal laws. He reformulated the relationship of Russia to Europe by suggesting that Russia was European because of their common cultural origin, not their common historical goal. Hence the primary purpose of Russian history was not to imitate the West. In his narrative of Russian history Kliuchevskii abandons, by implication, the model of unilinear progress and retardation developed by his teacher. Instead, his historiography emerges as more in keeping with the two historicist principles—development and individuality—as is foreshadowed in the second lecture of his course: And if you are able to acquire from my presentation, however full of deficiencies, if only the most general features of the image of the Russian people (obraz russkogo naroda) as a historical personality (istoricheskaia lichnost’), I will consider the purpose of my course achieved.111

A people’s “personality,” Kliuchevskii continues, is the main theme (osnovnoi predmet) when studying its history. By conceiving of the history of the Russian people in terms of a human personality, he opens up for individualising the historical development to a greater extent than his predecessors, and his history is ultimately the dramatic history of the Russian people (russkii narod), of its growth, withering, and possible future recovery. Since the course of Russian history according to Kliuchevskii is unique, colonisation also assumes a function different from that which it had in Solovev. Colonisation to Kliuchevskii was not the process by which Russia both adapted to and deviated from universal schemes.

109

Cf. Bohn, 1997, p. 368. This wording is taken from Paul Ricoeur’s reading of the anti-narrative work of Fernand Braudel, cf. Ricoeur, 1984, p. 230: “the history that is the least narrative in its style of writing nevertheless continues to rely on narrative understanding.” See also the section “Historiography and Narrativity” in the Introduction. 111 V.O. Kliuchevskii, 1955–1959, Sochineniia v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 1, Moscow, p. 41. 110

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Rather than relating it to the development of the Russian state, he sees colonisation as the fundamental vehicle of early Russian history that testified to the unique character or “personality” of the Russian people. Characteristically, Kliuchevskii redefines the colonisation process in a more positive way as a process that eventually enabled the emergence of Russian nationhood—as a commonly shared feeling among Russians for their own land—which in turn made possible the creation of the powerful, Muscovite state. Subsequently, however, the Russian people as coloniser of the Russian land is replaced by the powerful new Russian state—Muscovy—as the main agent of Russian history. The people disappear from the scene: “The state swelled and the people withered.”112 Colonisation is replaced by serfdom. This is the tragedy of Kliuchevskii’s Russia. However, out of this tragic development emerges the task of the addressee to restore Russian nationhood in the present through civil society.113 Kliuchevskii’s innovations in the field of social history, including his division of Russian history into four distinct periods, which are examined mainly from a synchronic perspective, have tended to overshadow the way in which he recreates an overall coherence in Russian history by seeing it as a dialectical process between the Russian people and the Russian state. Hence it appears that Kliuchevskii, to a larger extent than the other Russian historians of Imperial Russia discussed above, was an historicist in that he attempted to represent Russian history as a coherent, unique process of gradual development. Interestingly, Miliukov ascribed his previous concern with “Russian peculiarity” to the impact of his teacher—“the most original (svoeobraznyi) among Russian historians.”114 True, Kliuchevskii did not reject the notion of world history altogether, but reformulated it as a universal process of gradual diversification. The four authors analysed here, in turn, went even further in rejecting the adaptation of universal schemes to Russian history, at least secular schemes of unilinear progress (the notion of a Christian world history, in contrast, is maintained, though in different ways). They 112

Kliuchevskii, 1955–1959, 3, p. 12. For a further analysis of Kliuchevskii’s history of Russia as well as further references to literature on Kliuchevskii, see my forthcoming article “Russian History, Western Ideas: The Historical Vision of Vasilii Kliuchevskii,” to appear in The Borders of Europe: Hegemony, Aesthetics and Border Poetics, eds. S. Lægreid et al., Aarhus (Mjør, 2011b). 114 Miliukov, 1930–1964, 1 (Part One), p. 29. 113

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are deeply convinced of the existence of an indigenous Russian history, a belief they also shared with other émigré historians such as Georgii Vernadskii. In contrast to the culturosophical discourse as it appears for instance in Slavophile publitsistika, however, the overall tendency of these four writers is to adapt to relatively stable norms of scholarly writing. They situate themselves first and foremost in the pre-revolutionary academic tradition rather than in any non-academic one. Despite certain subjectivist tendencies in their texts, the works of Fedotov, Florovskii and Zenkovskii in particular, and less so Berdiaev, generally contain the features of serious academic historical writing (quotations, bibliographical references, “source criticism”), and claim they should be read as such. And this is indeed how they have largely been received, ever since their publication. At the same time, Fedotov, Florovskii, Berdiaev and Zenkovskii all provide openings for thematising the meaning and value of the past in relation to the tasks of the present. While questions related to national identity are fundamental also to academic nineteenth-century historiography,115 such aspects are discussed more openly in the four works examined here. In his description of the “historiographical operation,” Michel de Certeau pays particular attention to the role of the social place (lieu social) where history is written. “All historiographical research is articulated over a socioeconomic, political and cultural place of production.”116 As de Certeau sees it, historiography is a social practice rooted in a particular situation, where a central role is played by a group or a milieu, by a “we,” which is the central addressee of the historical work.117 Since the practice of writing history is rooted in a place, practices necessarily differ according to time and place. Within this place, in turn, we find a set of procedures (analytical practices) and the construction of texts (writing).118

115

Cf. Jaeger & Rüsen, 1992, p. 42. Michel de Certeau, 1988, “The Historiographical Operation,” The Writing of History, trans. T. Conley, New York, pp. 56–113, p. 58. 117 Cf. de Certeau, 1988, p. 63. 118 Cf. de Certeau, 1988, p. 57: “On a necessary limited scale, envisaging history as an operation would be equivalent to understanding it as the relation between a place (a recruitment, a milieu, a profession or business, etc.), analytical procedures (a discipline), and the construction of a text (a literature). That would be to admit that it is part of the ‘reality’ with which it deals, and that this reality can be grasped ‘as a human activity’, or ‘as a practice’.” 116

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Russia Abroad was not a strictly scientific community, like most of the places analysed by de Certeau. Moreover, the works examined here are not “professional” to the same extent as those of Solovev, Kliuchevskii and Miliukov. This was not only because Fedotov was the only trained historian among them (the others were philosophers), but also because they did not work within—and their works did not grow out of—normally functioning academic institutions. Their “place” (de Certeau) was that of exile. Russia Abroad generated a distinct practice that was guided in its case by a commonly shared quest to formulate and reformulate Russia. More specifically, while Russia Abroad did have a large number of academic institutions, these are necessarily of a different kind from what we usually understand by these. In exile, the Russian émigrés created their own institutions, which they themselves inhabited. Whereas Fedotov, Florovskii, Berdiaev, Zenkovskii and several others from among their fellow émigrés had emerged as lay theologians in pre-revolutionary Russia, and had developed their own ideas of Orthodoxy in opposition to the official teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church, they would now be in positions where they could cherish their own legacy at the very centre of this new émigré culture. They were able to determine the profile of important arenas such as the St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute, while this institute provided a framework that enabled them, under the burden of exile, to retain the freedom to base their work on a feeling for Russian spirituality, “to shape the Orthodoxy of the time and place.”119 The different and conflicting ways in which they shaped this Orthodoxy, however, remain to be explored.

119

Hackel, 2006, p. 553.

PART TWO

READINGS

CHAPTER THREE

GEORGII FEDOTOV AND THE SAINTS OF ANCIENT RUSSIA Georgii Petrovich Fedotov (1886–1951) began studying history in exile. In 1906, he was expelled from Russia for a two-year period as a result of his social-democratic activities. During the following years he actively participated in seminars and lectures on philosophy and history at the universities of Berlin and Jena.1 In 1908, he returned to St Petersburg, where he studied under the historians Nikolai Kareev (1850–1931) and Ivan Grevs (1860–1941). In particular the latter’s courses on the cultural history of late antiquity and the Middle Ages are believed to have had a decisive impact on Fedotov as well as on his fellow students and later fellow émigrés, including Petr Bitsilli (1879–1953) and Lev Karsavin (1882–1952).2 Fedotov specialised not in Russian, but in West European medieval history, although he is far better known today for his studies of early Russian culture. In 1911 he published an article on Augustine, on whom he had written an examination thesis the previous year entitled “St Augustine’s Confessions as an Historical Source” (unpublished). Having received his master’s degree in 1914, he began work on a dissertation about the Merovingian period. The work remained unfinished. Later publications in the same field before his emigration included a monograph on Abelard (1924). During the First World War and especially after the revolutions of 1917 Fedotov embarked on an intellectual and religious reorientation, without abandoning, however, his socialist orientation. Important in

1

For a biographical account of Fedotov’s life, see the memoirs of his wife, Elena Fedotova: E.N. Fedotova, 1967, “Georgii Petrovich Fedotov (1886–1951),” G.P. Fedotov, Litso Rossii, Paris, pp. i–xxxiv. See also Danièle Beaune, 1990, “Biographie de G.P. Fedotov,” G.P. Fedotov: Ce qui demeure . . . (Reflexions sur la revolution russe), Aix-enProvence, pp. 9–50, and S.S. Bychkov, “Georgii Petrovich Fedotov (biograficheskii ocherk),” G.P. Fedotov, 1996–, Sobranie sochinenii v dvenatsati tomakh, vol. 1, ed. S.S. Bychkov, Moscow, pp. 5–50. 2 For an account of this milieu, see N.P. Antsiferov, 1992, Iz dum o bylom: Vospominaniia, Moscow, pp. 155ff; Danièle Beaune-Gray, 2002, “Vers une histoire des mentalités,” La geste russe: Comment les Russes écrivent-ils l’histoire au xxe siécle, ed. M. Weinstein, Aix-en-Provence, pp. 329–344; B.S. Kaganovich, 2007, Russkie medievisty pervoi poloviny xx veka, St Petersburg.

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this respect was his participation in various “circles” (kruzhki) from 1918 onwards.3 Such circles were a central phenomenon of Russian intellectual life from the late eighteenth century onwards, until they were eventually banned in the 1930s. The traditional Russian intelligentsia circle, where members would gather in small groups mostly in the domestic sphere, for discussions on intellectual topics, may be regarded, as suggested by Barbara Walker, as communitas in Victor Turner’s sense. Antithetical to an institutional structure, communitas fosters “a spirit of humble egalitarianism among its members, who are bound together by intensely personal, spontaneous, unmediated ties, formed in mutual pursuit of a goal more ineffable than pragmatic.”4 In late Imperial Russia, intelligentsia circles “flourished at the fluid interstices of the regular order of society and a state that in many ways sought to prevent intelligentsia activity from impinging upon a formally recognized sphere.”5 Decisive to the formation of Fedotov’s new religious outlook in the post-revolutionary situation was his engagement in the circle “Resurrection” (Voskresenie), established in 1917. It grew out of the Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Society, which had ceased to exist after the Revolution.6 The circle was led by Aleksandr Meier (1875–1939) and Kseniia Polovtseva (1886–1948), and was later formed into a fraternity (bratsvo) called “Christ and Freedom” (Khristos i svoboda). By including Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox and Jews it displayed an ecumenical spirit especially in its early years, and was later closely related to the Bakhtin circle.7 The “Resurrection” members were responsible for the short-lived journal “Free Voices” (1918). Fedotov was its editor and published in the first of its only two published issues 3 Cf. Boris Anan’ich & Viktor Paneiakh, 1999, “The St. Petersburg School of History and Its Fate,” Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, ed. T. Sanders, Armonk & London, pp. 146–162, pp. 149ff. 4 Barbara Walker, 2005, Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture and Survival in Revolutionary Times, Bloomington, Ind., p. 9. The introductory chapter of this book provides an excellent introduction to the kruzhok phenomenon in Russian culture. 5 Walker, 2004, p. 10. 6 Cf. Jutta Scherrer, 1973, Die Petersburger religiös-philosophischen Vereinigungen: Die Entwicklung des religiösen Selbstverständnisses ihrer Intelligencija-Mitglieder (1901–1917) (Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 19), Wiesbaden. 7 For an account of the “Resurrection” circle and its affinity with Bakhtin, see Katarina Clark & Michael Holquist, 1984, Mikhail Bakhtin, Cambridge, Mass. & London, pp. 126ff.

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his essay “The Face of Russia,” which marked his turn towards Russian topics in his writing. Recognising the disintegration of his native land and culture, Fedotov creates a portrait of Russia where religious imagery centred on death and resurrection prevails throughout. To quote just one example: “We pledge to live for her resurrection, merge our most sacred ideals with her image.”8 The late 1910s and early 1920s were marked, however, not only by a (re)turn to Christianity (with which Fedotov had been brought up). In this period Fedotov also came under the influence of Oswald Spengler (1880–1936). He was by no means the only Russian intellectual to do so; on the contrary, Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918) and Preussianism and Socialism (1920), both of which contain reflections on Russia’s past and future, immediately elicited an overwhelming response in chaotic, post-revolutionary Russia. Already in 1922, a collection of essays entitled Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West appeared containing contributions by Fedor Stepun, Semen Frank (1877–1950), Nikolai Berdiaev, and Iakov Bukshpan (1887–1939).9 The influence of Spengler is particularly significant in the cases of Florovskii and Berdiaev, to which I will return in their respective chapters. As to Fedotov, who did not discuss Spengler’s ideas explicitly to the same extent, Danièle Beaune-Gray maintains that it was above all Spengler’s idea of the discontinuity of history that Fedotov found helpful, in particular for understanding the events that had recently taken place in Russia.10 It may be argued that Spengler’s writings brought about a revitalisation of the Slavophile idea of a separate way for Russia, an idea that could now be seen in relation to the new, post-revolutionary phase. In 1925, faced with a situation of increasing censorship and repression, Fedotov left the Soviet Union for Paris. He stayed in Paris until the outbreak of the Second World War, when he moved to the United States, where he lived and worked until his death in 1951. Only a year after his arrival in France, he was appointed professor at the St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, where he taught Latin, church

8

Fedotov, 1996–, 1, pp. 104–109 (“Litso Rossii”), p. 104. For a brief account of its publication and the reactions it provoked, see Finkel, 2007, pp. 125ff. 10 Cf. Beaune, 1990, p. 20. 9

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history, and hagiology. In 1943 he became professor at the St Vladimir Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York. While still in Russia he had published infrequently, due partly to the difficult political circumstances and increasing censorship; in exile, however, Fedotov became an extremely active writer and contributed extensively to the most significant Parisian émigré journals. In Paris, moreover, he published four monographs on various topics relating to the Russian past. The first, Saint Phillip, Metropolitan of Moscow (1928) analyses the metropolitan’s conflict with Ivan the Terrible. The description of the Tsar’s repressive reign is, as suggested by Marc Raeff, “obviously also a commentary on the contemporary scene that forced so many to suffer passively and in silence for their refusal to countenance the tyranny of dictators.”11 Saint Phillip was followed by Saints of Ancient Russia (1931), which I shall discuss in detail below, Reflections on the Russian Revolution (1933), and Spiritual Verses (1935), a book on popular Russian Christian belief from the sixteenth century onwards. In exile, Fedotov more or less abandoned the West European Middle Ages, with the exception of a few minor publications, and concentrated instead on Russian history and culture. A large proportion of his writings were the result of his teaching at the St Sergius Institute, but his profound preoccupation with the traditions of his native land cannot be explained only with reference to his profession. His patriotic sentiment, as noted above, was awakened during the First World War and the revolutions of 1917, events that to him meant the impending disintegration of his native land, and it developed further in exile. As Danièle Beaune-Gray argues, his feeling of “rootlessness” (déracinement) urged him to elaborate his national consciousness, for which the study of Russian history would provide the means for him to take root (s’enraciner) once again in his native culture.12 Fedotov’s concern with Russian history, a field to which he came in fact as a non-specialist, bears the undeniable mark of dissolution and dispersion, as well as of his attempt to overcome this tragic and traumatic situation.13 Fedotov

11

Raeff, 1990, p. 183. Cf. Danièle Beaune-Gray, 2003, “L’évolution de l’historien G.P. Fedotov en émigration: De l’historie du Moyen age latin à l’historie de la spiritualité russe,” Les historiens de l’émigration russe (Cahiers de l’émigration russe 7), ed. D. Beaune-Gray, Paris, pp. 106–120, p. 112. 13 Cf. Antoshchenko, 2003, p. 6. 12

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endeavours to write history in order to make exile meaningful, a history that assigns a particular mission to his émigré community. Culture, Creativity, Tragedy My discussion of Fedotov’s essay “Kliuchevskii’s Russia” in Chapter Two suggested that culture, according to Fedotov, is not merely one field among many accessible to historiography but one that has a particular value. According to Fedotov’s own perspective, the orientation towards culture is not horizontal (this would be Paul Veyne’s view) but vertical.14 It is a question of penetrating deeper into a nation’s historical as well as ontological substance. But what kind of substance is this; what are its main characteristics? Fedotov’s notion of culture is “humanistic” and normative. Culture consists of creativity and creative work (tvorchestvo), as well as of the “products” created by human beings. The importance of culture to Fedotov has been observed by several scholars, but it remains insufficiently examined.15 By the same token, one may look in vain for a thorough philosophical elaboration of this concept in Fedotov’s writings, although there are a few articles in which he refers to the philosophical and theological meanings of culture more explicitly, for example in “The Holy Spirit in Nature and Culture” (1932). Here Fedotov attempts a theological reflection on issues which, according to him, are mostly overlooked by theologians: nature and culture. Fedotov defines both as belonging to the sphere of the Holy Spirit and thus of divine inspiration. The Holy Spirit acts outside the Church, in nature and in culture, and inspires man’s creative work. “Culture is basically the activity of man—of man placed between God and the cosmos—but of man inspired by God to creative work (tvorchestvo). There are two eternal principles in culture: labour (trud) and inspiration (vdokhnovenie).”16 To my mind, Fedotov’s concept of culture expresses his own interpretation of traditional Orthodox anthropology, where the notion

14 Cf. M.G. Galakhtin, 2005, “Istoriia tragedii i tragediia istorii (istoriosofiia Georgiia Fedotova),” Filosofskie nauki 9, pp. 48–55; 10, pp. 59–72; Beaune-Gray, 2002, p. 332. 15 For an example of both tendencies, see V.V. Serbienko, 1991, “Opravdanie kul’tury: Tvorcheskii vybor G. Fedotova,” Voprosy filosofii 8, pp. 41–53. 16 Fedotov, 1996–, 2, pp. 232–244 (“O Sv. Dukhe v prirode i kul’ture”), p. 235.

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of the self is based on the idea of man created in God’s image and likeness, and where the Incarnation has enabled Christians to restore by imitating Christ their Godlikeness that was lost through the Fall. Moreover, the Fedotovian notion of culture bears some resemblance to Berdiaev’s idea of the creative act (tvorchestvo), the concept by means of which Berdiaev interpreted the Orthodox idea that human beings may restore their lost Godlikeness (see my next chapter). However, while Fedotov, too, uses tvorchestvo in relation to culture, there are significant differences between the two interpretations. First, Fedotov’s tvorchestvo has a more concrete character. Whereas Berdiaev stresses that it is the act itself, and not its results, that expresses the response to God, and that its results have first and foremost a symbolic character,17 Fedotov sees culture also as the domain in which past achievements are preserved. It is not only form but also content: it is the creation of something. In “On National Anger,” an article published in 1933, the year after “The Holy Spirit in Nature and Culture,” Fedotov defines culture as “concentrated drops (sgustki) of accumulated values”: it “slows down the bestialising process of godforsaken man, keeps him within the ethical, aesthetic bounds of human spirituality.”18 These values are both objects in themselves and objects testifying to the labour carried out in schools, libraries or monasteries, efforts of God-inspired labour that bring about the deification of mankind. Furthermore, the notion of trud, which is a fundamental principle in cultural creativity, emphasises its collective character. Fedotov’s introduction of a term that is at the same time central to socialist ideology, is by no means accidental, and I will return to this in my discussion of Fedotov’s reading of Feodosii of the Caves Monastery. The spiritual world, i.e. culture, is the “social sphere of spirit,” the “free harmony of personal, creative acts,” and not only “the depth of personal conscience or thought,” as he puts it in “The Social Question and Freedom” (1931).19 To summarise, these considerations suggest that culture, according to Fedotov, comprises the domain where individual humans and the whole of humanity encounter the Divine. Ultimately, cultural creativity expresses mankind’s response to God and his creation. This interpre17

Cf. Berdiaev, 1949, p. 233. For a comparison of Berdiaev with Fedotov in this respect, see O.I. Ivonina, 2000, Vremia svobody: Problema napravlennosti istorii v khristianskoi istoricheskoi mysli Rossii xix–serediny xx vv., Novosibirsk, pp. 285ff. 18 Fedotov, 1992, 2, pp. 41–49 (“O natsional’nom pokaianii”), p. 43. 19 Fedotov, 1992, 1, pp. 286–301 (“Sotsial’nyi vopros i svoboda”), p. 297.

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tation is confirmed by an illuminating remark in the introduction to Fedotov’s later work, The Russian Religious Mind (1946): I do not deny the supernatural, divine character of Christianity as a religion of revelation. But I believe that its realization begins with the human response to Grace. The history of Christianity is the history of this response; its culture is the culture of this experience. History and culture are, in essence, human.20

Nevertheless, culture is not simply humanity’s past and present achievements. The notion of culture is also central to Fedotov’s utopia. And while “culture” as discussed above is universal, there can be no doubt that the reason why this concept is elaborated and extended in a number of Fedotov’s texts is because of its relevance to the Russian future. Fedotov’s utopian dreams of a new Russian future find a model in the Russian past, above all in Kiev and, to a certain extent, also in Novgorod. To Fedotov Kiev represents a Christian socialist aristocratic theocracy, in which there is a harmonious balance between the princes, clergy and the popular assembly (veche). The task of Russian émigrés and later of the united Russian nation will be to restore this symbiosis.21 A concept Fedotov frequently uses in order to describe his utopia is Novyi grad, the New City. On the one hand, it refers to the journal Fedotov founded together with Fedor Stepun and Ilia Fondaminskii in 1931. More socially and politically oriented than Berdiaev’s The Way, the other leading religious émigré journal The New City devoted its pages not only to philosophical and religious problems, but also to social and economic topics. One of its goals was to outline a “third way” between capitalism and communism. The journal was closely associated with an émigré kruzhok simply known as Krug (of which the journal’s editors were prominent members), with the Russian Christian Student Movement, and in particular with the charitable works carried out by the movement known as Orthodox Action (Pravoslavnoe delo), lead by Elizaveta Skobtseva (Mother Maria). In opposition to the latter two, however, the journal, and Fedotov in particular, were more open to socialist ideas. “Social activism in a Christian socialist spirit, such was

20 G.P. Fedotov, 1946, The Russian Religious Mind: Kievan Christianity, Cambridge, Mass., p. xi. 21 Cf. Danièle Beaune, 1985, “Les idées de G.P. Fedotov dans les années 1930,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 26 (3–4), pp. 353–374, p. 359.

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the basic intellectual goal of the New City.”22 In proclaiming a Christian involvement with the outside world, Fedotov and his journal were carrying on a tradition in Russian liberal lay theology that had existed from Aleksandr Bukharev (1824–1871) onwards.23 On the other hand, Novyi grad refers, in particular in Fedotov’s own writings, to an earthly utopia, i.e. to the construction of a new society and culture here, both socialist and Christian. This earthly city is not some “Heavenly Jerusalem.” In general, Fedotov places such issues as the Last Days and eternity (eschatology) beyond the horizon of what human thought and efforts should devote themselves to. Instead, they should concentrate on cultural creativity here and now. As he writes in the article “Eschatology and Culture” (1938): “Our City is not yet that which the Revelation speaks of, and whoever refrains from contributing to the perfection or construction of this earthly city on the pretext of the expectation of that Jerusalem, is not with us, is not a member of the New City (novogradets).”24 At the same time, Fedotov was convinced that human creative feats would not perish with time but would form “bricks in the wall of the Eternal City.” The distinction between a terrestrial spiritual history (our human efforts) and Christian celestial world history (eschatology, revelation) that Fedotov makes here is also present in his discussion on the relationship between “Orthodoxy and Historical Criticism,” the title of an article he published in 1932. The idea he puts forward here is that historical criticism may serve a religious culture without abandoning its own critical methods, at least when it restricts itself to the tradition of the Church (predanie Tserkvi) and leaves out questions of faith, the mystery of the Trinity, or the divine nature of Christ. As the last point suggests, Fedotov is concerned with discriminating, almost in the manner of Kant, between what belongs to the historical discipline and what does not. In order to do so, he provides an unorthodox analogy: If one were to compare history with the theatre, then the ideal “theatre of human history” (theatrum historiae humanae) should be constructed like the medieval multidimensional theatre, where the action takes place simultaneously in three dimensions: in heaven, in hell, and on earth. The heaven, hell and earth of the medieval theatre correspond to holiness, sin and daily life (byt) in Christian history.25

22 23 24 25

Raeff, 1990, p. 153. On Russian liberal and/or lay theology, see Onasch, 1993, and Valliere, 2000. Fedotov, 1952, pp. 319–331 (“Eskhatologiia i kul’tura”), p. 320. Fedotov, 1996–, 2, pp. 219–231 (“Pravoslavie i istoricheskaia kritika”), p. 226.

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Daily life and institutions (uchrezhdeniia) form the field of the historical discipline. It develops, Fedotov suggests, in the “breaks” and “truces” that occur during the “tragic conflict between sin and grace.” The latter conflict, in turn, takes place over and above social life and is referred to as the “Christian Tragedy.” As observed by Mikhail Galakhtin, Fedotov uses the terms tragedy and tragic in different contexts. He perceives history as a tragedy (as exemplified by Saints of Ancient Russia) and refers to his own epoch, which is pervaded by catastrophic events, as “tragic.”26 The conflict between Grace and Sin appears to be a tragedy in yet another sense. However, the notion of tragedy is closely related to that of freedom: The Christian tragedy, Fedotov repeats, is that of the freedom of a human being, who makes an ethical choice which is never imposed upon him in advance or predetermined. But in his moral degradation too, in apostasy, in sin, God reserves for man the hope of salvation, and makes man’s sacrifice meaningful and religiously justified.27

A similar interrelationship between freedom, or rather free will, sin and grace is central to traditional Orthodox theology.28 To conceive of this relationship as a tragedy, however, is Fedotov’s own interpretation, but one which had also been suggested by other émigré philosophers (such as Florovskii and Berdiaev; see their respective chapters). How does this relate, then, to the writing of history? Fedotov’s analogy between the medieval theatre and the writing of history suggests that the tragic conflict that takes place outside of our daily lives should not be a subject for historiography, a principle that Fedotov finds had been observed by Russian nineteenth-century church historians, such as metropolitan Makarii (Mikhail Bulgakov, 1816–1882), Evgenii Golubinskii (1834–1912), Petr Znamenskii (1836–1917) and others. As a corollary, however, they have come to ignore the “content” of history: In their histories of the church we do not see the soul of history itself: spiritual life. Daily life and institutions, the political and cultural connections of the church absorb their attention. In this history we do not encounter the saints. Our age craves for a different, tragic perception of history.29

26 27 28 29

Cf. Galakhtin, 2005, p. 49. Galakhtin, 2005, p. 50. Cf. Timothy Ware, 1997, The Orthodox Church, Harmondsworth, pp. 221–225. Fedotov, 1996–, 2, p. 228.

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This statement repeats, on the one hand, the quest for a new cultural history as expressed in “Kliuchevskii’s Russia,” published the same year; on the other, it adds the notion of the tragic. But if the tragic dimension is to be included, this means that the distinctions initially drawn up by Fedotov have to be transgressed—and this is precisely what he claims the new cultural history must do. Thus it would seem that a history of spiritual culture should not only undertake to analyse literature, art, music and ideas, but also to see these efforts as expressions of what Fedotov refers to as the tragic conflict between grace and sin, i.e. of the encounters between the terrestrial and celestial spheres, between Man and the Divine—as well as the intended and unintended results of this meeting. In what way such a history might be written will be shown in my analysis of Saints of Ancient Russia, where Fedotov provides Russian cultural history with precisely such a tragic plot, which evolves from a new interpretation of Christianity—a “human response to Grace”—by the first Russian saints. To summarise this survey of Fedotov’s writings, we could say in very general terms that they deal extensively with the past (the meaning of Russian culture), the present (the task of the Russian emigration and contemporary political questions) and the future (the elaboration of utopian ideas and the ideal of a Christian socialism). In exile, Fedotov’s central project was to contribute to the revival of Russian culture in accordance with what he held to be its highest values, above all an allegedly unique Russian form of Christianity. Hence Fedotov’s thinking aims at synthesis on various levels, a project that creates tensions in his texts which may be problematic from a historian’s point of view but which may also prove to be generative of meaning. Both Fedotov’s fellow émigrés and later scholars have nevertheless noted possible conflicts and contradictions in his writings. Mark Vishniak (1882–1975), the editor of Contemporary Annals, notes in his memoirs that Fedotov from the very beginning of his exile “attracted attention as an outstanding stylist, with a huge erudition, often risky historical analogies, and original paradoxes.”30 Although Fedotov gradually simplified his style, his writings remained contradictory, according to Vishniak, and his opinion on a subject could change in the course of one and the same article.

30 M.V. Vishniak, 1993, Sovremennye zapiski: Vospominaniia redaktora, St Petersburg & Düsseldorf, p. 173.

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A similar point has been made by Danièle Beaune-Gray (previously Beaune), the scholar who has probably studied Fedotov’s work most thoroughly in the West. She wrote her dissertation on Fedotov (unpublished), later edited a translation of his writings on the Russian Revolution, and has also published numerous articles. In scrutinising Fedotov’s writings on the state, the church, socialism and freedom, she has identified confusing and contradictory elements which prevail in particular in his utopian treatment of these concepts. In these situations, a neglect of logical reasoning is made up for by rhetorical devices and a lively and sparkling style.31 In his discussion of Fedotov’s “Denken in Widersprüchen,” Dirk Uffelmann likewise notes a certain ambivalence in his teleological conception of history. On the one hand, it aims at historical contingency; on the other, it proclaims “freedom” as the ultimate goal of cultural history. His conception is thus both descriptive and normative, and he wavers between an historicist and an essentialist approach. His dependency on both historical facticity and philosophical and theological stringency suggests, according to Uffelmann, what Gregory Bateson has described as a “double bind.”32 Relevant in this context is also Jostein Børtnes’ discussion of the Fedotovian concept of kenoticism, which became particularly important in The Russian Religious Mind. Fedotov’s description of the early Russian saints (Feodosii, Boris and Gleb) as “kenotic” (which he claimed to be a specifically Russian trait) presents us, according to Børtnes, with the ideological reasoning of an early twentieth-century liberal theologian rather than that of the ancient Russian religious mind.33 Fedotov’s vision of the kenotic Christ and kenotic Russian saints comes closer to modern Protestant theology and even the Bible criticism of Ernst Renan and David Friedrich Strauss than to that of medieval Orthodoxy. In fact, it was from German Protestant theology 31 Cf. Beaune, 1985, p. 371: “C’est que Fedotov, non contraint par les faits, s’efforce de contourner les obstacles de la logique par mille artifices rhétoriques et la vigueur d’un style étincelant pour réconcilier son sentiment moral qui s’exerce dans l’absolu et la pratique politique qui s’inscrit dans le relatif.” 32 Cf. Dirk Uffelmann, 1994, “Halbherzige Heterogenität: Der Freiheitsbegriff in der politischen Philosophie von G.P. Fedotov,” Die Welt der Slaven 39, pp. 223–243, pp. 224f. 33 Jostein Børtnes, 1994, “Russkii kenotizm: K pereotsenke odnogo poniatiia,” Evangel’skii tekst v russkoi literature xviii–xx vekov: Tsitata, reministsentsiia, motiv, siuzhet, zhanr (Problemy istoricheskoi poetiki 3), vol. 1, ed. V.N. Zakharov, Petrozavodsk, pp. 61–65, p. 65.

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that the concept of kenosis was taken over when it was introduced into Russian theology by Mikhail Tareev (1866–1934) in the 1890s.34 In order to summarise the general features of Fedotov’s work, I find it relevant to return to a fellow émigré and colleague of Fedotov, Fedor Stepun, who notes in his portrait of Fedotov that one may find “without difficulty” several examples of inconsistency in his thought (neposledovatel’nost’ mysli). This was a man of nothing but vast knowledge in the most diverse fields of culture, and even if he was a genuine scholar (uchenyi muzh), Fedotov was after all not a professional academic (nauchnyi rabotnik). All his utterances, even the scientific ones, conceal within themselves the stamp of ethical-volitional impulses. The written form of these utterances always has an aesthetic rather than a disciplined scholarly character.35

Stepun makes us aware not only of the rhetoric of Fedotov’s writings; his comments also confirm our assumption that Fedotov’s historical discourse is always framed by a certain quest for relevance, which governs his comprehension, imagination, and representation of the past. Unfortunately, these aspects are often ignored, with a few notable exceptions, in post-Soviet Russian scholarship. A symptomatic example is Iuliia Selivanova’s study of Fedotov as a sociologist. Selivanova proclaims that he is characterised by consistency, objectivity and realism. She explicitly criticises Beaune-Gray’s view of Fedotov as an intuitive rather than deductive thinker, whose reasoning is often paradoxical and whose theoretical constructions are fragile and vulnerable. Selivanova, on the contrary, holds that if there are paradoxes in his thinking, a fact she eventually admits, they are rather reflections of the inconsistencies of social life itself.36 As my analysis will show, such an approach is inadequate in the case of Fedotov. Resurrecting Russian Sanctity Saints of Ancient Russia portrays a selection of the most famous Russian saints from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries and creates a 34 On the emergence of the concept of kenoticism in Russian thought in the 1890s, see Hermann-Josef Röhrig, 2006, “Zum Begriff ‘Kenosis’ in der russischen Theologie,” Russische Begriffsgeschichte der Neuzeit: Beiträge zu einem Forschungsdesiderat, ed. P. Thiergen, Köln, pp. 319–332. 35 Stepun, 2000, pp. 747–761 (“G.P. Fedotov”), p. 754. 36 Cf. Iu.V. Selivanova, 2003, Politicheskaia sotsiologiia G.P. Fedotova: Idei, problemy, prognozy, Saratov, p. 38.

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narrative out of their lives, i.e. it describes the development of Russian sainthood as exemplified by these saints. Parts of the book had already been or were later published as separate articles, mostly in Russian. In 1946, moreover, The Russian Religious Mind: Kievan Christianity was published in the United States. This book is an extended version of the first four chapters of Saints of Ancient Russia, with new sections on various topics relating to the period of “Kievan Christianity,” i.e. from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. For instance, the idea of “Russian kenoticism” as opposed to “Byzantinism” is more thoroughly elaborated here. These concepts, with the exception of a singular occurrence of the noun kenosis (sdr 129), were not used in the Russian text, and so will not be considered here, although they emphasise and amplify themes that are present in the Russian version as well, such as the alleged opposition between Russian and Byzantine Christianity. Fedotov continued to work on this study with the intention of publishing a second volume in English, devoted to the subsequent period of Muscovite Russia, but he failed to complete it before he died in 1951. An incomplete manuscript appeared in 1966, edited and with a foreword by John Meyendorff, and entitled The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 2: The Middle Ages: the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries. Meanwhile, the 1946 publication was republished as “Volume 1,” and the subtitle was altered: Kievan Christianity: the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. The present analysis is devoted to the Russian text of 1931. Written in a different language, The Russian Religious Mind addresses an audience that has no knowledge of Russian. By implication, the notion of a “we” possessing a mission in exile is omitted, quite logically, in the English text, which otherwise contains by and large the same analyses. The situatedness of Saints of Ancient Russia in an émigré context is clearly reflected in the opening passage of the book: To study the history and religious phenomenology of Russian holiness (sviatost’) is one of the most urgent tasks of our Christian and national revival today. In the Russian saints we honour not only the heavenly protectors of holy and sinful Russia; in them we look for a revelation of our own spiritual way. We are convinced that every people has its own religious calling and, of course, that it is realised most fully by its religious geniuses. Here is the way for everyone, marked by the signposts erected by the heroic feats of a few. Their ideal has nourished the life of the people for centuries; in them the whole of Ancient Russia lit its candles. (sdr 5)

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The book thus opens by presenting a “Christian and national revival” as the fundamental project for Russians today (“we”), and it is in relation to this task that a study of Russian holiness is of utmost urgency, in so far as this holiness of the past is, according to Fedotov, the means by which the revival might be made possible. “Russian holiness” is not a concept Fedotov attempts to define, neither at the outset nor at the end of his study; it was revealed by the saints in their practice and would now be elaborated by the author’s interpretations. This opening passage involves a “model reader” (Umberto Eco), a term that refers not only to the addressee of a text but to the set of competences, or “codes,” which are presupposed by the author or intended to be established during the reading.37 In addition, the concept may be understood, as suggested by Johan Tønnesson, as referring to a reader who possesses the competence required to realise the communicative goal of a text.38 So who is the “competent reader” in this case? Initially, Saints of Ancient Russia does not address only Russian émigrés, but all representatives of modern secularised Russian culture who share the author’s longing for its de-secularisation by means of an “ecclesification” (otserkovlenie) or (re-)Christianisation of this culture. As we read on, however, it becomes clear that it is the émigrés who must lead the way. At the end of the introductory chapter, Fedotov reminds the reader of the deceit to which the Russian people (narod) has been exposed since Peter the Great, exemplified by the “erroneous understanding” of the relics of saints that prevailed throughout the socalled “synodal period,” i.e. the period that began with Peter’s introduction of the Synod as the highest authority in the Russian Church. Meanwhile, in the Conclusion, Fedotov completes his account of Russia’s secularisation by suggesting that the Revolution accomplished what Peter had started. The Revolution committed the sins of Russia to the flames, and has caused an unprecedented flowering of holiness: that of martyrs, of confessors, of spiritual lay zealots. But the persecuted little herd of the Russian Church has now been expelled from the creation of Russian life, from its new, created culture. It cannot take responsibility for the “enemy’s” construction. (sdr 255)

37 Umberto Eco, 1979, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Advances in Semiotics), Bloomington, Ind., p. 7. 38 Johan L. Tønnesson, 2001, Vitenskapens stemmer (Sakprosa 2), Oslo, p. 82.

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In this situation, interpreted figuratively within the history of the persecution of Christians, it is Russians abroad who are responsible for carrying out the task of preserving the past for the sake of the future. The writer and literary critic Iurii Ivask (1907–1986), himself a prominent figure of Russia Abroad, notes in one of his many articles on Fedotov, “Eschatology and Culture” (1972), that a central project for Fedotov was to prepare material for what he hoped would be the construction of a new Christian culture. This material was to tell of the thousand-year-old culture of Russia which, in Ivask’s paraphrase of Fedotov, had been held back by the Tatars, violated since the time of Peter the Great, and almost ruined by the Bolsheviks. And Ivask comments: All his works are well-founded historically and are confirmed by academic research. At the same time, G.P. was convinced that they would prove to be useful for future work (stroitel’stvo). […] To build such a culture in emigration was impossible, but only in the West was it possible to discuss it freely.39

In other words, Fedotov’s exile historiography was aimed at preparing for the reunification and reconstruction of Russia. As noted in Chapter One, preparation for this task was one way in which the Russian émigrés understood their self-imposed mission. Nevertheless, Fedotov’s achievement with Saints of Ancient Russia extends beyond merely outlining the possible ways in which Russia could be revived. His book makes the past present to its audience. The stroitel’stvo (Ivask) is thus not placed solely somewhere in the future; it has already begun here and now, in this book. However, Fedotov’s interpretations inevitably challenge the consensus of the “we” that he himself presupposes in the opening passage. Ivask’s appraisal should not lead us to think that Fedotov’s ideas were widely supported by the emigration. On the contrary, Fedotov held controversial views on several central issues that were debated intensely in the émigré press and often stood alone in defending them.40 He suggested, for instance, pragmatic support for Soviet structures and

39 Iu.P. Ivask, 1991, “Eskhatologiia i kul’tura: Pamiati Georgiia Petrovicha Fedotova,” G.P. Fedotov, Sviatoi Filipp, mitropolitt moskovskii. Moscow, pp. 120–126, pp. 122, 124. 40 For an overview, see Danièle Beaune, 1994, “Fedotov et l’émigration parisienne,” La première émigration russe: Vie politique et intellectuelle (Cahiers de l’émigration russe 1), Paris, pp. 45–52.

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even dictatorship in the future transition to democracy, not least for the sake of preserving “Great Russia” (a goal that most Russian émigrés supported in other contexts).41 Furthermore, Fedotov’s view of the Revolution was a so-called “post-revolutionary” one: the Revolution was now regarded as an inevitable event that represented a transformation of the old regime, a process that could not be reversed. The creation of a “new city” had to accept these changes and contribute to (yet another) transformation thereafter.42 His views on matters related to Orthodoxy were also often controversial in their combination of conservatism (he dismissed the Philokalia, an eighteenth-century collection of ancient Eastern Orthodox writings, for its “obscurantism”) and radicalism (cf. his “Christian socialism”).43 As I will show below, his own interpretation of Christianity pervades his readings in Saints of Ancient Russia significantly, and this suggests moreover that we cannot assume that his ideas were widely accepted, however important Orthodoxy itself was considered to be. The only review of Saints of Ancient Russia in an émigré journal of which I am aware is the one by Petr Bitsilli in Contemporary Annals. Bitsilli judged the book favourably, emphasising in particular Fedotov’s idea that “the holiness and righteousness of Russian culture is not something given (dannoe) but a task (zadanie).”44 However, this is a very general statement. A more critical attitude towards Fedotov’s conception of Russian history may be found in Florovskii’s review of Fedotov’s A Treasury of Russian Spirituality (1948), a collection of Russian religious texts from the eleventh century to the Revolution. Florovskii observes that Fedotov “has a special feeling for what is peculiar to the Russian, and has very little sympathy for the Byzantine tradition.” He rejects Fedotov’s conception of a Russian tradition of “kenoticism” centred on the Humiliated Christ as opposed to Byzantine asceticism and mysticism, and claims instead that these aspects are complementary. “We are not permitted to read the Bible through the sentimental spectacles of the nineteenth century. [. . .] The Humiliated Christ is the King of Glory.”45 Florovskii’s remarks confirm that 41

Cf. Beaune, 1994, p. 49. Cf. Raeff, 1990, p. 153. 43 Beaune, 1994, pp. 49ff. 44 P.M. Bitsilli, 1932, “[Review of ] G.P. Fedotov: Sviatye drevnei Rusi,” Sovremennye zapiski 48, pp. 492–493, p. 493. 45 G.V. Florovskii, 1949, “[Review of ] G.P. Fedotov (ed.): A Treasury of Russian Spirituality,” American Slavic and East European Review 8 (4), pp. 329–330, p. 329. 42

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that there was no agreement among the émigrés on how to interpret Orthodoxy, Russian as well as Byzantine. On this point, I should also mention that Aleksandr Antoshchenko has suggested that Saints of Ancient Russia seeks to refute the Eurasianist conception of Russian history.46 While they all emphasised the central role played by Orthodoxy in Russian (or Eurasian) history, Fedotov assigned a particular importance to the Kievan period in relation to Russian culture and its Orthodox identity, a phase that was peripheral to the Eurasianists. The appeals addressed to the émigré community, advocating the rebirth of Russian culture, occur mostly in the Introduction and Conclusion, which provide a framework for the interpretations. The rhetoric in these passages is exhortatory, future-oriented, and even biblical and eschatological; here is how the entire book ends: But the time will come, and the Russian Church will stand before the task of baptising godforsaken Russia once more. Then the responsibility for the fate of the national culture will also be laid upon it. Then its two hundred years of estrangement from society and culture will come to an end. And the Old Russian saints’ experience of serving society will acquire an unexpected contemporary significance, and inspire the Church to new cultural feats. (sdr 255)

In so far as Fedotov’s utopia means the re-establishment of Russian culture in its Kievan form, he may be said to apply not only eschatological rhetoric for a given purpose but even an eschatological model, according to which history, as formulated by Karl Löwith, is “one great detour to reach in the end the beginning.”47 As will become clear, however, Fedotov does not conceive of history as a chain of great disruptions, but rather as a gradually evolving process. Fedotov is a historicist. Moreover, the return to the beginning should take place within the terrestrial sphere and terrestrial time; it does not represent the end of history as such. According to Fedotov, therefore, the relationship between Russian cultural history and Christian world history is analogical, in contrast to Florovskii’s metonymical representation, where the history of Russian theology is seen as part of Christian world history (see my next chapter). Besides, this eschatological mode of expression does not pervade the other parts of Fedotov’s text. Its main chapters are characterised

46 47

Antoshchenko, 2003, p. 342. Karl Löwith, 1949, Meaning in History, Chicago, p. 183.

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by a serious scholarly style, in which the historian quotes (in Church Slavonic), paraphrases, and comments minutely on his sources. Hence Saints of Ancient Russia consists of both scholarly historical writing and the promotion of a religious and national mission. It is a book that has several purposes; it aims both to say something true about the past and to demonstrate the relevance of this past. The latter aspect, however, has clearly shaped the interpretations of Fedotov. Configuring Russian Holiness The historians of St Petersburg, often referred to by the rather vague term as “the St Petersburg school” as distinct from “the Moscow school” founded by Kliuchevskii, are mostly associated with a greater emphasis on source criticism than the Moscow “sociologists.” A philological approach (which includes palaeography, epigraphy etc.) to history is evident in the works of several of its leading figures, from Konstantin Bestuzhev-Riumin (1829–1897) to Sergei Platonov (1870–1929), to mention only two names. This is coupled with a certain resistance to making the facts confirm to larger schemas.48 A similar tendency is also discernible in the scholarship of Fedotov’s teacher Ivan Grevs, who taught his students a modest source criticism and interpretation that should not be turned into a “hyper criticism” that “destroyed” the sources. Its goal was to elaborate the ideas inherent in the texts.49 Fedotov, similarly, attempts to bring about ideas allegedly contained in the sources, while the main task of his source criticism is to separate the factual content from mere form. In this respect, Fedotov enters a field of scholarship with established practices. However unsatisfied Fedotov was with the Russian historiographical tradition and its neglect of “spiritual culture,” his approach is indebted methodologically to Vasilii Kliuchevskii’s Old Russian Lives of the Saints as a Historical Source (1871) and Arsenii Kadlubovskii’s Outlines of the History of Old Russian Literature of the Lives of the Saints (1902). These works provided him with a perspective—namely to see the vitae 48 Cf. Anan’ich & Paneiakh, 1999, p. 147. According to Knight, 1998, p. 796, “the St Petersburg school was distinguished by its meticulous and cautious methodology. Avoiding broad schematic generalisations, its members produced tightly woven historical narratives that never strayed far from the sources.” On the difference between Moscow and Petersburg historians, see also Beaune-Gray, 2002, pp. 332f. 49 Cf. Beaune-Gray, 2002, p. 336.

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as sources for uncovering the past—and with a method for reading them as such. Kliuchevskii’s study of the Old Russian saints’ lives as historical sources was intended to be an examination of the monasteries’ participation in Russian colonisation of the land north-east of Moscow from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. The lives, however, failed to support such a project. Rather than being the “most copious and freshest sources” as Kliuchevskii had hoped, their historical content turned out to be quite “poor.” This material therefore had to be subjected to a preliminary study in order for any historical information to be gained from them.50 And so Kliuchevskii modified his colonisation project and examined instead the lives’ “circumstances and purposes,” i.e. the period in which they were written, the author’s personality and relationship to the saint, his sources and personal motifs, his main literary devices. Kliuchevskii maintained that a life consisted of two elements “of completely different origin and characteristics”: the rhetorical-literary and the factual-historical. In order for a source to be informative, these two elements had to be separated, but this proved to be especially complicated since “it is difficult to find any kind of literary work where the form dominates to such an extent over the content and subordinates it with strict and immutable rules.”51 To Kliuchevskii, a life forms a “barrier” (pregrada) between the historian and the historical fact. As Jostein Børtnes points out, Kliuchevskii’s analysis presupposes “a dichotomy between [the life’s] form—the literary, that is, conventional and artificial, imported elements—and historical facts, which are excluded, hidden, or distorted in the hagiographer’s endeavours to adapt his historical material to hagiographical schemes.”52 As Fedotov sees it, Kliuchevskii’s disappointment with the lives of the saints was the result of his own approach: “in a saint’s life, he did not look for what a memorial of a spiritual life promises to provide,

50 Cf. V.O. Kliuchevskii, 1871, Drevnerusskie zhitiia sviatykh kak istoricheskii istochnik, Moscow, p. i. 51 Kliuchevskii, 1871, p. 358. 52 Jostein Børtnes, 1988, Visions of Glory: Studies in Early Russian Hagiography (Slavica Norvegica 5), trans. J. Børtnes & P.L. Nielsen, Oslo & New Jersey, p. 17. For a survey of Russian pre-revolutionary and exile research on hagiography, see Robert Stupperich, 1956, “Zur Geschichte der russischen hagiographischen Forschung (von Kliučevskij bis Fedotov),” Kyrios: Vierteljahresschrift für Kirchen- und Geistesgeschichte 1, pp. 47–56.

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but for materials for studying an extraneous phenomenon: the colonisation of the Russian north.” Kadlubovskii, however, “proceeding precisely from the study of clichés, [. . .] could discern in the slightest variations in the schemas differences in spiritual movements, and outline the lines of development of spiritual schools” (sdr 10). Later, in his introduction to The Russian Religious Mind, Fedotov wrote with reference to Kadlubovskii that he is “much indebted to this rather forgotten scholar for both inspiration and method.”53 Kadlubovskii’s book may be seen as the most obvious predecessor to Fedotov’s study, since it replaces the “material” world of colonisation with “spiritual culture” as the ultimate subject of historical enquiry. In Kadlubovskii’s own words, a vita is not a historical source (istoricheskii istochnik) but a “literary memorial” (literaturnyi pamiatnik).54 A vita should first and foremost be analysed as a reflection of religious ideas and norms of the time in which it was written, rather than as a source for discovering material reality, Kadlubovskii argued. The purpose of hagiography is to provide examples of righteous behaviour, and its characters and events are thus idealised at the expense of certainty and exactness in their representation. The ideals represented by a vita, in turn, reflect the culture of the given epoch.55 Nevertheless, a negative notion of rhetoric is also present in Kadlubovskii, in so far as he seems to suggest that a representation of “concrete and living features” and an extended use of “eloquence and commonplaces” are mutually exclusive.56 In the lives, alongside (nariadu s) those phrases that are, in the strict sense of the word, rhetorical clichés, we should thus examine, where possible, indications of a different kind, namely those that are characteristic (kharakternye) in the sense that they depict images of thought, of outlooks, of ideals.57

Thus he largely preserves the dichotomy between form and content identified by Kliuchevskii. The task is to separate factual and significant representations from rhetorical clichés. Fedotov’s study is written in accordance with this methodological assumption made by both Kliuchevskii and Kadlubovskii. His method 53 54 55 56 57

Fedotov, 1946, p. xiii. Cf. Kadlubovskii, 1902, p. vii. Cf. Kadlubovskii, 1902, p. 163. Cf. Kadlubovskii, 1902, p. 188. Kadlubovskii, 1902, p. 165.

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for discerning textual features that are original and reflect a genuinely Russian reality, consists mainly of looking for resemblances and differences between the hagiography of Ancient Russia and that of the rest of the Eastern Orthodox world. Absence of parallels, i.e. topoi, makes the text more reliable as a source. However, the project is a challenging one. The sources of the pre-Mongol period in particular, but also of Muscovy, are poor or scanty (skudnye), both in terms of quantity and factual content, a point he repeatedly makes (sdr 65). Similarly, he regrets that the Life of Stefan of Perm, and to a certain extent that of Sergii of Radonezh, are “immoderately overfilled” with the rhetorical device of word-weaving (sdr 127, 140). Nevertheless, Russian holiness is accessible to the patient, careful and exact researcher through minor passages in the lives of the saints. Hagiographical literature is the source of Fedotov’s study, but this is not a study of hagiographical literature—its topic is Russian holiness. This holiness is represented by saints, by the persons recognised by the Russian church as holy. He does not question these recognitions or inquire whether holiness may be present elsewhere. In this connection he introduces two significant studies that precede his own: the histories of the canonisation of Russian saints by Vasilii Vasilev (1893) and Evgenii Golubinskii (1902), described by Fedotov as successful and illuminating (sdr 12). They are both chronicle-like histories of all the saints of the Russian church and provide Fedotov with a complete survey of their cults, possible dates of canonisation, miracle-working and so on. Both scholars operate with a notion of canonisation as an identifiable procedure throughout the whole of Russian history, an idea seemingly taken over by Fedotov, but which has been questioned by recent scholarship.58 A significant difference between Fedotov, on the one hand, and Vasilev and Golubinskii on the other, is the emphasis they put on miracleworking as a prerequisite for canonisation. In the history of Russian canonisation, both Vasilev and Golubinskii hold miracle-working to have been an indispensible condition for glorifying a saint.59 Fedotov does not question this assumption directly. In the theoretical discussion in his Introduction, he lists three possible requirements: miracles, 58

Cf. Paul Bushkovitch, 1992, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, New York & Oxford, p. 75. 59 Cf. V.P. Vasil’ev, 1893, Istoriia kanonizatsii russkikh sviatykh, Moscow, p. 125; E.E. Golubinskii, 1902, Istoriia kanonizatsii sviatykh v russkoi tserkvi, Moscow, p. 16.

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the life and heroic deeds of the saint, and indestructible relics (sdr 16),60 but the only condition that he discusses at length here is that of relics. The matter of life and heroic deeds is not taken up at all, while he simply notes regarding miracles, with reference to Golubinskii, that “miracles are generally the main condition for canonisation, but not the only one” (sdr 16f ). I would claim, however, that Fedotov’s readings seek to demonstrate that sainthood in Russia is to be explained first and foremost with reference to the life and deeds of a saint. Correspondingly, miracles and relics are less important to him. Thus, when Paul Bushkovitch claims that Fedotov was “misled” by the scholarly literature on the subject of canonisation, I believe this to be only partially true. Fedotov did take over the belief in canonisation as an identifiable process throughout history, but he rejects implicitly the idea that this was founded on miracle-working only, as Vasilev and Golubinskii believed, a view Bushkovitch holds to be more in keeping with the theology of the modern Orthodox Church from the 1550s onwards.61 With reference to Boris and Gleb, Fedotov states explicitly that it is insufficient to refer to miracles in order to explain the canonisation of the two princes (sdr 20). And what follows is a detailed study of the two princes’ acceptance of death based on a particular interpretation of the Gospels. In other chapters on the main figures representing Russian sanctity, miracles and relics are hardly mentioned at all, while the chapters on saintly princes, prelates, and holy laymen and women, which have a more summarising character, do include these prerequisites to a larger extent. While Fedotov accepted the Church tradition and pre-revolutionary scholarly literature with respect to the places in which holiness was revealed (i.e. in the saints), he emerges within this field as a creative and independent interpreter of Russian spirituality. His emphasis on life and deeds rather than on miracles and relics suggests that he advocates a modern, rational Christianity, where the supernatural is toned down, and where it is the Scriptures and the human response to these

60 These three conditions are listed also in the Russian pre-revolutionary Orthodox Theological Dictionary (1900–1911), which under the entry for kanonizatsiia lists the three prerequisites that we find in Fedotov, though in the opposite order. Cf. S.S. Averintsev et al. (eds.), 1993–95, Khristianstvo: Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ v 3-kh tomakh, Moscow, pp. 675–679; p. 677. This reprint edition also includes the entry for kanonizatsiia from Brockhaus and Efron’s Encyclopedia, which is more in keeping with Vasilev and Golubinskii and does not mention “the life” as a prerequisite. 61 Cf. Bushkovitch, 1992, p. 75.

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that matters first and foremost. As is evident in the above quotation from The Russian Religious Mind, Fedotov sees the history of Christianity as the history of human response to Grace and not so much as a religion of divine revelation. Not all Russian saints are included in Fedotov’s book. He points out that canonisation itself always implies selection (sdr 14). And the notion of canon has, correspondingly, a double sense in this context: On the one hand, canon is the list of saints as handed down to Fedotov by Church tradition as well as by Vasilev and Golubinskii. On the other hand, a canon is not simply a list but also a norm.62 The idea of canon as a norm inherent in the list suggests that not all parts of the list are of equal importance. The normative aspect may be revealed in a selection from the list, the “canon within the canon” or the “implicit canon.”63 It is in the latter sense that Saints of Ancient Russia is normative. It imparts a canon, a collection and selection of lives of the saints, that is particularly worthy of reading and studying. Although Fedotov claims that the names of Kirill of Belozero (the central figure in his chapter on the monasteries of the north) and Iosif of Volotsk are forgotten by the Russian people today, his own canon, the presentation and preservation of which his book contributes to, cannot be claimed, however, to be radically new or exclusively his own. His novelty consists first and foremost in the way in which the canon of saints is reinterpreted, according to his own notion of a distinctly Russian spiritual culture. “Canonization itself is a procedure not only of selection but of selective interpretation,” as Dominick LaCapra points out.64 The vision of a tragic plot inherent in the history of Russian spiritual culture makes Fedotov not only able to see a saint as representative of an epoch, but also to perceive cultural development in the relationship between the individual representatives of Russian spirituality.

62 Cf. Einar Thomassen, 1992, “Målestokken og spanskrøret: Kanon som religionsvitenskapelig term,” Chaos: Dansk-norsk tidsskrift for religionshistoriske studier 18, pp. 5–17, p. 7. 63 Cf. Thomassen, 1992, p. 12. 64 LaCapra, 1980, p. 261.

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The national revival Fedotov describes in the opening passage is also “Christian.” But as he continues, it becomes clear that the Russian saints are not so much seen as representatives of Christianity or even Orthodoxy as of Russian Christianity. Fedotov maintains that “Russian holiness” is a distinct tradition (osobaia traditsiia) in Christian spirituality (sdr 6f ). This belief is decisive in Fedotov’s way of approaching and interpreting his sources. Saints of Ancient Russia describes a national culture whose response to the Scriptures was truly original. As far as Russia is concerned, the Christian and national revival are one and the same. This Christian-national patriotism, one might add, is by no means without its predecessors in the Russian context, suffice it to mention the Slavophiles. Natalia Zaitseva has rightly argued that the “defining motif ” of Saints of Ancient Russia is Fedotov’s “interpretation of that which distinguishes the nation (national’no-osobennoe), the specifically Russian in our culture.”65 Furthermore, however, she claims that this approach is not “nationalistic” since Fedotov rejects “a limiting ecclesiastical particularism and narrow-minded nationalism.”66 Similarly, Olga Volkogonova maintains that Fedotov’s Christian perspective guards him against “jingoism” or a belief in the exceptionality of the Russian people.67 In Saints of Ancient Russia, true, Fedotov does criticise excessive national pride (see my discussion of his account of Stefan of Perm below). However, I do not find the statements of Zaitseva and Volkogonova very informative since “nationalism” can mean many things and its specific usage here needs to be explained in order for it to be instructive. In my opinion, Fedotov’s perspective is “nationalistic” for at least two reasons. First, as noted above with reference to Beaune-Gray, patriotic sentiment is clearly dominant in his postrevolutionary writings. Second, in so far as his interpretation attempts to promote the distinctive features of a national culture, defined in opposition to other cultures, the alleged boundaries of the modern nation are projected onto the medieval period, and more specifically onto East Slavic medieval culture. This enables Fedotov to speak of 65

N.V. Zaitseva, 2001, Logika liubvi: Rossiia v istoriosofskoi kontseptsii Georgiia Fedotova, Samara, p. 88. 66 Zaitseva, 2001, p. 89. 67 Cf. Volkogonova, 1998, p. 106.

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the “religious nationalism of the recently baptised people” (religioznyi natsionalizm novokreshchennogo naroda, sdr 20), i.e. of Russians of the eleventh century. His approach suggests that eleventh-century Russians and their land formed a national unity that was more fundamental than regional differences (Kievan, Muscovite) or similarities across national borders. After Fedotov, scholarly literature became more attentive to such similarities, cf. the perspectives inherent in the concepts Slavia orthodoxa (Riccardo Picchio) or “the Byzantine Commonwealth” (Dimitri Obolensky).68 Fedotov’s narrative, on the contrary, may be defined as a reformulation of the “traditional scheme of Russian history” (Hrushevsky).69 Saints of Ancient Russia describes forms of Russian holiness from the Kievan Boris and Gleb and Feodosii of the Caves Monastery to the Muscovite Nil of Sora and Iosif of Volotsk. According to this scheme, Russian history displays a continuity from its beginnings to the present; from Kiev via Moscow to St Petersburg.70 Fedotov believes that every Christian narod has a particular “calling” (prizvanie), and that the central subjects in the history of Christianity are the Christian peoples. It is they who respond to divine grace, to the Scriptures. By the same token, such collectives are conceived of as possessing individual and personal, i.e. human, characteristics. In a short article of 1928 entitled “Studying Russia,” Fedotov applies imagery in which the nation is equated with a personality (lichnost’) with an historical vocation (prizvanie), a notion which he claims at the same time to be the “Orthodox understanding of a nation” (pravoslavnie ponimanie natsii).71 Similarly, in his editorial article in the first volume of New City (1931), he describes nations as “great personalities” (velikie lichnosti) that should retain full freedom over their creative work (tvorchestvo).72 Fedotov thus conceptualises nations and national cultures as agents active in history. As shown in Chapter Two, such personification has been decisive to historical thinking

68 Cf. Dimitri Obolensky, 1971, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453, London; Riccardo Picchio, 2003, Slavia Orthodoxa: Literatura i iazyk, eds. N.N. Zapol’skaia & V.V. Kalugin, Moscow. Picchio appears to have used the term for the first time in 1958. 69 Cf. Hrushevsky, 1952. See also Chapter One. 70 Hence Rus’, as used by Fedotov, is rendered in this chapter as “Ancient Russia” (and not “Rus”) because that is what it was to him. 71 Cf. Fedotov, 1992, 1, pp. 123–126 (“Izuchenie Rossii”), p. 126. 72 Cf. Fedotov, 1952, pp. 371–377 (“Novyi grad”), p. 376.

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and writing since Herder, while a Russian equivalent can be found in Kliuchevskii’s historiography, which is founded on the idea of nations being personalities with a calling. Russian holiness is metonymically represented by the saints. In hagiographical literature they form the concrete expressions of the abstract category of Russian holiness. As observed by Mikhail Galakhtin, “in the individual fate of a Russian saint Fedotov saw a decisive moment in the historical fate of the nation.”73 But Galakhtin’s point suggests, in turn, that behind Russian holiness there stands an even more fundamental entity: Russia, or rather: Holy Russia (Sviataia Rus’ ). Not just Russian holiness or Russian spiritual culture, but Holy Russia, is what this book seeks to conceptualise and ultimately resurrect. Albeit applied infrequently, Fedotov’s use of the concept Holy Russia is significant. It represents not only the initial stage of the history of Russian culture, but also a negation of the modern, secular Imperial Russia founded by Peter the Great. What Peter did, however, was to complete an ongoing process of destruction: “Peter ruined the dilapidated shell of Holy Russia” (sdr 204). And Fedotov is exact in pinpointing when Holy Russia was replaced by the subsequent “Orthodox tsardom”: in 1547, the year of Ivan the Terrible’s coronation (sdr 203). At this point, Holy Russia ceased to exist. The discourse on Holy Russia had a history long before Fedotov. According to Michael Cherniavsky, the term occurred for the first time in the writings of Andrei Kurbskii (sixteenth century). Despite its infrequent use at that time, “from the very beginning the epithet ‘Holy Russia’ is an antitsarist, antistate slogan.”74 It became more frequent in the seventeenth century, above all as an expression of popular ideology, for instance in Cossack songs, in which it stands as a symbol for “the nonhistorical, transcendental Russia. The identifying feature of this other Russia is the orthodox Russian people.”75 There follows a hiatus: in the “borrowed classicism” of the eighteenth century, Holy Russia was not even thought of. However, it re-enters in the nineteenth century, when it became a commonplace. Now, it serves to advocate an anti-state nationalism opposed to the official version. To the intelligentsia, especially to the Slavophiles, Holy Russia designated an 73

Galakhtin, 2005, p. 54. Michael Cherniavsky, 1958, “ ‘Holy Russia’: A Study in the History of an Idea,” The American Historical Review 63 (3), pp. 617–637, p. 622. 75 Cherniavsky, 1958, pp. 623f. 74

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idealised past, i.e. it became a myth, which was believed to exist at the same time as a contingency, above all in the uneducated, lower strata of society. Numerous attempts were made to demonstrate its historical veracity, i.e. to rewrite history in order to find its concrete manifestations. Cherniavsky regards Kireevskii’s article “On the Character of Civilization in Europe and its Relationship to Civilization in Russia” as an early attempt to write the history of Holy Russia. Kireevskii’s text, however, is not scholarly literature. In my view, it is only with Fedotov’s Saints of Ancient Russia that we are presented with an attempt to write the history of Holy Russia based on a critical examination of sources and a historicist narrativisation. Nevertheless, this book also sustains the mythical aspect of its predecessors, an aspect which seems to be inherent in the notion of Holy Russia. Fedotov idealises the past believing at the same time that it is possible to activate it, in so far as it is assumed to exist as a contingency in the present (cf. the last part of this chapter). Detail and Meaning in Russian Holiness Having established this framework, we may now begin to examine more closely how this text is constructed. In addition to a short introduction and an even shorter conclusion, Saints of Ancient Russia consists of fifteen chapters, most of which are devoted to Russian saints from the eleventh to the sixteenth century: Boris and Gleb, Feodosii of the Caves Monastery, Avramii of Smolensk, Stefan of Perm, Sergii of Radonezh, Kirill of Belozero and others who settled and practised in monasteries “beyond the Volga,” Nil of Sora, and Iosif of Volotsk. In addition, the study contains chapters on the Kievan Caves Paterik, holy princes and prelates, holy fools, holy laymen and women, and legendary motifs in Russian lives. We are also presented with a chapter, the twelfth, entitled “The Tragedy of Ancient Russian Holiness.” Not all chapters are of equal importance to the structure of Fedotov’s narrative. It is those devoted to the individual saints (Boris and Gleb, Feodosii etc.) that contribute to the development of the plot. To adopt Foucault’s description of the writing of the history of ideas in Archaeology of Knowledge, we may say that the chapters describing these saints form the part of the text that “recounts the history of inventions, changes, transformations, it shows [. . .] how new forms rose up in turn to produce the landscape that we know today.” The

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remaining part, in turn, “reveals history as inertia and weight, as a slow accumulation of the past.”76 However unique they may have been originally, the “statements” represented by the latter group of chapters are “neutralized” (Foucault); the emphasis is put on what they have in common, i.e. they are seen in terms of “extent” and “repetition,” and as forming a “series of overall figures.” Their importance is thus diminished in favour of the events representing major transformations and changes. Fedotov organises his material by grouping it as either transforming or confirming, and without the latter it would not have been possible to speak of a “Russian tradition,” such as that of “saintly princes” (cf. chapter five in Saints of Ancient Russia), based on the Urbild of Boris and Gleb. The peculiar Russian type of holiness is present, according to Fedotov, in its most pure form in the earliest Russian saints: the princes Boris and Gleb (†1015), and Feodosii of the Kievan Caves Monastery (†1074). The Boris and Gleb chapter, in particular, shows how Fedotov adopts Kadlubovskii’s method for discerning spiritual differences “in the slightest variations in the schemes.” His quest for such differences will be examined in the following. The question Fedotov raises in relation to the two first Russian saints is: Why were Boris and Gleb canonised? What made them holy and how was this quality perceived? He sees these questions as the key to understanding not only their sainthood but Russian holiness in general. Their nationwide (vsenarodnoe) veneration began immediately, and it preceded the ecclesiastical canonisation. Moreover, this canonisation was certainly not carried out on the initiative of the highest hierarchy, i.e. the Greek metropolitans ( greki-metropolity), who nourished some doubts on the holiness of the new miracle-workers. (sdr 19)

According to Fedotov, this doubt regarding the holiness of Boris and Gleb was maintained by various metropolitans of Greek origin throughout the eleventh century, and he concludes: The firm belief of the Russian people in their new saints was needed in order to overcome the doubts regarding canonisation and the resistance of the Greeks, who were not inclined at all to support the religious nationalism of a newly-converted people. (sdr 20)

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Foucault, 2002, p. 157.

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The narrative of Saints of Ancient Russia takes as its starting point this antagonism between the “doubt” and “resistance” of “the Greeks,” i.e. the foreign clergy, on the one hand, and “the firm belief of the Russian people” on the other. The history of Russian holiness begins here, and not with the conversion to Christianity, which is hardly mentioned. It is division not inclusion that allegedly brings Russian holiness about. The narrative thus opens by suggesting an opposition between the top and bottom of the clerical hierarchy, which is at the same time an opposition between “the Greeks” and “the Russians,” i.e. between Byzantium and Kiev. Fedotov expresses these relationships by means of the compound term greki-metropolity. By combining the nouns “Greeks” and “metropolitans” he fuses vertical (hierarchical) and spatial (geographical) divergence. This compound term was not invented by Fedotov himself. Golubinskii used it in his History of the Russian Church, in particular in those paragraphs that deal with whether or not “the fact that in the pre-Mongol period our metropolitans were for the most part of Greek origin was a blessing or a misery to the Russian Church and to the Russian state?”77 According to Golubinskii, there are moments in favour of either conclusion, but one of his inferences is particularly noteworthy: “This dominion of the metropolity-Greki was not and cannot be acknowledged as an absolute blessing, since it cannot be a blessing to be under the ruling power of foreigners.”78 Following Golubinskii, the term occurred frequently in Mikhail Priselkov’s (1881–1941) Sketches of the Ecclesiastical-Political History of Kievan Rus (1913), a book whose general background perspective is that of political (and sometimes ecclesiastical) conflict, between Kiev and Bulgaria, and Kiev and Byzantium. Having been liberated first from the patriarchate of Okhrid, Kiev had to struggle subsequently against Byzantium for political and cultural freedom. Priselkov sees the appointment of a “Russian” metropolitan, Ilarion, as a strategic move of self-assertion by prince Iaroslav and his people. This meant that Ilarion succeeded the metropolit-grek79 or grek-metropolit 80 (both

77 Cf. E.E. Golubinskii, 1901, Istoriia russkoi tserkvi, vol. 1, Moscow, pp. 318ff. The quotation is taken from the index (p. 961). I have also come across an occurrence of russkii mitropolit-grek in Kliuchevskii’s Course in Russian History (Kliuchevskii, 1955–1959, 1, p. 265). 78 Golubinskii, 1901, p. 325. 79 Cf. M.D. Priselkov, 2003, Ocherki po tserkovno-politicheskoi istorii Kievskoi Rusi x–xii vv., ed. V.V. Iakovlev, St Petersburg, p. 53. 80 Cf. Priselkov, 2003, p. 56.

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variants are used) Theopemtos, whose first steps on Russian soil, according to Priselkov, “were not in character with the politics of peace and love, but were imbued with the evil and persecutions of the preceding period of Kievan ecclesiastical life.”81 Priselkov’s study figures in the bibliography of Saints of Ancient Russia, and Fedotov’s acquaintance with it may have supported his anti-Byzantine interpretation of early Kievan culture, even though “liberation” from the “foreign” culture is achieved far more easily in Fedotov’s account.82 His preference for the variant greki-metropolity, where emphasis is necessarily put on the first word, represents a development from Golubinskii via Priselkov, and suggests that he sees this conflict first and foremost as one between nations. Fedotov’s basis for claiming that the question of Boris and Gleb’s sainthood caused a conflict is a statement made in one of the hagiographical accounts of the two murdered princes. Here, it is said that the Kievan metropolitan of Greek origin, Ioann (John), is “struck with awe” upon hearing of the miracles performed by the recently murdered Boris and Gleb.83 That the official clergy nourish doubts about the holiness of a popular saint is itself a hagiographical topos.84 To Fedotov, however, it suggests the existence of different national (Greek and Russian) attitudes, not only to the princes in question, but eventually to Christianity itself. Allegedly different from previous forms, the holiness represented by Boris and Gleb was not universal but unique, and thus difficult to perceive: “The Greek’s doubt was understandable indeed” (sdr 20). Still, the Russians with their “firm belief ” were able to see something the sceptical foreigners were not, and it is not difficult to hear an echo of Fedor Tiutchev’s famous poem “These poor settlements” in Fedotov’s argument: “The proud foreign gaze / Cannot

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Priselkov, 2003, pp. 56f. On Priselkov’s and other political readings of early Kievan sources, such as Ilarion’s Sermon, see Simon Franklin (ed.), 1991, Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus’ (Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature: English Translations 5), Cambridge, Mass., pp. xvi–xliv, xxiii, xxxiiiff. See also Ihor Ševčenko, 1956, “Byzantine Cultural Influences,” Rewriting Russian History: Soviet Interpretations of Russia’s Past, ed. C.E. Black, New York, pp. 143–197, p. 156: “It was of course essential for Priselkov’s construction, published in 1913, that not only national, but also equally uncompromising pro-Greek, tendencies should have left an imprint upon the literary documents of the early period.” 83 See the translation of Nestor’s Lection [Lesson] in Paul Hollingsworth (ed.), 1992, The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’ (Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature: English Translations 2), Cambridge, Mass., pp. 20ff. 84 Cf. Hollingsworth, 1992, p. 27, n. 68. 82

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understand and cannot notice / What shows through and mysteriously shines / In your humble nakedness.”85 Having established the opposition between Byzantium and Kiev, between clergy and laity, Fedotov goes on to explain more specifically the meaning of Boris and Gleb’s holiness through an interpretation and comparison of two texts that record the lives and deaths of the two princes: the anonymous Narrative (Skazanie, early twelfth century?) and the hagiographer Nestor’s Lection (Chtenie, early 1080s?). Fedotov claims that the Lection relies far more heavily on Greek models than the anonymous Narrative (sdr 21). By implication, the Narrative is a more original creation and thus a more reliable source, despite the fact that inherited models capable of distorting its subject matter are also present. The dichotomy between form and content finds a parallel in that between traditional (Byzantine) Christianity and a new response to the Gospels represented by the Russians. Both hagiographical accounts represent the princes as imitators of Christ and as partakers of his passion. However, whereas the traditional concept of martyrdom implies an “ascetic heroism,” the Narrative, in Fedotov’s view, emphasises in addition a “human weakness” in both of the princes. This feature appears alongside the idea of martyrdom. In Boris, the relationship between heroic martyrdom and weakness takes the form of a “struggle” (bor’ba) between “self-pity and the sublime call to participate in Christ’s passion” (sdr 27). A similar conflict is present in Gleb. When he confronts his assassins, he displays no “courageous reconciliation” or “voluntary election,” but rather “horror” and “despair”—“almost to the very end.” But only “almost,” the text does not end with despair: “However (Odnako), this lament ends with an expression of a meek non-resistance” (sdr 28f ). Fedotov thus suggests that the Narrative contains different and competing motifs (weakness versus heroic martyrdom in the form of non-resistance) and sums up this relationship as follows: In full accordance with the ancient narrator, we may express, it seems, Gleb’s idea in his last moments as follows: every disciple of Christ is left in the world to suffer, and every innocent and voluntary suffering in the world is suffering in the name of Christ. And (A) the spirit of voluntary suffering—at least, in the form of non-resistance—triumphs even in Gleb over his human weakness. (sdr 29)

85 Translation taken from Michael Wachtel, 2004, The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry, Cambridge, p. 135.

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The conjunctions odnako and a contribute towards expressing the disjunction between different motifs in the text. According to Fedotov, it was the human weakness motif that made the saintly princes so dear to the Russian people—despite the fact that it seems to be overcome in the end. This short analysis demonstrates Fedotov’s preoccupation with the “slightest variations” in the two texts’ representation of the saints. Furthermore, he sees these variations as a manifestation of significant spiritual differences. In contrast to the traditional motif of martyrdom, which is of Greek origin, he regards that of human weakness as the genuine Russian contribution to the concept of sainthood. In other words, Fedotov uncovers at a micro-level in his sources the fundamental opposition between Byzantine and Russian Christianity, as he saw it. We should add, though, that a little later on Fedotov claims that also non-resistance (though presumably not in a heroic sense) is “a national Russian deed, an authentic religious discovery of the newly-converted Russian people” (sdr 31).86 Fedotov’s central point, nevertheless, is that Boris and Gleb present us with a hitherto unknown form of holiness (human weakness as well as non-heroic non-resistance) that is distinct from traditional concepts of martyrdom: Boris and Gleb were not martyrs for the faith in Christ (ne za veru Khristovu), Fedotov suggests, but “for Christ’s sake” (ideia vol’noi zhertvy za Khrista, sdr 31). The Workers in the Vineyard In order to recognise the true significance of these details, Fedotov next suggests placing them in a wider context: The saints Boris and Gleb did what the church did not require of them as a living Christian tradition, which had established a truce with the world. However, they, the last workers, did what the Master of the vineyard expected of them and “took away the ignominy from the sons of Russia.” Through the lives of the co-sufferers in the holy passion, as well as through the Gospels, the image of the humble and suffering Saviour entered into the heart of the Russian people forever as the most sacred of its holy treasures . . . (sdr 31) 86 The central premise in this deduction is that the Czech prince and martyr Václav (907–935), the only saint with whom Fedotov finds it relevant to compare Boris and Gleb, according to his vita attempted to escape his murderer and was thus far more “heroic” in a comparable situation.

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Fedotov evokes here the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20, 1–7), whose source in this context is Nestor’s prologue in the Lection. In Nestor, this parable is cited in order to suggest that the newly-converted Slavs are “the workers of the eleventh hour.” This people had for a long time served idols, but the Lord “took mercy on his creation, desiring to join them to His Divinity in the last days.”87 Nestor’s prologue may be said to celebrate the integration of the Eastern Slavs into Christianity, a topic we also encounter in another Kievan text from the mid-eleventh century: metropolitan Ilarion’s Sermon on Law and Grace. In the texts from this period, Prince Vladimir is represented as a new Constantine.88 In the frame story of his next work, the Life of Feodosii, Nestor resumes the same theme. With reference to Feodosii, Nestor writes: “For even the Lord Himself foretold of him: ‘Many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven’; and ‘Many that are the last, shall be the first’.”89 These last words, a quotation from Matthew 19, 30, resemble the final verse of the parable about the workers in the vineyard: “So the last will be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20, 16). The central issue in this context is: what is the meaning of being the last and becoming the first? With respect to the narratives of Nestor (as well as other Kievan texts from the same period), Simon Franklin has proposed the following interpretation: “For the Rus the universality of the Christian faith implied inclusiveness, irrespective of imperial succession and of chronological priority.” However, the application of these biblical narratives may also suggest that the inhabitants of Kiev accorded themselves “special status on account of their political and religious newness. Arriving late is turned into a virtue.”90 But does this necessarily imply an opposition between “the first and the last” with regard to precedence, so that the texts speak of exclusiveness instead of inclusiveness? At least, this is how Fedotov reads them. He considers the “last,” i.e. the people of Ancient Russia, to have become the “first,”

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Quoted from Hollingsworth, 1992, p. 5. Cf. Jostein Børtnes, 1984, “Assimilation and Dialogue: A Note on the Structure of the Primary Chronicle,” We and They: National Identity as a Theme in Slavic Cultures, eds. K. Heltberg et al., Copenhagen, pp. 22–30. 89 Hollingsworth, 1992, p. 34. Nestor quotes Matthew 8, 11, and 19, 30. 90 Simon Franklin, 2004, “Russia in Time,” National Identity in Russian Culture: An Introduction, eds. S. Franklin & E. Widdis, Cambridge, pp. 11–29, pp. 14f. 88

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in the sense that their “new” way of practising Christianity is superior to the Byzantine tradition. To Fedotov, all “workers” are not equal. We are faced here with different parabolic projections, to use Marc Turner’s term.91 In Matthew 20, the parable was projected onto the story of “the kingdom of heaven.” The same projection is found in Nestor’s account, only he attempts to include the Eastern Slavs more explicitly in his story. He does so by means of the same parable, while the story, if not changed, is at least expanded and elaborated. Fedotov, then, applies the same parable, and one may argue that he does so in order to describe the entry of a newly-converted people into “the kingdom of heaven.” However, it is, I would claim, just as much a projection of a different story: the Kiev–Byzantium relationship. When he claims that Boris and Gleb “did what the church did not require of them,” we should read this as a reference to the Byzantine church. Correspondingly, to be a “newly-converted people” (novokreshchen(n) yi narod, an expression Fedotov uses twice) is seen as a great blessing, since it meant liberation from foreign and alien traditions. While late Christianisation was not disadvantageous to either Nestor or Ilarion, they did not conceive of it as liberation from other churches, as Fedotov does. Fedotov’s radical interpretation of his sources is made possible precisely through his projection of the parable from Matthew 20 onto his own story of the Christianisation of Kiev as a liberation from Byzantium. We may read his reading as a variation of the topos that Manfred Hildermeier has termed “the privilege of backwardness,” which had prevailed in Russian thought since the eighteenth century (but not earlier), when it was introduced, in fact, by philosophers such as Leibniz and later Diderot.92 This Interpretationsfigur suggests that Russia is capable of finding ways and methods of development distinct from those of Western Europe, precisely because it has been untouched by the latter’s progressive development with all its corollaries. In the age of romantic nationalism, Russian thinkers themselves transformed this topos by searching for sources that offered a possible different way from the Western, above all in the Russian past. Fedotov’s argumentative strategy bears some resemblances to that of Aleksandr Herzen (1812–1870), who saw the Russian people as uncorrupted by 91

See Mark Turner, 1991, The Literary Mind, New York. Manfred Hildermeier, 1987, “Das Privileg der Rückständigkeit: Anmerkungen zum Wandel einer Interpretationsfigur der neueren russischen Geschichte,” Historisches Zeitschrift 244, pp. 557–603. 92

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civilisation and thus exceptionally capable of developing socialism, inspired by the Russian peasant commune.93 While the peasant commune itself was less important to Fedotov, both thinkers perceived in the past a distinct Russian way of orienting oneself in the world and of organising the cultural sphere, on the basis of their vision of Russian development as possessing a different, and slower, character than the Byzantine or Western. Later in Saints of Ancient Russia, Fedotov refers to the frame story of Nestor’s Lection twice. In the chapter on the saintly princes, he credits Nestor with having formulated a “national idea.” Whereas there were “no place and no words in the traditions of the old Church and the Byzantine Church” for expressing such an idea, Nestor “with ingenious insight uttered its first letters in his vitae, above all in the prologue to that of Boris and Gleb. In the lives of the princes, this idea is expressed fully in its ecclesiastical beauty” (sdr 95). Nestor’s “national idea,” as construed by Fedotov, is that every people (narod) has a particular “national calling” (national’noe prizvanie), a calling that, following his interpretation of Boris and Gleb, concerns the response to Christianity, which should be independent of imported traditions. It was the baptism of Russia that brought about this new and even unprecedented idea: “So customary for us, the national idea, articulated in the chronicles and in the Igor Tale, was not easily subjected to Christian reflection and sanctification” (sdr 95). However, this idea is not given in the historical sources themselves. Rather, it is Fedotov’s own construction, based on his creative interpretation of the sources— above all on his projection of the parable from Matthew 20. Next, in the chapter on Stefan of Perm, Fedotov even suggests the presence of a hidden Greekophobia in Nestor’s frame story, given its expression of pride (gordost’) on behalf of the young nation. Now Fedotov contrasts Nestor’s pride disadvantageously with the humility of Stefan, as manifested in his mission to the Permian (Komi) people and subsequent creation of a Zyriac written language. [Stefan] surrendered himself and his national awareness (smiril sebia i svoe natsional’noe soznanie) before the national idea of another, and such small, people. Only now [i.e. with Stefan’s mission, KJM] the religious foundation of the national culture bequeathed by Nestor to Ancient Russia, finds its deep, universal meaning. Alien to the Greek as well as to

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Cf. Hildermeier, 1987, pp. 576ff.

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chapter three the Roman Church, the national-religious idea is the creative gift of Russian Orthodoxy. [. . .] Only in the nineteenth century, the Slavophiles and then Vladimir Solovev came to develop and strengthen philosophically Stefan’s idea—the idea of Ancient Russia that was distorted in fifteenthcentury Moscow by the Byzantine-like reaction of the universal kingdom. (sdr 134)

The quotations from Matthew 20, 1–7 that appear in the source for this mission, Epifanii Premudryi’s Life of Stefan of Perm (late fourteenth century), suggest a parabolic projection similar to that of Nestor, except that here the parable is projected onto a different story, namely that of the conversion of the Permian people—they are now the “workers of the eleventh hour.” The question remains, however, to what extent Fedotov conceives of the conversion of the Permian people as being on equal terms with that of the Russian people. In one respect, he does. “What the ancient writers say in defence of Slavonic written language and the religious calling of the Russian people, Epifanyi attributes to the Permian letters and people,” Fedotov writes with approval (sdr 134). Stefan humbly accepts the “national idea” of another people. However, he goes on to say that this is not only the story of the “Permian idea” but also of the “Russian national idea,” which is applied here to another people so that its “universal meaning” may be revealed. By implication, the conversion of the Permian people does not carry after all the same historical significance as the baptism of Russia. Fedotov does not adopt the linear scheme of historical development in terms of progress as contained in the Life of Stefan of Perm.94 In Fedotov’s account, the baptism of Kiev remains the most important conversion to Christianity since it made possible the “national idea”— also called the “gift of Russian Orthodoxy”—of which the successful Permian mission is an expression. This “national idea” is claimed to be inherent in the Gospels but discovered and demonstrated only by the newly-converted Russian people. Paradoxically, in seeing the Permian mission as a spreading of Nestor’s national idea for the benefit of other peoples, he adopts an inclusive perspective on the relationship between Russia and the Permian people which he rejected, in fact, in the case of Russia and Byzantium.

94 On this linear historical scheme, see Børtnes, 1988, pp. 166f. In addition, Fedotov does not mention the conversion of other Slavs such as the Bulgarian people (ninth century).

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By implication, Greek culture, the Greek Church, in short “the Greeks,” are the other of Fedotov’s Saints of Ancient Russia, in relation to whom his idea of Russia is defined.95 This book is thus one of the rare examples in modern Russian intellectual history where the other is not (an idea of ) Europe, but rather Byzantium, which has otherwise been mostly considered to be a part of the Russian-Orthodox heritage (cf. the Slavophiles of the 1840s). From Negative to Positive Liberty The opening of Saints of Ancient Russia presents us with a complex notion of freedom which is, in Isaiah Berlin’s sense, both negative and positive. Negative freedom means freedom without interference, whereas positive freedom, as Berlin defines it, is the freedom to obtain self-direction or self-control.96 As demonstrated by Uffelmann, Fedotov operates with a similar double concept of freedom in several of his writings. On the one hand, he follows Thomas Hobbes in seeing freedom in terms of incongruence, i.e. a freedom from.97 On the other hand, he operates with a positive notion of freedom, which is largely that of Orthodox theology: a freedom to follow and adhere to Christian norms (“Kongruenz mit christlichen Normen”).98 So far in Saints of Ancient Russia, we have witnessed the achievement of a negative freedom in terms of the elimination of interfering Byzantine traditions. What the Kievan freedom thereby makes possible, is suggested towards the end of the chapter on Boris and Gleb. In doing “what the Church did not require of them” but “what the Master of the vineyard expected of them,” the two princes, and implicitly the Russian people, deliberately followed Christ by responding to his word directly instead of following some other traditional way of responding. Boris and Gleb’s liberation of Christianity from Byzantine traditions paves the way for Feodosii, who demonstrates the contingency of this negative freedom to an even greater extent.

95

Cf. Neumann, 1996, p. 1. Cf. Isaiah Berlin, 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 31 October 1958, Oxford, pp. 6f. 97 Uffelmann, 1994, p. 228. 98 Uffelmann, 1994, pp. 230f. 96

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While he was rather critical of the Lection on Boris and Gleb, Fedotov gives far more praise to Nestor’s next work: The Life of Feodosii. It is “the best work of our chronicler,” and presents us with “life, not literature” (sdr 35f ). It is the story of Feodosii’s childhood that Fedotov regards to be the most outstanding part of this text. True, these scenes reveal features of the saint that are not very individual, such as the ascetic exercises where he puts on iron chains. But the portrait of Feodosii’s mother and his struggle against “the despotism of motherly love,” and the scenes where Feodosii works in the fields or bakes the holy bread, are truly unique. “In this social degradation or adoption of the simple life, and only here, appears the ascetic inventiveness of the first Russian zealot (podvizhnik)” (sdr 41). And this inventiveness applies simultaneously to Nestor’s representation of this social degradation: The history of the saint’s youth, as it is given here, is Nestor’s original and daring attempt. Here he was not dependent on tradition and had no imitators in Ancient Russia. Saint Feodosii is the only saint of Ancient Russia about whose childhood and youth we have such rich material. This material is completely reliable, and is passed down by the saint’s mother, who took the veil in Kiev. It is free of legend and gives the vita of St Feodosii the character of a biography, to a greater extent than was the case with any other vitae of Russian saints. (sdr 39)

The independent character of Nestor’s text proclaimed in this passage corresponds to the independent behaviour of Feodosii, that is it is free of imitation. The scenes in which Feodosii works in the fields and bakes the holy bread, for instance, “are completely original and provide evidence of a particular religious intuition: These parts of Nestor’s narrative have no Greek parallels at all” (sdr 42). Again, the absence of textual parallels is taken to be the proof of originality, but not only with respect to the text itself. Feodosii also acted in a way hitherto unknown. While the story of Feodosii’s childhood, too, basically expresses a (negative) freedom from inherited patterns, genres, traditions, the subsequent phase of his life, in which he enters the Caves Monastery, demonstrates what this freedom makes possible. The monasticism founded there by Feodosii completes the innovatory achievements of Early Russian Christianity. The liberation from the “Greek church” is now used as a means of realising Christian ideas, present in the New Testament but undiscovered until now.

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However, the introduction of the notion of positive freedom means that the simple opposition between tradition and freedom that otherwise structures the Boris and Gleb chapter has to be modified. Positive freedom may pave the way to finding inspiration in other traditions as well. These traditions, however, are not imposed but deliberately chosen by Nestor and ultimately by the “whole of Ancient Russia” (sdr 37), according to Fedotov, from among several. To be more specific: In the history of Eastern Christianity, Fedotov detects certain saints who may be considered to be predecessors of Feodosii. These are the Palestinian saints of the fifth and sixth century: Sabas the Sanctified, Euthymius the Great, Theodosius the Cenobiarch and others. They were all portrayed by the hagiographer Cyril Scythopolis, from whom, as shown by textual criticism, Nestor borrowed extensively, especially from Cyril’s Life of Sabas. To Fedotov, this was not only a question of textual interrelationships, but of spiritual kinships as well. “Palestinian monasticism was our school of salvation, that branch (vetka) of the Eastern monastic tree from which the Russian sprout (otrasl’) developed” (sdr 37). Fedotov sees Palestinian monasticism as distinct from earlier forms of asceticism. These monks invented a new way of living and practising Christianity: a semi-coenobitic monasticism, in contrast to Egyptian and Syrian anchorite asceticism. As examples of the latter, Fedotov refers to Athanasius’ Life of Anthony (fourth century) and the Life of Symeon the Stylite (fifth century). It should be noted here that Fedotov takes into account neither the fact that coenobitic life was actually founded in Egypt by Pachomius (ca. 290–346), nor that the Life of Anthony is mentioned in Nestor’s text. Fedotov’s juxtaposition, which may be highly questionable from an historical point of view, allows him to construct different national monastic traditions, where the Russians, too, developed their own indigenous variant. Although the Egyptian and Syrian fathers impress us with their heroic asceticism, their ability to work miracles and their sublime contemplation, Fedotov writes, the modest and less conspicuous Palestinians “found time to serve the world as well,” for instance by establishing hospitals and hospices for pilgrims. They “humanised” the ascetic ideals, as the Russians did later. In exposing itself to Palestinian influence, Russian culture displayed at this early stage, in fact, a cultural self-confidence, capable of deliberately choosing what suited it best:

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chapter three This was not an accidental choice and was not governed by Nestor’s own assessment alone. We are right in seeing it as the assessment of the whole of Ancient Russia. [. . .] Ancient Russia possessed in translation a full corpus of ancient pateriki, a great number of ascetic lives and ascetic-didactical treaties. There was something to choose from, and this choice was made consciously. [. . .] It was this ideal [of the Palestinians, KJM] that Holy Russia set up for itself for imitation, while adding to it its own talent and stimulating its measured severity with her own sweet fragrance. (sdr 37f )

In these passages, Fedotov is preoccupied with the reconstruction of a national, social imaginary (Castoriadis), in that he speculates on what the inhabitants of the Eastern Slavic areas may have imagined they had in common. The Palestinian tradition is claimed to have been chosen for guidance because it is in keeping with the true message of Christianity as discovered by the newly-baptised Russians. And what they discovered in Christianity above all was its imperative of social service. Nestor’s work describes a “normal, Russian way of hard exhausting work (russkii put’ trudnichestva)” (sdr 35). Fedotov does not conceal that Feodosii also led a contemplative life, but it is “the energetic labour of his life that mainly fills the pages of his vast vita” which gives it its distinguishing quality. At the same time, his asceticism is moderate, Fedotov emphasises, and Feodosii’s physical labour is above all the serving of others. “Feodosii works both for himself and for others” (sdr 44). As we have seen, the concept of trud was central to Fedotov’s definition of culture, and we find it also in his Christian understanding of socialism as well as socialist understanding of Christianity. Here, it will be useful to turn once again to the editorial article in the first volume of New City, in which the “social problem” and “socialism” are also discussed. We are ready to define the concept of socialism, Fedotov writes, in terms of labour (trud), for labour, and not capital, occupies the honoured place within it. But we are not tempted by the dream of an absolute state-controlled compulsion in the organisation of labour. We wish to preserve the root of freedom and creativity (nachalo svobody i tvorchestva) in the economic process (khoziastvennyi protsess). [. . .] Against fascism and communism we defend the eternal truth of personality (lichnost’) and its freedom—first and foremost the freedom of the spirit (svoboda dukha).99

99

Fedotov, 1952, p. 375.

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What Fedotov attempts here, in my opinion, is to include the notion of labour (trud) in the personalist vocabulary (tvorchestvo, svoboda, lichnost’, dukh) that had been central to Russian Silver Age philosophy. The most important of these concepts is probably that of human personality (lichnost’ ), which was fundamental to most of the contributors to the Landmarks collection (1909), where it was conceived of as a “repository of human creative energy.”100 Although the Landmarks authors were eager to claim that they represented in this way a reaction to prevailing tendencies in Russian thought, Nikolai Plotnikov has recently argued that such emphasis on the human personality was by no means confined to them. The “creative individual,” according to him, had in fact been one of the main concerns of the Russian intelligentsia from Vissarion Belinskii (1811–1848) onwards.101 Interestingly, Fedotov used lichnost’ also in relation to or even as a metaphor for nations, as we saw above. Labour, however, was more peripheral in this discourse, although Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944) had given it a central place in his Philosophy of the Economy (1912), where human labour, both physical and mental, was conceived of as the “Sophianic” creative activity (i.e., permeated by Sophia), through which human beings may participate in the divine processes of creation and salvation.102 Fedotov’s attempt to associate physical labour with “spiritual” notions of creativity and personality, as well as his use of the concept khoziastvennyi protsess, testify to Bulgakov’s impact. Furthermore, the notion of labour is crucial to Fedotov’s understanding of Christianity itself, of the “Social Meaning of Christianity,” which was the title of a pamphlet he published in 1933. Here Fedotov argues that Christianity’s social meaning was first expressed by the solidarity among the Apostles. He claims that this “Jerusalem communism” is present in the Christian Church from the very beginning, as can be seen in the Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles (4, 32): 100 Alexandar Mihailovic, 1997, Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory), Evanston, Ill., p. 106. On the importance of the concept of lichnost’ in Russian Silver Age philosophy including Bakhtin and his circle, see Mihailovic, 1997, pp. 87–124. 101 Cf. N.S. Plotnikov, 2008, “Ot ‘individual’nosti’ k ‘identichnosti’: Istoriia poniatii personal’nosti v russkoi kul’ture,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 91, pp. 64–83. See also Derek Offord, 1998, “Lichnost’: Notions of Individual Identity,” Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940, eds. C. Kelly & D. Shepherd, Oxford, pp. 13–25. 102 On Bulgakov’s Philosophy of the Economy, see Catherine Evtuhov, 1997, The Cross & the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, Ithaca, N.Y., pp. 145–157, and Valliere, 2000, pp. 253–278.

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“Now the company of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had everything in common.”103 Equally important to Fedotov was the fact that Christ was the son of a carpenter and chose his disciples from among Galilean fishermen.104 He sees this as confirmation of the particular value ascribed to human physical labour in Christianity. Instead of being primarily an ascetic means of gaining self-control, labour testifies to the divine dimension of man. In the history of Christianity, moreover, the combination of labour and solidarity displayed by Jesus and his Apostles gradually stimulated the emergence of a tradition concerned with social service. It was particularly strong in Medieval Russia, despite, as Fedotov also emphasises here, Byzantine influence. “From the very beginning, Russian monasticism acquired the meaning of social service.”105 In developing the monasteries as institutions for social maintenance, such as the hospital Feodosii founded in Kiev, it created its urban character. (The model for Feodosii on this occasion was one of the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil the Great, second half of the fourth century.) Feodosii displays a social engagement, which is inherent in his putting an end to the cave monasticism founded by his predecessor Antonii. The initial years of the Kievan Caves Monastery are described by Fedotov not only in terms of expansion but also of advancement towards more developed and more socially oriented forms of monasticism in the urban sphere. Whereas Antonii, the founder of the monastery, established it in a cave and the abbot Varlaam erected the first wooden chapel above it, it was finally Feodosii who built cells around it. It is thus Feodosii who above all represents the outwardly directed, horizontal movement, which succeeds the vertical one: Abbot Feodosii not only did not isolate his monastery from the world, but established the closest ties with lay society. This was his testament to Russian monasticism. It was as if the monastery was situated just outside Kiev in order to serve the community. [. . .] The venerable Feodosii not only meets the world at the gates of his cloister, but he himself goes into

103 Cf. G.P. Fedotov, 1933, Sotsial’noe znachenie khristianstva (Khristianstvo na bezbozhnom fronte 3), Paris, pp. 12f. 104 Cf. Fedotov, 1933, p. 10. Cf. also Beaune, 1985, p. 364: “[Fedotov] trouve son modèle en Jésus-Christ, le travailleur manuel, l’artisan-ouvrier.” 105 Fedotov, 1933, p. 26.

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the world: we see him in Kiev, at feasts, visiting boyars. And we know that he was able to combine his meek discipleship with his visits. (sdr 48f )

Feodosii is not only a saint fulfilling his deeds within the coenobitic community of the monastery, but also a person interacting with the lay world. “The saint did not consider secular and political affairs beyond his spiritual competence” (sdr 51). In Fedotov’s account, Feodosii’s social concern and involvement in secular affairs form an imperative. Fedotov was not the first to emphasise the social dimension of Russian monasticism. In his bibliography, he includes a small book of 1903 by Sergei Smirnov (1870–1916) entitled How the Zealots of Ancient Russia Served the World.106 This text was a contribution to a debate that had been provoked a year earlier by Aleksandr Kruglov (1853–1915), who had claimed that Russian monasteries should devote themselves to active social service, such as helping the poor and sick, teaching illiterates to read and write, etc. Kruglov’s view did not gain much support from archimandrite Nikon or any other officials of the Orthodox Church, while Smirnov wrote his account in order to support Kruglov.107 As the title of his book suggests, Smirnov’s view is close to that later held by Fedotov, and he appears to have influenced Fedotov because of his emphasis on the urban and socially active character of early Russian monasticism. What Fedotov attempts to do, however, is to show the full implications of this interpretation—that social service is a fundamental aspect of Christianity itself. Difference and Opposition By defining the Early Russian response to Christianity as “evangelical” (evangel’skii)—a term that usually refers to Protestant denominations whose doctrines are claimed to rely directly on the Gospel—Fedotov suggests not only that it is more faithful to the Scriptures, but that the baptism of Russia ultimately represents a reformation of the Eastern Church. As he puts it towards the end of his book: “at the dawn of its existence, Ancient Russia preferred the way of holiness to the

106 S.I. Smirnov, 1903, Kak sluzhili podvizhniki Drevnei Rusi (Istoricheskaia spravka k polemike o monashestve) (Bogoslovskii vestnik 3–4), Sergiev Posad. 107 On the background to Smirnov’s book, see the introduction to its online, abbreviated version by the journal Moskovskie eparkhial’nye vedomosti (http://vedomosti .meparh.ru/2003_6_8/12.htm), accessed 01.12.10.

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way of culture” (sdr 204). This juxtaposition of holiness and culture is paradoxical indeed given the positive emphasis on culture elsewhere in Fedotov’s writings. However, it makes more sense in this context if we read “culture” as the “cultures and traditions of others” (Byzantium), while keeping in mind that Fedotov perceives nations and their cultures as personalities that should develop their own traditions. The childhood imagery plays a central role in the opening chapters of Fedotov’s book. The “workers of the eleventh hour,” he writes, “were able with ingenious childlike simplicity to be captivated by the image of Christ and by the absolute beauty of the evangelical way” (sdr 31, italics added). Characteristic of this simplicity of childhood is a direct and open attitude to the Scriptures cleansed of inherited traditions. Such a description bears the undeniable mark of Rousseau (and Tolstoi), in which childhood is portrayed as a natural and pure state, soon to be afflicted by unhealthy tendencies. In Fedotov’s account, the childhood of Russian history—the Kievan period as embodied in the first Russian saints—finds a parallel in the childhood of Feodosii himself, the part of his biography that is most clearly without any Greek model and thus the most original. Fedotov was not the first to use childhood as a metaphor for the initial phase of Russian history—at least in the kind of history written in accordance with the “traditional scheme of Russian history” (Hrushevsky). In his Notes on Ancient and Modern Russia, Karamzin describes the Russian state of the eleventh century as “resembling a sprightly, impassioned youth [who] could look forward to a long life and to glorious deeds.”108 However, although he concludes his notes by stating that “states, like human beings, have their definite life spans,”109 Karamzin’s idea of history is first and foremost cyclical, not linear. What saves Russia throughout its history is autocracy—despite “excessive fondness for political changes which shake the foundations of the empire.”110 Fedotov takes the childhood metaphor more seriously. Taken as a whole, his book represents Russian sainthood in constant transformation through a linear development, and its subsequent forms present a

108 Richard Pipes, 1959, Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis (Russian Research Center Studies 33), Cambridge, Mass., p. 104. 109 Pipes, 1959, p. 204. 110 Pipes, 1959, p. 156.

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series of deviations from that of Feodosii, which are not overcome in a circular movement as in Karamzin, at least not by the time of writing. The emergence during the twelfth century of a severe asceticism within the Kievan Caves Monastery represents the decline of this institution, and as such is a token of the decline of Russian sainthood in general. The history of the socially oriented monasticism founded by Feodosii is relatively short. In the third chapter, Fedotov examines the Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery, which is read as a source for the further development not only of this monastery but of the evolving spiritual life of Russia itself. A few monks (Nikola Sviatosha, Prokhor the Pigweed Eater, Spiridon the Baker, and Alimpii the Icon Painter) are considered by Fedotov to preserve the heritage of Feodosii in their continuous service to the world, for instance by their helping the poor. However, these figures are not representative of the general decline to which this source testifies: The general impression of the Paterik: quite another spirit is breathing here than in the Life of Feodosii. The venerable Feodosii’s connection with these spiritual children seems almost inconceivable. We may say at once: Here everything is harsh, extraordinary, excessive; we find asceticism, thaumaturgy, and demonology. The social service of monasticism recedes into the background. Besides, in the Paterik’s representation, the Caves Monastery loses its identity. Community life no longer exists. Wealth and poverty live side by side. The great achievements of some take place against the dissipation and wilfulness of others. It is not accidental that the clearest and most impressive portraits in the paterik are those of the hermits. (sdr 54f )

Fedotov sees these developments as a resumption of the anchorite monasticism that he associates with Feodosii’s predecessor, Antonii: “Severe temptations, severe demonology, severe sufferings—such is the atmosphere in which the astounding deeds of the posthumous disciples of Antonii are achieved” (sdr 61). These features are contrasted with those of the spiritual life founded by Feodosii: The first is that of the cave, the ascetic and heroic; the second takes place on the earth’s surface, is humbly serving, social, charitable. Their roots go back to the holy founders, and also to the two-fold tradition of the Greek East: the Palestinian-Stoudite and the Egyptian-Syrian-Athosian. (sdr 63)

Fedotov admits that is not always possible to separate these two forms from one another, yet the “opposition between them remains.” Although the empirical data at times suggests otherwise, Fedotov

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nevertheless tends to arrange his data into two separate categories, which he does not take as complementary but as mutually exclusive. This projection of dichotomies is a central rhetorical and argumentative strategy in Fedotov’s text. He applies binary oppositions in order to move through and make sense of the material presented by the sources, and as a result these oppositions acquire an ontological status. Antonii’s school, which did not consist of any disciples (among his contemporaries, there were none, as Fedotov points out) but of later generations that took up his form of monasticism, is seen as continuing the ascetic traditions of Egypt and Syria rejected by Feodosii, according to Fedotov. In addition, Antonii is depicted as a representative of the tradition of Mount Athos, which Fedotov sees in contrast to that of the Stoudiou Monastery in Constantinople. The basis for this juxtaposition is Nestor’s account of how Feodosii, immediately after the erection of the monastery, sent one of his brethren to the Stoudiou Monastery in order to bring back its rule, whereas Antonii visited Mount Athos (cf. the seventh discourse of the Paterik). In describing spiritual development from Feodosii to succeeding generations, the narrative thus presents us with two different, mutually exclusive, chronologically ordered types of monastic life in Russia. In this respect Fedotov’s view is by and large in accord with previous scholars such as Golubinskii and Nikolai Nikolskii (1863–1936), who used the metaphor “Enlightenment” to describe the first decades following the baptism of Russia. According to Nikolskii, “the years of our Enlightenment’s blossoming” were followed by a “darker religious doctrine.” And he continues, “In fact, the religion of the Kievan Caves monasticism differed from the Christianity of Vladimir just as a human being may differ from an incorporeal being.”111 According to Gerhard Podskalsky, Nikolskii’s idea of two opposing kinds of theological worldview succeeding each other on Russian soil had a longlasting effect on later scholars in general, including the late Dmitrii Likhachev (1906–1999).112 Podskalsky suggests that this sharp differentiation between two opposing Weltsichten, where the first is associated

111 N.K. Nikol’skii, 1913, “O drevne-russkom khristianstve,” Russkaia mysl’ 6, pp. 1–23, p. 15. See also Golubinskii, 1901, vol. 1, pp. 701ff. 112 Gerhard Podskalsky, 1981, “Grundzüge altrussischer Theologie (988–1237), I: Fürstenkirche, hierarchische Kirche oder Volkskirche?” Les pays du nord et Byzance (Scandinavie et Byzance): Actes du colloque nordique et international de byzantinologie tenu à Upsal 20–22 avril 1979, ed. R. Zeitler, Uppsala, pp. 195–201, p. 195.

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with the Slavic areas (Bulgaria, Kiev) and the other with Byzantium, tends to ignore the double and ambivalent character of them both, i.e. they both waver between humanism and Hesychasm.113 As I have shown, the strategy of grouping phenomena that are complementary or co-existing in both Byzantium and Kiev into binary categories is highly characteristic of Fedotov as well (cf. also his theory of a distinct form of Russian kenoticism as opposed to the Byzantine image of Christ Pantocrator), and it is above all thanks to him—more than any of the other scholars just mentioned—that these oppositions have had such a long-lasting impact on the field of Russian studies. The function of constructing binary oppositions, as observed by Maurice Halbwachs, is one of the central mechanisms of collective memory. In his work The Social Framework of Memory, Halbwachs emphasises the selectivity of memory, which implies that it gives certain specific events a privileged status over others, which are forgotten. According to Halbwachs, in Daniel Gordon’s paraphrase, “memory is capable of turning ‘difference’ into ‘radical opposition’, with the result that different events acquire a different ontological status within the mind of the rememberer.” However factual the events themselves may be, the relationship between them, i.e. the “radical opposition” that is constructed and transmitted by social memory, is “purely discursive and psychological, and has no foundations in the past.”114 Difference turned into radical opposition is the prevalent pattern in the opening chapters of Fedotov’s Saints of Ancient Russia. As suggested earlier, commemoration may be held to be a central purpose of this book and the observations of Halbwachs and Gordon are thus even more relevant here. However, the commemorative aspect of this text is most evident, I think, when we read the individual portraits of the saints independently of each other. More than anyone else, St Feodosii is held up as an ideal for the rebirth of Russian spirituality in the present. But his life, as a recorded event, is also part of a narrative. Fedotov is not only interested in the initial achievements of Russian spirituality but also in its subsequent transformations. In the light of Fedotov’s interpretation of the Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery,

113

Cf. Podskalsky, 1981, p. 196. Daniel Gordon, 1995, “[Review of ] Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory,” History and Theory 34 (4), pp. 340–354, p. 348. The text on which he comments is Halbwachs, 1992, pp. 84–119: “Religious collective memory” (see in particular pp. 88–92). 114

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which represents the next stage, we realise that his history of Russian holiness is one of a gradual decline. It anticipates the next major phase of Russian sainthood, which is represented by Avramii of Smolensk (†early thirteenth century). Fedotov’s Tragedy In the chapter on Avramii, Feodosii is continually referred to as the prototype to whom the subsequent figures are compared and in relation to whom they are evaluated. Initially, Fedotov states that “in his youth, Avramii himself no doubt went through Feodosii’s school and imitated him.” However, we soon encounter features that deviate from Feodosii’s pattern: As we know, the saint Feodosii frequented princes’ feasts, though he sighed while listening to the music of the minstrels. Avramii, however, “never went to dinners or feasts because of the many arguments which occur among those choosing their places.” This is the motivation that should justify the deviation from the prototype. (sdr 68)115

Fedotov’s emphasis on Avramii’s withdrawal from the social sphere, I would claim, is highly significant. It is in order to preach repentance and not to serve other people that Avramii comes out of his cell. Fedotov relates Avramii’s prophetic and eschatological character to his knowledge of the Scriptures and other Christian writings. Although the young Feodosii was also fond of books, Fedotov does not list bookish learning among his most profound features, while Avramii’s love of reading and his rhetorical gifts tend to supersede the constitutive characteristics of Feodosii as a model: “In Avramii, this particular ‘gift of labouring (trud) at the Divine Scriptures’, replaces the gift and labour of social service, without which one can hardly imagine a saint of Ancient Russia” (sdr 69). The occurrence of the word trud in the Life of Avramii as a reference not to physical labour but to bookish learning suggests that with Avramii preaching replaces social service as the characteristic feature of Russian spirituality. Emplotted into a narrative structure, Feodosii and Avramii do not so much represent different and complementary forms of sainthood as a chronological transformation of Russian holiness. In this way, Avramii represents

115

Translation of the vita extract is taken from Hollingsworth, 1992, p. 144.

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the embryo of Fedotov’s tragedy of Russian spirituality, which now begins to lose its social dimension. However, it will not be altogether lost. What is tragic above all in Fedotov’s work is that social service conflicts with another fundamental principle in Early Russian Christianity: freedom. As Antoshchenko points out, “Fedotov’s view of history was tragic. In accordance with the rules of the classical genre of tragedy, the fall of the hero led to catharsis, as the result of an inescapable conflict, the struggle against evil within himself or in the world around him.”116 Here, Antoshchenko suggests that Fedotov’s history is a tragedy composed in accordance with the literary genre of tragedy. The epithet “tragedy of Ancient Russian holiness” as used in the title of the twelfth chapter, thus has a deeper meaning. I share this view of Saints of Ancient Russia as a tragedy, and I think that Antoshchenko’s approach is fruitful. However, I do not believe that he analyses Fedotov’s tragic interpretation of the past sufficiently. Besides, the application of the concept of tragedy to the analysis of a historical work needs to be discussed more critically. I will begin with the first problem. To my mind, Saints of Ancient Russia is a tragedy first and foremost because it describes a tragic conflict, at whose centre are the most important achievements of early Kievan Christianity: freedom and social service. The tragic conflict is the collision between these two principles. This tragedy emerges slowly; it is not a sudden peripeteia. As his book demonstrates, Fedotov is not a maximalist, a feature that is otherwise often claimed to be characteristic of both Russian thought and history.117 In Fedotov’s account, Feodosii’s socially oriented urban monasticism was soon to suffer a decline (the Paterik, Avramii), and by the thirteenth century, Russian monasticism displayed a “huge estrangement from the world and its fate” (sdr 138). However, it was restored by the fourteenth-century Sergii of Radonezh (†1392), who inaugurates the “Golden age of Russian holiness” (sdr 162). With Sergii, Fedotov sees Russian monasticism as gradually returning to this world. After an 116

Antoshchenko, 2003, p. 347. For a survey of theories of Russian maximalism as well historical examples, see David M. Bethea, 1989, The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction, Princeton, N.J., pp. 12–31. As far as I know, Berdiaev was the first to formulate the maximalist view of Russian history and mentality, and it was later taken up and reformulated in structuralist language by the cultural semioticians Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii. See Chapter Five. 117

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initial period in the wilderness, cut off from the communal world, other hermits began to join Sergii and “against his will” he accepted being appointed abbot to the brethren who had gathered around him. So, step-by-step, the venerable Sergii returns to the human world from the wilderness that he held so dear, even if only to the world secluded by the monastery walls—in order to overstep those very walls. The wilderness he bequeaths to his more fortunate disciples; he himself embarks on the well-trodden path of Feodosii. (sdr 142f )

Sergii takes up the active, socially oriented monasticism of Feodosii, and becomes the next truly significant representative of the “pure Russian understanding of monastic service” (sdr 145). But not without alterations: “The most venerable Sergii, even more than Feodosii, stands out as a harmonious exponent of the Russian ideals of holiness, despite the sharpening of its extremities: the mystical and the political” (sdr 151f ). As this quotation suggests, however, Fedotov sees Sergii’s political activities as detached from his contemplative life. Sergii emerged as a “bearer of a particularly mysterious life that is not confined to the deeds of love, asceticism, and continual prayers” (sdr 148). It is this mystical dimension, unknown to Feodosii, which creates an ambiguity that is highly significant with respect to the tragic conflict that Fedotov now begins to expound. The mysticism of Sergii is the result of Hesychast influences, which were discernible in Russia from the middle of the fourteenth century onwards. The deposit of Hesychast writings in the Trinity Monastery (founded by Sergii) does not testify, Fedotov suggests, to a “direct Greek influence on the religious mind of the venerable Sergii. However, the ways of spiritual influences are not revealed by, nor confined to direct instruction or imitation” (sdr 149). This is how Fedotov concludes his discussion of Greek influences on Sergii, who lacked the transparency so characteristic of Feodosii. Fedotov is unable to figure out this mysticism and resigns from exploring it. From Sergii and his Trinity Monastery Russian monasticism developed in two “streams” (potoki): a mystical one, continued by Kirill of Belozero (†1427) and later Nil of Sora (†1508), and a social and urban one, represented above all by Iosif of Volotsk (†1515). Both correspond to different sides of Sergii himself, and the tragic conflict portrayed in Saints of Ancient Russia is precisely the clash between these two principles, now represented by opposing parties. The mystical current, which developed in the wilderness (to the north-east of Moscow), represents a withdrawal from the world of

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human beings and social relationships. “A firm, though also meek, independence from this severe world characterises both the venerable Kirill and his entire school” (sdr 159). His world is one of hermits, whose zealots “thirst first and foremost for silence” (sdr 164). The mystical side of Sergii, continued by Kirill, is fully revealed in Nil of Sora, who lived his life in loneliness, and was disturbed “only at times by tiresome guests from the world” (sdr 167, italics added). Fedotov discerns in Nil a “distrust for monastic penance” that gives him “spiritual freedom” (sdr 169). According to Fedotov, freedom has now moved from the sphere in which it was initially acquired (urban monasticism) to a place outside society, where it is no longer able to serve the lay world. Here, the lay world, on the contrary, has become a disturbing element. Nil was “very well read in the Greek mystical literature” and displayed the “gift of systematic exegesis, rare in Ancient Russia” (sdr 168). However, he is not entirely a Greek figure. At the end of the chapter, Fedotov emphasises that he also possessed a different side: Although found at the lowest level of the spiritual heights, this brotherly love makes up a different sphere of his soul, which is addressed to the world. It is free from any image of severity and gives him great earthly appeal. For this love he finds tremendous words of his own—not of Greek origin. (sdr 174f )

Hence, Nil also presents us with a modicum of Russianness—that which is not Greek—but the significance of positive freedom for expressing brotherly love is presented as marginal. Nil’s freedom is above all negative: it is a freedom from the surrounding world. As the quotation shows, Fedotov continues to structure his narrative on the Russian-Greek antithesis, where Russia is still perceived in terms of social concern and earthly presence (however marginal), a defining characteristic that is juxtaposed with mysticism, which in this case does have a Greek origin (Hesychasm). Russianness is implicitly defined as a negation of Greekness. Nil’s counterpart is Iosif of Volotsk. He represents the other movement that proceeded from Sergii, though not without modifications: “Iosif ’s service to society stems not from compassion but from Christian duty” (sdr 183). This did not prevent the expansion of the social work of his monastery; Fedotov emphasises that it “served the nation extensively” (sdr 187). However, loyalty to the state deprived Iosif and his school of the freedom that Nil and his followers were able to achieve.

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The conflict and subsequent schism between the Possessors and the Non-Possessors, i.e. between Iosif and Nil and their respective followers, was in many ways “tragic,”118 but this specific conflict and the Possessors’ subsequent victory is not, to my mind, the tragedy. Fedotov does not prefer Nil’s monasticism to that of Iosif, and appears not to be negative about the official defeat of eremitism in favour of coenobitic and wealthy monasteries.119 In my reading of Fedotov, it was far more tragic that Iosif, the saint preserving the heritage of Fedosii and Sergii, became a collaborator of the growing Muscovite state and ended up being subordinated to the Tsar, whereas freedom was preserved only among those who withdrew from the world. In other words, the tragedy consists in the clash between two principles that were once united, above all in Feodosii. And the origin of this tragedy is found in Sergii, in whom both principles were present but nevertheless separated, according to Fedotov. In Feodosii’s age, freedom made possible the conditions for social service. In Sergii, these two aspects became more polarised in that one did not presuppose the other. And after Sergii, they could no longer be preserved together. Originally, freedom was achieved in opposition to the Byzantine tradition within urban monasticism. Now it was preserved among the Hesychasts who settled in the wilderness, who represented a nonRussian (Greek) spirituality. Urban monasticism was subjected to the interests of the state. This is the narrative and tragic logic of Russian holiness according to Fedotov. This brings us to Fedotov’s use of a tragic plot. As observed above, Fedotov sees the individual saints as metonymical representations of Russian holiness and ultimately of Holy Russia itself, which is the imaginary agency in Fedotov’s tragedy. By implication, this imaginary agency is seen as embodied in the saints, who represent the course of events. The events are, in turn, conceived of as actions. Actions, i.e. events with an actor, are projected onto events.120 “Events as actions” are possible to emplot in a narrative structure, an operation that creates the illusion of causality between them and, not least, of an agency

118 This is Antoshchenko’s interpretation (cf. Antoshchenko, 2003, pp. 335, 339), and I disagree with his view that it is this conflict itself that constitutes Fedotov’s tragedy. 119 Again, I disagree with Antoshchenko, who holds that Fedotov’s sympathy is with Nil, cf. 2003, p. 338. 120 Cf. Turner, 1996, p. 26.

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that carries them out. This is how the narrative representation of Russian spirituality—in the form of a tragic plot—becomes possible. To my mind, the model of “events as actions” forms the basis of the personification or metaphorisation that takes place in Fedotov’s narrative representation of the past.121 Fedotov’s tragedy describes the unforeseen and unintended consequences of this imaginary action. To borrow a formulation from Northrop Frye’s description of the classical tragic plot, it presents the “theme of narrowing a comparatively free life into a process of causation,” or a “use of freedom to lose freedom.”122 More specifically, Fedotov notes at times how the subsequent reception of a saint goes against the saint’s own will. Feodosii symbolically bequeathed “probably against his will” his iron chains to subsequent Russian monasticism. Sergii the hermit was appointed abbot of a monastery—“not in keeping with his will.” And finally, “in his struggle with Nil of Sora and his disciples, Iosif—against his own will—destroyed the traditions of the venerable Sergii; traditions that became too awkward to the religious apparel of the magnificent Muscovite tsardom” (sdr 188). Here, to my mind, Fedotov sees a series of events in Russian cultural history through the prism of the genre of tragedy by allowing the imaginary agency (and not just the individual saints) to be confronted by the outcome of its own actions. Fedotov’s emphasis on the unintended consequences of action makes it necessary to critically evaluate a commonly held assumption in the literature on Fedotov’s historiography. Marc Raeff sees the exile historiography of Fedotov (and Florovskii) as the first successful attempts to break away from the nomothetic positivist tradition that

121 Compare in this respect White’s description of Tocqueville, the nineteenthcentury historian who more than anyone represented the past in a tragic mode: “The protagonist of The Old Regime was the old regime itself, caught between the dead weight of its past and its awareness of the changes necessary for its continued survival. It is too strong to say that Tocqueville actually personified the old regime and made of it the Tragic hero of his story, but there is a certain Lear-like quality about its dilemma. Tocqueville portrayed the monarchy and its sustaining institutions as impaled on the horns of a dilemma created by the logic of state centralization on the one hand and the logic of human aspiration on the other” (White, 1973, p. 215). I would like to add, however, that White’s reservations about speaking of personification are not entirely justified. As also noted in the Introduction, he fails to explain how the past may be represented in literary genres because he does not discuss such possible strategies as metaphorisation. 122 Northrop Frye, 1957, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton, N.J., p. 212.

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had dominated Russian historiography up to this point.123 As demonstrated in Chapter Two, Russian historicism operated with the idea of a pattern common to all national histories, often referred to as “laws.” The quest for laws became even more urgent to the subsequent generation of Russian historians, above all the so-called “Russian subjective school,” which consisted of Fedotov’s teacher Nikolai Kareev, Maksim Kovalevskii (1851–1916), Pavel Vinogradov (1854–1925), and others, who came under the decisive influence of French and English positivism (Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer). To Kareev, history was a process, whose laws were explicated by sociology. Furthermore, this process has a purpose, which should be conceived of in terms of progress, a fact that imposes an ideal onto historical development. Science would thus become able to predict the future.124 A clear, though more modest, belief in history as both process and progress was also present in Fedotov’s other teacher, Ivan Grevs.125 However, it is far more difficult to discern a similar confidence in progress in the émigré historian Fedotov’s tragic comprehension of the past and present. Antoshchenko maintains that history according to Fedotov “is a result of free human activity; what is done is the result of a choice, and this presupposes responsibility for what has been accomplished, for the choices that were made.”126 In my view, Raeff and Antoshchenko have rightfully perceived in Fedotov’s work a rejection of nomothetical historiography. However, when reading a work like Saints of Ancient Russia, I do not think that their assertions are sufficiently conclusive. Above all, I would claim that tragedy calls into question the simple opposition between freedom and necessity. True, an initially achieved freedom makes the history of a distinct Russian holiness possible, and in this connection we could say that Fedotov’s historiography rejects the notion of universal laws governing human action. In Saints of Ancient Russia, however, its subjects and the imaginary agency of Russian holiness are continually confronted by the unpredictable effects of that initial freedom and by the difficulty of preserving it. The main ambiguity

123

Raeff, 1990, pp. 176ff. For short presentations of Kareev, see Alexander Vucinich, 1976, Social Thought in Tsarist Russia: The Quest for a General Science of Society, 1861–1917, Chicago, pp. 50–54, and Hans Hecker, 1983, Russische Universalgeschichtsschreibung: Von den “Vierziger Jahren” des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur sowjetischen “Weltgeschichte” (1955– 1965) (Studien zur modernen Geschichte 29), Munich, pp. 153–159. 125 Cf. Kaganovich, 2007, pp. 62f. 126 Antoshchenko, 2003, p. 306. 124

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of freedom, as Fedotov’s book demonstrates, consists in its potential to lead to actions that may eventually undermine freedom itself. Fedotov’s Historicism Raeff has suggested that Fedotov’s study of Russian spirituality “fits in well with the methodology and findings of such recent works as E. Leroy-Ladurie’s [sic] Montaillou and Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms.”127 The suggestion of a parallel between Fedotov and Ginzburg in particular has been repeated by Zaitseva.128 I must admit I find this suggestion questionable. It is true that Fedotov in his introduction to The Russian Religious Mind outlines a programme for studying lower, popular forms of Russian Christianity and religious practice at the intersection between Christian and pagan belief. It is also true that in the 1910s and 1920s a new approach to medieval studies based on social psychology was developed by St Petersburg historians, above all by Olga Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaia (1874–1939). Her courses on medieval everyday life, which dealt for instance with the apprehension of time in the Middle Ages, have been claimed to anticipate later tendencies in French historiography (Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and Philippe Ariès) as well as in Russian (Aron Gurevich).129 However, Fedotov cannot be compared to these historians, at least not to the French ones. As should be clear by now, Fedotov constructs a narrative of Russian spirituality on the basis of his interpretations of Old Russian lives of the saints, and sets out in his study to (re-)construct the unique development of Russian holiness, from an instantaneous blossoming to a gradual decline. Fedotov is a historicist in this respect, and this alone is enough to distinguish him from the most innovatory currents in French twentieth-century historiography, be it of the early representatives of the Annales school (with whom Fedotov may have been acquainted), or of a later historian such as Ladurie, whose works are far from the kind of sweeping historicist narrativisation practised by Fedotov.

127

Raeff, 1990, pp. 184f. Zaitseva, 2001, p. 215. 129 Kaganovich, 2007, pp. 113f. This point initially put forward in Kaganovich’s candidate’s dissertation from 1986 is also referred to in Anan’ich & Paneiakh, 1999, pp. 160f. 128

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At the end of this analysis, therefore, I would like to emphasise more explicitly the historicist features of Fedotov’s work, because these features—including his narrative form—are the key to his ideas not only about the past but also about the relevance of the past to the present and future. In his introduction, Fedotov is concerned with rejecting what he refers to as the “prejudice” that spiritual life is uniform and immutable (sdr 6). Post-Petrine spirituality, Fedotov points out, is very different from that of the Philokalia, i.e. the asceticism of the Ancient Orthodox East (although the collection itself was compiled at the end of the eighteenth century). The existence of differences in time and space substantiate his idea that Russian holiness forms a distinct, “individual” tradition. Christian spiritual life does possess norms that are common to all but these are realised differently by different peoples, at different periods. In this respect Fedotov’s conceptualisation of history is in keeping with classic historicism as outlined by Friedrich Meinecke and others (cf. Chapter Two). And the fundamental challenge for a historicist, as emphasised by Frank Ankersmit, is to provide his or her scattered material with coherence.130 Fedotov himself refers to a “national idea,” which by providing the potential for national varieties in Christianity guarantees the coherence also of Russian historical development and continuity. As I have shown, however, this idea is not simply found in the sources; it is the result of Fedotov’s own interpretation of them. And the coherence of Russian cultural history is first and foremost constructed by means of a narrative structure, a tragic plot.131 In addition to the various forms of Russian holiness, Saints of Ancient Russia describes the development from an initial stage of organic unity of clergy and laity, i.e. of the Church and the Russian people (narod), to a unity of the nation-state and the church, whose relation to the people becomes increasingly antithetic. From his presentation we may infer that according to Fedotov’s conception, sainthood in the earliest phase of Russian Christianity was recognised first by the people and then confirmed by the church. While Fedotov defines canonisation as the “church’s act of initiating the worship of a saint,” in Ancient

130 131

Cf. Ankersmit, 1995a, pp. 152ff. See also Chapter Two. Cf. Fulsås, 1990, p. 123.

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Russia, he continues, “people’s veneration usually (though not always) precedes ecclesiastical canonisation” (sdr 12f ). The role played by the Russian narod is manifest above all in the story of Boris and Gleb. Since the anonymous Narrative had been preserved in far more copies than Nestor’s Lection, it was the features highlighted in the Narrative (human weakness, non-heroic nonresistance) that “remained in the memory of the people” (sdr 22). “Between these two different interpretations of the passion sufferers’ feats Ancient Russia made its choice: The Narrative overshadowed the Lection in the people’s love” (sdr 30). It was thus not only the saintly princes who responded “evangelically” to the Gospel; the Russian people did so too in their response to both the Gospel and to the princes. As mentioned earlier, the Palestinian influence on the composition of Nestor’s Life of Feodosii was similarly not an “accidental choice”; it was, Fedotov maintains, a conscious “assessment of the whole of Ancient Russia.” In this early phase of Russian spirituality, the people’s response became the key to discovering genuine holiness, and their recognition was accepted in turn by the Russian church. In Fedotov’s account, Boris and Gleb were canonised as a result of the people’s and the clergy’s “understanding” (narodno-tserkovnoe ponimanie) and “interpretation” (narodno-tserkovnoe osmyslenie, sdr 22, 24). This adjective narodno-tserkovnoe was not entirely invented by Fedotov himself. In the aforementioned article “Early Russian Christianity” (1913), Nikolai Nikolskii speaks of the tserkovno-narodnoe ponimanie of Orthodoxy as the thing which should be elaborated when seeking to define the specific characteristics of the Russian mentality, what is “genuinely Russian” (istinno-russkoe).132 Fedotov applies Nikolskii’s terminology in order to interpret the relationship between the people and the clergy, but as in the case of greki-metropolity, he reverses the order. By speaking exclusively of narodno-tserkovnoe Fedotov puts greater emphasis on the narod. In referring to mid-sixteenth-century events, however, Fedotov introduces the terms “national-ecclesiastical self-awareness” (natsionalnotserkovnoe samosoznanie) and “movement” (tserkovno-natsionalnoe dvizhenie, sdr 16). Whereas both natsiia and narod can mean “nation,”

132 Cf. Nikol’skii, 1913, pp. 3f. He reverses the word order once, i.e. narodnotserkovnoe, which is the variant Fedotov uses.

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the latter largely connotes a romantic notion of “the people,” i.e. “simple” or “common” people, rather than the state.133 In keeping with the dichotomy put forward by Belinskii in his article “Russia before Peter the Great” (1842), natsiia represents in addition a more complex stage that succeeds narod in the historical development.134 In contrast to Belinskii, however, Fedotov does not conceive of this shift in terms of progress. What he emphasises with this conceptual pair is the breaking-up of the initial organic bond between the people and the church as well as the new alliance between a loyal church and the state. Later, the church lost even its ability to perceive holiness as a result of its gradual submission to the tsar and his expanding and increasingly powerful Muscovite state. During the time of metropolitan Makarii (mid-sixteenth century) the number of saints doubled, but mostly for political reasons, a fact that testifies to abuse, according to Fedotov. The subsequent decrease in canonised saints in the synodal period, then, becomes yet another expression of a general decline in Russian sanctity, symptomatic of the tragedy of Russian holiness. However, the people, who are now opposed to the clergy, never entirely lose the ability to perceive true holiness. The persistence of this ability is reflected in the composition of Fedotov’s work. The chapter entitled the “Tragedy of Ancient Russian Holiness” is not the end of Fedotov’s narrative. It is followed by a postlude-like combination of three chapters which all deal with lower forms of Orthodoxy that are opposed to the official one: holy foolishness, holy laymen and women, and legendary motifs. The fact that Fedotov’s narrative continues after the final defeat of the (imaginary) agency, however, is also in keeping with a tragic perception of life, where death is never final but contains the seeds of a new life. “The fall of the protagonist and the shaking of the world he inhabits which occur at the end of the Tragic play are not regarded as totally threatening to those who survive the agonic

133 On the concepts of narod and narodnost’, see Maureen Perrie, 1998, “Narodnost’: Notions of National Identity,” Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940, eds. C. Kelly & D. Shepherd, Oxford, pp. 28–36, and Nathaniel Knight, 2000, “Ethnicity, Nationality and the Masses: Narodnost’ and Modernity in Imperial Russia,” Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, eds. D.L. Hoffmann & Y. Kotsonis, New York, pp. 41–64. 134 V.G. Belinskii, 1954, “Rossiia do Petra Velikogo,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5: Stat’i i retsenzii, 1841–1844, Moscow, pp. 91–152, pp. 121ff. Belinskii locates this transition in the reign of Peter the Great, and not in the proclamation of the Muscovite tsardom, as Fedotov does.

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test. There has been a gain in consciousness for the spectators of the contest.”135 Holy foolishness as a form of lay holiness appeared at the beginning of the sixteenth century, i.e. at the time when monasticism was about to suffer defeat, and Fedotov sees the rise of this lay form as a response to the tragic development of the church and its relationship with the state: “The holy fool became the holy prince’s successor in social service” (sdr 205). Similarly, holy laymen and women, above all Iulianiia Lazarevskaia (†1604), are praised by Fedotov for their “traditional love for the people and the pathos of social service” (sdr 232). Holy foolishness proved nevertheless to be a short-lived movement, and the seventeenth century saw a decline in this form of piety as well. Because of the authorities’ hostility, the holy fools withdrew into the wilderness of the north. “Deprived of spiritual support from the ecclesiastical intelligentsia and persecuted by the police, holy foolishness descended to the people (spuskaetsia v narod ) and suffered a process of degeneration” (sdr 219). There is, however, a positive side to this “descent to the people”: it suggests that the remnants of Russian spirituality were preserved here. In the nineteenth century, it is the peasantry (krest’ianstvo) that has become the principal representative of the ideals of Holy Russia (sdr 251). This idea is profoundly expressed in the following passage: Far from the protective surveillance of the rulers, unnoticed by the intelligentsia, even by the church hierarchy, spiritual life still glimmers in monasteries, in the hermitages, and in the world. During recent centuries, the Russian monastery has not lived up to its spiritual ideal. Towards the end of the synodal period, a decline, which often took very serious and disgraceful forms, can be seen in most of the monasteries. Yet even in the most dissolute of them there might be found a small forest retreat or a recluse’s cell where prayer never stops. In the towns, among the laymen, not only in the provincial backwoods but in the capital cities as well, amid the noise and rumble of civilisation, holy fools, blessed ones, pilgrims, the pure at heart, the poor, the devotees of love are passing by on their way. And the love of the people (narodnaia liubov’) notices them. (sdr 253)

It is above all this narodnaia liubov’ that confirms the existence of holiness in post-Petrine Russia. The people have remained capable of recognising genuine spirituality. Official Orthodoxy had long 135

White, 1973, p. 9.

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since degenerated, and not even the late eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury restoration of the mystical tradition (Serafim of Sarov, the Optina Pustyn monastery, the book The Way of a Pilgrim, in which the Philokalia plays an important role) could restore its ties with the Russian people. Fedotov claims that this nineteenth-century spiritual renaissance was alien to the “national life of Russia and its culture,” because of its origins in Eastern Orthodox asceticism. Christian institutions were cut off from the world, and the Russian spiritual tradition was finally broken. Only the Russian people remained truly Orthodox, a fact that might enable the possible restoration of Russia. In other words, the “national idea,” however vulnerable and threatened, is kept alive in the present by the Russian people, and it could prove beneficial to a future Russia if adequately thought through—a task that at present is assigned to the émigrés, to Russia Abroad. Without doubt, Fedotov continues the idealisation of the Russian people that became so widespread in Russian nineteenth-century thought. After the Napoleonic wars, the romantic ideas of Herder and other German philosophers contributed to the making of a national cultural identity through the rediscovery of its history and folklore. To be sure, this process was by no means an exclusively Russian phenomenon, but the forms it took display certain unique characteristics: “In their search for a national identity the Russian Romantics turned to the poetic heritage of the Slavs and to the half-forgotten culture of prePetrine Russia.”136 This heritage was believed by many to have survived as a gesunkenes Kulturgut among the lower strata of the Russian Empire’s population. To take one example: in his “Reply to A.S. Khomiakov” (1839) the Slavophile Ivan Kireevskii refers to the “ever-present unity of customs” whose “living remains” (zhivye ostatki) have been preserved “even up until our own times, all through the entire opposition of destructive influences that have attempted over two hundred years to provide a new basis in place of these old customs.”137 Fedotov, similarly, evokes and constructs an idealised vision of an early Russian heritage. Although its manifest forms were lost after Sergii of Radonezh,

136 Jostein Børtnes & Ingunn Lunde, 1997, “Foreword,” Cultural Discontinuity and Reconstruction: The Byzanto-Slav Heritage and the Creation of a Russian National Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Slavica Norvegica 9), eds. J. Børtnes & I. Lunde, Oslo, pp. 7–10, pp. 7f. 137 I.V. Kireevskii, 1911, “V otvet A.S. Khomiakovu,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, pp. 109–120, p. 115.

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it may be revealed fragmentarily even in the present, a belief that makes the rebirth of Russian holiness, of Holy Russia, possible. The self-imposed mission of the Russian diaspora was to preserve and restore Russian culture; the challenge was to define its content. In this respect, Saints of Ancient Russia is one attempt among several to formulate an imaginary heritage capable of uniting an imaginary community—the Russian people abroad and eventually at home—by providing it with a past. With this book, Fedotov presents his idea of what the memory of Russian émigrés should preserve and where his contemporaries could find inspiration and motivation for action. However, there are certain aspects of its content that make Saints of Ancient Russia stand out with particular force. Fedotov’s vision of a Holy Russia makes exile meaningful because of its inclusion of human weakness and non-resistance. It is a book that gives dignity to the insulted and humiliated. Understood in this light, tragedy is not one plot among many: It is the archetypical émigré plot that describes the past as the fall of an ideal and of an initial state of freedom, but which aims to bring about recognition and orientation in the present. The role of the historian—like that of the tragic poet, according to Aeschylus—is therapeutic: “A chaste historical consciousness would help to exorcise the residual fear of old gods and prepare men to assume responsibility for their own destinies by the construction of institutions and laws adequate to the cultivation of their noblest capacities.”138

138

White, 1973, p. 204.

CHAPTER FOUR

GEORGII FLOROVSKII AND THE WAYS OF RUSSIAN THEOLOGY “The history of Russian thought is not yet written.”1 This statement forms the opening sentence of one of the very first articles published by Georgii Vasilevich Florovskii (1893–1979), entitled “From the Past of Russian Thought” (1912). In this article, he argues that the most significant contributions so far, Pavel Miliukov’s Outlines of the History of Russian Culture (1896) and Dmitrii Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii’s (1853–1920) The History of the Russian Intelligentsia (1906–1911), had tended to focus on “the political self-awareness of Russian society” and thus to discuss other fields, such as literature, from a sociopolitical point of view. However, the study of the “history of political self-awareness,” Florovskii claims, must be founded rather on a study of the “development of communal metaphysics” (razvitie obshchestvennoi metafiziki).2 Florovskii’s charge against previous historical works as being too one-sided brings to mind Fedotov’s critique of Russian historiography in his essay “Kliuchevskii’s Russia,” published nearly two decades later. A central idea in both articles is that the cultural and intellectual history of Russia has so far been poorly understood. Discussing in particular two recent publications that he regards as promising efforts, namely Mikhail Gershenzon’s The Young Russia (1908) and Nikolai Berdiaev’s Khomiakov (1912), Florovskii is nevertheless optimistic with respect to the programme he proposes, and his article is meant as a preliminary study to the writing of a new Russian intellectual history, free from what he sees as reductionist tendencies. This new history should recognise “integral knowledge” (tsel’noe znanie) as the distinguishing feature of Russian philosophy.3 While the concept of “integral knowledge” was initially formulated by Ivan Kireevskii, Florovskii claims however that it is characteristic of Russian philosophy

1 2 3

Florovskii, 1998, pp. 7–27 (“Iz proshlogo russkoi mysli”), p. 7. Florovskii, 1998, p. 7. Cf. Florovskii, 1998, p. 26.

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per se, not simply a popular theme in the history of Russian thought— an idea that stems from one of the books he reviews in this article: Berdiaev’s Khomiakov.4 To both Berdiaev and Florovskii, the semantic dimension (philosophical concepts) is assumed to reflect the existential one (philosophical practices).5 Florovskii’s position is, in other words, markedly Slavophile. Looking back today at “From the Past of Russian Thought”, an article written only a year after Florovskii had begun his studies at the NovoRossiiskii University in Odessa, it is tempting to claim that the publication of Ways of Russian Theology in 1937 represents a fulfilment of an idea that had been present in his mind for a long time. However, what makes this article just as interesting from a retrospective point of view, is the way in which it reveals the discontinuity in Florovskii’s thought. Although he never came to reject entirely Slavophile ideas (such as the idea of a fundamental difference between Eastern and Western Christianity) and remained positive in particular towards Khomiakov, the firm belief in Russianness as expressed in his first article became far more problematic for him later on. Emigration, Eurasianism, and especially patristics—the study of the Church Fathers—significantly changed his worldview. The history of Russian thought that he ended up writing abroad turned out to be a different one. Florovskii grew up in Odessa, the second largest port and third largest city of the Russian Empire (until the incorporation of Warsaw), famous in the nineteenth century for its rapid growth and commercial activity.6 A cosmopolitan city with a complex ethnic composition, Odessa possessed a flourishing intellectual life, including numerous publishing houses. Florovskii was the son of a priest, who later became dean of the Odessa Spiritual Academy. Unlike Fedotov, Berdiaev and Zenkovskii, as well as several other prominent Silver Age philosophers, Florovskii apparently never rejected his childhood faith, but 4

Cf. N.A. Berdiaev, 1912, Khomiakov, Moscow, pp. 114f. Cf. Plotnikov, 2008, p. 74, who observes the same tendency in Vladimir Ern, according to whom personalism is characteristic of Russian philosophy since its creators have been “great personalities.” 6 For a biography of Florovskii, see Andrew Blane, 1993, “A Sketch of the Life of Georges Florovsky,” Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual and Orthodox Churchman, ed. A. Blane, Crestwood, N.Y., pp. 11–218. Detailed biographies are also to be found in Christoph Künkel, 1991, Totus Christus: Die Theologie Georges V. Florovskys (Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie 62), Göttingen, pp. 28–94, and Cherniaev, 2010, pp. 13–61. On Odessa in the imperial period, see Patricia Herlihy, 1989, Odessa: A History, 1794–1914, Cambridge, Mass. 5

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remained an Orthodox Christian throughout his youth (for a comparison, see the next chapter on Berdiaev). Nor did he participate in the religious-philosophical societies that had such a huge impact on Russian pre-revolutionary intellectual life in St Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev.7 This may suggest that Florovskii’s intellectual growth took place outside or at least on the periphery of the Russian intelligentsia of this period. This observation, moreover, is noteworthy in relation to his disassociation from the prevailing currents of Russian thought, discernible in his writings from the late 1920s onwards. In retrospect, Florovskii claimed that in the 1910s he followed the development of the contemporary intelligentsia closely and read “everything” written during the so-called Russian religious renaissance, but remained indifferent to its achievements.8 His relationship to this current, however, is more complex than his own statements might suggest. As I will demonstrate below, his emphasis on human creativity, for instance, testifies to the impact of contemporary thought. Another common feature was the rejection of the official Orthodox school theology contemporary to him.9 While we may see an interesting connection between his Odessa background and his later devotion to the Greek Orthodox tradition, his perspective in Ways of Russian Theology is likewise no less Great Russian or even Muscovite than those of the other writers discussed in this study. According to Ihor Ševčenko, Florovskii is without doubt a Russian theologian, for whom “the yardstick for measuring what is Orthodox is kept in Russia.”10 The great paradox that emerges from Florovskii’s work, however, is that while the benchmark is seemingly kept in Russia or Moscow, he finds virtually nothing in the Russian cultural heritage that may provide a genuine basis for a Russian cultural renewal. Francis Thomson would therefore appear to be right in objecting to Ševčenko’s view by pointing out that “Florovsky’s yardstick is not Russia but ‘Christian Hellenism’,” i.e. the Greek Church

7 Cf. Scherrer, 1973; Kristiane Burchardi, 1998, Die Moskauer “Religiös-Philosophische Vladimir-Solov’ev-Gesellschaft” (1905–1918) (Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 53), Wiesbaden. 8 Cf. Künkel, 1991, p. 30. This view was put forward in 1968 in a letter to Iurii Ivask. 9 Cf. Chernaiev, 2010, p. 84. 10 Ihor Ševčenko, 1984, “The Many Worlds of Peter Mohyla,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8 (1–2), pp. 9–44, p. 33. It is Florovskii’s treatment of Petro Mohyla and his Academy, and more generally his attitude towards early Ukrainian culture that form the background to Ševčenko’s judgement.

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Fathers.11 As will become clear, the Greek Fathers do indeed form the centre of Christian intellectual history according to Florovskii and hence the “yardstick” against which all later contributions to this history are measured. The question remains, however, why this “Hellenism” should apply to Russia in particular, i.e. why it forms the essence of Russia’s true self, and why it is the West, even as it “appears” in Ukraine, that should be Russia’s main constituent other.12 How could Russia still “remain” the Orthodox East, as Florovskii wrote in his article “The Eurasianist Allurement” some years earlier (1928), when its history is one of continual failure?13 These questions are not at all easy to answer, but by exploring Florovskii’s historiography of Russian thought we will at least understand his ahistorical conception of Russian identity, which in turn may explain his unhistorical readings of the past. Emigration, Eurasianism and Orthodoxy Florovskii graduated from the University in Odessa in 1919, having studied philosophy and history as well as the natural sciences. Today, he is primarily regarded as a theologian, even though in this field he was, in fact, an autodidact.14 In 1920, he emigrated to the West with his family. First, he lived for a brief period in Sofia, where he became involved in the Eurasianist movement and contributed with no less than three articles to the first Eurasianist publication, the miscellany Exodus to the East (Iskhod k vostoku, Sofia 1921). How “Eurasianist” Florovskii’s position actually was in these years, remains disputed. On the one hand, he never seems to have shown much interest in the concept of Eurasia itself; on the other, there was more to Eurasianism than its geographical redefinition of Russia as Eurasia only might suggest. On the most fundamental level, as suggested by Nicolas Riasanovsky, the new Eurasianist ideology that was created in Russian émigré circles in the early 1920s reflected the feeling of alienation from the native culture in exile. “Eurasianism constituted a desperate bid to reestablish 11 Francis J. Thomson, 1993, “Peter Mogila’s Ecclesiatical Reforms and the Ukrainian Contribution to Russian Culture: A Critique of Georges Florovsky’s Theory of the Pseudomorphosis of Orthodoxy,” Slavica Gandensia 20, pp. 67–119, p. 108. 12 Cf. Tolz, 2001, p. 1. 13 Florovskii, 1998, pp. 311–343 (“Evrasiiskii soblazn”), p. 333. 14 Cf. Künkel, 1991, p. 31.

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vanished Russia, to transmute a fragmented and rootless existence in a foreign society into an organic and creative life at home. The scope of the dream corresponded to that of a loss.”15 Eurasianism was thus an attempt to elaborate anew in the context of exile the intrinsic value of Russian culture. It was, furthermore, a post-revolutionary movement, i.e. it recognised the Revolution as a significant event that represented the abandonment of the old regime and the transition to a new age. In his open “Letter to P.B. Struve on Eurasianism” (1922), Florovskii claims that Exodus to the East was not a collection of political articles—its main purpose was to discuss, within a new framework, the cultural and philosophical meaning of Russian history and the Russian Revolution, and that this had been his main reason for contributing to it. Here as later, Florovskii insists on the primacy of “cultural creativity” (kultur’noe tvorchestvo) over “applied values” ( prikladnye tennosti).16 When in “The Eurasanist Allurement” he said good-bye to the movement, he directed this same argument against the Eurasianists. The movement’s failure had been not to pay sufficient attention to the fact that man “creates” (tvorit) and not only “expresses” (vyrazhaet) a territory.17 By making the Eurasian territory the real subject of the historical process, the leading Eurasianists had left no room for human creativity and responsibility. According to Aleksandr and Sergei Posadskii, the authors of the first monograph on Florovskii published in post-Soviet Russia, it was first and foremost Eurasianism’s quest for finding Russia’s “own way,” founded on a rather romantic conception of cultural history, that became important to Florovskii during the Sofia period. The politicalgeographical notion of “Eurasia” apparently had no direct impact on his writings.18 However, this observation reminds us that Eurasianism also transformed central nineteenth-century romantic, or Slavophile, notions of Russia into new concepts. These were scarcely the target of Florovskii’s criticism in “The Eurasianist Allurement.” In the otherwise innovative construction of Eurasia, Orthodoxy retained a central role, in the past as well as for the future. Several representatives of Eurasianism combined their belief in Orthodoxy with the Slavophile

15

Riasanovsky, 1967, p. 71. Cf. Florovskii, 1998, pp. 124–131 (“Pis’mo k P.B. Struve ob evraziistve”), p. 131. 17 Cf. Florovskii, 1998, p. 324. 18 Cf. A.V. Posadskii & S.V. Posadskii, 2004, Istoriko-kul’turnyi put’ Rossii v kontekste filosofii G.V. Florovskogo, St. Petersburg, p. 17. 16

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tendency of crediting Russia with a special mission.19 Christoph Künkel, the author of the most extensive study to this day of Florovskii’s thought, argues that in these years Florovskii began to maintain that it was Orthodoxy that guaranteed a genuine Russian culture and way of life.20 Moreover, Eurasianism maintained the dichotomisation inherent in so much nineteenth-century national romanticism. As observed by Riasanovsky, “the Eurasian critique of the West found expression, in particular, in a violent attack on the Roman Catholic Church.”21 Charles Halperin, similarly, notes that according to the Eurasianists, “the relationship between Orthodox and Western Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant) was one of unbridled hostility.”22 Besides, a Russocentric tendency was undeniably present in the widely held view that the other nationalities of Eurasia were “potentially Orthodox.”23 That this belief in an antagonistic relationship between Eastern and Western Christianity was to remain present in Florovskii’s thought, was observed by Berdiaev in 1937 when he reviewed Ways of Russian Theology for his journal The Way.24 A critical attitude towards the “West” may be found in Florovskii’s preoccupation in the early 1920s with European rationalistic philosophy, which he claimed, for instance in his article “The Cunning of Reason,” one of his three contributions to Exodus to the East, was incapable of conceptualising human beings as genuinely free and creative.25 Here, Florovskii interprets Western philosophy from a theological point of view and sees the “crisis” in European thinking as caused by its disbelief. Although he remained positive for instance towards Fichte, and found inspiration in the writings of the American pragmatist William James and the French philosopher Charles Renouvier, Florovskii in the Sofia period, according to Künkel, came to the conclusion that the problems of philosophy could only be solved by Orthodox theology.26

19

Cf. Böss, 1961, pp. 71, 96f. Cf. Künkel, 1991, p. 49. 21 Riasanovsky, 1967, p. 50. 22 Charles J. Halperin, 1982, “George Vernadsky, Eurasianism, the Mongols, and Russia,” Slavic Review 41 (3), pp. 477–493, p. 481. 23 Riasanovsky, 1967, p. 50. 24 Cf. Berdiaev, 1989, pp. 668–683 (“Ortodoksiia i chelovechnost’ (Prot. Georgii Florovskii: Puti russkogo bogosloviia)”), p. 674. 25 Cf. Florovskii, 1998, pp. 57–67 (“Khitrost’ razuma”); see also Künkel, 1991, p. 38. 26 Cf. Künkel, 1991, p. 46. 20

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The rejection of the dominant currents in Western European thought did not lead him, however, to abandon schemes of history that were indebted to European romanticism. An interesting example is his article “On Unhistorical Peoples (The Land of the Fathers and the Land of the Children),” also included in Exodus to the East, in which the future of Russia is conceived of by means of the Hegelian framework of “historical” and “unhistorical peoples.” According to Hegel, only the former were “chosen to further the progress of the Spirit” while the latter were “condemned to mere existence, to stagnation, to a lack of real history.”27 Florovskii’s aim is to demonstrate, as it had been for so many nineteenth-century Russian thinkers, not only Slavophiles but also Westernisers, that Russia is the land of a previous un-historical people that is now about to become world-historical. In contrast to the first generation of Westernisers and Slavophiles, and in keeping with later thinkers such as Nikolai Danilevskii and Oswald Spengler, Florovskii perceives a cultural succession in this development. He sees cultures in terms of human beings who are governed by the “law of life”: older ones are succeeded by young ones, while an end to succession could only mean death.28 Here as well as in his other writings of the 1920s, Florovskii regards the West as being in decline and the East as rising, and displays a belief in a Slavic Messianism, whose centre, however, is always understood to be Russia.29 Did this belief in Russia as a chosen land for a Christian renewal remain present with Florovskii? Without doubt, he would later tone it down as a result of his gradual recognition of the numerous failures that had marred Russian thought. In Ways of Russian Theology, his urgent concern is the improvement of Russia itself, not of the West through Russia. Only when the restoration of the patristic tradition had been accomplished on Russian soil, could Russia come to the aid of the West. However, the latter is suggested in this work to be the final goal. “A creative rebirth of the Orthodox world is the indispensible condition for solving the ecumenical question,” he writes emphatically (prb 515).30 Ecumenical work, to which Florovskii later became so

27 Ana Siljak, 2001, “Between East and West: Hegel and the Origins of the Russian Dilemma,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2), pp. 335–358, p. 339. 28 Cf. Florovskii, 1998, pp. 87–103 (“O narodakh ne-istoricheskikh (strana ottsov i strana detei)”), p. 94. 29 Cf. E.P. Aksenova, 2000, “G.V. Florovskii o slavianskoi idee,” Slavianovedenie 5, pp. 93–100. 30 Here as elsewhere, the italics are Florovskii’s own.

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intensely devoted, and to which he briefly refers at the end of Ways of Russian Theology, should not, it seems, be a dialogue that would lead to a mutual approximation.31 Rather, Russia should learn from the “crises” of the West in order to overcome them. “The way of a Christian restoration is a critical way, not an irenic one” (prb 514). According to Maria Vorozhishcheva, Florovskii held the view that “the Orthodox Church’s unique mission is to witness to the common heritage of all Christians, because, he argued, Orthodoxy is the true, though not perfect, manifestation of the living tradition of the universal church.”32 At the end of 1921, Florovskii moved from Sofia to Prague in order to teach philosophy at the Faculty of Law of the Russian University. In 1923, he defended a dissertation on the young Herzen in the presence of his opponents Nikolai Losskii (1870–1965), Petr Struve and Vasilii Zenkovskii, as well as Pavel Miliukov and Aleksandr Kizevetter (1866–1933). In his critical examination of the relationship between necessity and freedom in Herzen, in which he took further his rejection of various rationalist and romantic ideas, Florovskii made explicit his religious, Orthodox position. The view that Orthodoxy formed an indispensible basis for philosophy was reported by Florovskii himself as having been provocative, in particular to Struve, Miliukov and Kizevetter.33 In 1926, Florovskii was invited to teach philosophy at the newly founded St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris. Here, Sergei Bulgakov soon encouraged him to take up patristics. As a result of this study, he published two monographs on the Church Fathers (1931, 1933). According to the preface to the first volume, three volumes altogether were planned, but of the third, devoted to the fathers of the early centuries, only a fragment has ever been published.34 Florovskii was ordained priest in 1932, and during the next decade his articles focused increasingly on theological themes and became less

31 A more dialogical position in the ecumenical activity of the 1920s and 30s was assumed by Sergei Bulgakov, cf. Bryn Geffert, 2004, “Sergii Bulgakov, the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, Intercommunion, and Sofiology,” Revolutionary Russia 17 (1), pp. 105–141. 32 Maria Vorozhishcheva, 1999, “Georges Florovsky,” The Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity, eds. K. Parry et al., Oxford, pp. 204–206, p. 204. See also Künkel, 1991, p. 58. 33 Cf. Blane, 1993, pp. 43f. 34 Cf. G.V. Florovskii, 1931, Vostochnye ottsy iv-go veka, Paris; 1933, Vizantiiskie ottsy v–viii vekov, Paris; 1985, “Ottsy pervykh vekov,” Vestnik russkogo studencheskogo khristianskogo dvizheniia 45 (3), pp. 5–31.

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concerned correspondingly with Russian intellectual history than his publications of the 1920s had been. Künkel suggests that the publication of Ways of Russian Theology in 1937, considered by many to be his magnum opus, represents his disassociation (Abkehr) from “specifically Russian questions.”35 However, on the eve of this disassociation, he nevertheless presented émigré readers with this all-embracing account, addressed precisely to this audience, in order to steer them away from their own and their predecessors’ mistakes. The book is first and foremost addressed to Russians, not to all Orthodox or “potentially Orthodox” people. Russian readers should find their way to a more genuine form of Orthodoxy, not only because Orthodoxy is the “true manifestation of the universal church,” but also because genuine Russianness, according to Florovskii, is defined by its adherence to Byzantine Orthodoxy, since the latter “gave birth” to its cultural history (cf. below). He may be said to be one of the few figures in Russian intellectual history who seriously followed up the poet Aleksandr Pushkin’s attempt in 1822 to define Russian narodnost’ by reference to its Greek, i.e. Byzantine, roots exclusively: “the Greek creed, different from all others, gives us our particular national character.”36 To Florovskii, the Greek heritage is more fundamental to Russian culture than the Slavic, a fact that Florovskii underscores in his introduction by quoting in the original Horace’s instruction to study the “Greek examples day and night” (“Vos exemplaria graeca nocturna versate manu, versate diurnal,” prb ii). Nevertheless, after the publication of Ways of Russian Theology, Florovskii became mainly concerned not with the renewal of Russian culture (as in the 1920s), but rather with Orthodox theology in general. Moreover, a large proportion of his publications from the 1930s onwards were written in English. In 1948, he settled permanently in the United States, where he was appointed Dean of the St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. Later, he held positions at Harvard and Princeton Universities.

35

Künkel, 1991, p. 68. Posadskii and Posadskii (2004, p. 267) present a slightly different interpretation, namely that with the publication of Ways of Russian Theology, “everything that was urgent to say on this issue was said.” I do not (nor would Künkel, I suppose) disagree with this view, but the aspect of disassociation should be included here. On the other hand, he planned in the 1960s to revise Ways of Russian Theology, but these plans remained unfulfilled (cf. Blane, 1993, p. 206). 36 Quoted from Børtnes & Lunde, 1997, p. 9. The quotation is taken from an unpublished text entitled “Notes on Russian History in the Eighteenth Century.”

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Available in English are the fourteen-volume Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, the first volume of which appeared in 1972 and which are without parallel in Russian.37 The Russian original of Ways of Russian Theology was republished in reprint editions in Paris only in 1981 and 1983, then almost simultaneously in Vilnius and Kiev in 1991, and has only very recently appeared in a new edition in modern Russian orthography in post-Soviet Russia. The republication of his books on the Church Fathers as well as of several collections of articles demonstrates that Florovskii’s oeuvre too belongs to the heritage of the Russian emigration that inspires considerable interest in Russia today. However, Florovskii’s thought seems to have attracted relatively few Russian scholars, when we compare the number of publications devoted to him with those, for instance, on Fedotov or Berdiaev. Could it be, then, that the critical focus through which Florovskii examined the history of Russian thought has made this particular text at least less appealing in Russia today than those of other émigré philosophers? Interesting in this respect is the aforementioned book by Aleksandr and Sergei Posadskii, Russia’s Historical-Cultural Way in the Context of G.V. Florovskii’s Philosophy (2004), which attempts to re-actualise Florovskii in a post-Soviet context. In spite of some genuine insights and a generally thorough examination of its topic, the work is however problematical for several reasons. The authors argue, correctly, that during the 1920s and 30s Florovskii attempted to develop a personalist philosophy of freedom on the basis of a rejection of “naturalism.” 37 Additionally in the West, there exist several studies of Florovskii’s theology and philosophy, the most important of which are Yves Noël Lelouvier, 1968, Perspectives russes sur l’Église: Un théologien contemporain, Georges Florovsky (L’Église et son temps 15), Paris; Künkel, 1991; George Hunston Williams, 1993, “The Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Georges Florovsky,” Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual and Orthodox Churchman, ed. A. Blane, Crestwood, N.Y., pp. 287–340; F. Lewis Shaw, 1993, “The Philosophical Evolution of Georges Florovsky: Philosophical Psychology and the Philosophy of History,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 36 (3), pp. 237–255; Miguel de Salis Amaral, 2003, Dos visiones ortodoxas de la iglesia: Bulgakov y Florovsky (Colécción teológica 111), Pamplona, pp. 179–314. His historiography has attracted less attention; the most important study so far is Marc Raeff, 1993, “Enticements and Rifts: Georges Florovsky as Russian Intellectual Historian,” Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual and Orthodox Churchman, ed. A. Blane, Crestwood, N.Y., pp. 219–286 (for a short version, see Raeff, 1990, pp. 176–181). Important themes are dealt with also in Frank E. Sysyn, 1984, “Peter Mohyla and the Kiev Academy in Recent Western Works: Divergent Views on Seventeenth Century Ukrainian Culture,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8 (1–2), pp. 155–187; Karl-Christian Felmy, 1985, “Die orthodoxe Theologie in kritischer Selbstdarstellung,” Kirche im Osten: Studien zur osteuropäischen Kirchengeschichte 28, pp. 53–79; Thomson 1993.

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Other scholars have observed the same tendency. F. Lewis Shaw, for instance, maintains that “Almost all of Georges Florovsky’s philosophical writing argues for ‘the philosophy of freedom and of person’, as opposed to ‘the philosophy of thing’. Florovsky’s philosophy has as its constant aim the affirmation of the decisive value of personal freedom in human history.”38 However, the Posadskiis fail to demonstrate convincingly that Florovskii’s narrative (“conception”) of Russian history—to which they explicitly admit to be sympathetic—is also personalist. This remains an unsubstantiated claim only. Moreover, their approach suffers from a quite unsophisticated use of an invariable binary structure, whose holistic poles consist of “personalism,” “creativity” (tvorchestvo), “axiology,” “Orthodoxy,” “Byzantinism,” “Hellenism” as well as such epithets as “Russian personalism,” “Russian patristics” and “RussianOrthodox Hellenism” (the three last-mentioned are concepts Florovskii never used), on the one hand, and “romanticism,” “idealism,” “historicism,” “organicism,” “naturalism,” and “biologism” on the other. These terms are inserted, in turn, into an overall East–West, and even Russian–German, dichotomy, where personalism is equated with “Russian Orthodox philosophy” (and thus with “Byzantine,” “Hellenistic” etc.) as opposed to “German thought.” Their approach, in which all varieties of German idealism, romanticism and historicism are claimed to be naturalistic and biocentric, is reductionist as well as essentialist. Besides, the book conspicuously tones down Florovskii’s critical attitude towards the main currents of Russian thought. However, the post-Soviet readership has recently been presented with a more critical and analytical approach to Florovskii as a historian of Russian thought by Anatolii Cherniaev, who emphasises in particular Florovskii’s ignorance of social and political contexts in favour of a “spiritualisation of culture.”39 While Florovskii’s philosophy and theology may certainly be described as personalist, it is more difficult to see how this epithet applies to his historiography. In fact, it is not very clear what a “personalist historiography” really is, or could possibly be. As far as I can see, one would expect that a personalist history would be centred 38

Shaw, 1993, p. 237. Cf. Cherniaev, 2010, p. 83. Cherniaev holds, by the way, the Posadskiis’ book to be non-scholarly (nenauchnaia). Other faults include “verboseness,” a “tautological and schematic character,” and “subjectivism” (p. 11). 39

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on human individuals and their intentions, and relate their actions to their concrete and unique surroundings and situations. However, Florovskii’s Ways of Russian Theology is very far indeed from all this. In indirect contrast to Posadskii and Posadskii, Frank Sysyn has convincingly argued that Florovskii “showed little effort to describe or to understand the complexities of the culture of the age” (i.e. of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). His purpose was, rather, to “distinguish correct from mistaken paths of development,” and his strategy in this respect was to create camps that held completely opposite views, i.e. “Latin” and “Greek.” These two camps, Sysyn continues, “seem to be largely a construct of Florovsky’s understanding of the needs of his own time, or of the eternal needs of Orthodoxy, rather than a description of early modern Ukrainian religious and cultural life.”40 Sysyn’s view finds a resonance in the more general points on the writing of intellectual history formulated by Quentin Skinner in 1969 in his famous article “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” The understanding of texts, Skinner claims, “presupposes the grasp both of what they were intended to mean, and how this meaning was intended to be taken.”41 In this idea there is an implicit critique of the belief in the existence of eternal “doctrines” (cf. Lovejoy’s “unit ideas”). Florovskii, in fact, comes far closer to the target of Skinner’s critique than to his programme. According to Brian Horowitz, “one finds in Florovsky’s work a manipulative modelling of his heroes, a careful selection of their qualities, and a willful suppression of those aspects not useful for his overall synthesis.”42 Does this mean, then, that the concept of personalism is irrelevant to Florovskii’s writing of history? Not necessarily. A different approach has been suggested by Aleksandr Troianov. In his reading of Florovskii’s article “Types of Historical Interpretation” (1925), Troianov observes that according to Florovskii “the starting point of an examination of the past is the present to which the interpreter himself belongs.”43 An historical interpretation presupposes devoted commitment, without which a genuine study of the past, which is definitely absent but 40

Sysyn, 1984, p. 168. Quentin Skinner, 1969, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1), pp. 3–53, p. 48. 42 Brian Horowitz, 2000, “Georges Florovsky and M.O. Gershenzon: Metaphysical Philosophers of Russian History,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 34 (3), pp. 365–374, p. 374. 43 A.A. Troianov, 1997, “Filosofiia istoriia Georgiia Florovskogo,” Veche: Almanakh russkoi kul’tury 10, pp. 153–162, p. 157. 41

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may be retrieved by the dedicated historian, is inconceivable. Thus we may speak in this respect of a personalist historiography, at the centre of which is the personality of the interpreter, and not the personalities of those under scrutiny. This would not be, then, the historicist idea of the past “as it really was,” but rather the past as conceived by the devoted spectator. Consequently, as Florovskii puts it in Ways of Russian Theology, “unconditioned history does not exist, will never exist . . .” (prb i). As I trust will become clear, this book is a project that is indeed indebted to what Florovskii regards to be the “needs of his own time” (Sysyn). Florovskii’s Prophetic Eschatology Ways of Russian Theology describes the period from the baptism of Russia until the Revolution. Preceded by a very short introduction, the first four chapters—“The Crisis of Russian Byzantinism,” “Encounters with the West,” “The Contradictions of the Seventeenth Century,” and “The St Petersburg Upheaval”—cover the period 1000–1800 more or less chronologically (the second and third partially overlap). They are all relatively short (25–45 pages), whereas the subsequent ones (5–7) are each over a hundred pages long. These chapters—“Struggle for Theology,” “Philosophical Awakening,” and “The Historical School”— all deal with the nineteenth century and are primarily devoted to the topics signalled by their headings. The eighth chapter, “On the Eve,” takes the narrative up to 1917 and the re-establishment of the Russian Patriarchate, which is the final event described in this book. Finally, the ninth chapter, entitled “Gaps and Ties,” provides a conclusive overall interpretation. There follows a substantial bibliography. This means that the nineteenth century forms the centre of Florovskii’s study; 325 pages of the 500 pages of narrative are devoted to this period. In Florovskii’s work, this is portrayed as the age of attempted restoration, after centuries of one-sided Western influence. In Florovskii’s own words, Ways of Russian Theology presents an historical account of the numerous failures (neudachi) suffered by Russian thought ever since it lost its connection with Byzantium, i.e since the “crisis of Russian Byzantinism” that emerged in the fifteenth century and became particularly evident from the sixteenth onwards. In spite of Moscow’s claim to be a successor of the Roman empires, this crisis was the result, as Florovskii sees it, of a rejection of the Byzantine heritage and more specifically of the tradition ( predanie) of the

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Church Fathers. The aim for history should now be the overcoming of this alienation (otryv) by means of a return (vozvrashchenie) in order to bring about a rebirth (vozrozhdenie, prb if ). As already indicated, Florovskii makes it clear from the very beginning that his approach is axiological. He uses the theology of the Church Fathers as the firm standard by which Russian thought of all ages should be evaluated. His study aims to demonstrate the urgency of returning to the Greek patristic tradition and thus of restoring the connection that Russia once had with this heritage. Only within this particular tradition, can an Orthodox theologian of the present day “find for himself the true measure and living source of creative inspiration” (prb i). Ways of Russian Theology, then, is history for a purpose, proclaiming that Russian thought must disassociate itself from its own past and dedicate itself to patristics. This is the message that the entire narrative formulates as it proceeds. Thus, it is not the past as represented in the account that directly provides the basis for future intellectual work, as was the case in Fedotov’s Saints of Ancient Russia. On the contrary, it is the ideal in accordance with which this past is measured and mostly rejected, and which Russians must now rediscover. The return (vozvrat) to the Church Fathers is presented as a task or mission (zadacha) for a “we,” the addressee to whom the text is written. This “we” is situated in a “here and now”—in “our time” and “our ecclesiastical society” (prb ii, 517). While both Fedotov and Florovskii describe the purpose of their work in terms of a “rebirth”, the reader clearly senses however that Florovskii’s “we” is of a more exclusive kind. In speaking of “theology,” “theologians,” and “ecclesiastical society,” he seems to be addressing those particularly involved in theology and less to the entire émigré society. However, it is more probable, as suggested by Posadskii and Posadskii, that Florovskii addresses “intellectuals that are immersed, according to him, in the temptations of German idealism.”44 This group would also include the educated “we” of Russia Abroad, who are encouraged to abandon their customary opinions and attitudes. Florovskii’s message is that everyone concerned with theology, philosophy or any other kind of “thought” should “return to the Church Fathers,” not only professional theologians. Furthermore, his vocabulary, i.e. his references to a task (zadacha) and to a rebirth (vozrozhdenie), clearly demonstrates the work’s 44

Posadskii & Posadskii, 2004, p. 339.

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situatedness in the Russian émigré discourse. By the end of his book, where he explicitly refers to the current debates concerning the émigré mission, he reveals that his text is also a response to very much the same problems that were occupying most of the other émigré writers, only that his aims to be a more proper and correct solution than the ones previous offered. In particular, he confronts his own views with those of Fedotov and his colleagues writing in the journal New City: Our times are again called to take up theology . . . Such a claim may appear too daring, exaggerated, and unbalanced . . . Should one not rather see the present in terms of “social Christianity,” ever since the times of Lamennais and Maurice if not all the way back to the “new Christianity” of Saint-Simon? And does not Christianity appear in our anxious day to be called rather to “social work,” to the construction of a New City? . . . (prb 517)

This passage is part of a larger series of rhetorical questions which form possible counter-arguments to the author’s idea that traditional Orthodox theology is the most proper solution at present to the problem of the age. While this extract may suggest that Florovskii enters into a dialogue with his fellow émigrés, this is only seemingly so. The others’ arguments are rejected right away, while Florovskii’s mode of expression becomes towards the end that of prophecy and apocalypticism, where the latter in particular is characterised by a monologic stance, as pointed out by Amos Wilder.45 The use of prophecy and apocalypticism, both traditionally characterised as emerging in situations of upheaval and disorder, must be seen in light of the way in which Florovskii conceives of his own time. On several occasions, Florovskii uses the adjective “apocalyptic,” not only as a reference to the beliefs of others but even as an appropriate term for his age. As it turns out, he foresees an imminent End, and holds that with the Revolution a period of transition has begun. Without doubt, a new eon has quite recently begun in the history of the Christian world. This eon may be termed apocalyptic. This does not mean to speculate daringly about unknown and concealed dates. However, in the way in which all contemporary events develop, the apocalyptic theme shines through all too evidently. It seems that a God-fighting and Godforsaken rebellion is emerging in history for the first time so openly, on such a scale and with such usurping power. The whole of Russia is being

45

Cf. Amos N. Wilder, 1971, “The Rhetoric of Ancient and Modern Apocalyptic,” Interpretation 25, pp. 436–453, p. 446.

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chapter four raised (vospityvaetsia) in this God-fighting agitation and annihilation. The entire people is tempted by this charming and disgusting test, generation after generation. There is no longer anything “neutral” in the world, no longer any simple everyday issues or questions—everything has become questionable, ambiguous and doubled, everything has already to be recovered from the Antichrist. For he lays claims on everything, he hastens to put his mark on everything. (prb 516)

While Florovskii in this passage at first appears to observe the emergence of a new “eon” at a certain distance, he soon engages with it. The reference to the Antichrist suggests that he shares the prevailing apocalyptic understanding of the present. In this situation, he claims, everyone must take a stand, for or against. And he proceeds by quoting Matthew 12.30: “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.” At this point, then, Florovskii assumes the role of a prophet. His prophecy is a reformative rather than a divinatory activity; he seeks, in Bernhard McGinn’s words, “to correct a present situation in the light of an ideal past or glorious future.”46 Furthermore, his prophetic speech features apocalyptic rhetoric in the sense that its “syntax is not discursive or poetic or dialogic in the first instance. It takes the form of exclamation, apostrophe, adjuration, vow, spell, curse, blessing.”47 Above all, Florovskii’s rhetoric is exclamatory: A time is coming (nastupaet vremia)—and it has already come—of an open controversy and contest for the souls of human beings. A time is coming when indeed every question regarding knowledge and life should have and receive a Christian reply, should be incorporated into the unified texture and fullness of the confession. A time is coming when theology ceases to be a personal or “private matter,” which everyone is free to take up or not take up, depending on one’s own natural gifts, inclinations, inspiration. [. . .] A time is coming, and it has already come, when theological silence, or confusion, inconsistency or inarticulateness in testimony will be equivalent to treachery and running away from the enemy. (prb 516f )

46 Bernard McGinn, 1979, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies 96), New York, p. 4. 47 Wilder, 1971, p. 446. While the distinction between apocalypticism and prophecy is fundamental to biblical studies, they have frequently been mingled in later Christian tradition, as McGinn (1979, p. 3) points out. He claims, moreover, that it is possible to separate “apocalyptic form” from “apocalyptic content,” suggesting thereby that the former may be present in other kinds of texts as well.

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The parallelistic style of this chain of assertions (cf. the repetition of “a time is coming”) proclaiming that a new age is about to emerge, is clearly imitative of biblical and more specifically prophetic rhetoric. This use of language is further amplified by several biblical quotations, selected in order to substantiate the description of the present. I have already referred to Matthew 12.30; other examples in Florovskii’s final chapter include “There they were alarmed with fear, where there was no fear” (Psalms 14.5, in earlier numerations 13.5; prb 519), and “through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14.22; prb 520). The epigraph of the book, moreover, is taken from the Psalms (1.6): “for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, and the way of the ungodly will perish.” These authoritative statements are inserted in order to support the view that we live in a time of rupture, conflict and upheaval, in which everyone is urged to take sides and where there is a clear opposition between good (“the righteous”) and evil. In this discourse, moreover, the “enigmatic ciphers [are] drawn from outside the immediate cultural heritage,” to quote a characteristic of apocalyptic rhetoric, as described by Wilder.48 This is not to say that the Bible did not belong to the cultural heritage of Russian first-wave émigrés. But within this framework, contemporary events are seen as expressions of a higher order, such as the conflict between God and the Antichrist. The present is described and explained with reference to archetypical models. Biblical quotations, apocalyptic rhetoric and references to the Antichrist suggest that the history of Russian thought as well as the Russian Revolution are given a place within Christian world history, which, according to Florovskii, is about to reach its final stage (the last judgement). As shown in the introductory chapter, biblical typology was frequently used by Russian first-wave émigrés such as Merezhkovskii and Berdiaev in order to interpret and give meaning to their exile. Similarly, while Florovskii’s text contains a few references to the Revolution, there are hardly any signs of anti-Bolshevik rhetoric, and the present state is not discussed in terms of politics at all. The Revolution is only a manifestation of a deeper and more significant conflict: “The Revolution has revealed the severe and uncanny truth of the Russian soul, has revealed this entire abyss of unfaithfulness and long-term

48

Wilder, 1971, p. 444.

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decline, affliction, corruption. Poisoned, disturbed and strained is the Russian soul” (prb 516). By implication, Ways of Russian Theology is an eschatological work. It is a discourse on the end of time, structured in accordance with what McGinn refers to as the threefold eschatological pattern of crisisjudgement-salvation.49 Florovskii judges the crisis of Russian thought, i.e. he explains its failures, and then presents its salvation: the return to its alleged Greek sources. Despite the reference to the Antichrist, then, this is not pure apocalypticism. Rather, Florovskii employs apocalyptic rhetoric in the dramatic climax of this narrative in order to substantiate his eschatological perspective on the ways of Russian theology.50 Moreover, the coming of a new age is not solely a divine intervention but an event requiring, in fact, a human response: “Precisely because we are drawn into this apocalyptic struggle, we are called to take up theology” (prb 518). In the very last section of the work, which follows the dramatic passage using apocalyptic rhetoric, we read: The future is revealed to us under the sign of duty of service rather than under the sign of expectations and presentiment . . . The future is not only something that is required and hoped for, but also something that is being created (nechto tvorimoe) . . . [. . .] Prayerful ecclesification, apocalyptic faithfulness, return to the fathers, a deliberate encounter with the West— the creative postulate of Russian theology in the present situation consists of these and similar motifs and elements. [. . .] The historical way has not yet come to an end, the history of the church has not yet ended. [. . .] A genuine historical synthesis is not so much an interpretation of the past as a creative fulfilment of the future . . . (prb 519f )

49

McGinn, 1979, pp. 6, 9, 15. On the difference between apocalypticism and the more open concept of eschatology, see McGinn, 1979, pp. 3f: “Apocalypticism is a species of the genus eschatology, that is, it is a particular kind of belief about the last things—the End of history and what lies beyond it. [. . .] But there is still an important difference between a general consciousness of living in the last age of history and a conviction that the last age itself is about to end, between a belief in the reality of the Antichrist and the certainty of his proximity (or at least the date of his coming), between viewing the events of one’s own time in the light of the End of history and seeing them as the last events themselves.” The former view is eschatological; the latter is apocalyptic. In contrast to Florovskii, moreover, a genuine apocalypse, according to John Collins, is “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.” John J. Collins, 1998, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (The Biblical Resource Series), Grand Rapids, Mich., p. 5. In short, a supernatural world is not involved in Florovskii. 50

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Hence Ways of Russian Theology ends not with the proclamation of a divine intervention in the present order but with an encouragement to continue creative theological work. Its eschatology is thus not what modern theology has termed “consistent” (Albert Schweitzer and others) but one that is in the process of realisation in the present. In a later article, “Revelation and Interpretation” (1951), Florovskii actually supported the idea previously put forward by the theologians C.H. Dodd and Joachim Jeremias that eschatology is a historical process, not an apocalyptic event.51 On this occasion, Florovskii coined the term “inaugurated eschatology,” i.e. eschatology that was “inaugurated” with the Incarnation: “the crucial point of the revelation is already in the past. ‘The ultimate’ (or ‘the new’) had already entered history, although the final stage is not yet attained.”52 Florovskii’s formulation comes strikingly close to Karl Löwith’s description of the Biblical view of history, according to which in the penultimate times “everything is ‘already’ what it is ‘not yet’.”53 Florovskii thus conceives of his own times as “penultimate,” while presenting us with a notion of eschatology that involves contributions from human beings. In spite of the obvious elements of uncompromising apocalypticism, then, the conclusion of Florovskii’s narrative brings us back to the human sphere. Ways of Russian Theology is first and foremost an eschatological text which, on the basis of an alleged upheaval, appeals to human creativity within the framework of patristic theology. It relates the history of Russian thought in an eschatological mode, where its many failures are judged within the perspective of an initial fall from Byzantinism and its future restoration on Russian soil. By the same token, Ways of Russian Theology does not end with the fully revealed new age, but with the proclamation of a gradually emerging “theological epoch” (prb 517). The eschatological mode makes it possible to announce an end, even though it is still in its becoming. To borrow a formulation from Frank Kermode, Florovskii makes his narrative consistent by projecting himself “past the End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the 51 In the 1930s, C.H. Dodd had coined the term “realised eschatology” in order to reject Schweitzer’s interpretation, to which Jeremias in the following decade responded with his concept of “sich realisierende Eschatologie.” On these twentieth-century discussions on the eschatology of the Gospels, see George Eldon Ladd, 1980, The Presence of the Future: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism, London, pp. 3–42. 52 G.V. Florovskii, 1972, “Revelation and Interpretation,” Collected Works, vol. 1: Bible, Church, Tradition: An Orthodox View, Belmont, Mass., pp. 17–36, p. 36. 53 Löwith, 1949, p. 188.

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middle.”54 In Ways of Russian Theology, this projection is founded on a Christian notion of world history, centred on the Incarnation, where, in Löwith’s apt phrase, the “preliminary fulfilment of God’s purpose in actual history assures the Christian believer of the final outcome.”55 The history of Russian theology, then, is conceived of as a significant part of world history. The relationship between the two is metonymical rather than metaphorical. The history of Russian theology is taken to bear witness to the underlying scheme of Christian world history, while the latter, in turn, endows the former with meaning. Having established the eschatological framework of Florovskii’s historical narrative, we may now return to the problem that I discussed above, namely Florovskii’s possible personalist historiography and its appropriate form. In his article “The Metaphysical Premises of Utopianism” (1926), Florovskii defines history as a “mobile integral of an indefinite number of individual creative feats (tvorcheskie podvigy), outbursts, yearnings . . .”56 Correspondingly, the “history of the world is not development, is not a fatal unfolding of hereditary-innate dispositions but a heroic feat (podvig), numerous deliberate and miraculous contacts with Divine Glory, man’s miraculous encounters with God.”57 Florovskii rejects the idea of history as horizontal process and progress, in favour of a Christian history of independent creative acts, which become meaningful in a vertical relation to the overall scheme of Christian world history. Human history according to this view is the sum of individual creative acts, an idea Florovskii discovered not only in the Church Fathers but also in the writings of Charles Renouvier and William James.58 This idea of history has a clear parallel in the medieval chronicles, where single events are interrelated not so much with one another as with the overall scheme of Christian world history.59 One fundamental

54

Frank Kermode, 1967, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (The Mary Flexner Lectures), London, p. 8. 55 Cf. Löwith, 1949, p. 189. Cf. also p. 184: “The Christian interpretation of history stands or falls with the acceptance of Jesus Christ, i.e. with the doctrine of the Incarnation.” 56 Florovskii, 1998, pp. 265–292 (“Metafizicheskie predposylki utopizma”), p. 288. 57 Florovskii, 1998, p. 286. 58 Cf. Künkel, 1991, pp. 51ff. 59 Cf. Børtnes, 1984, p. 24: “the collage technique used by the author of the Primary Chronicle has enabled him to integrate his domestic records into the context of world history as it was understood in the Middle Ages, when history was interpreted as a teleological, or more precisely, as an eschatological process, beginning with the fall of

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difference between Florovskii and the medieval mind, however, is that Florovskii is concerned not so much with God’s will as with the human response to God.60 Florovskii, like Fedotov and Berdiaev, conceives of human beings as free, and of God as situated outside this world.61 However, Ways of Russian Theology turns out to present a conception of history that is radically different from what its author’s own idea of history might initially suggest. In his historiography, Florovskii is not concerned with past creative acts as such. Ways of Russian Theology is above all a manifestation of his own creativity in a critical situation. Florovskii, in fact, describes the “development” of Russian thought by means of an unfolding linear narrative, simply because this is what best suits his needs here and now. Florovskii, like Fedotov, sees human freedom and free will as basically tragic, as a “tragedy of freedom.”62 He even suggests that the history of Russian thought possesses a tragic plot (zaviazka): “This is a Christian tragedy, not a Hellenistic and antique one. A tragedy of volitional sin, a tragedy of a blinded freedom, and not of blind fate or primordial darkness” (prb 502). In his Introduction, likewise, Florovskii stresses that a “historian should never forget that he studies and describes the creative tragedy of human life” (prb i). While this might indicate that Florovskii conceives of the history of Russian thought not unlike Fedotov, the plot structure of Ways of Russian Theology is not that of tragedy. Genuinely eschatological texts cannot be, I believe, tragedies. In fact, it is difficult to see how this narrative conforms to the basic, archetypical forms of emplotment as listed by Northrop Frye (and Hayden White), but it does nevertheless have a clearly visible plot structure, to which I will now turn.

Adam and the expulsion from Paradise, and moving towards the final Day of Judgement, when history will come to an end. The central events of this process are the incarnation and the expiatory passion of Christ.” 60 For a comparison, see Collingwood, 1946, p. 53: “History as the will of God, orders itself, and does not depend for its orderliness on the human agent’s will to order it. Plans emerge, and get themselves carried into effect, which no human being has planned”; p. 55: “in medieval thought, the complete opposition between the objective purpose of God and the subjective purpose of man, so conceived that God’s purpose appears as the imposition of a certain objective plan upon history quite irrespective of man’s subjective purposes, leads inevitably to the idea that man’s purposes make no difference to the course of history and that the only force which determines it is the divine nature.” 61 Cf. Florovskii, 1998, p. 286. 62 Cf. Künkel, 1991, p. 47.

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chapter four The Pseudomorphosis of Russian Thought

Ways of Russian Theology is a comprehensive work containing detailed surveys of individual thinkers as well as of currents and discussions that have taken place in the past of Russian thought. Equally distinctive is its style. One of the very first things the attentive reader notices, apart from numerous misprints in the original edition, is Florovskii’s peculiar punctuation. His dense chapters are written without ordinary paragraphs; instead, paragraph-like breaks are marked in an unusual manner by three dots: “. . .” These are neither to be read as signs of omission, nor as an expression of irony and/or indignation, though an ironic as well as indignant tone may at times be felt in the text. Mostly, they simply mark a pause in the text. Ways of Russian Theology is, as pointed out by Marc Raeff, “very combative and pungent—Florovsky makes quite clear where his sympathies lie and he does not hesitate to denounce and to condemn positions and personalities he disagrees with.” And in characterising this combative style, Raeff emphasises the following aspects: Florovsky adopts basically two manners in dealing with personalities and events: descriptive summaries (or quotes and paraphrases), terse and condensed, given without elaboration and without bothering to develop fully the background; and equally terse and compact, almost aphoristic judgements, evaluations, and discussions of the long-range portée and significance of the problem or thinker under consideration.63

Correspondingly, Florovskii often tends to provide a catalogue of characteristics of a phenomenon or a thinker instead of an argument, as for instance in the opening lines of the final chapter: The history of Russian culture is one of interruptions, assaults, renunciations or enthusiasms; of disappointments, treacheries, breaks. What it possesses least of all is an immediate wholeness. The Russian historical fabric is so strangely confused, and everything is so crumpled and ragged. (prb 500)

That the Western impact on Russian thought has been so devastating is also not so much explicitly said as indirectly suggested, above all by focusing intensely on it and representing it as a narrative of decline. While the impossibility of a genuinely creative encounter between East and West remains an allegation only.

63

Raeff, 1993, p. 260.

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Florovskii, Raeff continues, creates astute sketches of the dominant spiritual movements of an epoch or of a certain group; “the picture is at times so vivid that one has the feeling of actually living in the atmosphere that produced the problems and ideas constituting the fabric of Russian intellectual history.”64 However, while Florovskii may at times “discuss” with the figures under examination, he is hardly ever concerned with their intentions. As already noted, he evaluates a spiritual movement not in order to understand it in the context of its immediate setting, but rather to evaluate it on the basis of his own idea of an eternal Orthodoxy. His position is thus not only subjective, as Raeff notes; it is also external. The primary focus of Ways of Russian Theology is on Russian cultural encounters. However different these may seem, they are all ultimately either with Byzantium or the “West.” The latter, which comprises not only Western Europe but also Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania, is summarised towards the end of the book: At the imitative level, Russian theology has gone through all the major stages of Western religious thought in modern times. Tridentine theology, the Baroque, Protestant scholasticism and orthodoxy, Pietism and Freemasonry, German idealism and Romanticism, the Social-Christian fermentation of the post-revolutionary period, the decay of the Hegelian school, the new critical and historical science, the Tübingen school and Ritschlianism, Neo-Romanticism and Symbolism—all these impressions in one way or another entered in turn into the Russian cultural experience. (prb 512)

In relation to Orthodoxy, Florovskii sees no significant difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, cf. his oxymoron-like concept of “Latin-Protestant scholasticism,” itself a highly characteristic feature of his rhetoric.65 And the main question that Florovskii asks of a text written by a Russian thinker, is whether it testifies to Western impact or to a possible return to the Church Fathers. These “encounters” form the events out of which Florovskii composes his narrative. Florovskii maintains that Russia’s cultural history begins with its conversion to Christianity. Culture comes from Byzantium. To Florovskii, this fact determines the (as yet unfulfilled) telos of Russian culture: it was born out of the encounter with Byzantine culture, and should become Byzantine once more. In fact, Florovskii regards

64 65

Raeff, 1993, p. 260. Cf. prb 92, 97, 104, 107, 167, 512.

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Russian culture to be as much “Byzantine” as “Russian.” When he refers to the subsequent crisis of “Russian Byzantinism,” he describes it as a “crisis of Byzantine culture in the Russian spirit” (prb 2).66 To Florovskii, there is no independent, self-sufficient Russian culture—it could only come about in the encounter with another culture. This explains why the question of impact is so crucial to him. Russia is destined to choose between a Western and an Eastern way. Needless to say, Florovskii’s positive view of Byzantium and Byzantine Christian culture is radically different from that of Fedotov. Moreover, whereas Early Russian culture according to Fedotov reached its apex almost immediately and was able to communicate its newlydiscovered message of Christianity, Florovskii’s metaphor for Kievan Christianity is silence. He acknowledges that great achievements were made in art and architecture, but Kievan Christianity remained “silent” in the fields of theology and secular thought (prb 1).67 Florovskii distinguishes this concept of “silence,” however, from the negative views of early Russian intellectual life previously put forward by Petr Chaadaev and Gustav Shpet (1879–1937), which his approach might otherwise appear to resemble.68 The problem was not one of isolation, Florovskii argues against Chaadaev, but rather the experience of encountering the overwhelming enormity of a highly-developed culture. This made genuine and independent creativity (tvorchestvo) difficult. Still, this problem was not so great that it could not be overcome. In the first pages of Ways of Russian Theology, Florovskii creates a picture of a new-born culture that is gradually developing in the right, Byzantine direction. However, this development is disrupted. Russian culture and thought are lead astray, and it was this disruption that led to the “crisis of Russian Byzantinism.” More specifically, this crisis consists of two aspects: Influences from the West reach the Orthodox North-East, and Moscow’s connections with Byzantium are broken. In Florovskii’s account, non-Byzantine ideas emerged in post-Christianised Russian culture for the first time in the fourteenth century. The “religious fermentation” (religioznoe 66 In 1962, he even used the formulation “Russian Byzantium,” cf. G.V. Florovskii, 1962, “The Problem of Old Russian Culture,” Slavic Review 21 (1), pp. 1–15, p. 14. 67 On this issue, see also Florovskii, 1962, which is part of a debate with Nikolay Andreyev, James Billington, and later Dmitrii Likhachev on the “problem of Old Russian culture.” 68 Cf. P.V. Kuznetsov, 1997, “Metafizicheskii nartsiss: P.Ia. Chaadaev i sud’ba filosofii v Rossii,” Voprosy filosofii 8, pp. 175–190. On Shpet, see Chapter Six.

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brozhenie) that took place in Novgorod at this time made it the first centre of Western impact in Medieval Russia. Later, during the time of Archbishop Gennadii (late fifteenth century), we find here “a whole movement in Latin style” (prb 15). In Ways of Russian Theology, this period forms the peripeteia of the narrative: In Novgorod, one turned neither to Greek manuscripts, nor even to Greek editions. Not even the fully available Slavonic material (from the liturgical books) was used in sufficient measure. Instead, the impact of the Vulgate is felt very strongly. Some books are quite simply translated from the Latin: the Book of Chronicles, Jeremiah, 3 Ezra, Wisdom of Solomon, 1 and 2 Maccabees. Introductory articles are taken from the German Bible of 1500. The Deuterocanonical books are also included in the collection—also in accordance with Latin usage. (prb 16)

This passage demonstrates how Florovskii creates historical changes in his narrative. While it may initially give the impression of a professional description of purely philological issues, the description is clearly structured according to the opposition Greek-Latin, and thus by implication the opposition between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, whose relationship is portrayed as antagonistic. Intellectual life in fifteenth-century Novgorod testifies to an historical development from the Greek to the Latin style, a circumstance that to Florovskii represents a token of decline. The Byzanto-Greek heritage is abandoned in favour of imports from the Latin West. These are not random occurrences but refer to an increasing Western influence on Russian religious life in general, which corresponds to a parallel suppression of Byzantine ideas. In Florovskii’s account, the increasing Western impact via Novgorod corresponds to the emergence of Moscow as the centre of a new East Slavic state in the sixteenth century, an event which resulted in an increasingly self-confirming and self-confident national identity. Moscow did not “succeed” but “replaced” (zamenit’, prb 11) the Eastern Roman empire that finally fell in 1553 to the infidel Turks. By “replacing” Byzantium as the new Christian empire it turned its back on the Byzantine heritage, including the tradition of the Church Fathers. While Ivan III’s marriage to Sophia (Zoe) Paleologus (1472), a relative of the Eastern Emperor, is often seen as an expression of Moscow’s claim to Byzantine heritage, Florovskii reads it differently: Sofia’s Italian background contributed to a rapprochement between Muscovite and Italian cultures, and so he sees this marriage as marking the beginning of Russian westernism (nachalo russkogo zapadnichestva, prb 12).

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From the fifteenth century onwards, correspondingly, representatives of Byzantinism such as Nil of Sora, Maksim Grek, Ivan Viskovatyi, Artemii the Elder and Andrei Kurbskii, are suppressed, expelled or exiled. The isolationist politics of Moscow were based, according to Florovskii, on an illusion of self-sufficiency. However, Moscow’s turning away from Byzantium towards itself inevitably cleared the way for Western influences similar to those that had occurred in Novgorod. Florovskii does not say this explicitly, but he suggests it by reversing natural chronology, i.e. the fabula, so that in his siuzhet sixteenthcentury Moscow precedes the earlier “fermentations” in Novgorod. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the darkest in Florovskii’s account, and constitute the “disequilibrium” in the text. According to Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the “two principles of language,” there exists a basic pattern valid for most narratives, which takes the reader through the following elements: from a state of equilibrium through degradation, disequilibrium, and recovery, and eventually the re-establishment of the initial equilibrium.69 To my mind, a variation of this scheme is clearly present in Florovskii’s text, including the last stage, although its realisation is envisaged to take place in the near future. In the seventeenth century, Moscow experienced a huge cultural impact from the West, transmitted via Poland/Lithuania and Ukraine, and these currents were then followed by the reforms of Peter the Great (early eighteenth century). All these “encounters with the West” end, in Florovskii’s account, with “surrender,” “captivity” and a “pseudomorphosis” of Russian thought. Although Florovskii gives no reference to its origins, the term “pseudomorphosis” is taken from Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, a work that deeply influenced Florovskii’s view of Russian history. In Spengler, the term historische Pseudomorphosen refers to cases where an older and foreign culture prevails over a younger and domestic culture to such an extent that the latter is prevented from freely developing and gaining independent self-awareness. Spengler used the concept to explain deficient cultural development, and he regarded, in fact, modern Russia as an example of a pseudomorphosis that had forced this nation to assume various alien forms.70 According to Susanne Pocai, Spengler developed these 69

Cf. Tzvetan Todorov, 1990, “The Two Principles of Language,” Genres in Discourse, trans. C. Porter, Cambridge, pp. 27–38. 70 Cf. Oswald Spengler, 1922, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, vol. 2, Munich, pp. 231f: “Auf diese Moskowiterzeit der großen Bojarengeschlechter und Patriarchen, in der beständig eine altrussische Partei

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ideas under the influence of the Slavophiles and Dostoevskii, and she regards the concept of historical pseudomorphosis to be a Slavophile topos.71 Moreover, it suggests that cultural manifestations are mutilated through their adaptation to foreign forms.72 This biased notion serves, in other words, to describe an alleged cultural inauthenticity and decline. Florovskii uses it to substantiate his idea that for Russia there is a clear line of demarcation between what is native (Byzantium) and what is foreign (The West), while it also describes what happens when this demarcation is ignored. We should note, though, that there is a subtle difference between Florovskii’s use and Spengler’s definition in that according to Florovskii, it is the older culture that is suppressed. Spengler, by contrast, was more concerned with the liberation of the young culture from older forms.73 While the initial “fermentations” took place in Novgorod, the subsequent pseudomorphosis had an equally precise geographical location: Kiev. From the time of the Union of Brest (1596) and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Kiev remained the centre of Latin learning: “Western influence is growing stronger all the time in the very life of the Church. And the main road of this influence comes from Kiev” (prb 74). In the case of both Novgorod and Kiev, it is the western periphery of the Russian Empire—even though Kiev had not yet become a part of it—that is claimed to be particularly vulnerable and exposed to the outside. Gradually, the impact (of Latin learning) is transmitted to the centre (Moscow). By the end of the century, the pseudomorphosis takes place in Muscovite education . . . Moscow struggles with the Latinophilism that is advancing from Kiev. But there was nothing in its idle and confused reserves to oppose it. The Greeks that were invited offered little promise, despite their erudition . . . And Kiev triumphs . . . (prb 81)

Here, Florovskii’s characteristic three dots seem to express above all indignation. In Moscow, there was nobody able to provide a gegen die Freunde westlicher Kultur kämpfte, folgt mit der Gründung von Petersburg (1703) die Pseudomorphose, welche die primitive russische Seele erst in die fremden Formen des hohen Barock, dann der Aufklärung, dann des 19. Jahrhunderts zwang.” For a discussion of this term as it is used by Florovskii, see Thomson, 1993. 71 Cf. Susanne Pocai, 2002, “Das deutsche und das russische Sonderbewußtsein: F. Nietzsches und F. Dostoevskijs Einfluß auf die Geschichtsphilosophie von O. Spengler und N. Berdjaev,” Osteuropa 52 (12), pp. 1597–1607, p. 1606. 72 Cf. Spengler, 1922, 2, p. 227: “Alles, was aus der Tiefe eines frühen Seelentums emporsteigt, wird in die Hohlform des fremden Lebens ergossen.” 73 Cf. Künkel, 1991, p. 265, n. 14.

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counterbalance. The “Grecophil” Patriarch Nikon could not be said to represent a genuine return to the Church Fathers, since he simply “imitated contemporary Greeks” (prb 64). Neither could the Old Believers in their desperate defence of Ancient Russian traditions. The chief architect of the pseudomorphosis is the “enigmatic” Petro Mohyla (1596–1646). Although Florovskii admits that he contributed substantially to a reorganisation of the “West-Russian” Church following the Union of Brest, this church was penetrated by an “alien, Latin spirit,” for which Mohyla more than anyone was responsible: This was an acute Romanisation of Orthodoxy, a Latin pseudomorphosis of Orthodoxy. In the deserted place a Latin and Latinising school was built, and it was not only rituals and language that was Latinised, but also theology, the worldview, and the religious psychology itself. The very soul of the people was Latinised. This inner intoxication by means of religious Latinism, this crypto-Romanism may have been even more dangerous than the Union. [. . .] An inner freedom and independency was lost, even the standard for self-examination was gone . . . The Eastern ties were broken. An alien and artificial, non-organic tradition was consolidated, which seemed to block the ways of creativity . . . [. . .] [Mogila] did more than anyone else to strengthen this “crypto-Romanism” and protect it in the life of the West-Russian Church. (prb 49)

Florovskii’s repetitions of “Latin” and other words with the prefix Latin- are conspicuous (there are even more in the original), and are intended to demonstrate what a devastating process this was. It begins with the external forms of rituals and language and continues through theology, ideas and psychology, and finally reaches the soul of the people (narod) itself. At this point Florovskii introduces the metaphor of “intoxication.” The Western impact in this period is described as a massive poisoning of the Russian soul and of Russian life. Through the wounds on the surface (the periphery of the Empire) the entire organic body (centred on Moscow) becomes infected. The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, founded by Mohyla in 1632, is claimed to be “a certain unexpected Polish-Latin colony in the native land,” a characterisation that creates an image of colonisation and domination. Although Moscow in Florovskii’s first chapter was reproached for its isolationist tendencies, it was hardly capable of resisting this flux of Western impact via Kiev, which was perpetuated in the second half of the seventeenth century by other “Latin souls” educated at the KyivMohyla Academy such as Simeon Polotskii and Silvestr Medvedev. In the early eighteenth century, Europeanisation was represented by the “uncanny” (zhutkii) Feofan Prokopovich, who studied in Kiev and was

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then summoned to St Petersburg by Peter the Great. Later there was the Ukrainian philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722–1794), who, despite certain patristic influences, remained heavily influenced by the mysticism of the Freemasons, whom Florovskii describes as people who had “lost the ‘Eastern way’ and got lost on the Western” (prb 114). Florovskii’s negative and prejudiced description of the RussianUkrainian intellectual life of this period is supported by an extensive use of illness metaphors, where derivatives of bolezn’ are particularly frequent. Whereas the Novgorodian encounters with the West were described by means of the biochemical image of fermentation, the aftermath of the Union of Brest is seen in terms of pain. The separation and rupture in the hierarchy and among the laymen could not avoid being painfully (boleznenno) reflected in the self-awareness and self-esteem of the lay world. [. . .] The “restoration” of the Orthodox hierarchy (by Patriarch Feofan of Jerusalem in 1620) could not immediately solve the painful (bolezennoe) tension in the West-Russian Church . . . (prb 39)

The subsequent period (the mid-seventeenth century) is described in a similar way. On Ioannykii Haliatovskyi, writer, preacher, and rector of the Mohyla Academy (1658–62), Florovskii writes: True, Galiatovskii had sharp disputes and contests with the Jesuit polemists, but these concerned only individual questions (on the authority of the Pope, the emanation of the Holy Spirit). However, Galiatovskii’s theological style remained Roman. This is even more painfully (Eshche boleznennee) felt in Lazar Baranovich (rector 1650–58, later archbishop of Chernigov). (prb 53)

Having reached the Petrine epoch, Florovskii summarises the previous centuries as follows: “In the history of Russian theology and the Russian religious mind in general, all these contradictions and injuries of the eighteenth century resounded and proclaimed themselves with great force and sickliness (boleznennost’)” (prb 104). As noted above, it is characteristic of Florovskii to assert rather than argue, but we can now see that his statements are supported in addition by conspicuous metaphors, for instance, of illness, which contain implicit judgments on the historical process. Western impact is seen “as illness,” where this “as” becomes constitutive of the object itself.74

74 Cf. Wittgenstein, 2001, part 2, section 11. On the relevance of Wittgenstein’s remarks on “seeing as” to metaphor, and the theoretical adjustments that are necessary

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As observed by Frank Sysyn, Florovskii was not alone in seeing Mohyla and his Academy in such extremely negative terms. Florovskii “belongs to the school of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian church historians (Golubinskii, Znamenskii, Kartashev) who condemn Mohyla for his Westernizing tendencies.”75 This condemnation is based on the idea that Kievan learning introduced elements that were not so much new as alien and thus incompatible with earlier traditions. Florovskii, Sysyn observes, “examines Mohyla’s age against the measure of ‘true’ Orthodoxy, and finds it wanting.”76 Sysyn further holds that it was the influence of Kiev on Russia, i.e. the transplantation of Mohyla’s educational model to Moscow, that troubled Florovskii the most, and not so much its presence in Kiev. However, given the striking “Great-Russian” mode of reasoning in Florovskii’s treatment of this period, observed also by Sysyn, Florovskii seems to regard Kiev and Ukraine as an inseparable part of “Great Russia.” By implication, Latin learning in Kiev is no less problematic than its transference to Moscow from Kiev. In striking contrast to Dmytro Chyzhevskyi (1894–1977), who describes for instance in his Outlines of the History of Philosophy in Ukraine (1931) the Baroque as an exceptionally creative and productive period of Ukrainian culture,77 Florovskii denies it any value as part of his history of Russian theology, in which it is nevertheless included. Sysyn has suggested that in Florovskii’s description of the seventeenth century we may discern a rejection of Ukrainian nationalism as it had developed in late Imperial Russia and in the post-revolutionary period. “Florovsky’s opinions on the characteristics of Mohyla and his age and their lasting harmful influences in the Ukraine can be seen as a condemnation of Ukrainian Orthodoxy and the Ukrainian national movement.”78 Correspondingly, Florovskii never refers to anything “Ukrainian,” only to “Little,” “South,” or “Western Russian.” The exception is a single occurrence of the word “ukrainizatsiia” (in quo-

in this respect, see Marcus B. Hester, 1967, The Meaning of Poetic Metaphor: An Analysis in the Light of Wittgenstein’s Claim that Meaning is Use (De proprietatibus litterarum: Series maior 1), The Hague, pp. 169ff, p. 176: “Metaphorical seeing as is a seeing as between elements of an imaginistic description.” 75 Sysyn, 1984, p. 164. 76 Sysyn, 1984, p. 171. 77 See Taras Zakydalsky’s paper of 2003, “Chyzhevsky as a Historian of Ukrainian Philosophy,” accessible on http://www.ditext.com/zakydalsky/chyzhevsky.html (accessed 01.12.10). 78 Sysyn, 1984, p. 169.

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tation marks), which is used in his contemptuous description of Peter the Great’s reforms of the ecclesiastical schools (prb 98). Gradual Recovery and New Excitements Although Russian cultural history is, in Florovskii’s view, of Byzantine origin, there were neither theologians nor theology in Medieval Russia. The most outstanding representatives of Byzantine culture, such as metropolitan Ilarion (mid-eleventh century) and Kirill of Turov (twelfth century?), were first and foremost “people of genuine ecclesiastical cultivation and culture” (prb 8). These and others are nevertheless taken to embody the development towards an Orthodox (Byzantine) theology on Russian soil, which was subsequently broken off. However, the Western currents that began to reach Russia a few centuries later are described as “theological.” The first reference to theology or “theological work” in Russia is found in Florovskii’s description of the compilation and revision in Novgorod of a Bible in Slavonic (cf. above)—a work that “unexpectedly ended up in Latin hands” (prb 15). Towards the end of the book, Florovskii confirms that Russian theology was “born” out of the Western tradition (prb 515). Since theology reached Russia from the West and not from the East (as it should have done), the task was now to entirely replace the Western way with a truly Eastern way. These are the two possible “ways of Russian theology,” of which only the Eastern way is the proper one. The title of the work—Ways of Russian Theology—is therefore not necessarily “poorly chosen and even misleading,” as Raeff claims.79 True, there is much in this work that is not theology, but its purpose is to show Russian

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Raeff, 1993, p. 261. The view that the title of Florovskii’s work is “wrong,” is also shared by Berdiaev, who suggested that the book should be called instead the Waylessness (Besputstvo) of Russian Theology (Berdiaev, 1989, p. 668). Closer to my own interpretation comes Aidan Nichols, who has related the “ambiguous term” of “ways” to the epigraph on the frontispiece of the work, taken from the Psalms (1.6: “for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, and the way of the ungodly will perish”), suggesting thereby that “Russian theology had wandered erratically from its proper course” (Aidan Nichols, 1989, Theology in the Russian Diaspora: Church, Fathers, Eucharist in Nikolai Afanas’ev (1863–1966), Cambridge, p. 155). Thomson, in turn, observes that the introductory chapter of Florovskii’s second monograph on the Church Fathers (1933) bears the heading “The Ways of Byzantine Theology” and that Ways of Russian Theology thus forms a sequel to his studies of the Fathers (Thomson, 1993, p. 103).

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thinkers the way towards Orthodox theology—from un-Orthodox activities and back to the Church Fathers. The first serious attempt at recovery begins at the end of the eighteenth century. This period, finally, presents us with the emergence of positive tendencies that may prove able to counterbalance the preceding centuries of Western impact. Florovskii describes the activities of Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724–1783) and Paisii Velichkovskii (1722–1794) as a rebirth of monasticism, and thus as a return to an earlier mode of spirituality. “The return to the sources was a discovery of new ways, was an achievement of new horizons” (prb 127). The opening of the subsequent chapter, “Struggle for Theology,” then continues this positive tone. In the early nineteenth century there begins a struggle, according to Florovskii, to develop a truly Orthodox theology in opposition to prevailing Western ideas and forms. True, Western thought does not cease to have an impact on intellectual life in Russia. During the reigns of Alexander 1 and Nicholas 1, “Latin tendencies,” such as the mysticism of the Freemasons, continue to obstruct the development of a genuine Orthodox theology, while simultaneously new currents, above all German idealism, emerge from the West. Nevertheless, a “creative awakening” does take place. The period is characterised by its abundance of creativity, where the question of the very existence of Russian theology, Florovskii exclaims, was solved with a “creative ‘yes’ ” (prb 231). The hero in this chapter is Filaret (Vasilii Drozdov, 1782–1867), metropolitan of Moscow, who contributes substantially to the liberation of Russian theology from its “servitude” (rabstvo) to “Western scholasticism.” Thanks above all to Filaret, “Russian theological tradition had by this time become too strong and vital” to be suppressed (prb 228). While the achievements of Russian theology by now held great promise for the following decades, corrupting forces had by no means been eliminated, and the situation remained unsettled. The sixth chapter, “Philosophical Awakening,” describes the condition of Russian philosophy in roughly the same period, and, as the title suggests, Florovskii sees positive tendencies also in this field. The narrative is brought back to the 1820s and the formation of the Wisdom Lovers’ Society, and then moves on to the debates of the 1840s. The development as described in this chapter culminates in the writings of Aleksei Khomiakov (1804–1860). In the second half of the century, however, we face a new decline. Not only the civic critics of the 1860s and 70s, but the entire intelligentsia had led Russian thought into new crises.

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The seventh chapter, entitled “The Historical School,” provides no solution to the ongoing tensions. At first, it resumes the line of argument of the fifth chapter by examining in detail ecclesiastical reforms, the compilation of new textbooks, and in particular the process of translating the Bible into Russian. The dissolution in 1824 of the Russian Bible Society, which had been supported in fact by Western organisations, meant that the publication of a Russian Bible was postponed for several decades. As a consequence, the replacement in theological academies of Latin books with the Russian Bible, an event that Florovskii suggests might have strengthened the theological recovery, never happened. “History” as an explicit topic appears only in the middle of this chapter, where we are presented with the historiography on the Russian Church as represented by the comprehensive works of the historians Filaret Gumilevskii, metropolitan Makarii, and Evgenii Golubinskii (second half of the nineteenth century). This period in addition saw a marked interest in dogmatic theology examined from a historical perspective. “History” became a fundamental category in Florovskii’s theology; according to him, Christianity had revealed the truly historical character of the world through the historical event of the Incarnation. Florovskii therefore welcomes this “awakening of a living and direct historical feeling” in Russian thought (prb 364). However, it is soon to be challenged by a new tendency, hitherto unknown in Russian intellectual history: “moralism.” Florovskii sees “historism” and “moralism” as mutually exclusive. He regards the “moralists” as the most negative characters in the narrative since Mohyla and his companions, and they include Lev Tolstoi, Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1827–1907), Mikhail Tareev and Viktor Nesmelov (1863–1937). Tareev’s ideas, which Florovskii claims privilege emotional and moral-mystical judgements over theoretical, historical reasoning, are said to be a “direct antidote to patristics” (prb 443). The emergence of moralism, then, turns out to be a product of the nineteenth century. Florovskii regards the “moralist rejection of history” as representing a return to the dominant mood of the eighteenth century. In retrospect, the promising efforts that had been made during the first half of the nineteenth century had not been followed up. Eventually it becomes clear that Russian thought in this century experienced several “awakenings” (probuzhdeniia) but almost no genuinely creative achievements (with two exceptions: Filaret and Khomiakov). Positive trends are succeeded by new “excitements” (vozbuzhdeniia)

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and “passions,” and the way in which the century came to an end provokes an indignant comment from Florovskii: Thus, from the 1880s onwards a new wave of moralism, sentimentalism, and pietism rises in our ecclesiastical consciousness. [. . .] A degraded type of Orthodox Churchdom (tserkovnost’ ), simplified and weakened, is formed. [. . .] At this moment, suppressed passions and doubts furiously emerged from dark depths. It was nothing but revenge . . . Tiutchev’s words, uttered on a different occasion, may be applied in full to this situation: “He will be destroyed by the fateful saying: freedom of conscience is nonsense” . . . (prb 423f )

This furious tone is somewhat softened in the next chapter, which examines the final decades before the Revolution. In general, Florovskii sees the new interest in religious themes in philosophy and the intelligentsia’s return to the church as positive events. Certain thinkers even attempted to “return to the fathers.” Simultaneously, however, yet another destructive current occurs: “Aestheticism,” as reflected above all in Vladimir Solovev’s sophiology: The beginning of the 1890s was for Solovev a period of the unhealthiest erotic excitements, a period of passionate theosophical love, a “spiritual fainting.” His famous articles on the “Meaning of Love” (1892–1894) stem from this experience. This is a kind of uncanny, occult project of uniting mankind with God through heterosexual love. (prb 463f )

We know that Florovskii held sophiology and its closely related metaphysics of pan-unity to be at odds with the Orthodox dogma of creation.80 However, we would look in vain for a theological discussion of this issue here. Instead, we are presented with Florovskii’s tendency to provide negative characteristics instead of an argument: Sophiology is “erotic” and “intimate,” Florovskii repeatedly proclaims. Most importantly, however, sophiology, as well as aestheticism more generally, are rejected because they reveal the adherence to the wrong tradition

80 Cf. Alexis Klimoff, 2005, “Georges Florovsky and the Sophiological Controversy,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 49 (1–2), pp. 67–100. John Meyendorff has argued, Klimoff notes, that “opposition to Sophiology was in fact the principal motivating factory throughout Florovsky’s scholarly career.” As Klimoff points out, however, this critique is often latent or indirect; “there seems to be nothing in the corpus of writings published by Florovsky in his lifetime that could qualify as an explicit attack on Sophiology” (2005, p. 75). This holds true for Ways of Russian Theology as well. On Florovskii’s idea of the Orthodox dogma of creation, see above all his article “Created Being and Createdness” of 1928 (G.V. Florovskii, 2005, “Tvar’ i tvarnost’,” Khristianstvo i tsivilizatsiia: Izbrannye trudy po bogosloviiu i filosofii, ed. I.I. Evlampiev, St Petersburg, pp. 280–315). I shall return to this issue in Chapter Six.

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(Platonism and Neoplatonism, Schelling and Romanticism). This trend is claimed to be continued by Pavel Florenskii (1882–1937) in his The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914), which is the last contribution discussed by Florovskii. A “romantic” project that is more Platonic than Christian, “this is very much in its inner meaning a Westernised book” (prb 497). And Florovskii concludes: “The temptation of aesthetics affected Russian theology as the moralistic had done earlier, and Florenskii’s book was one of the most striking symptoms of this temptation . . .” (prb 498). To summarise, Florovskii sees the entire nineteenth century in terms of a “struggle” for Orthodoxy and Orthodox theology, against Western influences. But who represented the Orthodox camp in this struggle? Who “fought” for theology? In fact, if we look closer into the narrative, very few. Except for Filaret and Khomiakov, nearly all Russian philosophers, writers and theologians are seen as contributing in one way or another, inevitably and often unintentionally, to a constant flux of Western ideas into Russia. In the second half of the nineteenth century in particular, there is hardly anyone who still embodies the earlier recovery. Florovskii continues nevertheless to see the history of Russian theology as moving towards its goal, regardless of the interruptions to which it is continually exposed, and where history “ends time and again in ruins” (Löwith). Hence the “struggle for theology” is understood first and foremost as a telos claimed to be inherent in the course of history itself, despite the fact that its agency is not embodied. His belief that the history of Russian theology has a purpose and a clearly defined goal is founded on the underlying scheme of Christian world history as a teleological and eschatological process. In order to represent this idea of history, Florovskii emplots his vast material into the narrative structure of disequilibrium and recovery, which enables him in turn to evaluate each contribution to Russian theology with respect to its possible adherence to or, as in most cases, deviation from the norm represented by the Church Fathers. Herein lies the pragmatic and didactic purpose of Florovskii’s work: a study of the numerous failures is useful for finding a way out of the present cul-de-sac. Against this background, it is interesting to observe the way in which Florovskii repeatedly uses the impersonal predicate nuzhno bylo, “it was necessary.” In Russian, nuzhno allows syntactical constructions without a grammatical or even a logical subject (in English, “it” has to be added). Thus there is no need to emphasize for whom something is necessary. At the same time, however, an agency is inevitably implied, which in Florovskii’s text is inherent in history itself. He creates the

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illusion of a providential perspective by implicitly suggesting what should have taken place in order for an event to conform to the overall design of history. This rhetoric prevails in particular in the part of the narrative that describes the last decades of the nineteenth century, a period in which the process of recovery shows increasing signs of collapse, and of which the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod and Minister of Enlightenment Dmitrii Tolstoi’s (1823–1889) reform of the Church and education system is one of numerous examples: True, the ecclesiastical courts and legal procedures in Russia were in need of radical reorganization—not in accordance with a secular feeling for justice, naïvely and violently brought into action, but because of the principles of the living, canonical self-awareness of the Church. It is also true that this self-awareness was not sufficiently alive and sensitive at that time—it was necessary to awaken it (nuzhno bylo ego probudit’ ) . . . This was precisely what count Tolstoi wanted to avoid. He acted fully in the spirit of Peter the Great, by subordinating the entire Church to the interests of the state. (prb 343)

What is, in fact, the author’s own personal perspective on past actions is presented as though it were history itself that requires new and different endeavours. We find the same phrase in Florovskii’s critical evaluation of the writings of Sergii of Starogorod (who later became Metropolitan and eventually Patriarch of Moscow under the Soviet regime), which is summarised as follows: “It was necessary (nuzhno bylo) to return to the fathers more totally and with greater humility” (prb 439). While Florovskii attempts to enter into the historical flux, he judges it according to his own transhistorical standards. The return (vozvrat) to some original, initial Orthodoxy is conceived of as the only proper move forwards in history. “ ‘To the Fathers’ is, in any case, always forwards, not backwards” (prb 506).81 This idea conforms to the Biblical view of history, according to which, to quote Löwith once more, history is “one great detour to reach in the end the beginning through ever repeated acts of rebellion and self-surrender.”82 In Florovskii’s narrative, this “backward yet forward” movement is contrasted with a “move backwards” (obratnyi khod ), i.e. a move that only goes backward. The latter term in taken from Filaret of Moscow, who used it to describe the relapses that took place in his own time 81 Cf. also Felmy, 1985, p. 75: “Rückkehr zum Ursprünglich-Orthodoxen ist so für Florovskij überhaupt der eigentlich notwendige Schritt nach vorn.” 82 Löwith, 1949, p. 183.

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with respect to the use of Russian instead of Latin in the ecclesiastical academies. Filaret saw the dissolution of the Bible Society in 1824 (cf. above) as a “move backwards to the times of scholasticism” (prb 166). In addition to supporting Filaret’s view of this particular situation, Florovskii also uses the term elsewhere to describe events that prevented a genuine Orthodox theology in Russia as figurative repetitions. The last to represent a “move backwards” was the last Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod Konstantin Pobedonostsev (prb 410). While vozvrat reflects the purpose of history, the term obratnyi khod suggests a perpetual repetition or endless accumulation of the same without introducing any genuinely new achievements. Here, history is conceived of as a meaningless ongoing movement, where this vicious circle must be overcome in order for history to reach its goal. Florovskii’s Theology of Creativity Let us now take a closer look at how Ways of Russian Theology indicates that this ongoing situation of “moving backwards” may be overcome through a genuine return to patristics. The work informs us that this has been accomplished twice before in Russian thought: by Filaret of Moscow and Aleksei Khomiakov, who serve here as models for the liberation of Russian thought. Filaret developed as a theologian under “Latin conditions,” at a time when the ideas of the German Protestant theologian Johann Franz Buddeus (1667–1729) were predominating. Yet he managed, more than anyone else, to remain “ecclesiastically firm and inwardly alien to this mystical excitement” (prb 169). Filaret was able to free himself from the prevailing conditions to a degree not seen earlier in the history of Russian thought. The rhetoric of Florovskii’s description of this achievement is noteworthy: In any case, Filaret never examined the Scripture abstractly or in isolation. The Bible is given and maintained in the Church, and is passed on from the Church to the believers for reading and guidance. The Scripture is recorded Tradition, and testifies in its dignity to the living authority and intellectual capability of the Church. The Scripture is the record of Tradition; not of simple traditions or of human recollections, but namely the Tradition of the Holy. (prb 177f )

In this passage, Florovskii abandons the narrative mode in favour of a purely theological exegesis by replacing the past tense with the present

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tense. The effect of this shift, scarcely seen so far in the narrative, is striking. By omitting all markers of speech representation, Florovskii suggests that this is not only Filaret’s theology; it is the truth. Through Filaret, then, Russian thought reaches its goal: it becomes Orthodox theology. When this purpose has been fulfilled, history seems to have reached its telos and time stops, an impression brought about by the shift in tenses. However, this end of history was only temporal, and in the history of Russian theology new failures were soon to follow. The narrative mode is resumed. It is also striking how references to influences or contexts disappear when Florovskii presents Filaret. As suggested by Frode Molven, it is characteristic of histories of philosophy to apply the device of contextualisation only in cases where the author discusses thinkers of whom he or she is critical.83 We can see the same tendency in Florovskii’s book: in the case of true originality, references to context become irrelevant. Khomiakov, too, is presented as having developed his ideals more or less independently of surrounding conditions. Florovskii states enigmatically that he did not “become” but “was born” Khomiakov (prb 271). Khomiakov’s thinking is claimed not to have any external sources except for the Church Fathers. Florovskii writes that “one should not overshadow the thinker’s self-activity (samodeiatel’nost’) with reference ‘influences’ ” (prb 274). In contrast to his contemporaries, Khomiakov rejected the “context” (kontekst) of contemporary “Western European science” in favour of the “restless and unexpected spaces ( prostory)” of the theology and asceticism of the Church Fathers (prb 284). Influences were replaced by genuine creativity, which does not depend, Florovskii implicitly suggests, on external circumstances. In the case of Khomiakov, there is an additional implication of his (re)turn to the Church Fathers. Whereas Filaret is analysed in the chapter “Struggle for Theology,” Khomiakov is the most outstanding representative of the “Philosophical Awakening.” However, the fact that the outcome of this awakening is the return to patristics, and as such parallels the struggle for (Orthodox) theology, suggests that the

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Cf. Frode Molven, 2005, “Filosofihistoriens nytte og ulempe for faget,” Norsk filosofisk tidsskrift 40 (3), pp. 194–200, p. 195. Cherniaev, 2010, pp. 130f, discerns in Florovskii’s portrait of Filaret a “self-projection,” in which Florovskii saw the “lonely theologian” Filaret, surrounded by hostile and ignorant figures, as his alter ego.

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goal of Russian philosophy is its sublation into theology, an idea that was commonly held in the Middle Ages. Medieval notions of the relationship between (pagan, i.e. Greek) philosophy and (Christian) theology were far from uniform. Some theologians were positively disposed towards philosophy, while others were far more negative and even condemned it. The view of Origen, who, by referring to Exodus 11.2, compared the Christian application of philosophy to the Lord’s instruction to Moses to tell the Israelites to request silver and gold from the Egyptians, did carry a certain weight. In Frederic Artz’s paraphrase, “The pagan authors might be pillaged— as the children of Israel in the Mosaic story borrowed ornaments and vessels from the Egyptians—to find arguments and literary adornments for Christian writings.”84 However, Christians had to exercise caution in order to remain loyal to Scripture. In general, philosophy was held to have been “released” by theology and should therefore sublate into it.85 A similar hierarchal relationship between philosophy and theology, where the former may support the latter or, even better, be sublated into it, is undeniably present in Florovskii’s work. Patristics is prescribed as the goal not only of theology but of philosophy as well. Prior to this Aufhebung, philosophy could be of help in the struggle for theology, as it was in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century. Thanks to the love of wisdom (liubomudrie) in the ecclesiastical education, Florovskii suggests, “the Russian theological consciousness is lead through speculative temptation and wakes from naïve sleep . . .” (prb 242). As a corollary, however, not any philosophy is necessarily a blessing. Solovev, for instance, “was too tied to Protestantism, through philosophy, through German idealism and mysticism” (prb 317). Here, the term “philosophy” is used without any adjective that might specify it further, implying that it is potentially harmful. The main failure of

84 Frederick B. Artz, 1980, The Mind of the Middle Ages, a.d. 200–1500: An Historical Survey, Chicago, pp. 66f. Origen’s view is found in his “Letter to Gregory Thaumaturgos,” and he also evoked other passages in the Bible to elaborate this relationship, for instance Deut 21, 10–13 (cf. next footnote). 85 Cf. Herwig Görgemanns, 1989, “Philosophie II: Patristik und Mittelalter A: Griechishe Patristik,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 7, eds. J. Ritter & K. Gründer, Darmstadt, cols. 616–623, col. 619: “Im ganzen herrscht die Vorstellung, daß [die Philosophie] von der christilichen Theologie abgelöst worden ist und in ihr aufgehen soll. Eine weiterführung neben der Theologie (mit methodisch begründeter Aufgabentrennung) wird nicht vertreten.”

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Solovev was that “he tried to construct an ecclesiastical synthesis out of this non-ecclesiastical experience” (prb 316), i.e. out of his reading of Schelling, Schopenhauer and Hartmann. The boundaries between philosophy and theology should only be transgressed by sublating the former into the latter, and not the other way around. Philosophy should always be subordinated to theology, which in turn should be Orthodox. In Ways of Russian Theology, “creativity” or “the creative act,” tvorchestvo, is the central theological term. However much of a traditionalist Florovskii aimed to be, his use of this concept of tvorchestvo reveals that his thinking was indebted after all to Russian Silver Age philosophy, in which tvorchestvo became such a central notion. It was Berdiaev who wrote most extensively on the Meaning of Tvorchestvo, the title of his most important philosophical work (1916), but as we saw in the previous chapter, it plays an important role in Fedotov’s writings, as well as in Bulgakov’s ideas of “economy” (khoziastvo). In Bulgakov’s thought, as Catherine Evtuhov points out, “Christianity became a stimulus for creative activity in this world, in both an aesthetic and a material sense.” This was, in fact, characteristic of the entire period: “a strong ethical sense, a religious spirit, and a pervasive sense of joy in the creative process are common features of Silver Age thought.”86 Florovskii, similarly, applies the notion of tvorchestvo in order to capture the human response to the divine encounter. In his early articles, such as “The Metaphysical Premises of Utopianism” (1926), Florovskii seems to have largely shared Berdiaev’s conception of tvorchestvo, although the latter is not mentioned. In Ways of Russian Theology, however, its meaning is slightly different: tvorchestvo refers not so much to man’s response to creation (cf. Berdiaev) as to man’s response to the Church Fathers and to their response to Creation, Incarnation and the Scriptures. According to Florovskii, man’s response to God must happen via the Church Fathers, via the Orthodox tradition.87 Hence, not just any kind of creativity is appropriate. To reject the “Greek heritage” is equivalent to an “ecclesiastical suicide,” it is a “mortal sin” (prb 512, 519). The normativity of tradition is indisputable, but at the same time it is claimed to be the indispensible condition for creativity.

86 87

Evtuhov, 1997, p. 185. See also Cherniaev, 2010, p. 79. See also S.S. Khoruzhii, 2000, O starom i novom, St Petersburg, p. 138.

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Genuine tvorchestvo, according to Florovskii, is first and foremost a question of acquiring the patristic discourse, of finding the proper form of response. This response should be analogous to the response once made by the Church Fathers. The content of this response is less important; to take up patristics does not mean only to appropriate the Fathers’ ideas and copy their writings. It is a question of “method” and above all “style,” a term Florovskii uses on several occasions in order to describe the goal of Russian thought: A renewal of the patristic style, this is the first and most important postulate for the renaissance of Russian theology. It is not a question of “restoration,” and not of a simple repetition, and not of moving backwards. “To the fathers,” in any case, is always forwards, not backwards. It is a question of being faithful to the spirit of the fathers and not only to the letter, of being filled with enthusiasm from the patristic flame, and not of herbarising old texts. Unde ardet, inde lucet! To entirely follow the fathers is possible only by a creative act, not by imitation . . . [. . .] The experience of the fathers is imperative not only to preserve, but also to discover. (prb 506, 513)

Consequently, the absence of classical learning in Medieval Russia as well as later does not represent a problem in this respect. Florovskii’s “To the Fathers” is not first and foremost a (philological) study of their texts. It is the creative acquisition of the Fathers’ manner of thinking, of their “Denkbewegung,” as Künkel paraphrases Florovskii.88 Their works should be read and understood figuratively. In his rather harsh review of Ways of Russian Theology (1937), Berdiaev criticised Florovskii for referring to a theological system and using theological concepts without defining them: “he does not enter into the theological problems in their essence. [. . .] He never attempts to reveal his ideas of history, just as he does not generally reveal his positive ideas.”89 Berdiaev was, I believe, right on this point. In Florovskii’s book, there is no elaboration of an Orthodox theological system—we are presented only with fragments of what appears to be a larger system. However, the reason for this absence of a theological system in Ways of Russian Theology is not simply that Florovskii had not yet developed what has later been described as his “Neopatristic synthesis.”90 More

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Künkel, 1991, p. 66. Berdiaev, 1989, p. 670. 90 Cf. Williams, 1993; Künkel, 1991, pp. 261–276. As Künkel notes, Florovskii himself never came to elaborate this term; it functioned mostly as a title of a theological programme centred on a “return to the fathers.” See also Khoruzhii, 2000, p. 137. 89

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importantly, the essence of this otherwise verbose work, I would claim, is apophatic. It seeks affirmation through denial. Rather than explicitly describe what Russian thought should be, it provides an extremely detailed account of its failures, i.e. what it should not be. This suggests, moreover, that it is not possible to describe genuine creativity fully in words. On a few occasions Florovskii presents fragments of a theological system based on notions such as church (tserkov’ ), tradition ( predanie), and history (istoriia). However, these “cataphatic moments” are marginal—the proper form of tvorchestvo is not fully explicable. The “acquisition of Patristic style” is, similarly, a vague prescription. In fact, a more precise definition of tvorchestvo than the one outlined above is not possible. By the same token, the most important feature of tvorchestvo is also negatively defined: it should not be imitative. Florovskii’s notion of tvorchestvo may therefore be described as a regulative idea in a Kantian sense: it should guide our strivings, but can never be fully defined or specified. The Ascetic Way Home The dramatisation of Russian thought and Russian theology on its way towards Orthodox theology in the form of a narrative is made possible, as pointed out in the Introduction, through a metaphorical projection, by means of which it is conceived of as a living being. In this text, Florovskii uses a heterogeneous set of organic metaphors; there is not one but several projections of different kinds, i.e. from different (though related) “source domains” onto the “target domain,” to use two terms from George Lakoff ’s theory of conceptual metaphor.91 As noted above, the first occurrences of a Western impact (in fourteenth-century Novgorod) are described by means of the metaphor of “fermentation” (brozhenine), which in this part is used three times. The main metaphor for the prevailing tendencies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, furthermore, is “illness,” as illustrated above. Taken together, fermentation and illness testify to a decline that begins discreetly but is gradually intensified.

91

Cf. Lakoff, 1993.

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Moreover, the disequilibrium represented by illness is also one of rootlessness—the metaphors of soil and roots are particularly frequent in this part of the narrative. This entire ‘scholastic’ theology was, in a strict sense, rootless (bespochvennoe). It rose and grew on foreign land . . . Precisely a superstructure above an empty place . . . And instead of roots (korni) there were piles . . . Theology on piles—that was the result of the eighteenth century. (prb 114)

It was impossible for this new theology from the West to take root in Russia, Florovskii maintains, because the Russian soil was not receptive. At the same time, Western theology lost contact with its own soil. Summing up the first encounters with the West, Florovskii writes: A scholastic tradition was founded, a school developed, but no spiritual or creative movement came about. A provincial and imitative scholasticism was founded, precisely a “scholastic theology,” theologia scholastica. This meant a certain new stage in the religious-cultural consciousness. At the same time, however, theology was cut off from its living roots (s ego zhivykh kornei). A painful and dangerous division between experience and thought developed. (prb 56)

Although it is not quite clear what is soil and what are roots, when we read the two quoted passages together (prb 56, 114), this organic imagery, which seems to be inspired by Nikolai Danilevskii’s antitransmutationalist theory of historical-cultural types, is used in order to demonstrate that there is a cultural and theological incommensurability between East and West. In Russia and Europe (1869), Danilevskii had formulated a relativist system of incommensurable cultural types that was based on a rejection of Darwin’s idea of transmutation as well as of his unilinear view of history.92 In contrast to Danilevskii’s quite consistent imagery based on biological laws, however, Florovskii applies various kinds of organic metaphor: after the state of illness and rootlessness there follows a gradual awakening. Here, his imagery may have been inspired also by the Eurasian Nikolai Trubetskoi’s Europe and Mankind (1920). While this work parallels that of Danilevskii in several respects, for instance in its rejection of West European 92 Cf. Vucinich, 1976, p. 98: “Relying on a biological analogy, [Danilevsky] found ‘scientific’ support for his contention that human societies, too, are discrete, discontinuous, and individualized and that a scientifically rigorous history must deal exclusively with ‘natural systems’ in sociocultural formations. A society, like a biological species, must be studied as a unique morphological phenomenon, as a historical culture sui generis.”

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culture as universal, Trubetskoi replaces Danilevskii’s biological imagery, as demonstrated by Stefan Wiederkehr, with a psychological one,93 whereas Florovskii, in turn, seems to construct a deliberate blend of both. This brief summary demonstrates that Florovskii uses a large aggregate of closely related metaphors, whose source domains may be human beings, plants or biochemical processes. The metaphorical network itself is not consistent, as far as I can see. What is important in this respect is that the different metaphors are applied in order to describe the different phases, and not least the transitions, in the history of Russian thought, i.e. the narrative of equilibrium–disequilibrium– recovery, the structure by means of which Florovskii constructs the past as a coherent whole. The metaphors (fermentation, illness, rootlessness, awakening for different phases in history) visualise and make present this narrative structure. Since they all describe the transition from one state to another, moreover, they substantiate the point I made above, namely that Florovskii did compose an unfolding narrative— for pragmatic and didactic reasons—however critical he claimed to be of such a conception of history. This plot structure enables him to make visible his idea of teleology, which has its source in the scheme of Christian world history. With the possible exception of “fermentation,” the other metaphors just mentioned are traditional and even commonplace, though Florovskii’s combination and projection of them, on the basis of a particular narrative structure, are highly individual. What is more noteworthy is Florovskii’s dramatisation not only of Russian thought but even of the Russian soul (or mind). In these instances, agency is made explicit in terms of the “Russian soul.” Characteristic examples include “at the beginning of the last century, the Russian soul goes through this trial or temptation of pietism” (prb 128); or “from the 1820s to the 30s, the Russian mind endured this philosophical birth or awakening; this disintegration of an ‘inner striving’ with ‘outer reality’” (prb 234); or “the return of the Russian soul to the church [towards the end of the nineteenth century, KJM] was stopped and became enchanted by these

93 Cf. Stefan Wiederkehr, 2000, “Der Eurasismus als Erbe N.Ja. Danilevskijs? Bemerkungen zu einem Topos der Forschung,” Studies in East European Thought 52, pp. 119–150, p. 142: “Nicht mit dem Lebenszyklus eines Organismus von Geburt bis zum Tod, sondern mit der psychischen Reifung eines Individuums sei [nach Trubeckoj] die Entwicklung von Kulturen zu vergleichen.”

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reveries of sinful imagination” (prb 459). In contrast to the metaphors discussed above, these examples present us above all with dramatic reversals characteristic of the human condition, and not so much of organic processes. And while Florovskii (just as Fedotov, cf. the previous chapter) sees individual Russian thinkers as metonymical expressions of (an imaginary) Russia, on the one hand, these statements also demonstrate, on the other, the reverse operation: The imaginary Russian soul stands metonymically for its thinkers, i.e. the (imagined) whole stands for its parts (totium pro paste). This explicit dramatisation of the Russian soul enables Florovskii to evoke far more unconventional and obscure imageries than those discussed above. The numerous failures in Russian history are, he suggests, the result of a lack of asceticism: It is also possible to put it in the following way. The defect and weakness of Old Russian spiritual development is partially due to an insufficient ascetic temperament (and not at all to the excesses of asceticism), to an insufficient “spirituality” of the soul, to an excessive “soulfulness” and “poeticity,” to a spiritual formlessness of the psychic element. To spontaneity, as it were . . . This is the source of the contrast that may be described as an opposition between Byzantine “dryness” and Slavic “softness” . . . (prb 3f )

Accordingly, Russian thought, the Russian soul, must dedicate itself to ascetic practices: There is a way from the uncontrolled weak-willed state to volitional responsibility, from the whirling of intentions and passions to asceticism and a gathering of the soul, from imagination and arguments to the wholeness of spiritual life, experience, and visions, from the “psychic” to the “pneumatological.” And this way is a difficult and long one, a way of a wise and inward feat, the way of an intelligible historical effort . . . (prb 4)

Whereas this prescription is presented at the beginning of his account, Florovskii resumes this topic at the end of the book, where asceticism is now applied more explicitly to Russian thought: To break loose from this underworld tornado of passions, therefore, is only possible through penitential vigil, in a return, gathering and abstinence of the soul . . . The way of an exodus does not lead through culture or community, but through asceticism, through an “inner hermitage” of the spirit that returns . . . (prb 502)

The asceticism Florovskii speaks of here is clearly not that of physical abstinence. Rather, the concept is used metaphorically for mental

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or spiritual exercises. A similar notion of asceticism is found in Florovskii’s studies of the Church Fathers, published in the early 1930s, above all in his discussions of the Cappadocian Fathers and PseudoDionysius the Areopagite. Here is how Florovskii describes the cognition of God according to one of the Cappadocians, Gregory of Nazianzus (329–389): Man is a creature, yet has received the command of becoming God, as Gregory renders the brave words of St Basil. The way of “deification” is the way of purification and ascent—katharsis. This is first and foremost the way of renunciation of the sensible world, of matter. Feelings obscure the intellect. Moreover, the way of inner gathering, of focusing on the self is the way of struggling with the passions and achieving impassibility (“apathy”). The image of the ascetic in St Gregory’s account is the image of the wise man, or rather, the wisdom-lover, and clearly recalls the image of the “Gnostic” according to Clemens of Alexandria. [. . .] This is the way of renunciation of the body and of “entering into oneself ”—the way of simplification and enthusiasm . . .94

Florovskii proceeds by claiming that these mutual processes of cognition of God and deification of man together form an “ascetic way.”95 As the quotation suggests, this “asceticism” is not so much a physical practice as a mental exercise or activity (cognition) of the purified and attentive soul emancipated from external obstacles. It is not control of the body that is the primary concern to Florovskii; it is control of the mind.96 Still, the idea of an “ascetic cognition” appears to be founded on an analogy with gaining control over the flesh. This is a projection from the physical domain to the mental, where severity and austerity become features of an intellect that is then able to concentrate on the cognition of God. The goal of this kind of asceticism is the emancipation of the mind from mental preoccupation with the sensible world. If we now return to Ways of Russian Theology, we will recognise the “outer things” and “sensible world” precisely as synonyms for Western impact, from which this intellectual asceticism aims to liberate the Russian soul. What this discussion of Florovskii’s interpretations of the Church Fathers helps us to see is that he regards Russian thought in its “encounters with the West” as having been exposed to and having yielded to a series of mental temptations or excitements (vozbuzh-

94 Florovskii, 1931, p. 100. For a similar description of the “ascetic cognition of God” according to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, see Florovskii, 1933, p. 102. 95 Cf. Florovskii, 1931, p. 102. 96 See also Künkel, p. 358, n. 114.

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deniia). In the eighteenth century, the new-born Russian intelligentsia took over an “entire system of mystical excitements” (prb 118). The 1870s, similarly, was a period of religious-ethical excitements, represented for instance by the “Going to the people” movement (narodnichestvo, prb 401). And as already shown, Florovskii regards Vladimir Solovev’s preoccupation with “the eternal feminine” as an unhealthy erotic excitement, which is also described as “intimate.” He interprets intellectual activities by means of a Christian ascetic vocabulary, in accordance with which the main task is to banish temptations. According to the Church Fathers, in Florovskii’s interpretation, asceticism should lead the mind to self-mastery. Transferred to the history of Russian thought, the idea of “entering into oneself ” (cf. quotation above) receives yet another meaning, namely to find the way “home” to Byzantium by shedding the excitements inspired by Western influences. The goal of ascetic mental practices is ultimately to rediscover one’s genuine “home” in the form of Byzantine theology. However, the Russian soul is continually threatened by its fateful and ambiguous receptivity, metaphorically described by Florovskii as journeying through foreign temptations, as exile: In these wanderings in time and through cultures the danger of not finding oneself is threatening. The soul becomes lost, it loses itself in these plays of historical impressions and experiences. Indeed it does not have time to return to itself, there is too much that attracts it and diverts it, retains it in a foreign way of living. And some kind of nomadic habit is established in the soul—the habit of living in wrecks or in mobile tents. The Russian soul badly remembers kinship. (prb 500f )

As Florovskii proclaims at the very beginning, Russian theology is a field in which “it was necessary to find oneself ” (prb i). In Russian intellectual history, however, “influences are more strongly felt than creative self-activity” (prb 500). By contrasting “influences” and “creative self-activity,” he suggests that a return to patristics—through the appropriation of the patristic style through a creative act—will be the recovery and rediscovery of Russia’s true inner self, of which it is still unaware in the present. Impact and influences (vliianiia), in contrast, are always of the other (the West). Florovskii’s negative view of imitation seems to be indebted to Ivan Kireevskii and Danilevskii.97 By the same token, cultural syncretism is harmful:

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Cf. Uffelmann, 1999, p. 241.

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chapter four Mogila and his followers were open and resolute Westernisers. They aimed to forge Russians and Non-Russians in the interests of common cultural work into a single psychology and culture . . . And that mute but very tense struggle that we continually observe in all activities and enterprises of Mogila represents exactly the encounter and conflict between two religious-psychological and religious-cultural positions or orientations—the Westernised and the Helleno-Slavonic . . . (prb 45)

While Kireevskii and Danilevskii did not see Russian culture as so deeply Byzantine as Florovskii does, all three regard the transmission of Western culture to Russia as the meeting of two individuals alien to one another. The imagery of temptation and asceticism is an original and daring achievement of Florovskii and undoubtedly challenges our understanding of his text. We must keep in mind, however, that he uses it not only as a means to represent the past but also to convey the future and thus introduce a possible world. The reference of the imagery is nonostensive. At this point, Ways of Russian Theology speaks “of possible worlds and of possible ways of orientating oneself in these worlds,” to quote Paul Ricoeur’s description of texts structured on metaphors.98 It is paradoxical that Florovskii is so extensively concerned with finding the proper way home on the one hand, and yet on the other rejects what most of his fellow émigrés would conceive of as “home.” In fact, it might appear as if the restoration of patristic style on Russian soil was intended to abolish anything commonly regarded as “Russian.” Florovskii’s home is not geographical Russia; his homecoming is the imaginary meeting of Russia with Byzantium in the future. To Florovskii it is not sufficient to restore the culture of pre-Petrine and “Holy” Russia as Fedotov attempted to do—early Russian culture was only potentially Byzantine. Nevertheless, Florovskii firmly believes that a “return to the fathers” would mean the recovery and rediscovery of Russia’s true, Orthodox identity.99 However exposed Russian thought has been to foreign influences, it remains fully possible to distinguish between what is one’s own and what is foreign. To Florovskii, by

98 Paul Ricoeur, 1974, “Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics,” New Literary History 6 (1), pp. 95–110, p. 106. 99 Florovskii’s project of constructing a new Orthodox identity is discussed by Brandon Gallaher, 2008, “Georges Florovsky,” Moderne teologi: Tradisjon og nytenkning hos det 20. århundrets teologer, eds. S.J. Kristiansen & S. Rise, Kristiansand, pp. 366–388, though with the main focus on his theological writings, i.e. his “Neopatristic synthesis.”

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implication, identity is something stable and essential: the true inner self of the Russian soul is eternally Byzantine—despite the fact that Russian culture never became truly Byzantine and had lived for centuries in a condition of estrangement: The Reformation of Peter the Great was settled by a Protestant pseudomorphosis of churchdom (tserkovnost’ ). A dangerous habit is created of calling, or, rather, of covering things with names that are generally known to be inadequate. The “Babylonian captivity” of the Russian Church begins . . . (prb 89)

The Babylonian exile (from 597 bc onwards) is often regarded as marking the beginning of the history of the Jewish diaspora, and although many Jews were permitted to return to their native land about 60 years later, a considerable number of them remained in exile. In Florovskii’s work, “Babylonian captivity” is a metaphor that applies not just to the church in the Petrine period. The entire involvement of Russian thought with Western ideas is conceived of as a Babylonian exile, from which it has not yet returned. The Westernisation of Russian culture made it homeless on its own soil by tearing up is roots, while the history of Russian thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth century became the story of failed attempts to find a way home. It still resides abroad. In this way, Ways of Russian Theology tells the story of being in exile.

CHAPTER FIVE

NIKOLAI BERDIAEV AND THE RUSSIAN IDEA Unlike the other authors whose works are examined in this book, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev (1874–1948) had been an active writer for a long time before he was forced to emigrate in 1922.1 Although his university studies in Kiev from 1894 onwards had been devoted primarily to science and law, his publications had concentrated from the very beginning on philosophical issues. In 1901, he published his first monograph, Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy, a critique of the populist sociology and philosophy of Nikolai Mikhailovskii (1842–1904). As argued by Edith Clowes in her illuminating study of philosophy in Russia, Berdiaev was more than just some “leading figure” in Russian philosophy of the early twentieth century. He was one of the most important creators of a distinct philosophical discourse in Russia. In Russian culture, after an initial phase of enthusiasm (cf. the “Wisdom Lovers” of the 1820s, Petr Chaadaev and others) philosophy had fallen into discredit since the mid-nineteenth century in favour of literature. The emergent philosophical discourse to which Berdiaev was one of the main contributors, developed therefore at the intersection of traditional philosophy (abstract, logical and systematic philosophy), literature (fiction), and journalism ( publitsistika), and came about through disputations with other discourses, above all the scientific and poetic ones. Philosophers such as Berdiaev, Vladimir Solovev, Vasilii Rozanov and Lev Shestov attempted, according to Clowes, to “redefine philosophy, to evaluate its kinds of truth and knowledge, and to accord it a place and a high level of legitimacy in Russian culture.”2 And she goes on to claim that, “Russian philosophy in its own original way emerged

1

The chief source of Berdiaev’s biography remains his own autobiography Samopoznanie, published posthumously in 1949. A detailed biography has recently been provided by Olga Volkogonova (2010). 2 Edith W. Clowes, 2004, Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy, Ithaca, N.Y. & London, p. 3.

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from the ‘overcoat’ of an already well-established literary culture that offered alternatives to systematic Western philosophy.”3 Berdiaev’s contribution to this development was significant for several reasons. Of fundamental importance was his conception of what Clowes characterises as an “epic philosophy”: “Epic” philosophy may be described as a philosophy that builds an influential public presence, reaching across the breadth of intellectual discourse and reconstructing a significant history of philosophical development. In short, epic philosophizing is important both as a tradition and as a major contemporary discourse, not just for a small circle of like-minded people but also for the well-educated public.4

There were several implications of Berdiaev’s “epic strategy.” In the public sphere, he was deeply concerned from very early on with establishing himself as a philosopher. He wrote a huge number of articles for journals and newspapers, and as early as in 1907 reissued those he had published so far in the collection Sub specie aeternitatis. However, he was not only preoccupied with himself and his own philosophy, but also with the making and fostering of a Russian philosophical culture. Particularly noteworthy in this respect is his struggle to keep philosophy alive during the difficult period of the Civil War. In fact, he managed to do so for a number of years, when numerous people attended his lectures at his Free Academy of Spiritual Culture in Moscow, which existed from 1918 until his exile in 1922.5 Finally, Berdiaev was equally devoted to the Russian philosophical past, to the formulation and canonisation of a Russian philosophical heritage. This, too, was a project he started early on and continued until the publication of The Russian Idea in 1946. Berdiaev repeatedly lectured his audience on what Russian philosophy and Russian intellectual history really were. To cite Clowes once more: “He strove in much of his writings to flesh out a history of Russian philosophy, showing that, beyond Solovyov, who was well known in educated circles, Russia indeed had a continuous philosophical past.”6 Important in this respect was the construal of Dostoevskii as a philosopher, to which process Berdiaev was one of the main contributors. In his interpretations of Dostoevskii, Berdiaev reconceptualised the novel3 Clowes, 2004, p. 5. In speaking of “overcoat,” Clowes refers of course to the phrase attributed to Dostoevskii that “we all came out of Gogol’s overcoat.” 4 Clowes, 2004, p. 182. 5 For a brief account of this institution, see Finkel, 2007, pp. 103ff. 6 Clowes, 2004, p. 183.

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ist’s works, above all Ivan’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” in The Karamazov Brothers in a philosophical language thereby turning the author into a Christian existentialist.7 In his pre-exile period, Berdiaev contributed to the three famous collections: The Problems of Idealism (Problemy idealizma, 1902), Landmarks (Vekhi, 1909) and Out From the Depths (Iz glubiny, 1918, officially published in Paris only in 1967). All these books consisted of a heterogeneous set of articles and essays that in one way or other rejected pure materialism as well as the kind of radicalism that claimed to speak on “behalf of the people.” Instead, most of the authors maintained that philosophy ought to be centred on ethics and the individual personality (lichnost’ ). Liberation had to start here. The Landmarks collection, in particular, marked an opposition to the prevailing radical tendencies of the Russian intelligentsia and became highly controversial. It was reprinted five times and may be regarded as one of those publications that enabled philosophy to have a presence in the public sphere. It represented a major event in the establishment of a philosophical culture in pre-revolutionary Russia.8 In the 1890s Berdiaev experienced an enthusiasm for Marxism and was subsequently exiled to the Vologda district for his radical activities, while his writings during the first decade of the twentieth century suggest a change towards an idealist, neo-Kantian and eventually a Christian position.9 He was, in other words, not only a central representative of the current often referred to as “from Marxism to Idealism,” a phrase taken from Sergei Bulgakov’s collection of essays of 1903, but belongs to those who went even “further”—from “from Idealism to Christianity.”10 He became a Christian thinker, however, not because of an increasing admiration for official Orthodoxy, as he is at pains to point out in his autobiography, but rather as a result of his continuous quest for the meaning of life. According to him, it was his recognition of the fundamental importance of freedom that made

7

Cf. Clowes, 2004, p. 192: “In Dostoevsky’s Worldview (1921), [Berdiaev] presented Dostoevsky’s views in terms of ontological and ethical categories, such as ‘person’ (chelovek), ‘freedom’, ‘evil’, and ‘love’, as well as the Solovyovian categories of ‘divine humanity’ (bogochelovechestvo) and ‘human divinity’.” 8 Cf. Clowes, 2004, p. 190. 9 Cf. Volkogonova, 2010, pp. 16–80 (=“Chast’ pervaia: Stanovlenie”). 10 See Nicholas Zernov, 1963, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century, London, pp. 131–164 (=Chapter Six: “Four Notable Converts”). The three other “converts” described in this chapter are Petr Struve, Sergei Bulgakov and Semen Frank.

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him a Christian, a turn inspired above all by Dostoevskii’s interpretation of the problem of evil versus freedom in “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.”11 At the same time, he considered himself, as he proclaims in the Foreword to his autobiography dated 1940, an “aristocratic thinker” who had recognised the “truth of socialism.”12 Berdiaev repeatedly describes his own life and intellectual maturation in terms of “turns” ( povoroty) and “conversions” (obrashcheniia, a term he applies with reservations, though): first to philosophy in general in his youth, then to socialism and Marxism, and later to idealism and eventually to Christianity.13 His account of the first decade of the twentieth century, by implication, refers to what Nikolai Plotnikov has termed the “stereotype of a ‘transitional period’,” according to which idealism is simply seen as a preparation for a subsequent phase. Plotnikov claims that this notion has pervaded the historiographical representation of this period, indebted as it is to influential émigré historians and philosophers, who themselves had proceeded to Christianity, but who did not necessarily represent a main current of intellectual life in Late imperial Russia.14 On the other hand, it is highly characteristic of Berdiaev’s autobiography that it lacks dates and references to concrete circumstances. In The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916, written in 1911–1914), Berdiaev formulated what were to remain his most important philosophical ideas. He always considered this book to be his most outstanding philosophical work, and so do most of his interpreters. Later émigré works such as The Destiny of Man (1931), The Slavery and Freedom of Man (1939) and Essay in Eschatological Metaphysics (1947) are first and foremost variations and expansions on topics already put forward in his pre-revolutionary writings. The key themes of his mature philosophy were, as formulated by Clowes, “the affirmation of the human body as a source of creative energy, in which the human and the divine would intertwine, the concept of ‘freedom’, and, even more important, the idea of the ‘creative act’.”15 As suggested in my Fedotov chapter, Berdiaev sees the creative act as man’s response to God’s creation, 11

Cf. Berdiaev, 1949, pp. 91, 189ff. Cf. Berdiaev 1949, p. 12. 13 See in particular Chapters Three and Seven of his autobiography (1949). 14 Cf. N.S. Plotnikov, 2002, “Filosofiia ‘Problem idealizma’,” Problemy idealizma, ed. M.A. Kolerov, Moscow, pp. 5–60, pp. 5f. In addition to Berdiaev himself, Zernov (1963) is an example that confirms Plotnikov’s suggestion. 15 Clowes, 2004, p. 186. 12

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a reciprocal relationship that testifies to the divine “image and likeness” of the human person.16 Although Berdiaev was often eager to distance himself from the official Orthodox Church, its clergy and its alleged empty rituals—“my revolt against official Orthodoxy, against historical forms of Churchdom (tserkovnost’ ), has been increasing intensively”17—his religious understanding of human creativity suggests that he was deeply indebted to Orthodox anthropology, which he adopted however from Dostoevskii and other Russian lay theologians, and not from the official church. On the other hand, he operates even in his Autobiography also with a more positive notion of the “Orthodox Church,” which comes closer to Aleksei Khomiakov—on whom Berdiaev published a book in 1912—and his notion of sobornost’, i.e. the church as a free, spiritual communion.18 Revolution and Exile Many interpreters have emphasised a strong continuity in Berdiaev’s thought. Fedotov writes that “he remained true in his heart to the main intuition of his life, which had already been formed as an integral metaphysical worldview in his first genuine books: The Philosophy of Freedom (1911) and The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916).”19 Nikolai Poltoratskii, similarly, claims that “despite quite crucial external changes, inwardly Berdiaev changed relatively little.”20 For support, Poltoratskii refers to Fedotov and Stepun, who both held that the changes in Berdiaev’s political opinions were “superficial” in that as his philosophical worldview remained the same. The fact that Berdiaev

16 The formulation “image and likeness of God (obraz i podobie Bozh’e)” is used in Berdiaev, 1949, p. 191. For a discussion of this Orthodox aspect in Berdiaev, see also Piama Gajdenko, 1994, “The Problem of Freedom in Nicolai Berdjaev’s Existential Philosophy,” Studies in East European Thought 46, pp. 153–185. 17 Berdiaev, 1949, p. 219. 18 Cf. Olivier Clément, 1978, “L’evolution de la pensée de Nicolas Berdiaev entre 1899 et 1914,” Colloque Berdiaev, ed. J.-C. Marcadé, Paris, pp. 20–39, p. 36. As observed by Clément, the church as conceptualised by Berdiaev in the early 1910s is one that is situated “en marge de l’institution” (p. 25). For a discussion of Berdiaev’s ecclesiology, see also Nichols, 1989, pp. 135–145. 19 Fedotov, 1952, pp. 301–318 (“Berdiaev-Myslitel’ ”), p. 302. 20 N.P. Poltoratskii, 1967a, Berdiaev i Rossiia (Filosofiia istorii Rossii u N.A. Berdiaeva), New York, p. 16.

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extensively recycled identical passages in his writings throughout his career contributes to the impression of constancy in his work.21 This, however, should not lead us to conclude that Berdiaev’s thought was indifferent or insensitive to social, political and intellectual changes. The aforementioned collections Landmarks, and in particular From the Depths, to both of which he contributed, were responses to ongoing changes in Russian society. Among his pre-exile works, the book The Fate of Russia (1918), a collection of essays written during the First World War, is probably the one that most clearly shows how a period of rupture and crisis not only made Berdiaev take up the pen but also led him to become interested in new themes— above all Russia, Russians and Russianness. In the essay that opens The Fate of Russia, “The Soul of Russia,” originally published in 1915, Berdiaev writes: “The world war acutely raises the question of Russian national self-awareness. Russian national thought senses the plight of Russia, the need to solve the riddle called Russia, understanding the idea of Russia, determining her task and place in the world.”22 The ongoing war marks the end of an epoch and the emergence of a new. German hegemony is over, according to Berdiaev’s dramatic message, and the turn of Russia has come, which has now been called to “proclaim its word to the world.” The “Slavic race” (slavianskaia rasa) as led by Russia is about to replace the others as the “race of the future” (rasa budushchego) and to demonstrate its spiritual potential.23 In the foreword to the collection, written after the October Revolution, Berdiaev explicitly states that he believes that Russia has a mission and that “Russia” is an idea conceived of by God (Bozh’ia mysl’ ). Thus we can see that national degradation in the form of war, dissolution and revolutions, to which Berdiaev explicitly refers in this text, is implicitly taken to correspond to a subsequent spiritual awakening, rebirth and triumph. This is a highly significant pattern in Berdiaev’s historical thinking that will recur in The Russian Idea.

21 Cf. N.P. Poltoratskii, 1967b, “Nikolay Berdyayev’s Interpretation of Russia’s Historical Mission,” Slavonic and East European Review 45 (104), pp. 193–206, p. 194, who writes with reference to The Russian Idea: “Almost all the main ideas of ‘The Russian Idea’ may be found in various of his other works, including ‘The Destiny of Russia’, in embryonic form.” Cf. also p. 199, n. 25, where he draws attention to how Berdiaev repeats a “definition almost verbatim” in different works. 22 N.A. Berdiaev, 2007, “Dusha Rossii,” Padenie sviashchennogo russkogo tsarstva: Publitsistika 1914–1922 (Sotsial’naia mysl’ Rossii), ed. V.V. Sapov, Moscow, pp. 21–42, p. 21. 23 Cf. Berdiaev, 2007, p. 36.

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In his doctoral thesis of 2003, Christian Gottlieb examined Berdiaev’s post-revolutionary writings up until his emigration in terms of response and reaction to the Revolution. Criticising unhistorical approaches to Berdiaev’s philosophy, Gottlieb sees his thinking as deeply affected by the political, social and intellectual changes going on around him. The Meaning of History, for instance, written in the aftermath of the Revolution, should be read “as an attempt to uncover the meta-historical forces at work in the actual historical situation; and as an integral part of his attempt to formulate a Christian alternative to the revolution.”24 Although Berdiaev had touched upon historicalphilosophical themes in the pre-war period as well, it was only in the post-revolutionary period that he undertook a systematic treatment of the philosophy of history.25 So how did Berdiaev respond to the Revolution? As pointed out by Gottlieb, Berdiaev “does not concern himself with the concrete facts and details of revolutionary development [. . .] but almost exclusively with what he sees as the ideological and spiritual basis of the revolution.”26 Although he declined to see it as a significant religious event, i.e. as representing a decisive turn in the overall scheme of world history, he did conceive of it in spiritual terms: the Revolution was above all a punishment for sins in the past.27 And at the same time, he was deeply concerned with rejecting the idea on which the Revolution was based, which he saw a symptom of a deeper malady. Berdiaev rejected the Revolution first and foremost because it was intended to eradicate suffering and evil. According to Berdiaev, suffering and evil are inherent in the human condition. Evil exists because freedom exists, and to abolish evil means to abolish freedom. As Gottlieb puts it: “Consequently, since suffering [. . .] is precisely what the revolutionary socialists are concerned to do away with, they obviously cannot accept that the state of perfection and bliss can only be realized through suffering, or even, it seems, through what Thomas à Kempis

24 Christian Gottlieb, 2003, Dilemmas of Reaction in Leninist Russia: The Christian Response to the Revolution in the Works of N.A. Berdyaev 1917–1924 (University of Southern Denmark Studies in History and Social Sciences 266), Odense, p. 309. 25 Berdiaev’s post-revolutionary “historiosophy” is also analysed in O.B. Leont’eva, 1998, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev: V poiskakh smysla istorii, Samara, pp. 102–160, and L.A. Gaman, 2003, Istoriosofiia N.A. Berdiaeva, Tomsk, pp. 157–181. 26 Gottlieb, 2003, p. 155. 27 See for instance N.A. Berdiaev, 1923, Filosofiia neravenstva: Pis’ma k nedrugam po sotsial’noi filosofii, Paris, p. 9.

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called the Imitatio Christi.”28 Gottlieb’s reference to the imitation of Christ, a concept not used in the source referred to here,29 suggests that suffering may have a double purpose: it testifies both to the preservation of freedom and to a possible transfiguration or glorification of man. Berdiaev himself wrote that: The crucified Christ resists the chiliastic utopia that has penetrated the Christian world, and rejects it. The whole world must go through crucifixion, through Golgotha before the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Jesus will come. Without accomplishing to the end the secret of redemption, humanity and the world will not enter the Kingdom of God. And this means, furthermore, that the Kingdom of God is impossible in this world, in the material and natural order. The Kingdom of God is a perfect transfiguration of the world, a transition to a different dimension of being.30

There exists, in other words, a complementary pattern of suffering and subsequent transfiguration that is inherent in history. During the post-revolutionary years, Berdiaev was active as never before, despite a difficult relationship with the Bolshevik authorities. He established the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture in Moscow, and from the October Revolution until his expulsion in 1922, wrote numerous books and articles, even though he was only allowed to publish a few of them. Upon his arrival in the West, however, four monographs came out in rapid succession: The Meaning of History, The Philosophy of Inequality, Dostoevskii’s Worldview and The New Middle Ages. A recently published collection of his articles from the period 1914–1922, The Fall of the Sacred Tsardom (2007), amounts to over 800 pages. After a short period in Berlin, Berdiaev settled in Paris, where he remained until his death in 1948. He became probably the most famous philosopher of Russia Abroad. During the 1930s several of his writings were translated into the major Western European languages, and in the literature about him and his work, which grew rapidly over the following decades, he is commonly understood as a Christian existentialist.31 28

Gottlieb, 2003, pp. 173f. I.e. in The Philosophy of Inequality (1923, written before his exile). In his autobiography, however, Berdiaev expresses a liking for Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, cf. Berdiaev, 1949, p. 203. 30 Berdiaev, 1923, p. 233. 31 For a detailed survey of secondary literature on Berdiaev up to the late 1970s, see Paul Champbell Murdoch, 1981, Der sakramentalphilosophische Aspekt im Denken Nikolaj Aleksandrovitsch Berdjaevs (Oikonomia 14), Erlangen, pp. 2–41. 29

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We have seen how Berdiaev responded to the Revolution. What about exile? It is known that his immediate reaction to the émigré milieu in Berlin was quite hostile, and he attempted to distance himself from the Russian emigration, which, according to Nikita Struve, he saw as a “negative and morbid phenomenon.”32 Still, his editorial article in the first number of The Way, “The Spiritual Tasks of the Russian Emigration,” to which I referred in Chapter One, suggests that he soon came to conceive of Russia Abroad in more positive terms. Christians are not allowed to think that the lot that falls to them in life is fortuitous and meaningless. And the Russian diaspora has a meaning and purpose. Russians are spread over the entire face of the earth not only because of the will of the Bolsheviks, but also the will of God’s Providence. The result is not only sufferings and torments because of isolation from the homeland, but also a positive mission.33

In terms of intellectual capacities, he maintains here, the Russian emigration is a unique phenomenon, comparable only to the Jewish diaspora (another commonplace in the émigré discussions). Similarly, the positive view of the Orthodox Church that Berdiaev formulates here differs conspicuously from the negative attitude he later assumed in his autobiography (cf. above): “Only through the Orthodox Church may the emigration feel itself to be a united Russian people.”34 Ten years later, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of The Way, Berdiaev’s view of Russia Abroad had changed once more. Now, he describes his own journal almost as a place of exile within exile, indifferent to the heated political and religious discussions that had been so characteristic of Russia Abroad. When compared to the editorial article of 1925, his belief in the uniqueness of the Russian emigration seems to have faded. In The Russian Idea, published a decade later, it is entirely gone. In his post-war writings, the emigration plays no significant role at all. What remains unique, however, is the Russian people. In The Russian Idea, he continues to compare Russians with the Jewish people, but not as exiles. Their most important common feature is now their “messianic consciousness.”

32 Cf. Nikita Struve, 2004, “Berdiaev dans les controverses de l’émigration,” Nicolas Berdiaev, eds. G. Johannet & N. Struve, Paris, pp. 55–61, p. 55. See also Volkogonova, 2010, p. 257. 33 Berdiaev, 1925, p. 3. 34 Berdiaev, 1925, p. 5.

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As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Berdiaev had been deeply concerned for a long time with the past of Russian thought. In addition to numerous articles, he wrote three monographs on individual thinkers, Khomiakov (1912), Dostoevskii’s Worldview (1923), and Leontev (1926). In 1937, furthermore, he published simultaneously in English and German The Origin of Russian Communism, a book meant for non-Russians as an historical explanation of Russian Communism (the Russian original saw the light of day only in 1955). And yet, within Russia Abroad The Russian Idea became his first, but also his last major treatise on the history of Russian thought published during his lifetime. Typeset in the modern, post-1917 Russian orthography, The Russian Idea reflects, as I see it, a situation where the exile community of Russia Abroad had disintegrated and dissolved, while Berdiaev’s homeland, under the name of the Soviet Union, had defeated fascist Germany in the Second World War. Although there is much in this book that would be familiar to Berdiaev’s readership, this new situation is very much present in the book, above all in its final pages. At the same time, it is a work that reflects Berdiaev’s idea of the meaning of history and of suffering, themes that are examined in relation to Russian intellectual history. It appears to be his view that these universal themes make themselves felt with particular force in the history of Russian thought. In the following, I intend to examine how Berdiaev treats these themes by focusing on the narrative patterns by means of which they are represented. In The Russian Idea, narrative is not only a means for creating coherence, but also for communicating meanings that are indirectly revealed to the reader rather than explicitly formulated. Berdiaev’s Paradoxes and Inconsistencies The Russian Idea bears the subtitle The Main Problems of Russian Thought in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. With this subtitle, the author places his work in the genre of the history of thought (istoriia mysli), the Russian equivalent to the German Geistesgeschichte, and the English “history of ideas”/“intellectual history” (cf. Chapter Two). At the very beginning of The Russian Idea, however, we encounter not so much a traditional intellectual history as a speculative discourse on the eternal characteristics of Russia, Russians and Russianness. Berdiaev thus presents us with something other than what is

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promised in the subtitle of the book. This discrepancy foreshadows a deeper aporetic aspect of the work, which has been thoroughly examined by Nikolai Poltoratskii. In his doctoral dissertation, as well as in several articles based on it, Poltoratskii has provided a critical analysis of Berdiaev’s writings on Russia, above all of The Fate of Russia and The Russian Idea, and his work is so far the most thorough examination of this part of Berdiaev’s oeuvre.35 Whereas Poltoratskii finds The Fate of Russia to be quite balanced, he is far more critical of The Russian Idea. He charges Berdiaev with “subjectivity and shaky conceptual foundations, dialectical duplicity, discrepancies and paradoxality”; with “vagueness and inconsistency of terminology.” The work’s main subject is itself an example of this: “Are Russian calling, thought, and idea synonymous and identical? Is every Russian peculiarity or Russian phenomenon a part of the Russian idea, or the idea itself ?”36 Poltoratskii was not the first to point out a lack of logical consistency in Berdiaev’s writings. Zinaida Gippius spoke once of the “muddy stream” (mutnyi potok) of Berdiaev’s thinking, while Fedor Stepun claimed that even though Berdiaev presents us with much that is “true,” this “truth” is often “distorted” (iskazheno).37 From Berdiaev there stems Berdiaevshchina, “Berdiaevism,” a term that Stepun uses to describe confusing aspects of Berdiaev’s discourse. Berdiaevshchina was also used by several other émigrés more generally in order to describe and dismiss Berdiaev’s ideas. It came into use in émigré circles in the 1920s, especially during the controversies surrounding Ivan Ilin’s (1883–1954) To Resist Evil by Force (1925), whose ideas Berdiaev intensely opposed.38

35 Poltoratskii (the Anglicised form he mostly used was “Poltoratzky”) defended his dissertation written in French at the Sorbonne in 1954, and it was later published in a Russian translation (Poltoratskii, 1967a). Most of his analysis of The Russian Idea is contained in N.P. Poltoratskii, 1962, “The Russian Idea of Berdyaev,” Russian Review 21 (2), pp. 121–136, and in 1967b, and I will mainly refer to these two articles in the following. 36 Poltoratskii, 1962, p. 122. 37 Stepun, 2000, pp. 849–860 (“Po povodu pis’ma N.A. Berdiaeva”), p. 849. I have not been able to locate the Gippius reference, but the statement is recorded in Stepun’s article as well as in Poltoratskii, 1962, p. 122. 38 Cf. Struve, 2004. See also I.A. Il’in, 2005, O soprotivlenii zlu siloiu; Pro et Contra: Polemika vokrug idei I.A. Il’ina o soprotivlenii zlu siloiu (Belaia Rossiia), Moscow, an edition that includes the numerous responses to this book. Other disputes on and with Berdiaev are recorded in A.A. Ermichev (ed.), 1994, N.A. Berdiaev: Pro et contra, vol. 1, St Petersburg; see in particular pp. 358ff. Significant differences between Berdiaev and Ilin are also discussed in Finkel, 2010.

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Later, in 1958, a massive critique against Berdiaev was formulated by the second-wave émigré N. Osipov, in his pamphlet Friends’ Slander. Osipov could not accept Berdiaev’s idea of communism as a predetermined result of Russian intellectual history. In his detailed examination of The Russian Idea, Osipov rejects Berdiaev’s interpretations of Russian history and culture as polarised, messianic and apocalyptic, imperialistic, revolutionary and anarchic as well as submissive, totalitarian etc.39 His main point is simply that from a historian’s point of view, almost everything Berdiaev says in The Russian Idea is wrong. But he also criticises Berdiaev’s style: “Berdiaev does not like terminological precision.”40 As we see, Berdiaev has regularly been accused of inconsistency and vagueness at least since the 1920s. This trend continued also after his death. To be sure, Berdiaev himself did not deny his inconsistencies and contradictions.41 In The Meaning of the Creative Act, he is concerned with rejecting what he refers to as “discursive thinking,” which is formal, persuasive, manipulative and bound by logic, while in his autobiography he defends his own thinking as “nondiscursive,” i.e. “intuitive and aphoristic.” Only the latter is truly free.42 In Assen Ignatow’s sympathetic interpretation, “Berdjaev considered himself as an ‘existentialist’ thinker who spurns the systematic, discursive, and analytical method, since these cognitive tools fail to disclose the subjective reality of freedom and the person.”43 Pure rationalism, according to Berdiaev as read by Ignatow, means objectification. In contrast to what this might suggest, Berdiaev’s writings are nevertheless also, as Clowes points out, characterised by simplicity and an ordinary expository structure. “Although he wanted his writing to be ‘non-discursive’—he claimed he was unable to ‘prove’ anything—he nonetheless wanted to base the authority of his contentions on logical argument.”44 His philosophical language itself is neither mystical nor

39

Cf. N. Osipov, 1958, Kleveta druzei, Munich, p. 10. Osipov, 1958, p. 50. 41 Cf. his foreword “On the Contradictions in My Thinking” in N.A. Berdiaev, 1939, O rabstve i svobode cheloveka: Opyt personalisticheskoi filosofii. Paris. The contradictions he speaks of here, however, are claimed to be characteristic of the human condition in general, and not so much of his own philosophical discourse. 42 Cf. Clowes, 2004, pp. 194f. 43 Assen Ignatow, 1989, “The Dialectic of Freedom in Nikolai Berdjaev,” Studies in Soviet Thought 38, pp. 273–289, p. 273. 44 Clowes, 2004, p. 184. 40

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abstract, and it was far less figurative than that of many of his contemporaries. On the contrary, “it was dramatic and assertive, a speaking voice confident of its intuitive insight.”45 Stepun, similarly, described Berdiaev’s style as a philosophical Umgangssprache, though its stylistic simplicity, in Stepun’s view, by no means makes his ideas more easily accessible than those of Kant and Heidegger.46 According to Aleksei Peskov, however, Berdiaev’s “rhetoric of simplicity” may be read not only as a form of discourse congenial to communicating intuitive insights, but also as an expression of his tendency to be categorical. The Origin of Russian Communism, Peskov argues, “is basically written by means of short phrases, very often consisting of one sentence, all of which contain a categorical assertion.”47 In these statements, we find an extensive use of adverbs such as “always,” “everything,” “only,” “completely,” “impossibly,” “without exceptions” etc., as well as of the verb “to be” in the present tense (est’ ), which in Russian is emphatic. Typical examples from this book are “The entire history of the Russian intelligentsia was a preparation for communism”; “Nihilism is a typically (est’ kharakterno) Russian phenomenon” and so on.48 A similar example from The Russian Idea reads as follows: “Russia has always been filled with mystical-prophetic sects. And they have always displayed a thirst for a transfiguration of life. [. . .] In addition, the Russian religious mind has always possessed a strong eschatological element” (ri 10, italics added). This use of language expresses a particular view of history, according to which everything that has happened was inevitable (“Communism was the inescapable fate of Russia”)—a paradoxical fact indeed given the fundamental importance of freedom that Berdiaev otherwise advocated. According to Peskov, Berdiaev attempts to evaluate history from a providential point of view, for which this language turned out to be the most well-suited. He assumes the role of a prophet, not a historian.49 Berdiaev’s language finds a parallel in a mode of expression that frequently occurs in Tolstoi’s writings, and has been described by

45

Clowes, 2004, p. 194. F.A. Stepun, 1964, Mystische Weltschau: Fünf Gestalten des russischen Symbolismus (Solowjew, Berdjajew, Iwanow, Belyj, Blok), Munich, p. 107. 47 A.M. Peskov, 2007, “Kommunizm—‘neotvratimaia sud’ba Rossii’: Logika N.A. Berdiaeva,” “Russkaia ideia” i “Russkaia dusha”: Ocherki russkoi istoriosofii (Natsiia i kul’tura: Novye issledovaniia), Moscow, pp. 81–87, p. 81. 48 Cf. Peskov, 2007, p. 82. 49 Peskov, 2007, p. 83. 46

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Gary Soul Morson as “absolute language.” Absolute language statements are situated outside the narration and are not dialogised.50 But, as in Tolstoi, the fact that these statements are nevertheless inserted into a narrative aimed at visualising their “truth,” inevitably sets in motion an interpretative and dialogic activity, since the relationship between the categorical assertions and the narrativised material is never self-explanatory. As I intend to show, the categorical opening of The Russian Idea, where this use of language prevails in particular, does not exhaust the meaning of the subsequent narrative. Berdiaev’s language, in The Russian Idea too, is straightforward and dramatic, categorical and monologic, as well as full of paradoxes and inconsistencies. However, to my mind, The Russian Idea also presents us with an attempt to exploit ambiguities, a strategy that is very important with respect to the meaningful connections it tries to create between the past and the present. Let me try to make this a little clearer with the aid of some of Poltoratskii’s rather harsh remarks. It is above all the notion of “the Russian idea” that Poltoratskii finds unclear in Berdiaev’s book: “nowhere in The Russian Idea can one find a distinct and complete summing up of what Berdyaev says about the main subject of his book—the Russian idea.”51 Still, Poltoratskii continues, it seems as if the main themes of Russian thought according to Berdiaev—messianism, personalism and the spirit of community, humanism, socialism, nihilism, anarchism, religious existentialism and totalitarianism, eschatology and prophetism— appear to represent [. . .] also the components of the Russian eschatological idea of the Kingdom of God. To go even further, it sometimes appears that these are the characteristics not only of the idea of God’s kingdom, but of God’s Kingdom, the Future City, the New Jerusalem itself.52

However, these elements, Poltoratskii adds, are nothing other than “the component parts of Berdyaev’s own ideology, of his own idea of God’s kingdom during the last period of his intellectual evolution.”

50 Gary Saul Morson, 1987, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace”, Stanford, Calif., pp. 9ff. The most famous example is probably the opening of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This single sentence is followed by a new paragraph, where the proper narrative begins. 51 Poltoratskii, 1962, p. 123. 52 Poltoratskii, 1962, p. 124.

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While Poltoratskii’s description of Berdiaev’s ambiguous discourse is very precise, Berdiaev’s ambiguities, in my view, also contribute to making The Russian Idea meaningful, a fact that, as far as I can see, Poltoratskii misses. He notes that Berdiaev’s vagueness “verges on ‘cunning ambiguity’,”53 but I cannot see that he analyses this “cunningness” sufficiently. To my mind, Berdiaev utilises ambiguities on different levels, not least in the very concept of the “Russian Idea,” which stands both for “typically Russian ideas” in the past, and for a particular (divine) idea of Russia. The Russian Idea or the Idea of Russia? Let us return to the speculative first pages of The Russian Idea. Berdiaev opens his work by claiming the “impossibility” of giving an exact “scientific definition” of a “national type” or “national individuality.” From this negative statement he proceeds by evoking the notions of “faith, love and hope,” whose relevance he tentatively exemplifies by quoting Tiutchev’s legendary poem “One cannot understand Russia by reason, [. . .] One can only believe in Russia.” This anti-scientific approach corresponds to a particular perspective suggested by Berdiaev as being the most congenial in relation to his subject—that of God: “I will not be so much interested in what Russia has been empirically, as how the Creator conceived of Russia; as the comprehensible (umopostigaemyi) image of the Russian people, its idea” (ri 5). Although The Russian Idea contains empirical material in abundance, Russia according to Berdiaev is more than the sum of its “components” (the empirical material). This imaginary Russia is what the book aims to bring about. The sentence just quoted presents us with the first occurrence of the term idea in combination with Russia in the text, and the formulation is clearly indebted to Vladimir Solovev’s definition of a “national idea” in his article “The Russian Idea,” originally a lecture given in French in Paris in 1889, and published in Russian in 1909. Here, Solovev writes: “The idea of a nation is not what it conceives of itself in time but what God conceives of it in eternity.”54 While it is Dostoevskii who is

53

Poltoratskii, 1962, p. 122. V.S. Solov’ev, 1989, “Russkaia ideia,” Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, vol 2: Chteniia o bogochelovechestve; Publitsistika (Iz istorii otechestvennoi filosofskoi mysli), eds. N.V. Kotrelev et al., pp. 219–246; p. 220. 54

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held to have been the first to use the concept of “the Russian idea” (in his “Announcement about the Publication of the Journal Vremia in 1861”), in order to express his belief that Russia may be able to reconcile the hostility among other European nations,55 it was Solovev who created with this lecture and article the “genre” of the Russian Idea, in Mikhail Maslin’s somewhat vague and confusing term.56 Personally, I would prefer to speak of a discourse, in so far as the texts discussed by Maslin are linked mainly on the level of content. They were first and foremost contributions to an ongoing discussion of Russia’s place and role in the world, and the term russkaia ideia is not even used in this simple form by all the contributors to this discourse.57 The discourse about the “Russian idea,” according to Maslin, was finally formed in the 1910s, whereas Berdiaev’s book represents its culmination. Examples from the “formation period” include Viacheslav Ivanov’s (1866–1949) “On the Russian Idea” (1911), Evgenii Trubetskoi’s (1863–1920) “Old and New National Messianism” (1912) and Vasilii Rozanov’s (1856–1919) “About the ‘Russian Idea’ ” (1915), while the last major contribution in post-revolutionary Russia was Lev Karsavin’s short book East, West and the Russian Idea, published on the eve of his emigration (1922). As Maslin notes, the discourse about the “Russian idea” is “characterised by a particular figurativeness (obraznost’ ), and it does not aim at elaborating any unambiguous ‘scientific’ definition of the Russian idea.”58 What is all the more interesting, therefore, is the way in which the term is used in these texts. Solovev, Karsavin and Berdiaev all see the question of the “Russian idea” in terms of Russia’s particular vocation in history, be it on behalf of itself or of the rest of the world. To Karsavin, the “Russian idea” refers to the “meaning of our existence,” whereas Solovev and Berdiaev speak of “what God conceives of Russia.” Underlying the discourse on the Russian idea is a quest for self-definition and self-realisation,

55 Cf. F.M. Dostoevskii, 2000, “Ob’’iavlenie ob izdanii v 1861 godu zhurnala Vremia,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii: Kanonicheskie teksty, vol. 4, ed. V.N. Zakharov, Petrozavodsk, pp. 7–14, p. 9. 56 Cf. M.A. Maslin (ed.), 1999, “Russkaia ideia,” Russkaia filosofiia: Slovar’, Moscow, pp. 421–423, p. 422. Evgenii Barabanov describes it as “an almost independent genre,” cf. E.V. Barabanov, 1990, “‘Russkaia ideia’ v eskhatologicheskoi perspektive,” Voprosy filosofii 8, pp. 62–73, p. 63. 57 Evgenii Trubetskoi mostly uses the term “Russian national idea” (russkaia natsional’naia ideia), cf. E.N. Trubetskoi, 1912, “Staryi i novyi natsional’nyi messianizm,” Russkaia mysl’ 3, pp. 82–102, passim. 58 Maslin, 1995, p. 422.

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which require the formulation of Russia’s purpose in a world-historical perspective. The “Russian idea” in this respect means a transcendental and eternal idea of what Russia is and should be. Solovev’s text belongs to his post-Slavophile period, and his “Russian idea” refers to Russia’s decisive role in the construction of a universal church and theocracy. Still, he was criticised by Trubetskoi for not having sufficiently abandoned the nationalist messianism that was so characteristic of his early period. To Trubetskoi, Russia is only one individual, unique Christian nation among all the others, all of whom are equally called to accomplish the task placed before them by God.59 Karsavin framed his quest for the “Russian idea” differently and largely left aside the question of what role Russia should play in a universal context. Instead, his major concern, as formulated by Françoise Lesourd, was a “defence of the Greek Orthodox religion wherein he saw the quintessence and the guardian of the Russian mentality and of its specific values.”60 In other words, he searched for the “Russian idea” in the past. A dominant theme in his book is the alleged antithetical relationship between East and West. Karsavin did not oppose a reciprocal exchange of ideas, but he firmly believed that the “advantage of Eastern Christianity over the Western one consists in the wholeness and purity of the heritage it preserves—of what was expressed in the period of the ecumenical councils in Church history.”61 Berdiaev’s The Russian Idea represents both a quest for the differentia specifica of Russian mentality and culture (cf. Karsavin) and an attempt to imagine and formulate “God’s idea of Russia” (cf. Solovev). Berdiaev and Solovev agree that this idea cannot be found empirically in the past or present. Nevertheless, what Berdiaev does in The Russian Idea is precisely to write a history of Russian thought, which is “empirical” in the sense that it consists of an interpretation of a corpus of Russian philosophical texts, out of which a narrative is composed. This history is inserted, in turn, into the discourse of the Russian idea. The intellectual history of Russia is not the final purpose of this work, but a means of eventually uncovering and imagining “what the Creator conceived of Russia.” Evgenii Barabanov has correctly observed that Berdiaev attempts nothing less than to speak on behalf of a “silent 59

Cf. Trubetskoi, 1912. Françoise Lesourd, 2007, “Karsavin and the Eurasian Movement,” Russia between East and West: Scholarly Debates on Eurasianism, ed. D. Shlapentokh, Leiden & Boston, pp. 61–94, p. 74. 61 L.P. Karsavin, 1922, Vostok, zapad i russkaia ideia, St Petersburg, p. 65. 60

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God.” This is, according to Barabanov, Berdiaev’s “Gnostic project.”62 However, Barabanov does not seem to have recognised the double nature of this work, which refers to two traditions simultaneously: previous writings on Russian intellectual history and the discourse about the Russian idea, where the former is intended to serve the latter.63 Blending two traditions into one discourse, Berdiaev’s The Russian Idea analyses the past in order to speculate about the future. Correspondingly, the term “the Russian idea” itself has a similarly double— or ambiguous—meaning. On the one hand, it refers to the idea of the Russians, i.e. the idea(s) Russians have had of themselves and their culture. As already noted, Berdiaev puts a particular emphasis on eschatological thinking as being characteristic of Russians: “The ‘idea’ of Russia (‘ideia’ Rossii) has always been based on a prophecy about the future, not about what is—and this is the only possible form of messianic consciousness” (ri 54). This “idea of Russia,” then, is a “Russian idea” in the sense that it is characteristic of Russian thought. When referring to an idea of brotherhood among the people and among peoples, for instance, Berdiaev proclaims: “This is a Russian idea (Eto russkaia ideia)” (ri 130). Similarly, Khomiakov’s “combination of the spirit of freedom and the spirit of communitarianism remains a very Russian idea (ostaetsia ochen’ russkaia ideia)” (ri 167). On the other hand, because he is interested ultimately in God’s idea of Russia, Berdiaev endeavours to make the transition for which Poltoratskii later criticised him: from speaking of the character of the Russian people to suggesting its capacities and even “true vocation,” i.e. to proceed from a “Russian idea” to an “idea of Russia.” In order to find out how a Russian idea may become an idea of Russia we have to examine his historical thinking and writing more in detail. Chaotic Essentialism Having proposed as his goal the laying bare of God’s plan for Russia, Berdiaev proceeds by confronting the reader with a series of enigmatic

62

Cf. Barabanov, 1990, p. 72. Cf. Barabanov, 1990, p. 62, who mentions only the latter. Olga Volkogonova, on the contrary, seems to be aware of the double character of this work by referring to it as a “book devoted to the history of Russian thought, to the philosophy of Russian history” (Volkogonova, 1998, p. 137). However, she too does not undertake to analyse sufficiently the interplay between the two dimensions. 63

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statements about Russia and the Russian people. These statements add up to an initial description that frames the subsequent examination, though their direct relevance is difficult to perceive immediately. The opening, covering the first six pages of the work, is probably the most challenging part of The Russian Idea. This for at least two reasons. First, Berdiaev’s reasoning is clearly not “discursive” but impressionistic and associative. Here is one telling example of this tendency, and I would like to emphasise that I have not omitted anything from these sentences: Bylinas and warriors are associated with Kievan Russia, with Saint Vladimir. But knighthood did not develop on the spiritual soil of Orthodoxy. There is no heroism in the martyrdom of the saints Boris and Gleb, the idea of sacrifice prevails. The feat of non-resistance is a Russian feat. Simplification and degradation are Russian features. Holy foolishness is also characteristic of the Russian religious mind—the acceptance of peoples’ abuse, mockery of the world, challenging the world. It is characteristic that the saintly princes disappeared after the transference of sinful power to the great Muscovite princes. And it was no coincidence that holiness in general became impoverished during the Muscovite tsardom. Selfimmolation, as a religious feat, is a Russian national occurrence, almost unknown to other peoples. What has been called double faith by us, i.e. the combination of Orthodox faith with heathen mythology and popular poetry, explains the many contradictions in the Russian people. (ri 9)

Although acquaintance with Fedotov’s Saints of Ancient Russia will help the reader to make sense of parts of this passage (such as the interpretation of Boris and Gleb), Berdiaev’s discourse cannot but give an haphazard impression. Taken together, these seemingly isolated statements create a very rhapsodic and capricious text. While Berdiaev’s stream-of-consciousness-like technique gives an undeniably “muddy” (Gippius) impression, he nevertheless manages to reflect and represent in this way the associative logic of his inner thoughts.64 Second, the image of Russia presented here is clearly essentialist and static. In the course of a few sentences, he describes a period of nearly eight centuries (from Prince Vladimir to the Old Believers), where everything mentioned is claimed to be “truly Russian.” Besides, he appeals to and activates traditional national-romantic stereotypes

64 According to his wife Lidiia Berdiaeva’s diaries (entry for 11 November 1934), Berdiaev claimed that he would never become tired of writing because “my process of writing is not conscious but unconscious . . . Its source is in the unconscious.” L.Iu. Berdiaeva, 2002, Professiia: Zhena filosofa, ed. E.V. Bronnikova, Moscow, p. 44.

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of Russia and Russians, for instance by claiming that “there is a correlation between the immensity, the borderlessness, the endlessness of the Russian land and the Russian soul, between the physical geography and the geography of the soul” (ri 6). The idea of the broadness of the Russian landscape as reflecting the Russian soul, Peter Ulf Møller has suggested, was invented by the Romantics (cf. Gogol’s Dead Souls and its famous image of the troika that concludes it), and has remained one of the most popular Russian autostereotypes.65 By the same token, Berdiaev resumes the antinomian approach to Russianness already put forward in “The Soul of Russia” (1915).66 In this text, the existence of antinomies is mainly seen as a problem resulting from the absence of “masculinity” (synonymous here with “logos”) and the abundance of “femininity” (“passivity”) in Russian culture.67 However, such “explanations” in terms of gender stereotyping are absent from The Russian Idea. Here it is simply stated, almost as a positive fact, that the Russian people is “to the highest degree a polarised people, it is a coincidence of contradictions.” And Berdiaev continues: Two contradictory principles have served as the basis for the formation of the Russian soul: a natural, heathen Dionysian element and asceticmonastic Orthodoxy. It is possible to uncover opposite capacities in the Russian people: despotism and hypertrophy of the state versus anarchism and liberty; cruelty and violence versus kindness, humanity and softness; a ritualistic faith versus a quest for truth; individuality and a clear recognition of personality versus anonymous collectivism; nationalism and pride versus universalism and pan-humanity; religious-messianic eschatology versus outward piety; search for God versus rebellious atheism; humility versus insolence; slavery versus rebellion. (ri 6f )

65

Peter Ulf Møller, 1999, “Russian Identity as an East–West Controversy: Outlining a Concept,” Through a Glass Darkly: Cultural Representation in the Dialogue between Central, Eastern and Western Europe (Slavica Lundensia 19), ed. F. Björling, Lund, pp. 1–19, p. 11. 66 Cf. Berdiaev, 2007, pp. 21–33, where the two main antinomies are 1) Russia is the most non-governmental (and most anarchic) land and Russia is the most governmental (and bureaucratic) land; 2) Russia is the most non-chauvinistic land and most nationalistic land. 67 On Berdiaev’s gender stereotyping of Russia and its contexts, see Robin Aizlewood, 2001, “Berdiaev and Chaadaev, Russia and Feminine Passivity,” Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilisation, ed. P.I. Barta, London, pp. 121–139. As Aizlewood notes, Berdiaev’s own discourse is “feminine.”

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We might ask here: is there anything at all that is not characteristic of the “Russian soul”? And yes: Berdiaev proclaims that the Russian society has never been “aristocratic” or “bourgeois.” The latter especially is referred to several times during the work as being constitutive of Russianness by its very absence—it seems at times just as important as the positive features listed above. Thus, “bourgeois mentality” is not held to be a “polar concept” of any kind; if it were present, it would have been situated in some in-between sphere. According to Berdiaev, there is no such middle ground in Russian cultural and spiritual history, an idea that was later taken up by the semioticians Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii. The resemblances between their idea of the “role of binary models” in Russian history and those of Berdiaev are, I would claim, too obvious to be coincidental.68 Berdiaev’s attempt at an antinomian approach to Russian mentality in 1915 may have been indebted to the antinomian thinking that had been introduced to Russian pre-revolutionary thought above all by Pavel Florenskii. In his The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914), Florenskii writes: “The thesis and the antithesis together form the expression of truth. In other words, truth is an antinomy, and it cannot fail to be such.”69 Truth (istina) is thus the wholeness of antinomies. According to this idea, contradictory assertions should be fully acknowledged simultaneously without attempting to overcome their antithetical relationship by means of a Hegelian synthesis. This theory of antinomies was one of the few aspects that Berdiaev held to be valuable in Florenskii’s book, of whose “stylised Orthodoxy” he was otherwise quite critical.70 However, we should not forget that Berdiaev’s antinomian thinking, which cannot claim Florenskii’s philosophical profundity, is also exclusive. There is no place in his conceptualisation for “Western European bourgeois” mentality, a use of negation that is seemingly not in accordance with Florenskii’s idea of antinomian 68 Cf. Iu.M. Lotman & B.A. Uspenskii, 1985, “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture,” The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History: Essays by Iurii M. Lotman, Lidia Ia. Ginsburg, Boris A. Uspenskii, eds. A.D. Nakhimovsky & A.S. Nakhimovsky, Itacha, pp. 30–66. For a study of this article and its contexts, see Kåre Johan Mjør, 2005, “Semiotikk som indre eksil? Om binære modellars rolle i russisk kultur,” Nordlit: Arbeidstidsskrift i litteratur og kultur 18, pp. 105–132. 69 Quoted from Ksana Blank, 2007, “The Rabbit and the Duck: Antinomic Unity in Dostoevskij, the Russian Religious Tradition, and Mikhail Bakhtin,” Studies in East European Thought 59, pp. 21–37, p. 26. 70 Cf. Blank, 2007, p. 27. His essay “Stilizovannoe pravoslavie (o. Pavel Florenskii)” (1914) is reprinted in Berdiaev, 1989, pp. 543–566.

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truth.71 This is also where Berdiaev becomes more essentialist than Florenskii, in so far as he does not accept every thesis. Gradually, Berdiaev proceeds to an account of Russia in a temporal perspective, while still remaining essentialist. “Russian history is characterised by disruption,” Berdiaev begins, and exemplifies this statement by referring to the succession of discrete phases: Kievan Russia, Russia of the Tatar Yoke, Muscovite Russia, Petrine Russia, Soviet Russia—and a possibly “new Russia.” But whereas history is hereby conceived of in terms of disruptions, Berdiaev continues by describing the history of the Russian people as “one of the most painful ones.” Already on the first page, Berdiaev claims that there is much in Russian history that is repulsive (ri 5). And this history of sufferings cuts across the disruptions just mentioned: it begins with the Tatar invasion and is followed by the “totalitarian regime of the Muscovite state.” Later events include the Time of Troubles, the seventeenth-century Schism in the Russian Church, the reforms of Peter the Great, and the persecution of the intelligentsia and the Decembrists during the repressive regime of Nicholas 1. Then came the Revolution and the “most terrible war in world history,” probably a reference to the Second World War. But Berdiaev also finds place for more constant features in his scheme, such as the permanent illiteracy of the Russian people. To Berdiaev, there is no fundamental opposition between disruption and continuity. Preoccupied with the same problem, Lotman and Uspenskii argue that continuity and discontinuity—at least with respect to Russia—are two sides of the same coin. They also perceive oppositions in Russian cultural history on both a temporal and spatial level. However, as Simon Franklin argues, both continuity and total discontinuity are abstract categories that hardly ever correspond to the historical reality of displacements.72 What Berdiaev, as well as Lotman and Uspenskii ignore is therefore historical transformations in Michel Foucault’s sense, the recognition of which “disarticulates the synchrony of breaks.”73 There is no room for displacements and transformations in the kind of scheme drawn up here by Berdiaev. To him, new events result 71 Cf. Florenskii’s statement in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: “Truth is truth precisely because it is not afraid of any objections. And it is not afraid of them because it itself says more against itself than any negation can say, but truth combines this its self-negation with affirmation.” Quoted from Blank, 2007, p. 26. 72 Cf. Simon Franklin, 2002, Byzantium—Rus—Russia: Studies in the Translation of Christian Culture (Variorum Collected Studies Series 754), Aldershot, p. ix. 73 Cf. Foucault, 2002, p. 195.

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only in increased suffering (the Same). As observed by Aleksei Peskov, “Berdiaev writes not about the changing history of Russia but about the substance of Russian history—the ‘Russian soul’ (the ‘national soul’) that remains the same at all times [. . .]. In such an approach, different epochs remain structurally identical, because they are organised by the Creator’s sole design.”74 In this respect Berdiaev is not a historicist. The opening of the work, therefore, presents us with an entirely static image of Russian culture and history, as well as of its people. Poltoratskii is therefore right in claiming that The Russian Idea describes a “people without state and history” and that Berdiaev “isolates the Russian people from its history.”75 However, his account becomes gradually more dynamic when he begins to explore the Russian people’s response to their suffering. The recurrent pattern underlying his description is precisely that of challenge and response, which is fundamental to Berdiaev’s thought (cf. his idea of the human creative act as a response to Creation). Russians as Schismatics After six pages of an ahistorical and even alogical portrait of Russia, Berdiaev finally arrives at the conflict between Iosif of Volotsk and Nil of Sora in the early sixteenth century. It is Iosif in particular who is important to the further development of Berdiaev’s plot. The conflict between Iosif and Nil, and the former’s defeat of the latter, forms the first event of any real significance in Berdiaev’s narrative, and informs the reader first and foremost of repression. As the representative of an Orthodoxy that sanctified the “totalitarian regime of Muscovite tsardom,” Iosif was “a supporter of a cruel, almost sadistic and powerseeking Christianity, a defender of interrogation and punishment of heretics, an enemy of all kinds of freedom” (ri 11). From here on, the text becomes much more clearly organised. The description of Iosif is followed by that of the monk Filofei of Pskov and his idea of Moscow the Third Rome (formulated at approximately the same time), to which Berdiaev had already devoted considerable attention in The Origin of Russian Communism. In both works, the “doctrine” of Moscow the Third Rome is seen as the idiomatic ideology 74 75

Peskov, 2007, p. 83. Poltoratskii, 1967b, p. 205.

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of the Muscovite state, whose messianic idea remained present in the ideology of the Russian state right up to and including communism. Berdiaev reads “Moscow the Third Rome” as a totalitarian ideology for a totalitarian state. As noted by Nina Sinitsyna, Berdiaev’s interpretation of Moscow the Third Rome as a totalitarian and even imperialist idea represented a new direction in the modern reception of Filofei’s letters, starting with their republication in the 1860s. During the first years of the Cold War, Berdiaev’s view became commonplace.76 When viewed in the larger historical perspective, however, the attention Berdiaev drew to Filofei must be said to have contributed substantially to the overshadowing of other sources on Muscovite ideology and national consciousness that were probably more important at the time of their origin.77 True, Berdiaev also paraphrases the Muscovite pseudo-historical works of the (false) imperial genealogy stretching back to Caesar Augustus (cf. for instance the sixteenth-century Book of Ranks), but he is far from according them the same importance. The third major event mentioned at the beginning of The Russian Idea is the Schism that took place in the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1650s. To Berdiaev, this conflict arose not because of the changes to rituals, but because of an emerging popular disbelief in the idea of Moscow as the genuine Orthodox kingdom (or the “Third Rome”). It reflected a rejection of the ideas put forward by Iosif and, in particular, by Filofei. To the Old Believers, the reforms of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich had demonstrated that Moscow was not the genuine kingdom of God. They rejected the mundane world and began a quest for the other world on their own. However, this emergence of a “messianic consciousness” also had a second source: the continual sufferings inflicted by the totalitarian Muscovite regime. Confronted by the misery of life in this world, the Russian people began to devote themselves to speculations about the end of this world and the coming of the next. In summing up the seventeenth century, Berdiaev writes: “And an extraordinary capacity of the Russian people was revealed: the enduring suffering, the tendency towards the other world, towards

76 Cf. N.V. Sinitsyna, 1998, Tretii rim: Istoki i evoliutsiia russkoi srednevekovoi kontseptsii (xv–xvi vv.), Moscow, p. 41. 77 Cf. Paul Bushkovitch, 1986, “The Formation of a National Consciousness in Early Modern Russia,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 10, pp. 355–376. On the reception of Filofei’s letters from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, see Sinitsyna, 1998, pp. 7–57.

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the ultimate end” (ri 17). The omission of “and” in the last sentence is noteworthy; it creates the impression that there is a close relationship between suffering and messianic consciousness. The former inevitably leads to the latter, while the latter, in turn, amplifies the former. Here we are once more confronted with Berdiaev’s impressionistic, non-discursive style, in which there is no logical inference, in this case between suffering and the emergence of messianism. In the case of Russia, the two tendencies should always be conceived of together, he suggests. At the same time, we are nevertheless presented with a significant narrative pattern of succession. However, there is also a different kind of response to suffering that is even more fundamental to Berdiaev’s conceptualisation of Russian history. Russians have not only been exposed to suffering by repressive regimes. Equally important, they display from the earliest times a capacity for suffering, as revealed in Boris and Gleb’s self-sacrificial non-resistance, in holy foolishness, and above all in the self-inflicted suffering (self-immolation, for instance) of various sects. The Russian suffering is thus both voluntary and involuntary. And in Berdiaev’s history, voluntary suffering is no less important than suffering imposed from outside or above. The abundance of voluntary suffering demonstrates that Russians have responded to suffering through accepting more—self-imposed—suffering. In rejecting the hardships of Muscovite Russia, which was supported ideologically by both Iosif and Filofei, the schismatic Russian people did not aim at eliminating their own suffering. As noted earlier, Berdiaev believed that human beings should not attempt to abolish evil. And neither did Russians try to do so. Herein lies, to my mind, the most fundamental significance of the seventeenth-century Schism according to Berdiaev. The response to suffering is more suffering. Following its chaotic opening, The Russian Idea therefore presents us with a minor narrative of challenge (Iosif, Filofei and their defence of the repressive regime) and response (the Schism). The central theme in this structure is the relationship between suffering and its twofold outcome: the emergence, on the one hand, of a “messianic consciousness” (i.e. a thorough preoccupation with the end) and, on the other, of self-inflicted suffering. This story functions as an allegory for the history of the Russian intelligentsia, which will present us with a similar structure of (symbolic) self-imposed suffering as a response to the hardships suffered by others. This is the fundamental narrative pattern of The Russian Idea.

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The agency embodying this twofold response to suffering are the various Russian sects, in particular those that emerged in the aftermath of the Schism. To Berdiaev, however, sects are more than sects. Poltoratskii emphasises that “Berdyaev ‘loves’ wanderers, fugitives, ‘searchers after truth’, sectarians, schismatics, rebels, ragged Cossacks, anarchists, nihilists, and revolutionaries. In them he ‘believes’, and in them he hopes.”78 Aleksandr Etkind goes even further and suggests that sectarianism is Berdiaev’s main metaphor for Russianness. It is projected onto the (idea of ) the “Russian soul,” as well as onto Russian intellectual life.79 Peskov reads Berdiaev’s historical works in a similar way: First we are told of the religious schism of the second half of the seventeenth century, then, without transitions, it is inferred that the schism was a ‘characteristic occurrence in Russian life’, and soon afterwards the concept of schism is transferred to the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century—on the assumption that the seventeenth-century schismatics and nineteenth-century intelligentsia considered the existing state power to be evil.80

Characteristic in this respect is Berdiaev’s extensive use of vague and generalised concepts (messianism, religiosity, eschatological), which are combined in turn with terms that refer to more specific Russian phenomena or situations (schism, intelligentsia, bolshevism). Furthermore, Berdiaev tends to apply the latter also to other periods of Russian history, so that different events and occurrences are described by means of the same metalanguage. Messianism is eventually claimed to be characteristic even of the intelligentsia. “As a result, Russian history appears as a series of isotypic events, generated by the same causes.”81 In The Russian Idea as well as in other writings, Berdiaev claims to have personal knowledge of sects. In an account inserted into the ninth chapter, he describes his personal encounters with a group of people opposed to official Orthodoxy at an inn in Moscow: Approximately around 1910, I was lucky enough to come into personal contact with the tramps of Russia (brodiashchaia Rus’ ), in search of God and God’s truth. I am able to tell of this characteristic Russian phenom-

78

Poltoratskii, 1962, p. 133. Cf. A.M. Etkind, 1998, “Berdiaev,” Khlyst: Sekty, literatura i revoliutsiia (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie: Nauchnoe prilozhenie 12), Moscow, pp. 231–243, pp. 233f. 80 Peskov, 2007, p. 84. 81 Peskov, 2007, p. 83. 79

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enon not from books but from my own personal impressions. And I must confess—this has been one of the strongest impressions of my life. (ri 200)82

Praised for their exceptional command of the Russian language, Berdiaev’s discussion partners possessed, as he puts it, a “part of the truth” (chast’ istiny). He claims that it was easier for him to discuss spiritual and mystical themes with a muzhik, whose views resembled those of Boehme and Eckhart, than with the cultivated people of the intelligentsia. In general, the mood at these meetings was truly “eschatological”: “I cannot imagine Russia and the Russian people without these searchers for God’s truth. In Russia there has always been and will always be a spiritual pilgrimage, there always has been this tendency towards a final state” (ri 201). Again we are presented with Berdiaev’s characteristic manner of making categorical and unfounded inferences. Sects, accordingly, are more than just an example of Russia—they are Russia. Sectarianism is a metaphor for Russianness. In Berdiaev’s analyses, as formulated by Etkind, “everything that interests him and is close to him appears to be antinomian. Man is antinomian as such, but ‘the Russian Man is more contradictory and antinomian than the Western man’; whereas the khlysty [sectarians, KJM] are even more antinomian that other Russians.”83 The antinomies of the sectarians are, in turn, projected back onto the entire Russian people. The Martyrology of the Intelligentsia In the first chapter of The Russian Idea, Berdiaev takes us from the beginnings of Russian history as far as the reign of Alexander 1. In the chapters that follow next (2–9), he examines the nineteenth century, and his account is structured according to the following themes: historiosophy, the conflict between the personality and world harmony, the problem of humanism, social problems, the justification of culture, authority and the state, religion, and eschatology. In other words, the book does not consist of a linear narrative, though the individual chapters devoted to these topics are more or less linear. Only the tenth and final chapter gives an overview of the nineteenth century as

82 These recollections were also reused by Berdiaev on several occasions; Etkind analyses the essay “Spiritual Christianity and Sectarianism in Russia” (1916). 83 Etkind, 1998, p. 239.

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a whole and surveys the two decades preceding the Revolution. Here, the chronological narration of the first chapter is resumed. Adopting Paul Ricoeur’s apt formulation in his analysis of Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip ii (cf. the Introduction), we could say that Berdiaev’s examination of the “main problems” of Russian thought is anti-narrative in so far as it is not a representation of a chronologically ordered sequence of events. Nevertheless, it relies on a narrative understanding of history.84 This becomes quite clear with the re-emergence of chronology towards the end. Berdiaev’s narrative understanding of history is also revealed to us, however, in his use of the basic storyline of suffering and response to suffering, that is to a preceding situation. Correspondingly, Berdiaev the historian is concerned mostly with what he sees as the fundamental structure of Russian thought throughout its history, and not so much with its gradual emergence and development. History becomes above all a variation upon an archetypal pattern. It should be added here that Berdiaev, just like Florovskii, is critical of the idea of history as development (razvitie). The idea of progress, he claims in The Meaning of History, tends to devaluate human efforts of the past since it is the future, the goal of history, that counts. Instead, the meaning of human history should be sought in individual creative acts in the past, present and future, however bound they are to fail ultimately. They reveal the vocation of human beings to realise their potentials.85 In contrast to Florovskii, however, The Russian Idea may be read as an attempt to find a new form for expressing this idea of history, in which the major figures of Russian thought occur many times, in different chapters, i.e. as continually responding to new situations or questions. Despite its aforementioned division into different topics, The Russian Idea follows at the same time, in my view, a more fundamental pattern that underlies and informs the work as a whole. This feature has also been observed by Barabanov, who suggests that Berdiaev’s overall perspective on Russian thought and the Russian idea is eschatological.86 By this Barabanov implies that the “Russian idea” claims to be centred ultimately on the Kingdom of Heaven. I would agree

84 85 86

Cf. Ricoeur, 1984, p. 230 (quoted in Chapter Two). Cf. N.A. Berdiaev, 1990, Smysl istorii, Moscow, p. 157. Cf. Barabanov, 1990, p. 66.

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with the contention that an eschatological (or historiosophical) theme cuts across the different topics and chapters, in so far as the Russian intelligentsia, according to Berdiaev, is obsessed by how to find a “way out of the unbearable sadness of the Russian reality and into an ideal reality” (ri 31). But in my view, Berdiaev’s own perspective on Russian intellectual history is not eschatological. In contrast to Florovskii, Berdiaev neither judges the past and present from the perspective of crisis, nor does he foresee an imminent salvation, at least not in the same, dramatic way. By the same token, Berdiaev does not speak first and foremost as a prophet, though elements of prophetism are present, for instance when he speaks of bringing about “God’s idea of Russia.”87 While eschatology may be a central topic in the history of Russian thought as interpreted by Berdiaev, his own narrative is a martyrology. His perspective is, I would therefore suggest, not eschatological but hagiographical. “Without Peter’s violent reform, in many respects so painful for the people, Russia would not have been able to carry out its mission in world history and could not have proclaimed its word” (ri 17). Here, as elsewhere, Berdiaev insists on the interdependency of painful debasement and a complementary spiritual resurrection, mission and triumph. According to Berdiaev, Peter’s reforms and the subsequent growth of the Russian Empire perpetuated the sufferings of the Russian people. At the same time, the reinforced sufferings brought about a new response in the form of a “spiritual-social formation” and a new “idealistic (and not social) class”: the Russian intelligentsia, which emerged under Catherine the Great. Berdiaev’s history of the Russian intelligentsia, to which the main part of The Russian Idea is devoted, stretches from late-eighteenth-century Freemasonry to the 1917 Revolution, and its first representatives were Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818) and Aleksandr Radishchev (1749–1802). The intelligentsia, according to Berdiaev, emerged as a protest against the injustices of the Russian Empire. Its history begins with the recognition of suffering. Although it was essential for it to exist so that injustice might be recognised, the emergence of the intelligentsia as such, i.e. the social and political conditions that made it possible, is not an issue in The Russian Idea. Berdiaev conceptualises the Russian intelligentsia in terms of a response to the suppressive regime. The

87

Cf. Barabanov, 1990, pp. 72f.

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intelligentsia was a “class of people completely obsessed with ideas and would accept in the name of their ideas prison, penal servitude, and punishment” (ri 28). This willingness to make sacrifices, characteristic of the intelligentsia from the very beginning, acquires a religious significance: “With the persecution of Novikov and Radishchev began the martyrology of the Russian intelligentsia” (ri 22). Berdiaev thus invites us to read Russian intellectual history as an account of martyrs and their sufferings, and interprets the behaviour of the Russian intelligentsia in accordance with this idea.88 Their “martyrdom” consists in responding to a certain situation—the recognition of the suffering of the Russian people—by taking suffering upon themselves: Radishchev was the ancestor of the Russian intelligentsia; he anticipated and determined its main features. When Radishchev in his Journey from Petersburg to Moscow wrote that, “I looked around me—my soul became tortured by the sufferings of mankind,” the Russian intelligentsia was born. [. . .] He was heavily wounded by the injustice of serfdom. (ri 30)

We see that suffering here has two aspects: on the one hand, it is an empirical fact in the past and in the present (the people do suffer); on the other, it is met with a new compassionate response, in the form of the torment suffered by the onlooker. Radishchev’s own formulation “my soul became tortured by the sufferings (uiazvlena stradaniiami) of mankind” as well as Berdiaev’s paraphrase “he was wounded by the injustice (ranen nepravdoi)” are not accidental; the complementary structure of suffering and compassionate response reveals the most significant pattern in the history of Russian thought, according to Berdiaev. Berdiaev’s account is indebted to the Russian intelligentsia discourse that had emerged from the 1860s onwards, when the concept came into use in Russian as a borrowing from Polish.89 In Russian, “intelligentsia” became not so much a social or sociological category as an ethical and political category, in that the “common ethos” of the intelligentsia

88 For a critical account of what Berdiaev thereby omits, see E.G. Plimak & T.A. Saburova, 2006, “ ‘Russkaia ideia’ Nikolaia Berdiaeva kak nasledie russkoi intelligentsii?” Voprosy filosofii 9, pp. 84–101. 89 On the history of the Russian intelligentsia discourse, see Nathaniel Knight, 2006, “Was the Intelligentsia Part of the Nation? Visions of Society in Post-Emancipation Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7 (4), pp. 733–758. See also Knight, 2000, for a discussion of the complementary notions of narod and narodnost’.

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was held to be its struggle against reaction. To be an intelligent would mean to accept this command.90 By the same token, “intelligentsia” came to function as a complementary concept to narod (meaning the “simple people”),91 a usage that is reflected in The Russian Idea: “The intelligentsia was placed in a tragic situation between the Empire and the narod. It strongly opposed the Empire in the name of the narod.” And moreover: the intelligentsia “opposed itself to the narod, sensed its guilt before the narod, and wanted to serve the narod ” (ri 31). Here, Berdiaev takes over a commonly held notion of the intelligentsia as a particular group whose raison d’être is the suffering of the people. Correspondingly, the intelligentsia is also seen in opposition to the state. Its independency vis-à-vis the state contributed to the idea of the intelligentsia as a liberating force, whose civilising mission was to transform Russian society. What is original in Berdiaev’s history, however, is that he largely ignores the intelligentsia’s “positive” attempts to theoretically and/or practically solve the problems of social injustice. In the Landmarks collection (1909), to which Berdiaev was a contributor, the Russian intelligentsia was criticised for putting first the liberation of the masses, and ethical concern for the individual human personality only second. In The Russian Idea, likewise, suffering is not conceived of as a state that human beings should attempt to abolish. Its significance lies elsewhere. For Berdiaev, the most important element in the intelligentsia’s recognition of the sufferings of the people is its reaction in the form of torment. A Russian intelligent suffers because the narod suffers: “The great Russian writers of the nineteenth century will create not from joyous creative abundance, but from thirst to save the people, mankind and the whole world, from unhappiness and suffering related to the injustice and slavery of man” (ri 27). Russian literature, accordingly, is “penetrated by pain caused by the sufferings (bol’ o stradaniiakh) of the individual human being and of the people” (ri 132). The

90 Cf. Andrzej Walicki, 1979, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. H. Andrews-Rusiecka, Stanford, Calif., p. xv. 91 In The Russian Idea, Berdiaev uses the term narod in both its meanings: as a reference to both the entire nation and to the common or “simple” people only (cf. my chapter on Fedotov). While at the beginning he uses narod in the first sense (it is the entire Russian people that is “polarised” etc.), the term assumes the second meaning when the concept of intelligentsia is introduced.

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recognition of suffering itself is painful and represents in this way a self-imposed hardship. The paradigmatic expression of the theme of suffering is found in the works of Dostoevskii, whom Berdiaev generally considers to be the most important thinker of them all: “The problem of suffering stands at the centre of Dostoevskii’s work. In this respect he is very Russian. The Russian man is able to endure suffering better than the Western man, and is in addition extraordinarily sensitive to suffering; he is more compassionate (sostradatelen) than the Western man” (ri 80f ). “The Russian” here may be read as referring to both an “ordinary Russian”—or to the entire narod—and to a representative of the intelligentsia. Everyone suffers, but in different ways: The question of the relationship to “reality” torments (muchit) the Russian idealists of the intelligentsia, who were deprived of the possibility of active engagement. [. . .] The Russian “reality” that surrounded the idealists of the 1830s and 40s was terrible (uzhasna); this was the empire of Nicholas 1, serfdom, absence of freedom, ignorance. (ri 75)

The recognition of genuine hardships, the compassionate response to these, as well as the inability to act, together create a situation pervaded by different forms of suffering. “The problem of theodicy, the existence of evil, tormented (muchila) Belinskii and Bakunin just as much as Dostoevskii” (ri 161). And the most important “solution” to the problem of theodicy in nineteenth-century thought, Berdiaev suggests, was precisely the compassionate response. The acceptance of suffering characterises the entire political spectrum of the Russian intelligentsia; it is first and foremost a Russian capacity: “Pity for the fallen ones, for the insulted and humiliated, capacity for compassion (sostradatel’nost’ ) are very Russian features” (ri 89). By implication, even the most militant atheists and revolutionaries are discussed within the same martyrological framework: Russian atheism emerged for moral reasons as a result of the impossibility of solving the problem of theodicy. A peculiar Marcionism is characteristic of Russians. The Creator of this world cannot be good, because the world is full of sufferings, the sufferings of the innocent. (ri 81)

The reference to the second-century Marcion, who was excommunicated from the church for his allegedly heretical (gnostic) views, reveals to us how Berdiaev interprets Russian spiritual life within a Christian framework. The problem of theodicy remained one of utmost concern for all Russian nineteenth-century thinkers, including those who

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had seemingly rejected Christianity. Its response—compassion and torment—would in turn take the form of the traditional Christian renunciation of this world: (symbolic) monasticism and asceticism. When we finally acquired in the second half of the nineteenth century a leftist intelligentsia, then it took on a character similar to that of a monastic order. The deeply Orthodox foundation of the Russian soul was revealed there: withdrawal from a world filled with evil, asceticism, capacity for self-sacrifice and the enduring of martyrdom. (ri 29f )

Belinskii too fits well into Berdiaev’s monastic-ascetic framework in that he too “out of compassion (sostradaniia) for the unhappy, refrained from dedicating himself to the fine arts, to learning” (ri 106). So does the “confessor” Petr Lavrov, a leading narodnik, who recognised “the guilt of the intelligentsia before the people” (ri 119). And however critical he is of Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s (1828–1889) materialist and utilitarian philosophy, Berdiaev claims that he possessed a strong moral character: “Judged by his moral qualities this was not only one of the best Russian people, but also a man close to holiness. Yes, this materialist and utilitarian, this ideologue of Russian ‘nihilism’, was almost a saint.” In referring to Chernyshevskii’s exile, Berdiaev notes that “one might even say that he endured his martyrdom with Christian humility” (ri 108). He was “unusually human, full of love and of self-sacrifice” (ri 111). The nihilist Dmitrii Pisarev’s (1840–1868) obsession with the hungry and naked, similarly, brought him “closer than the ‘imperialist’, however Orthodox, to the Gospels” (ri 114). By implication, the radical Russian intelligentsia of the 1860s is interpreted within a framework strikingly different from the one adopted by the Landmarks collection of 1909. In his contribution to that book, “Heroism and Asceticism,” Sergei Bulgakov had observed an ascetic dimension to the “heroism” of the radicals, which was discernible in the religious tone of their rhetoric and not least in their willingness to sacrifice themselves for a common cause. Nevertheless, Bulgakov continued to insist on the fundamental opposition between this kind of heroism and genuine, humble asceticism ( podvizhnichestvo), and thus between atheism and Christianity.92 This distinction, however, becomes distinctly blurred in The Russian Idea, whose author had

92 Cf. S.N. Bulgakov, 1991, “Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo (Iz razmyshlenii o religioznoi prirode russkoi intellilgentsii),” Vekhi; Iz glubiny, ed. A.A. Iakovlev, Moscow, pp. 31–72.

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contributed a similar critique of the Russian intelligentsia before the Revolution. The most outstanding ascetics, according to Berdiaev, are Nikolai Dobroliubov (1836–1861) and Petr Tkachev (1844–1885). Tkachev’s A Revolutionary’s Catechism is a “unique ascetic book. [. . .] The requirements he presents are harsher than those of Syrian asceticism” (ri 120). The young Dobroliubov, similarly, was characterized by a very “ascetic mood.” As revealed by his diaries, his recognition of evil and the unjust sufferings of the world eventually led him, according to Berdiaev, into atheism and nihilism. However, this is not described as a decisive break. Berdiaev sees the source of his nihilism precisely in his ascetic youth, when he perceived sin everywhere. Throughout his life, he rejected his sinful and evil surroundings. Herein lies his “Marcionism” (ri 134f ). Berdiaev summarises the interrelationship between nihilism and asceticism as follows: The imprint of a unique asceticism was present in Russian socialrevolutionary thought. Just as the Christian ascetics of the past believed that it was necessary to struggle first and foremost with personal sin, so the Russian revolutionaries believed that it was necessary to struggle first and foremost with social sin. All the rest was to be dealt with afterwards. Yet there were people who had an especially strong sense of this sin, who were not alien to the Russian social theme and who revealed a brilliant creativity. These were above all Lev Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, and Vladimir Solovev. The great Russian writers, however much they differed from each other, and the representatives of religious narodnichestvo, both believed in the truth of the simple working people. The Russian genius, in contrast to the western European, having reached the summit, throws himself down and wishes to be united with the earth and the people. (ri 122)

Despite the differences mentioned in this passage, the various camps of the Russian intelligentsia are unified, according to Berdiaev, through their common response of symbolic self-sacrifice for the sake of the people. This self-sacrifice, in turn, is interpreted typologically by being imagined as a modern fulfilment of early Christian asceticism. True, Russian torment may also have other sources than the suffering of the people. The form of response nevertheless remains the ascetic-monastic one and conforms as such to Berdiaev’s martyrology: Tolstoy was tormented (muchaetsia) by his own privileged position, a fact that eventually made him reject it and become a muzhik (ri 89). Gogol’ suffered (ego muchilo) because he was not able to perceive and

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represent the image of God in man (ri 83). Only Konstantin Leontev (1831–1891) “stands aside,” as Berdiaev repeatedly states (ri 96, 129), because of his positive, uncompassionate acceptance of pain. Leontev “accepted any sort of suffering and torture of the people. [. . .] To accept life is to accept pain” (ri 95). In order for life to be filled with beauty, Leontev claimed, there has to be evil in the world; “all sufferings of the people are justified if they make the appearance of Pushkin possible” (ri 143). This justification of suffering excludes him from the “Russian idea,” despite the fact that he shares an eschatological orientation. According to Berdiaev’s own philosophy, however, it is not beauty but freedom that justifies the existence of evil. In fact, to abolish evil is to abolish freedom. This brings us back to Dostoevskii, as interpreted by Berdiaev: Suffering is not only deeply characteristic of man; it is the only cause of the evolution of consciousness. Suffering redeems evil. Freedom, which is a sign of the highest dignity of man, his likeness to God, turns into wilfulness (svoevolie). Wilfulness, in turn, generates evil. (ri 181)

Berdiaev discussed the interdependence of freedom and evil in numerous writings both before and after his emigration, and seems to have acquired this idea first and foremost from Dostoevskii. Whereas Berdiaev had described suffering elsewhere as characteristic of the human condition in general, The Russian Idea turns this universal feature into something peculiar to Russian mentality. Berdiaev constructs the history of Russian thought as the field in which the differentia specifica of human life is revealed. As we can see, Berdiaev’s use of the label “martyrology” in relation to the history of the Russian intelligentsia was not accidental. The history of Russian thought provides us with ascetics and confessors who accept pain in forms that acquire sadomasochistic attributes. This interpretation enables Berdiaev to see the nineteenth-century intelligentsia as a parallel to both Christian ascetics and seventeenth-century schismatics. Russian cultural and intellectual history taken as a whole is one of constant debasement and humiliation. Berdiaev’s strong emphasis on various forms of martyrdom, furthermore, inevitably activates a hagiographical structure, according to which degradation is always complemented by transfiguration and glorification.93 In my view, this 93 Cf. Børtnes, 1988. In his autobiography, Berdiaev claims that he had always been ambivalent towards ascetic literature, but acknowledges that he has found inspiration

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imaginary transfiguration of the Russian people is what Berdiaev’s martyrology ultimately aims to bring about, by implicitly describing the agents of Russian intellectual history as following a pattern prefigured by the imitation of Christ. On the basis of this hagiographical representation, Berdiaev attempts to conceive of Russian messianism not only as an element in Russian thought but also as acted out by the intelligentsia and the people, who suffer according to the prototype of Christ’s passion. While he accepts the ethical notion of “intelligentsia” (cf. above), he transforms this abstract concept in order to designate a group of socially active individuals who contribute to a symbolic shaping of history. Russian Ideas as Ideas of Russia In On the Slavery and Freedom of Man (1939), Berdiaev introduces a three-fold concept of time: cosmic, historical, and existential. The first is circular or cyclical, and is the time of nature. The second is linear, stretching from the past (history, tradition, memory) towards the future. The third, in contrast, has a momentary character, symbolised neither by a line, nor a circle, but by a point (tochka). Existential time is that of the creative act. Berdiaev claims that “every creative act of man is performed in existential time and projected in historical time.”94 Creative acts, in which the godlikeness of humankind becomes apparent, dispel linear, successive or “historical” time, if only for a short moment (i.e. while they last). They are “irruptions” ( proryvy) of metahistory, a term that designates the temporal world of God, into history, the temporal world of man.95 However, all creative acts are bound to fail, Berdiaev contends. As soon as they are performed, they are inevitably “objectified” in terms of “results” or “products.” While human creativity is the foundation of the deification of man, it also makes human life tragic because of this objectification. Man is free to in Philokalia as well as, as already noted, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ (cf. Berdiaev, 1949, p. 203). 94 Berdiaev, 1939, p. 217. For a discussion of Berdiaev’s conceptions of time, see David Bonner Richardson, 1968, Berdyaev’s Philosophy of History: An Existentialist Theory of Social Creativity and Eschatology, The Hague, pp. 37ff., and Marko Markovic, 1978, La philosophie de l’inégalité et les idées politiques de Nicolas Berdiaev, Paris, pp. 201ff. 95 Cf. Berdiaev, 1939, pp. 221ff. In The Meaning of History (1922), Berdiaev uses the terms “celestial” and “terrestrial” history, which are largely synonymous to metahistory and history (cf. Berdiaev, 1990, chapter 3).

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perform creative acts, but this freedom is continually undermined by its own outcome. Berdiaev’s account of the last decades before the Revolution, which he refers to as the “Russian cultural renaissance,” provides us with a historical example of interrupted creativity. The final chapter of The Russian Idea, in which chronology is resumed, is a celebration of this period as an extraordinarily productive phase in the history of Russian thought, with whose canonisation Berdiaev was very much concerned throughout his émigré period.96 In Berdiaev’s highly selective version, early twentieth-century Marxists and even liberals are mostly neglected in favour of religious philosophy, whose foremost representatives are claimed to be Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Florenskii, and Berdiaev himself. The creative philosophical activity of this renaissance, however, came to an abrupt end with the October Revolution: “The cultural renaissance was disrupted and its creators were removed from the forefront of history, forced partly to emigrate.” And he adds: “that is how history is accomplished” (ri 252). The interruption of the creativity of this period is characteristic of the interruption and objectification of human efforts in general. And yet, this is not the end of The Russian Idea, only of Russian intellectual history. There then follow three more pages that provide us with another ending, an epilogue, where Berdiaev returns to the speculative mode of the opening of the book. Here, he continues his speculations on the Russian people, whose characteristics are claimed to parallel those required for the New Kingdom of Heaven: The Russian people, according to its eternal idea, has no love for the order of this earthly city and is directed towards the city that is to come (Grad Griadushchii), to the New Jerusalem, but the New Jerusalem is not separate from the enormous Russian land, it is connected with it, and the Russian land enters into it. Communitarianism, brotherhood among the people are necessary for the New Jerusalem and it is therefore necessary to endure the epoch of the Holy Spirit, in which there will be a new revelation concerning society. This has been prepared for in Russia. (ri 255)

96 See for instance his article of 1935 on the “Russian Spiritual Renaissance” (as he terms it here), published on the tenth anniversary of The Way (Berdiaev, 1989, pp. 684–708, discussed in Chapter One), a text from which Berdiaev extensively reuses parts both in this final chapter of The Russian Idea and in Chapter Six, “The Russian Cultural Renaissance of the Early Twentieth Century; Meetings with People,” of his autobiography (1949).

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There is a striking discrepancy between these two endings: the first highlights interruption, while the second suggests, as it were, initiation into the metahistorical dimension. History is described as moving towards the Age of the Holy Spirit, a notion which was invented by the twelfth-century Italian monk and chiliast Joachim of Fiore, and was taken up in the nineteenth century by the Polish Hegelian August Cieszkowski (1814–1894), whom Berdiaev, in fact, includes in The Russian Idea. The application of a trichotomic scheme of history, according to which the Age of the Holy Spirit succeeds those of the Father and the Son, is a characteristic feature of chiliastic or millenarian literature.97 However, it is not Berdiaev’s main project to herald this new epoch; to him, its coming in the future is simply a fact. The Russian Idea, rather, aims to describe the transfiguration of the Russian people, which will enable it to “prepare” for the Age of the Holy Spirit. On the one hand, the ending of The Russian Idea tells us that human creativity is bound to fail (history), but that God’s overall historical plan remains (metahistory); on the other, Russia is given a special place in the scheme of world history in that it is imagined to be capable of mediating between these two spatial and temporal dimensions: the Russian land is “connected with” and “enters into” the New Jerusalem. Creative acts may testify to the transfiguration of earthly life, if only for a moment, as Berdiaev continually stresses in his philosophy.98 What is important in The Russian Idea is not only that this transfiguration is anticipated with particular force on Russian soil, but also that it is amplified by total degradation in the form of symbolic martyrdom, and it is here we must look for an explanation of the exaltations that conclude the book. The final passage of the work, quoted above, represents Berdiaev’s answer to his own question concerning “how God conceives of Russia.” In his attempt to answer this question, arguments and discursive reasoning are abandoned—we are now in the domain where “one can only believe in Russia” (Tiutchev). Berdiaev could have claimed, however, that brotherhood and communitarianism define the Russian people without writing a history of Russian thought, since he never argues in favour of these characteristics. The

97 Cf. Andrzej Walicki, 1969, “Two Polish Messianists: Adam Mickiewicz and August Cieszkowski,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 2 (New Series), pp. 77–105, pp. 81, 92. According to Walicki, variations of this chiliastic scheme are present in both Cieszkowski and Mickiewicz. 98 See for instance Berdiaev, 1939, pp. 218ff.

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reason why he nevertheless did emphasise them, I would suggest, is that he wanted to construct an imaginary transfigured Russia as the reverse and complementary side of the manifestly humiliated and debased Russia. The hagiographical mode of representation enables Berdiaev to be both a historian and a messianist in the course of one and the same work, and I think that this is the central moment that Poltoratskii overlooks in his critique of Berdiaev, however justified it might otherwise seem. What defines Russian thought, therefore, is its martyrological aspect. The meaning of Russia’s existence is found in its suffering and asceticism, in its acceptance of debasement, which is the source of its transfiguration. This, in turn, gives Russia a mission on behalf of the rest of the world: to demonstrate true brotherhood and communitarianism. “Brotherhood and communitarianism” are precisely Russian ideas converted into ideas of Russia; a favourite idea among Russian thinkers that Berdiaev now claims to be Russia’s vocation. In The Russian Idea, characteristics and vocation represent two sides of the same coin. Berdiaev’s treatment of the Slavophiles, from whom the ideas of brotherhood and communitarianism as particularly Russian social structures originate (though they preferred other terms), demonstrates how he deliberately shifts between an analytical and a speculative mode. At first, Berdiaev is highly critical of the Slavophiles, above all because they idealised Russia’s past without sufficiently taking into account the overwhelming suffering that was part of it. Aleksei Khomiakov, for instance, is reproached for having no notion of evil. The construction of Russian history by the Slavophiles, first and foremost by Konstantin Aksakov, was entirely fantastic and does not withstand criticism. The Slavophiles confused their ideal Russia, their ideal utopia of a perfect system, with Russia’s historical past. [. . .] They projected this organic ideal onto the historical past, onto the pre-Petrine epoch. [. . .] The Slavophiles searched in history, in society and culture, for the same spiritual wholeness that they had found in the soul. (ri 42ff )

A few pages later, however, we see that the Slavophiles’ imaginary Russia, which they had invented “in the soul,” is nevertheless accepted as an “idea of Russia”: And after all Khomiakov was right on one point, which is not refuted by empirical Russian reality. In the depths of the Russian people there lies hidden a freedom of spirit which is greater than that of the freer and

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chapter five more enlightened people of the West. In the depths of Orthodoxy there lies hidden a freedom more profound than that of Catholicism. (ri 47f )

While Konstantin Aksakov (1817–1860) is initially criticised for his “fantastic constructions” (cf. above), Berdiaev does eventually admit that “Russians have a dislike for the state and are inclined not to consider it their own” (ri 145). He accepts, in other words, Slavophile ideas as a contingency.99 Berdiaev’s characteristic ambiguities may also be observed in his rhetoric, more specifically in the way in which he changes verb tenses when paraphrasing a thinker. An example is found in the following passage, which begins in the past tense but soon switches to the present and even future tenses: Russian reflections on the historiosophical theme led to the idea that Russia’s way is a particular one. Russia is the Great East-West, it is a whole enormous world, while the Russian people possess great powers. The Russian people are a people of the future. It will solve problems that the West is no longer capable of solving, that the West does not even raise anymore in sufficient depth. But this idea is always accompanied by a pessimistic feeling about Russian sins and Russian darkness, at times the consciousness that Russia is flying into the abyss. Russian consciousness goes hand in hand with eschatological consciousness. What problems are raised by Russian consciousness? (ri 72f )

In Russian, true, indirect speech uses the same tense as would have been used in direct speech. In this passage, however, the markers of indirect speech disappear after the opening sentence, a fact that makes it ambiguous with respect to whose views are being paraphrased here (that of the Slavophiles? of Berdiaev himself ?). As we saw in the analysis of Florovskii, the present tense may be used in historical discourse as a means of expressing the “truth,” in this case “Russian ideas” that are to be taken to be “ideas of Russia.” Here is another example, from Berdiaev’s fifth chapter: Nearly everyone thought that the Russian people were called to realise a social truth, brotherhood among the people. Everyone hoped that Russia would avoid the injustice and evil of capitalism, that it would become the best social system while bypassing the capitalist period in its economic development. And everyone thought that the backwardness of Russia

99 In “The Soul of Russia,” Berdiaev proclaims by means of a human metaphor that it is “biologically impossible” for a people such as the Russian people to believe in its own vocation (prizvanie) to such an extent as it has done in the past, without really possessing a true vocation (Berdiaev, 2007, p. 21).

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was its advantage. Russians contrived to be socialists under serfdom and autocracy. The Russian people are the most communitarian people in the world; such is Russian everyday life, such are the Russian customs. Russian hospitality is a part of this communitarianism. Predecessors of Russian socialism were Radishchev and Pestel. (ri 101f )

And so we are brought back into the narrative of Russian thought. In the meantime, Berdiaev’s characteristic way of switching tenses has created a double-voiced discourse, in which he not only renders what others have said, but also accepts these ideas, at least as a contingency. In the two passages quoted above, we are once more presented with Berdiaev’s characteristic stream-of-consciousness-like writing, which is instrumental in his creation of this ambiguous discourse. In constructing his “idea of Russia,” Berdiaev does not only utilise “Russian ideas.” An important authoritative voice in his text is that of Oswald Spengler; in The Russian Idea there are no less than three references to one particular statement made by Spengler: “Russia is an apocalyptic revolt against antiquity” (ri 89, 132, 195). Berdiaev’s quotation is neither exact nor correctly referenced; it is not from The Decline of the West but from Prussianism and Socialism, where we read: “Es ist der Urhaß der Apokalypse gegen die Antike Kultur.”100 This “es” refers to a series of Russian reactions against post-Petrine westernisation— Spengler’s examples are taken from Dostoevskii and Aksakov—which he compares to Biblical apocalyptic literature from the Book of Daniel onwards, read as though directed against the “antique culture” of Rome. To Spengler, Dostoevskii and Aksakov represent a reaction against post-Petrine classical “antique culture.” The main function of Spengler’s statement as recorded in The Russian Idea is to give weight to the claim of a sharp division between Russia and Western Europe, and of apocalypticism as being characteristic of the former. Nevertheless, Berdiaev interprets its meaning differently in various settings. The first quotation is followed by the assertion that humanity (chelovechnost’) is (yet another) distinctive Russian feature, as opposed to Western humanism ( gumanizm). “Revolt against antiquity” stands here for the absence of classical and Renaissance culture. When quoted for the second time, in chapter six, “revolt against antiquity” is equated with “revolt against form,” or “against completeness.” It is used to support the view that nihilism is a “typical Russian

100 Oswald Spengler, 1920, Preussentum und Sozialismus, Munich, p. 94 (italics in original).

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phenomenon.” Besides, it recalls the first quotation: “The Russian people is a people of the end (narod kontsa), and not of the middle of the historical process. Humanist culture belongs to the middle of the historical process” (ri 132). The term narod kontsa is particularly interesting here. While its basic meaning seems to be that Russians are preoccupied with endings, its double meaning comes about when Spengler is referred to for the third time: “this means that the Russian people, in accordance with its metaphysical nature and its calling in the world, is a people of the end (narod kontsa)” (ri 195). Here, Berdiaev makes explicit his idea that the Russian people not only speculates continually about the end, but is also a chosen people in the historical transition to the epoch of the Holy Spirit. The term narod kontsa expresses both ideas simultaneously. Narod kontsa is an important example of how Berdiaev utilises ambiguities “cunningly” (Poltoratskii) in order to create new meanings. As the examples from his treatment of Spengler as well as the Slavophiles demonstrate, it is highly characteristic of Berdiaev to deliberately alternate between analytic and speculative modes in his discourse. However, the numerous ambiguities that are thereby brought into play in this text make sense, to my mind, only in relation to the martyrological plot, which binds together the seemingly contradictory elements of the book. The hagiographical structure of debasement and transfiguration as complementary processes makes it possible to conceive of Russian ideas as ideas of Russia: “Russian thought, the Russian quests in the early nineteenth and early twentieth century testify to the existence of the Russian idea, which corresponds to (sootvetstvuet) the character and mission of the Russian people” (ri 253). In this statement, which opens the epilogue-like second ending, the intelligentsia and its “common people” are united, finally, in their sufferings and transfiguration. As Jane Burbank has shown, Berdiaev’s belief in the Russian people underwent a transformation in the aftermath of the Revolution. As we remember, he perceived the Revolution as retribution. Accordingly, he expressed a strong disbelief in the Russian people, i.e. in the masses. What mattered to him at that point was the creative individual. However, he soon modified his views and shifted his focus of criticism. “Before, Russians had failed to live up to European standards; by 1922 European culture was at fault for Russia’s misfortunes.” This implicit accusation became coupled with the vision of Russia’s superiority to the West; “its

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Eastern ‘secret’ held the key to the meaning of history.”101 Decisive in this respect was not least Spengler’s idea of the End of European culture, which, as noted above, had an enormous and immediate appeal to the Russian intelligentsia. Berdiaev’s last publication in Russia before his exile was his contribution to the Spengler anthology published in Moscow in 1922 (see Chapter Three), which heralded a “return to Slavophile jingoism” (Burbank). And while this Slavophilism did not immediately bring with it a transcendent faith in the Russian people, The Russian Idea demonstrates that this was what was eventually to happen. Berdiaev’s Messianism The Russian Idea, on the one hand, is the history of the belief that Russia has a particular mission in the course of universal history.102 On the other, it is a text proclaiming the Russian people as chosen in “preparing for” the Epoch of the Holy Spirit. By implication, Berdiaev’s text represents a continuation of his own account. In his study of Russian messianism from the early sixteenth century to the present (2000), Peter Duncan maintains that messianism can be defined here more crudely as the proposition or belief that a given group is in some way chosen for a purpose. Closely linked to this is the view that the great suffering endured by the group will lead somehow to the redemption of the group itself and possibly of all humanity.103

Given its emphasis on various forms of suffering, Berdiaev’s Russian Idea clearly conforms to this definition, which suggests that suffering is the key factor that makes a group conceive of itself chosen or at least that strengthens this feeling. What I would like to suggest, however, is that such an emphasis on suffering is hardly found among those Russian nineteenth-century thinkers who may be described as messianists, a fact that is indirectly confirmed by Duncan’s own study,

101 Jane Burbank, 1986, Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917–1922, Oxford, p. 208. 102 Peter Duncan sees his own study of Russian messianism (2000) as a successor to Berdiaev’s book: “I would venture that this is the first book in English dedicated to Russian messianism and extending into the Soviet period since the English translation of Nikolai Berdiaev’s The Russian Idea appeared in 1947.” Peter J.S. Duncan, 2000, Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After (Routledge Advances in European Politics 1), London, p. 4. 103 Duncan, 2000, p. 1.

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although its initial paragraphs might suggests otherwise. I am not saying that it was absolutely absent, and Duncan asserts that we may see it in the writings of Gogol, Tiutchev, and Dostoevskii.104 However, not even Dostoevskii, however humiliated his protagonists often are, held up suffering as the defining characteristic of his country, of Russia and Russians. According to Joseph Frank, Dostoevskii’s “Russian messianism” was a blend, on the one hand, of an ethical component, “the notion that Russia was destined to install a Christian reign of goodness and justice on earth,” and on the other, an imperialistic one proclaiming “the importance of extending Russian political power.”105 By the same token, the Slavophiles were first and foremost set on the idea that Russians possessed a distinctive, superior collective spirituality, held to be aptly captured by Khomiakov’s neologism sobornost’. In this context, Andrzej Walicki has claimed that the Slavophiles were not messianists at all; they were conservatives who promoted the return to a broken tradition and not some “total regeneration of mankind, presupposing a decisive fight against the ‘old world’.”106 My view that the notion of suffering did not play a central role in nineteenth-century ideas of Russian superiority is supported by a comparison with the Polish messianism of the 1830s and 40s. As shown by Walicki, suffering played a major role here, above all in the thought of the poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), who conceived of Poland as a nation-Messiah with reference to the suffering this nation had gone through. Poland, we should remember, did not exist at that time on the map, while Russia was, after all, an empire. The difference between Russian and Polish messianism had also been observed by Berdiaev himself. In the article “Slavophilism and the Slavic Idea” (1915, also included in The Fate of Russia), he observed that “Polish 104

Cf. Duncan, 2000, pp. 21 (on Gogol), 25 (on Tiutchev), 37 (on Dostoevskii). Joseph Frank, 1995, Dostoevsky, vol. 4: The Miraculous Years 1865–1871, Princeton, N.J., p. 254. Cf. moreover: “When it came to individual human life, however, Dostoevsky’s nationalistic hubris was tempered by an acute sense of human fallibility and of the impossibility, which he would dramatize in Prince Myshkin, for any terrestrial being fully to realize the Christian ideal. [. . .] This helps to account for some of the discrepancy, which has often been commented on, between the disquieting political ambitions of Dostoevsky’s Messianism and the quite different compassion and sympathy with human suffering displayed in his fiction.” 106 Andrzej Walicki, 1968, “The Paris Lectures of Mickiewicz and Russian Slavophilism,” Slavonic and East European Review 46 (106), pp. 155–175, p. 173. Walicki’s concept of messianism is narrower than that of Duncan in that the former puts a stronger emphasis on the religious component, cf. Walicki, 1969, p. 77. See also Andrzej Walicki, 1994a, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland, Notre Dame, Ind., p. 240. 105

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messianism is more pure and more sacrificial than Russian messianism, which is not free from an idealising sentiment on behalf of our state power.”107 The last part of the statement refers to the Slavophiles as well as to Dostoevskii. We have Berdiaev’s own account of suffering as a central theme in Russian nineteenth-century thought. However, as shown by Duncan, “redemption through suffering” with respect to an entire nation became seemingly more important to Orthodox dissidents under Brezhnev than to nineteenth-century Slavophiles and Panslavists.108 And it was more important to Russian first-wave émigrés such as Berdiaev, whose writings were a chief source of inspiration to the late Soviet dissidents and circulated widely in the samizdat. This fact supports Walicki’s point that “messianic hopes emerge in periods of great disasters and calamities, in conditions of emotional frustration deepened by bitter consciousness of the defection of traditional religious authority.”109 While such a context hardly can be claimed to have been present in the age of empire in Russia, it was so for Soviet dissidents as well as for Russian émigrés. It was only with the terrible experiences of the twentieth century that a Russian messianism centred on suffering could emerge. Berdiaev began to formulate messianic visions of Russia during the First World War. In “The Soul of Russia” and other texts from this period, he foresaw an imminent world historical succession where the time would finally come for Russia to prophetically “proclaim its word.” Although he maintained that the exclusive, national messianism of the Jewish Old Testament was no longer possible after the appearance of Christ, he eventually suggested that different peoples could succeed one another in possessing such a prophetic task. In Christian history there is no single people chosen by God, but different peoples in different periods are chosen for a great mission (missiia), for a revelation of the spirit. In Russia the prophetic intuition that a time of history is coming when a great revelation of the spirit will be called for, when the centre of universal spiritual life will be found here, was already born a long time ago. This is not Jewish messianism. Such a prophetic intuition does not exclude the great calling (izbranie) and destiny ( prednaznachenie) of other peoples; it is simply a continuation

107 108 109

Berdiaev, 2007, pp. 126–132 (“Slavianofil’stvo i slavianskaia ideia”), p. 130. Cf. Duncan, 2000, chapter 7. Walicki, 1968, p. 174.

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chapter five and fulfilment of previous accomplishments made by other peoples of the Christian world.110

In The Fate of Russia, it is the First World War that is understood as heralding this forthcoming cultural upheaval. In the Russian Idea, the Second World War now assumes a similar role in that it allegedly marks the end of German hegemony and paves the way for Russian messianism. However, the difference is not only one of historical context. While Berdiaev too in 1915 conceived of Russia as a sacrificial nation, he saw this first and foremost in terms of its prophetic capacities and service to the rest of world. “Messianism, in rejecting all forms of nationalism, wants the Russian people to sacrifice itself for the sake of serving the task of releasing all peoples. It wants the Russian man to reveal the image of the all-human”111 However, his extensive emphasis on various forms of suffering in 1946 was new and confirms a point suggested at the beginning of this chapter, namely that Berdiaev’s thinking was indeed receptive to external events. “At different stages he sometimes formulated and solved identical problems in different ways. This is especially true with reference to his Russian themes.”112 The Russian Idea, I would claim, is precisely an attempt to conceive of Russia as a sacrificial nation in the sense that it is its suffering that brings about a spiritual transfiguration. Berdiaev’s post-1945 messianism and nationalism were controversial among the émigrés. Poltoratskii, who was the son of a first-wave émigré, asks how Berdiaev could move “from his valuable spiritual and historical universalism to become the herald of Russian and (even) Soviet provincialism?”113 Just as the First World War had kindled Berdiaev’s “patriotic excitement” and “rudiments of messianic provincialism and provincial messianism,” Poltoratskii points out, so now it seems the German–Soviet war had done the same. In his autobiography Berdiaev claims that he had “always had a ‘Soviet orientation’” because the Soviet power is the “only Russian national power, there is no other,”114 110 Berdiaev, 2007, p. 36. See also the essay “Nationalism and Messianism” in Berdiaev, 2007, pp. 99–104. Messianism is discussed in The Meaning of History too, though without any reference to “Russian prophetic messianism,” only to the “unacceptable” and “nationalist” Old Testament one. The latter text, however, was written after the Revolution, in a context where Berdiaev, as noted above, assumed a more elitist position for a brief period. 111 Berdiaev, 2007, p. 103. 112 Poltoratskii, 1962, p. 121. 113 Poltoratskii, 1962, p. 130. 114 Berdiaev, 1949, p. 363.

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while in The Russian Idea, it is the references in the final speculative passages to German imperialism, in contrast to Russian brotherhood and communitarianism, that make the context of the Second World War present. “The German idea is the idea of supremacy, dominance, might; the Russian idea is the idea of communitarianism and brotherhood between peoples and nations” (ri 254). Berdiaev was by no means the only Russian émigré to develop proSoviet feelings during the 1940s; another example was the once antiSoviet Ivan Bunin (cf. Chapter One). As David Bethea observes, “one result of the Allied victory was that Russian patriotism and (not illogically) pro-Soviet sentiment began to blend together in the minds of a significant portion of the émigré population.”115 Nevertheless, Berdiaev’s “nationalistic turn” in The Russian Idea was severely criticised for instance by Fedotov. In his “Reply to Berdiaev” (1946), Fedotov accuses Berdiaev of having become completely spellbound by his Russian idea. Berdiaev’s idea of history, Fedotov maintains (in opposition to my own interpretation presented above), is not so much Christian as Hegelian, in that it is the idea itself that matters, not the individual human beings. How come that this defender of the human personality against nature and society surrenders to History in this way? Unwilling to recognise well-known facts about life in the Soviet Union, “Berdiaev lives in an imaginary, unreal world,” and is “captivated by dead ideas that were once vital.”116 It may be objected here that a recognition of these facts would probably not have changed Berdiaev’s martyrology; if incorporated they could easily have served as yet another confirmation of the fundamental hagiographical pattern of Russian history. However sarcastic his comments, Fedotov is nevertheless right to claim that Berdiaev’s Russia is an imaginary one, not so much because The Russian Idea is not always in keeping with the common standards of historical writing, but because it is a martyrology. What is described in this book should be taken only as a manifestation of a transfigured and more profoundly spiritual Russia, which is to be imagined in the mind of the reader. Berdiaev’s messianic idea of Russia emerged without doubt within a specific historical and political context. At the same time, the messianism of The Russian Idea expresses, paradoxically, the wish to remain

115 David M. Bethea, 1984, “1944–1953: Ivan Bunin and the Time of Troubles in Russian Émigré Literature,” Slavic Review 43 (1), pp. 1–16, p. 5. 116 Fedotov, 1996–, 9, pp. 194–209 (“Otvet N.A. Berdiaevu,”), p. 208.

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free from such external events in favour of a contemplation of the grand scheme of world history, in its steady progress towards the Epoch of the Holy Spirit. In The Russian Idea, history is not conceived of in terms of a shared “task” or “mission.” According to Berdiaev, human beings cannot intervene in world history, but only perform creative acts, individually or as a group (cf. the intelligentsia). These acts, in turn, may be capable of transfiguring human history symbolically. They are meaningful not on an intentional level but on a symbolic level. Correspondingly, Berdiaev assigns no particular mission to Russians abroad. Although he had remained sceptical of the Russian emigration since his arrival in Berlin in 1922, he did subscribe to the idea of Russian émigrés having a mission in the first number of The Way (1925). As we have seen, by 1935 he had lost this faith in his fellow émigrés, while exile does not play any role at all in the historical schemes of The Russian Idea. Only towards the very end does he find a place for the following terse remark: The defeat of spiritual culture that has taken place among us is only a dialectical moment in the fate of Russian spiritual culture and testifies to the fact that culture is problematic for Russians. All creative ideas of the past will again assume a fertilising significance. Spiritual life cannot fade away, it is immortal. In the emigration, the reaction against the Revolution has also created a reactionary religious life. But this phenomenon is insignificant in light of wider perspectives. (ri 252f )

Neither exile, which is represented here in a conspicuously reductive manner, nor revolutions are capable of intervening in history. The Russian Idea projects the victory of the eternal, imaginary Russia over the dwindling Russian exiled community. It assures its readers that here and now matters little. But this is also a way of making exile meaningful: the degradations in the present are only a passing phase. It is unlikely that this way of conceiving of exile could have been put forward in the interwar period. As Berdiaev points out in his autobiography, however, which was written at the same time as The Russian Idea, there was no freedom of expression in the Soviet Union, his homeland (rodina).117 In the late 1940s, in other words, there were still “benefits of exile” to Russian first-wave émigrés.118

117 118

Cf. Berdiaev, 1949, p. 364. Cf. Göbler, 2005.

CHAPTER SIX

VASILII ZENKOVSKII AND THE HISTORY OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY In his short “Outline of My Inner Biography,” published posthumously in 1962, Vasilii Vasilevich Zenkovskii (1881–1962) describes his youth as a variation on the “from Marxism to idealism” scheme, in accordance with which so many prominent Russian thinkers after 1900 conceived of their intellectual development (cf. my previous chapter).1 As a child Zenkovskii had been deeply religious, but at the age of 15 he began to read the radical “man of the sixties,” Dmitrii Pisarev. His atheistic period and his enthusiasm for this “naturalism,” however, were relatively short. During the early years of his university studies in Kiev (1900–1909), he “returned to the church,” as he puts it himself, and from 1905 onwards actively participated in the religiousphilosophical society that had been founded there in the 1890s.2 Opposed to the radical intelligentsia, on the one hand, and the clergy of the Orthodox church on the other, the religious-philosophical societies of Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and other provincial cities had a formative influence, but also a polarising effect on the Russian intelligentsia of this period. The rivalry between clergy and lay theologians/religious philosophers, however, was less marked in Kiev than in other cities. In the short-lived Kievan journal Christian Thought (1916–17), which grew out of this society, it was possible to encounter such notions as “Church intelligentsia” and “Orthodox intelligentsia,” terms which in Russian intellectual history were unheard of before this time and which previously, as suggested by Jutta Scherrer, would have been regarded as contradictio in adjecto.3 Until this time, the 1 Cf. V.V. Zen’kovskii, 1962a, “Ocherk vnutrennei moei biografii,” Vestnik russkogo studencheskogo khristianskogo dvizheniia 66–67, pp. 8–15. See also V.V. Zen’kovskii, 1984, “Iz moei zhizni,” Pamiati ottsa Vasiliia Zen’kovskogo, Paris, pp. 83–100. For a more detailed biographical account, see O.T. Ermishin, “Put’ k ideinomu sintezu i edinstvu,” V.V. Zen’kovskii, 2008, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, ed. O.T. Ermishin, Moscow, pp. 5–37. 2 For an account of the Kievan Religious-Philosophical Society, see Scherrer, 1973, pp. 226–234. 3 Scherrer, 1973, p. 232.

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concept of intelligentsia had been mostly associated with the radical, materialist and atheist Russian intellectuals from Belinskii onwards. In contrast, this new Orthodox intelligentsia was to contribute first and foremost, Zenkovskii and others proclaimed on the pages of Christian Thought, to the creation of a new spiritual culture. At the same time, Zenkovskii’s intellectual maturation, to a far greater extent than that of Florovskii, took place in association with seminal figures of the Russian intelligentsia. In the early 1900s, he became closely acquainted with Sergei Bulgakov, who was living in Kiev at that time. In Kiev, Zenkovskii studied philosophy and psychology under the influential neo-Kantian philosopher and psychologist Georgii Chelpanov (1862–1936) as well as natural sciences; the latter a corollary, he himself suggests, of his brief materialist period. Still, it was psychology and philosophy that remained his major scholarly interest. In 1915, he defended his doctoral thesis The Problem of Psychical Causality, in which he examined psychological problems within a Christianmetaphysical framework,4 and the year after, he became professor of philosophy in Kiev. His political engagement led him—reluctantly, he later claimed—to accepting the post of Minister of Faith in Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi’s short-lived government, the Hetmanate (April– November 1918).5 The reason for his later discontent with this activity was that he considered himself to be Russian and not Ukrainian. Zenkovskii emigrated in January 1920, and he spent the first years of his exile in Belgrade. From 1923 to 1926 he lived in Prague, and from 1926 onwards in Paris. He took an active part in the establishment of the St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute and became dean of its department of philosophy. Until the mid-1930s, his publishing activity concentrated on psychological and pedagogical issues; the latter being a reflection of his engagement in the fate and conditions of Russian émigré youth. From 1923 to 1962, accordingly, he was president of the Russian Christian student movement. After the Second World War, most of which he spent in prison, he devoted himself more fully to Christian philosophy. His major works in this field are Apologetics

4

Cf. V.M. Lettsev, 2006, “Psikhologiia kak vedushchaia tema filosofskikh iskanii V.V. Zen’kovskogo (kievskii period tvorchestva),” Voprosy filosofii 6, pp. 128–137. 5 He has given his own account of this period in V.V. Zen’kovskii, 1995, Piat’ mesiatsev u vlasti, Moscow.

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(1957) and The Foundations of a Christian Philosophy in two parts (1961–1964).6 In 1942, he was ordained priest. In addition to psychology, pedagogy and philosophy, Zenkovskii took an interest throughout his life in Russian intellectual history. His most important contributions to this field were Russian Thinkers and Europe (first edition 1922) and the two-volume History of Russian Philosophy (1948–1950). In addition, in 1961, he finally published after decades of preparation a monograph on Gogol, of whom he had been particularly fond since his youth. Zenkovskii’s History of Russian Philosophy is largely based on lectures he gave over two decades at the St Sergius Institute, and it soon gained a reputation for being the best history of Russian philosophy ever written. It was rapidly followed by another text that was to become standard, Nikolai Losskii’s shorter History of Russian Philosophy (1951), which, however, never achieved quite the same status. In the early 1950s, George Kline reviewed both in The Journal of Philosophy, Zenkovskii’s book most favourably, and the other far more critically.7 Kline soon took up the task of translating Zenkovskii’s work into English, and the first volume appeared in 1953. In the same year, a French translation also saw the light. In post-Soviet Russia meanwhile the book has been used extensively as a textbook, and has been reissued several times by different publishers. In the foreword to an edition of 2001, the Russian scholar Viacheslav Serbienko writes that “until this day, the work remains the most fundamental of its kind.”8 The comparison he draws with Losskii’s History as well as with Florovskii’s Ways of Russian Theology clearly favours Zenkovskii. A similar appraisal has been put forward by another Russian scholar, Mikhail Gromov:

6 Both works are contained in V.V. Zen’kovskii, 1996, Osnovy khristianskoi filosofii (Istoriia khristianskoi mysli v pamiatnikakh), Moscow. On Zenkovskii’s Christian philosophy, see V.M. Lettsev, 2003, “Lichnost’ kak sredotochie mirovozzrencheskikh iskanii V.V. Zen’kovskogo,” Voprosy filosofii 12, pp. 140–146, and V.V. Lazarev, 2006, “Ob osmyslenii V.V. Zen’kovskim dukhovnoi tselostnosti,” Voprosy filosofii 6, pp. 116–127. 7 George L. Kline, 1950, “[Review of ] V.V. Zenkovsky: Istoriya russkoi filosofii, vol. 1,” The Journal of Philosophy 47 (9), pp. 263–266; 1953a, “[Review of ] V.V. Zenkovsky: Istoriya russkoi filosofii, vol. 2,” The Journal of Philosophy 50 (6), pp. 183–191; 1953b, “[Review of ] N.O. Lossky: History of Russian Philosophy,” The Journal of Philosophy 50 (22), pp. 668–673. 8 V.V. Serbienko, 2001, “Vasilii Vasil’evich Zen’kovskii,” V.V. Zen’kovskii, Istoriia russkoi filosofii, Moscow, pp. 5–14, p. 8.

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chapter six One may agree with the commonly held view that Zenkovskii’s History of Russian Philosophy is the most profound, most complete, most fundamental examination of its kind. It is not fragmentary, not mosaic, not multi-schematic, as those collective, even—to be honest—excessively collective publications that have appeared more recently. It is the work of one author who has a well thought-out conception, who is familiar with the basic empirical material and has become sufficiently acquainted with the philosophical currents contemporary to him.9

And although Gromov proceeds by criticising Zenkovskii’s rather scanty, as he sees it, description of the medieval period, his comments confirm the widespread opinion that this is a work of unrivalled quality. Another scholar who has studied the historiography of Russian philosophy in more detail, and Zenkovskii’s place in it, is Oleg Ermishin. His monograph published in 2004, Russian Historical-Philosophical Thought, deals not only with historiography in the strict sense, but also examines the way in which Russian philosophers in their writings have treated and activated, for instance, Greek classical philosophy and German idealism, i.e. the philosophical past. In his third chapter, Ermishin turns to the various accounts of the history of Russian thought, “from the first conceptual approaches to the systematic comprehension,” as the title of this part indicates.10 And it is Zenkovskii who represents first and foremost the “systematic comprehension.” Ermishin sees him as having overcome the “subjectivity,” as he terms it, of previous approaches, in particular those of Boris Iakovenko and Gustav Shpet (see below). Although Ermishin is mainly concerned with analysing Russian Thinkers and Europe, he makes it clear that the History of Russian Philosophy confirms Zenkovskii’s outstanding achievement as a historiographer of Russian thought. What is problematic about Ermishin’s study, however, is that he seems to regard the synthesis designed by Zenkovskii as confirming the essence of Russian philosophy itself: “Thanks to his synthetic and dialectical approach Zenkovskii succeeded in creating a wide pan-

9 M.N. Gromov, 2005, “Russkaia srednevekovaia mysl’ v interpretatsii V.V. Zen’kovskogo (Tesizy doklada),” Filosofskie nauki 7, pp. 71–72, p. 71. 10 O.T. Ermishin, 2004, Russkaia istoriko-filosofskaia mysl’ (konets xix-pervaia tret’ xx v.), Moscow, pp. 102–130 (=Chapter Three: “Istoriia russkoi mysli: Ot pervykh kontseptual’nykh podkhodov k sistematicheskomu osmysleniiu”). An abbreviated English version of this chapter, focusing in particular on Iakovenko and Shpet, is available: O.T. Ermishin, 2005, “On Two Conceptions of Russian Philosophy: V.V. Zenkovsky, B.V. Iakovenko, G.G. Shpet,” Russian Studies in Philosophy 43 (3), pp. 81–89.

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orama of Russian philosophical thought in its development and genetic multiplicity.”11 However, this belief makes it difficult for Ermishin to analyse Zenkovskii’s construction of a Russian philosophical past. That Ermishin sees Zenkovskii almost as the end-point, or even goal, of an historical development, prevents him from approaching his subject with sufficient distance and from revealing its characteristic features. Instead, we are presented with comments whose informative value is rather limited: “On the one hand a minute examination of a theme, on the other a thorough and unbiased approach to the material—these two features formed the historical-philosophical methodology, which in the History of Russian Philosophy was developed even further.”12 A more fruitful framework for analysing this work has been suggested by Paul Valliere, who places Zenkovskii’s book within the “Russian school of theology,” a notion initially invented by Alexander Schmemann.13 This “Russian school” is largely synonymous with the Russian religious philosophy of the Silver Age (Solovev, Bulgakov, Florenskii and others), though Valliere expands the term to include also the defrocked church theologian Aleksandr Bukharev and his quest to relate Orthodoxy to the modern world. Having continued its activity in exile, this current, however, was gradually sidelined from the 1930s onwards by the Neopatristic school. Now, the latter’s “back to the fathers”—as opposed, in Schmemann’s words, to the “beyond the fathers” of the Russian School14—came to dominate Orthodox theology through the works of Florovskii, Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958), John Meyendorff (1926–1992) and others. In contrast to these theologians, Zenkovsky believed the theological creativity of modern Russian Orthodoxy did not derive from the inner logic of Orthodoxy alone but from the momentous meeting with the modern western world. Zenkovsky’s History of Russian Philosophy was thus a response to Florovsky’s Paths of Russian Theology. It celebrated the engagement of Orthodoxy with the modern world.15

Valliere does not analyse Zenkovskii’s work any further, but his approach appears to be able to capture the nature of Zenkovskii’s 11

Ermishin, 2004, p. 130. Ermishin, 2004, p. 127. 13 Alexander Schmemann, 1972, “Russian Theology: 1920–1972: An Introductory Survey,” St Vladimir Theological Quarterly 16, pp. 172–194; Valliere, 2000. 14 Cf. Schmemann, 1972, p. 178. 15 Valliere, 2000, p. 374. 12

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History better than that of Ermishin. In fact, a “meeting between Orthodoxy and the modern Western world” is a precise description of what this text aims to bring about, a meeting that takes place through a gradual dialectical process, as Zenkovskii himself would have termed it. It is his narrative structuring of the dialectics of Russian philosophy that I intend to explore in the following. Before turning to Zenkovskii’s History of Russian Philosophy, however, I would like to take a look at two other texts written shortly after his emigration, in order to suggest that the emergence of this dialectical conception of the relationship between East and West would appear to be closely connected with his experience of exile and disruption. Russia and Europe In 1922 while he was living in Belgrade, Zenkovskii published Russian Thinkers and Europe: On Russian Thinkers’ Critique of European Culture (in Serbian), which was based on a series of articles that he had written for the Serbian daily Nova Europa. Around 1926 (the year of publication is not typed in the book) a Russian version was published in Paris, while a second edition appeared in 1955. This book is arguably the first historical study of the “Russia and Europe” theme in Russian thought, i.e. of Russian debates about Europe and hence implicitly or explicitly about themselves.16 It provides a detailed account of Russian thinkers from Gogol to Berdiaev, focusing in particular on their critique of European culture. Common to most of them has been the attempt to formulate Russian culture as an alternative to the European. These Russian thinkers have argued that Russia possesses its “own way,” which is distinct from that of Europe.17 Vladimir Solovev is an exception, and it is interesting to note the rather negative treatment of him here when compared to the extensive praise he receives in the History of Russian Philosophy. In Russian Thinkers and Europe,

16

Cf. Neumann, 1996, p. 223. Numerous studies of this topic have appeared since

then. 17 In the foreword to the second edition (1955), he acknowledges that he could have paid more attention to the positive ideas of Europe formulated for instance by the Westernisers, cf. V.V. Zen’kovskii, 2005, Russkie mysliteli i Evropa (Mysliteli xx veka), ed. P.V. Alekseev, Moscow, p. 11. However, this would have been a completely different project, since Zenkovskii aims to demonstrate the impact of Russians’ criticism of Europe on their self-perception.

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Zenkovskii criticises Solovev for not sufficiently acknowledging the values of Russian Orthodoxy. For the opposite reason, the philosophy of Berdiaev is portrayed far more positively here than in the History of Russian Philosophy. These two books were clearly written for different purposes under different circumstances. Nevertheless, they also contain significant similarities. What is most compelling about Russian Thinkers and Europe, in my view, is its conclusion, where Zenkovskii asserts that the series of attempts to liberate Russian culture from the European culture that was imposed on it during the eighteenth century, have only contributed to binding Russia even closer to Europe. “Russian self-awareness is inevitably bound up with the problem of the West and its coexistence (vzaimootnoshenie) with Russia—and this testifies to our historical and spiritual attachment to (neotryvaemost’ ot) Europe.”18 The West has, in other words, become an inseparable part of the Russian mind, and to such an extent that Russia cannot conceive of itself without Europe. For a Russian to reject Europe would mean to reject him- or herself. Europe forms, in other words, Russia’s constituent “other,” as contemporary theoreticians would put it.19 Europe is no longer outside but inside us—and this holds true not only for the cultural elements but also for the religious ones. Thus all kinds of anti-Westernisation in all their forms are false and dangerous—they will inevitably be directed towards the Russian soul itself. The criticism of European culture was necessary in order to understand the Russian way, to fully understand what the West is. But now it has become ridiculous and inopportune to criticise Europe, when its movements have penetrated so deeply into the Russian soul. Both the secular culture of the West in all its movements, its benign as well as unhealthy forces, and its religious elements have already become or are becoming internalised as Russian—the deep splitting of the Russian soul continues and so it will in the future.20

By implication, the quest for Russian individuality (svoeobrazie) and its “historical exposure” are illegitimate, Zenkovskii maintains; our task is to serve Orthodoxy without yielding to “dangerous messianism.”21

18 19 20 21

Zen’kovskii, 2005, p. 137. Cf. Groys, 1992; Neumann, 1996; Tolz, 2001. Zen’kovskii, 2005, p. 139. Cf. Zen’kovskii, 2005, p. 139.

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In the aftermath of the “Catastrophe of 1917,” to which he repeatedly refers here, it is no longer possible to idealise the Russian people. What makes Zenkovskii’s book challenging, however, is that these statements are seemingly undermined by other, more essentialist statements appearing in the same text. In the conclusion of Russian Thinkers and Europe, Zenkovskii also sets out to formulate a task for the future: the construction of a new, Orthodox “integral culture.” We have approached even more closely and seriously the problem of constructing an integral culture, and this means that before us stands the task (zadacha) of constructing a culture on the principles of Orthodoxy and in its spirit. [. . .] Our way, our calling, is to serve Orthodoxy by transferring its principles, its spirit, into our life. This is what the construction of an Orthodox culture is: revelation of the testaments of Christianity in the life of the individual and in the life of history.”22

Despite his critical attitude towards previous quests for Russian originality and despite his anti-messianism—the creation of a new Orthodox culture is not a “universal task,” he emphasises; we must do this first and foremost for our own sake in order not to “split spiritually”23— Zenkovskii makes extensive use, in outlining this new Orthodox culture, of Slavophile topoi, to which he had been even more sympathetic before his emigration.24 He contrasts the West, its “extremes” (krainosti) and its “cultural crisis,” with the “wholeness” and “integral culture” of Orthodoxy. Russian critique of Europe has been justified in many cases, he claims. This ambiguity is also found in his contribution to the miscellany Orthodoxy and Culture, which was published by a group of Russian émigrés in Berlin in 1923 (Zenkovskii was its editor) and which aimed to rework a basis that could make émigré life and future life in a united Russia meaningful. The central article in this book is Zenkovskii’s “The Idea of an Orthodox Culture,” in which he claims that “we have entered into an epoch of Orthodox culture, the construction of a cultural system based on the principles of Orthodoxy.”25 The task

22

Zen’kovskii, 2005, pp. 138f. Zen’kovskii, 2005, p. 140. 24 Cf. his article “Russia and Orthodoxy” of 1916 (Zen’kovskii, 2008, 2, pp. 7–64), in which the imagery “captivity of the West” prevails. In this article, Zenkovskii insists that Russia must first liberate itself from the West and return to its own cultural foundations in order to be able to meet the West on its own terms. That Russia’s involvement with the West was inescapable, always already a fact, was thus something he came to realise later. 25 Zen’kovskii, 2008, 2, pp. 65–86 (“Ideia pravoslavnoi kul’tury”), p. 68. 23

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for this new Orthodox culture lies in the “ecclesification” of secular culture (votserkovlenie kul’tury), a concept that soon became popular among émigré thinkers including Fedotov. What makes Orthodoxy so appealing at present, Zenkovskii continues, is its ability to help us distinguish the superficial illusory existence ( prizrachnoe bytie) from the truly historical. “In addition to the historical empirical there exists a deeper sphere of historical existence—its metaphysical stratum.”26 And Zenkovskii maintains, accordingly, that “the ‘withdrawal’ into the inner life is particularly characteristic of [Orthodoxy].”27 Orthodoxy aims at transfiguring historical existence (bytie), he notes repeatedly. It is not difficult to see his rejection of the present as being illusory and superficial as a reflection of his own, concrete situation of exile and disruption, in which his native, traditional culture faced an uncertain future, and where the need for stable values that do not yield to historical change, had become urgent.28 In order to describe his idea of Orthodoxy in more detail, Zenkovskii activates inherited, stereotypical Slavophile oppositions: West versus East (Russia), outer versus inner, fragmentary versus integral, as well as past versus future. Orthodoxy appeals to the inner dimension of human beings, it represents integrity (tselostnost’ ) and completeness (polnota), and the new Orthodox culture is a culture of the future. His manner of portraying Orthodoxy positively on the basis of a negative portrait of Catholicism and Protestantism, as well as of European culture in general and its alleged “crisis,” is strikingly similar to that of Ivan Kireevskii in his “On Civilisation in Europe and its Relationship to Civilisation in Russia,” a classic text of Slavophilism.29 Besides, Zenkovskii description of Catholicism is explicitly drawn from Dostoevskii’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” In conclusion, Zenkovskii suggests that Europe too will benefit from this new Orthodox culture of the future:

26

Zen’kovskii, 2008, 2, p. 72. Zen’kovskii, 2008, 2, p. 73. 28 This interpretation is shared by Ermishin, cf. Zen’kovskii, 2008, 1, p. 14. 29 Cf. Kireevskii, 1911, 1, pp. 174–222 (“O kharaktere prosveshcheniia Evropy i ego otnoshenii k prosveshcheniiu Rossii”). See also Stefan Wiederkehr’s (2000, p. 132) comment on a similar strategy in the writings of Danilevskii and the Eurasianists: “Solange das Eigene (Eurasien und das Slaventum) in Bezug auf das Andere (den Westen) definiert und dadurch aufgewertet wurde, daß dessen Anspruch, die allgemein-menschliche Kultur im fortgeschrittensten Stadium zu verkörpern, durch eine geschichtsphilosophische Alternative und Kritik am Anderen zurückgewiesen wurde, spielte die positive Beschreibung des Eigenen eine untergeordnete Rolle.” 27

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chapter six The culture of the West is great and powerful, but has also experienced a collapse and suffers from unsolvable contradictions. We cannot turn away from it, but we cannot accept it entirely either—our task is to provide the elements of European culture with a new meaning; in the making of an Orthodox culture to find a cure for the illness from which the West suffers.30

Zenkovskii’s idea of an Orthodox culture, addressed to a Russian audience and not to be understood as a messianic vision on behalf of all Europe, presents us with his characteristic, ambiguous attitude to the West. Although he appears to be more reluctant to accept the positive impact of the West on Russia in this text, Zenkovskii stresses here too that the new Russian Orthodox culture cannot exist independently of the West (“we cannot turn away from it.”). While it may be opposed to Europe, it will nevertheless have to live with Europe. In Russian Thinkers and Europe, by the same token, the encounter between Russian and European culture in the eighteenth century is described as “unavoidable and necessary” (neizbezhna i neobkhodima),” while at the same time leading the “Russian soul” into “captivity” ( plen).31 By being captured, Zenkovskii suggests, apparently inspired by Hegel’s dialectics of master and slave, Russian thought was able to attain a new level of self-awareness. Zenkovskii emerges from these two texts as an ambiguous and even paradoxical thinker, who maintains apparently contradictory viewpoints and positions simultaneously. The question is, however, whether “position” is an adequate category for understanding the dialectical nature of Zenkovskii’s reasoning on Russia and Europe, a relationship that itself does not amount to “a simple question of fact—otherwise it would have been settled long since.”32 Instead, Zenkovskii is strikingly sensitive to the aporias into which naïve and stubborn positions on such questions might lead. While Russia is and should remain Orthodox, European secular thought and ideals have come to influence Russia’s perception of itself—even as Orthodox—fundamentally, and have thus become an inevitable part also of Orthodox Russia. And as I hope to show in my analysis, this dialectical conceptualisation of the relationship between Russia and Europe also prevails in his History of Russian Philosophy, where he starts from a seemingly essentialist East–West dichotomy, 30

Zen’kovskii, 2008, 2, p. 85 (italics added). Cf. Zen’kovskii, 2005, p. 13. 32 Henry L. Roberts, 1964, “Russia and the West: A Comparison and Contrast,” Slavic Review 23 (1), pp. 1–12, p. 3. 31

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beyond which however Russia and Europe enter into a dialogue. While the dialectical nature of Zenkovskii’s own thinking transcends traditional positions, identifying positions becomes nevertheless a fundamental strategy in his own historiography, which is deeply indebted to the historiography of philosophy as it emerged in Western Europe. The Historiography of Philosophy To a philosopher, the past is necessarily a part of one’s subject (philosophy). To interpret and reactivate old philosophical texts is a central part of philosophy itself. Philosophers thus have “always” dealt with the past, i.e. with previous texts. However, the historiography of philosophy as an activity independent of philosophy proper is of a more recent origin. Even though a “history of philosophy” has been handed down to us from Classical Antiquity (Diogenes’ Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, late second century ad), the historiography of philosophy as an autonomous genre and even discipline emerged only in the eighteenth century.33 A seminal work here is Johann Jakob Brucker’s comprehensive Critical History of Philosophy (1742–1744), a book which had a tremendous impact on Diderot, Voltaire, Hume and others, and which was still in use in a shortened version at German universities in the nineteenth century. What makes Brucker’s work so important for the successive notions of philosophy and its past, as Jonathan Rée has observed, is that it “provided a well-organised inventory of philosophical problems and a definition of the territory with which philosophy was concerned.”34 More specifically, Rée singles out two features of this work that became characteristic of its successors and thus of the genre: First, there was the idea of philosophy as the product of the selfconscious and explicit philosophical activity of “philosophers,” rather than as something which, like religion, had sources deep in the wordless experiences of masses of non-intellectuals. Secondly, and involved with this, there was a certain idea of the form of philosophical discussion: philosophy consisted of battles between warring schools (or “sects”) each defending some “system” or “-ism.”35

33

For an “archaeology” of the historiography of philosophy, see Schneider, 1990. Johnatan Rée, 1978, “Philosophy and the History of Philosophy,” Philosophy and its Past, eds. J. Rée, M. Ayers & A. Westoby, Hassocks, pp. 3–39, p. 9. 35 Rée, 1978, p. 6. 34

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In Rée’s view, these features became characteristic also of the nineteenth-century histories of philosophy (for example that of Wilhelm Windelband)—despite Hegel’s criticism of such historical conceptions in his own history of philosophy.36 Brucker’s notion of philosophy and its past as a clearly defined field with a limited set of problems has prevailed ever since, particularly in university introductory courses. This kind of history of philosophy is also known as a doxography. This term was originally coined by the German classical scholar Hermann Diels in order to describe the way in which thinkers in Classical Antiquity dealt with the “opinions” (doxai) of their predecessors (cf. his edition of “Greek writers of opinions,” Doxographi Graeci, 1879). While doxography understood in this way may be found in every philosophical treaty (cf. my above remark), the term has been used more recently as a synonym for a certain kind of history of philosophy that itself does not aspire to be philosophical. This concept of doxography stems, above all, from Richard Rorty, who in an article of 1984 classifies doxography as one of four genres of the history of philosophy. Rorty makes it quite clear that he considers this to be the lowest ranking one. Doxography, as Rorty describes it, is A History of Philosophy that begins with Thales and ends with, say, Rorty himself. “They gallantly attempt to find a few ‘continuing concerns’ which run through all the great philosophers who do get included.”37 This kind of historiography tends to view a philosopher of the distant past in light of more recent discoveries (“This was later to be known as . . .”), a feature that makes such history deeply unhistorical. Its purpose is to make “dead” philosophers “live.” While several of Rorty’s characteristics of doxography may be applied to Brucker, the narrativisation that he suggests as being characteristic of doxography, i.e. that “Western philosophy” is seen as a subject developing from Thales onwards, became more characteristic of nineteenth-century historians of philosophy such as Windelband (one of very few names mentioned by Rorty). At the end of the eighteenth century, there emerged a tendency to view the past as leading up to some present position, often held by the historiographer

36

Cf. Rée, 1978, pp. 15ff. Richard Rorty, 1984, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, eds. R. Rorty, Q. Skinner & J.B. Schneewind, Cambridge, pp. 49–75, p. 65. The three other genres are Geistesgeschichte, rational reconstruction, and historical reconstruction. 37

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himself. The past was worth describing in so far as it constituted, in Michael Frede’s formulation, “the steps through which we historically arrived at our present philosophical position.”38 Although Brucker did not narrativise his material to such an extent,39 there can be no doubt, however, that to represent the development of philosophy in the form of a doxography presupposes the order with which Brucker paradigmatically provided philosophy. And as I will show, Zenkovskii takes over from the “doxographical tradition” the combined quest for order, i.e. a defined set of problems regarded as philosophy, and for development. His Russian predecessors, however, did not agree on what genuine philosophical problems really were. In 1839–1840, archimandrite Gavriil (Vasilii Vozkresenskii, 1795– 1868) published a six-volume History of Philosophy, whose sixth part was devoted to “Russian Philosophy.”40 This text is the first attempt to present a history of Russian philosophy.41 In its opening sentence, Gavriil firmly proclaims “every people has its own distinct character that distinguishes it from other peoples, and its own philosophy, of a more or less scholarly character (naukoobraznaia).”42 By the time this text was published, Russian philosophy could, Gavriil argued, look back on a 700 years long history, beginning in the twelfth century with the writings of Metropolitan Nikifor and Prince Vladimir Monomakh. According to Vasilii Vanchugov, the official imperial ideology of that time—Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and narodnost’—is clearly reflected in the work.43

38 Michael Frede, 1988, “The History of Philosophy as a Discipline,” The Journal of Philosophy 85 (11), pp. 666–672, p. 667. 39 Cf. Frede, 1988, pp. 666f. 40 This part has recently been republished as a separate volume: Arkhimandrit Gavriil, 2005, Russkaia filosofiia ed. V.V. Vanchugov, Moscow. 41 For overviews of the historiography of Russian philosophy, see Wilhelm Goerdt, 1984, Russische Philosophie: Zugänge und Durchblicke, Freiburg & Munich, pp. 689– 752; B.V. Emel’ianov & K.N. Liubutin, 1991, “Russkaia filosofiia na putiakh samosoznaniia: Stranitsy istorii,” A.L. Vvedenskii, A.F. Losev, E.L. Radlov, G.G. Shpet: Ocherki istorii russkoi filosofii (Russkaia filosofiia), Sverdlovsk, pp. 3–25; V.V. Vanchugov, 1994, Ocherk istorii filosofii “samobytno-russkoi” (Filosofsko-literaturnoe prilozhenie k zhurnalu Volshebnaia gora), Moscow; O.T. Ermishin, 2004, pp. 102–130, and finally Zenkovskii’s own short, schematic overview in his introductory chapter (irf i 25–29). 42 Gavriil, 2005, p. 21. 43 Cf. V.V. Vanchugov, “Pervyi opyt istorii otechestvennogo liubomudriia: Arkhimandrit Gavriil i ego ‘russkaia filosofiia’,” Gavriil, 2005, pp. 4–20, pp. 8ff.

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One cannot say, however, that Gavriil’s work elicited much immediate response. In general, the nineteenth century was not a very favourable period for philosophy in Russia. The university departments of philosophy had to close down after the Decembrist uprising (1825), to reopen only in 1863. In addition, as mentioned in my previous chapter, philosophical discourse had by this time fallen into disrepute.44 It was only around the turn of the twentieth century that interest in a Russian philosophical past became more pronounced. Examples include Aleksandr Vvedenskii’s The Fate of Philosophy in Russia (1898), Ernest Radlov’s Outline of the History of Russian Philosophy (1912), Gustav Shpet’s unfinished Outline of the Development of Russian Philosophy (1922), Boris Iakovenko’s Outlines of Russian Philosophy (1922), and Matvei Ershov’s The Ways of Philosophical Development in Russia (1922). Two issues appear to be crucial to these histories of Russian philosophy: first, what is Russian philosophy, and second, is it something original? The first question, to which I will return in the next subsection, is seldom raised explicitly, but it is indirectly revealed in the composition of a historical work, i.e. in the selection and combination of thinkers chosen to represent Russian philosophy and its development. Is, for instance, “Russian philosophy” only philosophy practiced by professional academics at the universities, or is it found elsewhere as well—in literature, theology etc.? As the aforementioned studies demonstrate, in the first decades of the twentieth century there was no consensus on these questions. The question of originality is the one made most explicit. Despite the abundance of borrowings in the past, Vvedenskii and Radlov both believe that a distinct Russian philosophy is now about to emerge. Aleksandr Vvedenskii (1856–1925) believes the philosophical outcome of the Slavophile/Westerniser debate to have been of great value, but regards the mathematician Nikolai Lobachevskii (1792–1856) to be the most outstanding Russian philosopher to date.45 Ernest Radlov (1854–1928), in turn, sees a “national current” extending from the Slavophiles to Vladimir Solovev and is in general even more positive about the past of Russian philosophy than Vvedenskii. It now stands

44

Cf. Clowes, 2004, pp. 17–99. Cf. A.I. Vvedenskii, 1991, “Sud’by filosofii v Rossii,” A.I. Vvedenskii, A.F. Losev, E.L. Radlov, G.G. Shpet: Ocherki istorii russkoi filosofii (Russkaia filosofiia), eds. B.V. Emel’ianov & K.N. Liubutin, Sverdlovsk, pp. 26–66, p. 62. 45

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on its own feet, Radlov contends, as he attempts to single out topics particularly dear to Russian philosophers.46 These topics are characterised by a preference for ethical problems rather than theoretical ones and a “love for objectivity” (and “rejection of subjectivism”).47 In contrast to Vvedenskii and Radlov, Shpet and Iakovenko provide a generally negative assessment of Russian philosophy, although they too have hopes for its future. Still, neither believes that Russian philosophy has so far contained anything original. According to Evgenii Barabanov, the quest for originality had been inherent in Russian philosophical discourse since the publication of Petr Chaadaev’s first philosophical letter (1836). It is Barabanov’s contention, moreover, that the widespread insistence on the separate character of Russian philosophy, as distinct from “European” philosophy, is ultimately an attempt to repress an “originality neurosis.”48 Shpet and Iakovenko, however, would have agreed with Barabanov in that “Russia and Europe” as a topic of philosophical discourse is a “pseudophilosophical” theme, which is not really of interest to philosophy proper. According to them, philosophy is and should be concerned with universal, not national problems. Their quest for originality is different, therefore, from the “neurotic” one that has prevailed in Russian philosophical discourse, as Barabanov insinuates. Gustav Shpet denies the existence of significant national variations in philosophy: “Philosophy achieves a national character not in answers—a scientific answer is in fact the one and same for all people and languages—but in the ways in which the questions are posed, selected, and modified.”49 However, Russian philosophy, as Shpet saw it in the early 1920s, had failed to even pose relevant questions. Shpet explains this unfortunate state of Russian philosophy by introducing the concept of neveglasie, implying both silence and lack of knowledge.50

46 Cf. E.L. Radlov, 1991, “Ocherk istorii russkoi filosofii,” A.I. Vvedenskii, A.F. Losev, E.L. Radlov, G.G. Shpet: Ocherki istorii russkoi filosofii (Russkaia filosofiia), eds. B.V. Emel’ianov & K.N. Liubutin, Sverdlovsk, pp. 96–216, p. 200. 47 Cf. Radlov, 1991, p. 201. 48 Cf. E.V. Barabanov, 1991, “Russkaia filosofiia i krizis identichnosti,” Voprosii filosofii 8, pp. 102–116. 49 G.G. Shpet, 2008, Ocherk razvitiia russkoi filosofii (Iz istorii otechestvennoi filosofskoi mysli; Rossiiskie propilei), vol. 1, ed. T.G. Shchedrina, Moscow, p. 40. 50 Goerdt, 1984, p. 716, translates neveglasie as “stummer Unwissenheit,” while James P. Scanlan, 2009, “The Fate of Philosophy in Russia: Shpet’s Studies in the History of Russian Thought,” Gustav Shpet’s Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory, ed. G. Tihanov, West Lafayette, Ind., pp. 83–97, pp. 84f , describes it as an “Old Church Slavonic term for ignorance.”

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Neveglasie is defined both as ignorance in the form of a utilitarian attitude to knowledge and science, and as absence of genuine education. Thus, a general summary of the conditions under which philosophy developed in Russia will be short. Neveglasie is that soil on which Russian philosophy sprung up. Not the Russian’s inherent philosophical inability (tupost’ ), as will be shown below, not the absence of living creative forces, as demonstrated by the whole of Russian literature, not the deficiency of flair, as proved by the whole of Russian art, not the inability of scientific asceticism and self-sacrifice, as revealed to us by the history of Russian science. Ignorance (nevezhestvo) and nothing but ignorance prevented the Russian spirit from becoming sufficiently absorbed in European philosophical reflection to make it part of common consciousness. No wonder that on such a soil it was a bleak, sickly, fragile philosophy that sprung up. What is strange is that nevertheless, despite everything, it grew.51

Shpet’s incomplete history of Russian philosophy was originally planned in fifteen volumes and later reduced to three, of which only the first part appeared.52 As it is, it gives an account of the constant absence of enlightenment and education, in spite of individual attempts to introduce them. The problems raised by the Slavophiles are granted some originality, but they do not qualify as genuinely philosophical.53 “Russian social consciousness remains to this very day half-educated. [. . .] In Russia, philosophical consciousness as social consciousness, philosophical culture, philosophy in its purest form as pure knowledge and free art is a matter for the future.”54 Written as it was at a critical moment in Russian history, the main objective of Shpet’s text was not only to represent the past for its own sake, but also, in James Scanlan’s formulation, “to present a vision of philosophy as a perfectly free and creative quest for knowledge, untrammeled by any extrinsic or utilitarian concerns—a vision that in its purity excluded the great bulk of the philosophical thought of his own homeland.”55 Boris Iakovenko (1884–1949) may not base his reasoning on such a clear-cut conception of what philosophy should be, but he is just as unambiguous in denying Russian philosophy any originality. Had there been any, a western philosopher could have turned to Russian

51 52 53 54 55

Shpet, 2008, p. 73. The initial prospect is printed in Ermishin, 2004, pp. 157–159. Cf. Shpet, 2008, p. 76. Shpet, 2008, p. 59. Scanlan, 2009, p. 96.

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philosophy in order to “open new philosophical horizons.” However, this is not the case. According to Iakovenko, philosophy requires both traditionalism and originality—“the presence of a saturated tradition of originality or a saturated originality of tradition.”56 And the “Russian spirit,” he continues, has so far not fully lived in a philosophical tradition (in the way that the German spirit in the early nineteenth century managed to do) and has so far not provided anything truly philosophically original (as the Greeks and the Germans did on a grand scale and even the Italians and English on a lesser scale).57

Despite this negative view, Iakovenko puts forward two reasons for studying Russian philosophy and its past. First, he discerns the emergence of a Russian philosophy conforming to his criteria at the present time (1922). Second, he believes that the (failed) achievements of Russian philosophy provide a valuable source for Russian cultural history: “Who wants to really understand Russian history, the Russian people, the Russian soul, and the contemporary Russian Revolution should, in addition to everything else, become acquainted with the philosophical sufferings of the Russian mind.”58 While the past of Russian thought might be of relevance to the study of cultural history, however, Iakovenko maintains that its achievements are irrelevant to philosophy proper. There was no consensus at this time on what Russian philosophy was, as noted above. Illuminating in this respect is Matvei Ershov’s study, based on a series of lectures delivered in 1920–1921 at the University of the Far East in Vladivostok. Ershov regards philosophy as exclusively confined to professional academic philosophers, mostly at the universities of St Petersburg and Moscow, while the major figures in Russian philosophy, according to Ershov, are Pamfil Iurkevich, Nikolai Grot, Lev Lopatin, Sergei Trubetskoi, Georgii Chelpanov, Mikhail Vladislavlev, Aleksandr Vvedenskii, Ivan Lapshin and Nikolai Losskii. Several of these names would hardly be included in a Russian philosophical canon today. Moreover, the most important philosophers situated outside the institutions are mentioned only in parentheses:

56

B.V. Iakovenko, 1922, Ocherki russkoi filosofii (Vseobshchaia biblioteka 34–35), Berlin, p. 4. 57 Iakovenko, 1922, p. 5. 58 Iakovenko, 1922, p. 10.

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“(K. Kavelin, N. Strakhov, K. Leontev, N. Debolskii, Vl. Solovev, N. Berdiaev)”59—many of whom figure prominently in Zenkovskii’s history and are widely read at present. Ershov’s book thus reflects a situation where the canon of Russian philosophy was not yet formed. If we return to Iakovenko, however, we can see that the philosophers he discusses are by and large those who represent the canon of Russian philosophy today. His study includes Hryhorii Skovoroda, the Slavophiles and Westernisers, the materialism and positivism of the 1860s, Vladimir Solovev, Lev Tolstoi, and several figures from the Silver Age (Nikolai Losskii, Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Florenskii, Semen Frank, as well as Iakovenko himself). As noted, Iakovenko was quite optimistic in the early 1920s regarding the future of Russian philosophy, despite its past. But in his History of Russian Philosophy of 1939 (published in Czech), he nevertheless continues to insist on the unoriginality of Russian philosophy, basing himself on the same names.60 To create a canon of Russian philosophy and to write its history, in other words, requires not only the selection and combination of a group of texts; it is also a procedure of “selective interpretation,”61 on the basis of a provisional idea of what philosophy actually is. Reframing Russian Philosophy As I have tried to demonstrate, the histories of Russian philosophy written before or just after the Revolution all conclude that generally speaking Russian philosophy had not contributed any truly significant and original achievements to date. However, the originality and distinctiveness of Russian philosophy are precisely what Zenkovskii undertakes to demonstrate in the course of his history of more than 900 pages, by means of a new and different framework. According to Zenkovskii, Russian philosophy is not Russian only because it is practised by a Russian person. Russian philosophy is more than just “Philosophy in Russia.” Some scholars prefer to speak not of “Russian philosophy,” but of “philosophy in Russia,” seeking hereby to express the idea that Russian philosophical constructions do not contain anything “specifically Rus-

59

Cf. M.N. Ershov, 1922, Puti razvitiia filosofii v Rossii, Vladivostok, p. 54. Cf. B.V. Iakovenko, 2003, Istoriia russkoi filosofii, trans. I.N. Solodukhina, Moscow. 61 Cf. LaCapra, 1980, p. 261. 60

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sian,” that Russian philosophy has not yet become national, i.e. has not reached the point of uncovering and expressing the main quests of the Russian soul. This, of course, is not true; the consistent study of various thinkers will sufficiently convince us of this fact. (irf i 22)

The scholars to whom Zenkovskii refers here are, without doubt, Shpet and Iakovenko, although he appears to attribute to them views they obviously did not have. To Shpet and Iakovenko, it was not a goal of philosophy to “become national.” As argued by Thomas Seebohm, they both firmly believed that philosophy is Wissenschaft and not Weltanschauung.62 In order to find out what Russian philosophy really is, according to Zenkovskii, we may begin by taking an overview of his narrative in order to find out when and how Russian philosophy comes into being from his perspective. The main parts of his book are as follows: Foreword—Introduction Part One: On the Threshold of Philosophy Part Two: The Nineteenth Century Part Three: The Period of Systems Part Four: The Twentieth Century Conclusion

These parts are, in turn, divided into chapters. The first part, for instance, contains three: “Until Peter the Great”; “The Eighteenth Century—Disruption in Ecclesiastical Consciousness—The Philosophy of Skovoroda”; “The Beginnings of Secular Culture in Russia—The Philosophical Movement in Eighteenth-Century Russia.” The second part describes Russian philosophy from the reign of Alexander I to Konstantin Leontev and Vasilii Rozanov, and the third devotes two chapters to Vladimir Solovev and one to Nikolai Fedorov, while the remaining chapters are concerned with groups of thinkers such as “Hegelians,” “Neo-Leibnizians,” “Neo-Kantians,” and “Neopositivists.” Although several of the philosophers discussed here belong to the twentieth century, it is the last part that bears the title “The Twentieth

62

Cf. Thomas M. Seebohm, 1977, Ratio und Charisma: Ansätze und Ausbildung eines philosophischen und wissenschaftlichen Weltverständnisses im Moskauer Russland (Mainzer philosophische Forschungen 17), Bonn, p. 1. Seebohm claims that the opposite view—philosophy as Weltanschauung and reflection of a national spirit— was first formulated by the émigré historians of philosophy Zenkovskii, Losskii and Semen Frank (cf. the latter’s short Die russische Weltanschauung, Berlin 1926). While I agree with the observation, it may only serve, at least in the case of Zenkovskii, as a provisional characterisation.

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Century.” Its main figures are the dialectical materialists, Evgenii and Sergei Trubetskoi, Nikolai Berdiaev and Lev Shestov, Lev Karsavin and Semen Frank, Pavel Florenskii and Sergei Bulgakov. The overall structure of the work means that if a writer represents a tendency associated with a certain period, he is discussed there, even if he was active a little later. This is why Rozanov precedes Solovev. Although Rozanov wrote his most important works after the death of Solovev in 1900, Zenkovskii considers the former to be less systematic than the latter, and the development towards the construction of philosophical systems is the teleological development that Zenkovskii sees as inherent in the history of Russian philosophy. Chronology is thus one principle of arrangement, but if thematic arrangement corresponds better to the narrative’s dialectical structure, then it may be equally important. While the headings introducing the five major parts may suggest that Russian philosophy emerged after the turn of the nineteenth century, the first figure Zenkovskii finds worthy of the title of philosopher, and even “real philosopher,” is Hryhorii Skovoroda (irf i 64ff ). In a footnote, Zenkovskii firmly rejects Shpet’s view that Skovoroda’s writings present us with “only a minimal quantity of philosophy.” Zenkovskii sees Shpet’s negative opinion of Skovoroda as a reflection of his conception of Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft, which Shpet took over from Edmund Husserl, with whom he had studied in Germany (irf i 66). According to Zenkovskii, however, such a conception is too narrow. “Independent creative work (tvorchestvo) in the field of philosophy, or rather the first attempts ( pervye nachatki), we find in Russia only in the second half of the eighteenth century,” Zenkovskii writes at the beginning of his work (irf i 13). Philosophy thus emerges in Russia in the age of secularism, a fact that is of fundamental importance to his conception of Russian philosophy and its history. Secularism in Russia takes two forms. On the one hand, we have the introduction of a general secular culture; on the other, we witness what Zenkovskii describes as a “disruption in ecclesiastical consciousness” ( perelom v tserkovnom soznanii). The church is not secularised but it is confronted with secular thought, with philosophy. This tendency may be observed in Skovoroda’s writings, which embody a free philosophical creativity—and philosophy is “free,” Zenkovskii repeatedly asserts in the course of his book—that takes place within the realm of faith and even of the Church. In the depths of ecclesiastical consciousness a wide field is opened up for philosophical thought in the search for truth, based on Christian

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principles but free in its creativity (tvorchestvo). This process reaches its highest expression in the philosophical works of Skovoroda, in whom a free Christian philosophy expresses itself for the first time. This is a secularisation that takes place inside ecclesiastical consciousness, without breaking with the Church. (irf i 57)

The emergence of philosophy in the “ecclesiastical consciousness” finds its parallel, furthermore, in what takes place outside the church, with the difference that outside it secularisation lasts longer and is more penetrating. In both cases, however, Russian philosophy comes about through a “return” from the encounter with secularism, a term explicitly applied in the heading of the chapter on Gogol, early Slavophilism and Khomiakov: “The Return to the Ecclesiastical Worldview” (Vozvrat k tserkovnomu mirovozzreniiu). Despite the presence of a few secular Russian thinkers around the turn of the nineteenth century, e.g. Karamzin, Russian philosophy has never been secular, even though “philosophy in Russia” has. Russian philosophy, more precisely, consists of religiously based reflections that represent a response to secularisation. It is Zenkovskii’s fundamental idea that Russian religious philosophy as such presupposes the encounter with secular thought. On Skovoroda we read: “Skovoroda goes from Christianity to philosophy, but he does not walk away from Christianity, he only enters onto the way of free thought” (irf i 80). Later, Christian philosophers such as Fedor Golubinskii, Ivan Kireevskii and Aleksei Khomiakov attempt to “construct a system of philosophical concepts corresponding to the ‘spirit’ of Orthodoxy, [and they] do not avoid the application of philosophical ideas that have their origin in the West; it is often by means of these ideas that they grasp the guiding lines of an ‘Orthodox philosophy’ ” (irf i 404). Here, Zenkovskii gives us a description of the meeting between Orthodoxy and the “modern Western world” (Valliere). Later in the work, when introducing the philosophers active in the ecclesiastical institutions of the early twentieth century, Zenkovskii resumes his discussion of the relationship of philosophy to faith and religion. The task of philosophical creativity, he writes here, is either to uncover or “make sense of ” (“osmyslenie”, Zenkovskii’s own quotation marks) the contents of “faith consciousness” (verosoznanie), or to “justify” faith or make it conform to the principles of philosophy (irf ii 101). Only in the first case, he adds, is it possible to speak of a “Christian philosophy” (again, quotation marks as in the original). In this connection, Zenkovskii refers to the eleventh-century scholastic Anselm of Canterbury’s concept of fides quaerens intellectum, “faith

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seeking understanding.” This suggests that he conceives of Christian philosophy in a way similar to that in which Anselm defined his own discipline, theology, as a reflection on faith by means of reason. Religious philosophy, however, is also opposed to traditional theology. It rejects abstract dogmatism in order to formulate religious truth and faith by means of free, creative and even rational thought: Philosophical creativity (tvorchestvo) sets as its goal the expression in a system of concepts of what is revealed directly by the contemplation of faith; without setting itself any other task, it inwardly subordinates itself to the dialectics of faith consciousness (dialektika verosoznaniia) as well as to the dialectics of the ideas that emerge from the contemplation of faith. Herein lies its freedom of creativity, just as philosophical creativity is independent wherever it is subordinated only to the immanent dialectics of contemplation and ideas. If the introduction of the elements of faith consciousness into the form of rationality combines with ideas that have been developed outside Christianity, then this “coincidence” itself does not give greater validity to ideas that have grown out of faith consciousness, but merely illuminates them from a new angle. Only along these lines is a “Christian philosophy” in the strict sense of the word possible. The task of philosophy is to understand the inner dialectics of ideas; it lies in the systematic development of these ideas. (irf ii 101)

By implication, without secularisation (“ideas developed outside Christianity”), Russia would not have had its own, Christian philosophy. Hence, the “return” to faith and the Church does not lead Russian thought back to a pre-reflexive state, without changing it. Rather, it is taken a step further. Backwards inevitably means forwards. This is Zenkovskii’s dialectical conception of Russian philosophy and its history. And whereas Florovskii seemed to be of the opinion that philosophy could at best serve theology, Zenkovskii does not argue in favour of a sublation of philosophy into theology. Philosophy, even religious philosophy, claims its own legitimacy. This, in my view, is an implicit corrective to Florovskii’s conception of Russian thought as theology in its becoming. Khomiakov, to take a thinker whom they both acclaim, was, according to Zenkovskii, not a Russian theologian about to accomplish a “return to the Church Fathers” but a Christian Russian philosopher. Philosophy and its Soil In his Introduction, Zenkovskii makes a preliminary attempt to single out a set of characteristics that might define Russian philosophy.

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While Western philosophy has tended to privilege epistemology, as exemplified by the philosophy of Kant, Russian philosophy, Zenkovskii argues, emphasises in contrast our activity (deistvovanie) in the world. Zenkovskii describes this situatedness by means of the concept of “ontologism”: “Russian ontologism expresses not the primacy of ‘reality’ over cognition, but the fact that cognition is part of our being involved in the world, of our ‘activity’ in it” (irf i 17). More specifically this ontologism consists in Russian philosophy’s indebtedness to its own religious context: “Russian thought has always been (and will always be) tied to its own element (stikhiia), to its own religious soil ( pochva). Here has been and remains the main root of originality (svoeobrazie), but also of various complications (oslozhneniia) in the development of Russian philosophical thought” (irf i 14). This formulation may indicate a romantic idea of the distinctive character of Russian philosophy, not least because of its use of the “soil” metaphor ( pochva). Traditionally, the Russian word pochva has stood for “top layer of land” as well as the more abstract meaning of “foundation” or “basis.”63 From the 1850s onwards, however, the movement known as pochvennichestvo started to use pochva as a metaphor for a “native, national environment” and “the deeply national (narodnaia) foundation of life.”64 One of its leading figures, Apollon Grigorev (1822–1864), wrote that “the soil is the depths of the national life, the mysterious side of the historical development.”65 By means of this notion, the pochvenniki attempted to advocate and celebrate the “immediateness” (neposredstvennost’ ) of the life of the simple Russian people, taking up and further developing the Slavophile project of constructing Russianness with reference to the uneducated and unenlightened culture of the masses.66 Pochva, in this respect, stands for this imaginary pre-reflexive state. Zenkovskii’s use of the soil metaphor is, at first glance, clearly indebted to the pochvennichestvo tradition, also in that it incorporates the East–West antithesis. In contrast to the commonly held belief that philosophy is the result of doubt, philosophy is born, Zenkovskii claims, “out of the depths (nedra) of a religious worldview. Religious consciousness, if it impregnates (oplodotvoriaet) all the forces of the

63

On the etymology and history of pochva, see V.V. Vinogradov, 1999, Istoriia slov, Moscow, pp. 527–531. 64 Vinogradov, 1999, p. 530. 65 I have not been able to locate the reference to this statement, but it is recorded in irf i p. 409. For a similar use by Dostoevskii, see Vinogradov, 1999, p. 530. 66 Cf. Groys, 1992, p. 55.

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spirit, inevitably and constantly generates philosophical creativity” (irf i 13). In Chapter One (“Until Peter the Great”), these organic metaphors are resumed: The ways of Russian thought have been and remain different from those of the West. Russian philosophical creativity—as we will be convinced many times in the following—has its deep roots in ( gluboko ukhodit svoimi korniami v) the religious element of Ancient Russia; they are so deep that even those currents that resolutely break with religion altogether remain connected (although negatively) with this religious element. (irf i 38f )

On the one hand, this soil, or “religious element” as it is called here, is seemingly unavoidable: pure secular Russian thought is impossible. Not even Russian nineteenth-century positivism (semi-positivism, as Zenkovskii usually terms it) and radicalism were able to free themselves from their “soil.” On the other hand, the relationship of Russian philosophy to its soil is not only conceived of in a geographical (spatial) sense. In contrast to the first quotation (“Russian thought has always been (and will always be) tied [. . .] to its own religious soil”), which expresses first and foremost the spatial relationship, a temporal dimension is now added here: Russian philosophy is rooted in the past (Ancient Russia). By means of this imagery, Zenkovskii historicises the “native, national environment.” In the active Russian phrase ukhodit svoimi korniami v, which may be literally rendered as “extends (or stretches) by its roots into,” the prefigured verb of motion ukhodit, here meaning “extends” or “stretches” but usually referring to a movement “away from a place,” underscores a distance between this soil and the philosophy that is rooted in it. Russian philosophy, the phrase suggests, is not so much situated in its own soil as continually and dialectically interacting with it. In our modern times, the relationship to one’s soil is not immediate but reflexive. Taken together, these metaphors and phrases, the organic metaphorical network, become a model for a redescription of the development of Russian philosophy.67 By means of this model, Zenkovskii provides the history of Russian philosophy with a particular time-space structure, a chronotope (Bakhtin) of departure from a pre-reflexive religiosity and a return to a reflexive one.68 Russian philosophy is not statically situ-

67

Cf. Ricoeur, 2003, pp. 283ff. Cf. M.M. Bakhtin, 1975, “Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane: Ocherki po istoricheskoi poetike,” Voprosy literatury i estetiki: Issledovaniia raznykh let, Moscow, pp. 234–407. 68

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ated in an Orthodox culture (the “soil”). Rather, Zenkovskii’s narrative sets out to show how Russian philosophy presupposes a continual movement out of and back into this soil. Hence the opening, however romantic and essentialist it may seem at first glance, anticipates the encounter with secular, i.e. Western ideas that will bring about a truly Russian philosophy. Herein lie the “various complications in the development of Russian philosophical thought” to which Zenkovskii refers already on the second page of his work. In contrast then to what Semen Frank claimed, when he reviewed the first volume in 1949, this book is far more than a “variation on the Slavophile doctrine.”69 But Frank was not entirely wrong; Slavophile doctrines are not abandoned altogether. Rather, they form a starting point for a dialectical reflection on the relationship between Orthodoxy, secularism, and Russian philosophy. Zenkovskii outlines his idea of what this pochva consists of more specifically in the chapter entitled “Until Peter the Great.” Here, he gives a detailed account of various aspects of Early Russian intellectual life: icon art, holy foolishness, and maximalist historiosophical models such as “Moscow the Third Rome.” This period presents us with a “gathering of spiritual forces,” which made possible the emergence of philosophy later on (there was no philosophy in Russia at this time, Zenkovskii emphasises). This idea of Early Russian intellectual life as possessing a “preparatory character” became a topos in Russian émigré historiography that we have already come across both in Florovskii’s Ways of Russian Theology and in Berdiaev’s The Russian Idea. Whereas Berdiaev sought to trace the structure of Early Russian mentality in its nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century transformations, their role in Zenkovskii’s subsequent narrative of Russian philosophy is not so easily discernible. Historiosophy, for instance, with which Zenkovskii deals extensively in his first chapter, is touched upon again later only with respect to very few thinkers (an example is Chaadaev, cf. below). I would claim that this discrepancy, however, itself reflects Zenkovskii’s idea that the relationship between modern Russian philosophy and Orthodoxy is indirect. Zenkovskii’s project aim to construct first and foremost an imaginary soil, which he sees as separated temporally from the present (“Until Peter the Great”). In addition, it is separated spatially, i.e. as a nation; Byzantium is only present in terms of “influence.” The narrative function of this pochva, then, is to symbolise the 69

Cf. Frank, 1949, pp. 297f.

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“place” from which Russian thought had to depart in order to become a truly original Russian philosophy. Zenkovskii’s description of the “encounters with the West” also finds a seeming parallel in that of Florovskii. Both see this period in terms of “captivity by the West” ( plen zapadu, plen u zapada, irf i 36, 59). And yet, Zenkovskii soon emphasises a complementary dimension, which is highly characteristic, as should be clear by now, of his way of conceptualising historical events. To him, the “captivity” is a necessary phase in the dialectical development of Russian philosophy. True, almost all of South-Russian learning was entirely captured by the West (nakhoditsia v polnom plenu u Zapada), was torn off from the main Eastern sources of Christianity, but it would have been historically wrong to ignore the positive effort with which this learning contributed to the intellectual life of Ukraine first and of the whole of Russia later. Although South-Russian learning was by no means free, it was no accident that the first declaration of freedom of thought, of an inner force characteristic of thought, comes from the eighteenth-century Muscovite scholar Feofilakt Lopatinskii, pupil of the Kievan Academy. (irf i 59)

What Zenkovskii attempts here is not so much to reject Florovskii’s interpretation altogether as to point to the positive implications of being “intellectually captured.” By means of a dialectical perspective, Zenkovskii is able to bring out aspects that were not accessible to Florovskii’s eschatological view of history. According to Zenkovskii, Russian philosophy does not reject Western models but adopts them in a creative manner. As I will demonstrate in the following, this idea is formative for the way in which Zenkovskii interprets individual Russian thinkers as philosophers. Philosophy as a System As we have seen, Zenkovskii conceives of (Russian) philosophy as a reflection on religious faith ( fides quaerens intellectum). However, this is not the only notion of philosophy activated in this work. Zenkovskii defines philosophical activity and creativity also as the construction of systems. In other words, he operates with two different concepts of philosophy alongside one another. It is extremely important to note that philosophical creativity is always moving towards the construction of a system. This is what the “plan of the logos” is—here, everything that is born out of the depths of the spirit,

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that arises in it, without asking for any permission, should “be placed” (vmestit’sia) in a system, find its place in it. (irf i 16)

This idea of philosophy as a system is closely associated with the work of the German idealists Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. By taking German idealism as the paradigm for his own project, Zenkovskii supplies his initial conception of philosophy as a reflection on one’s own faith with a contextual one. Although the concept of philosophy as a system had been used earlier as well, Kant was apparently the first to argue that philosophy should be systematic in order to become a science.70 As far as the world itself is concerned, however, the notion of system, i.e. the idea of the world forming a coherent whole, could only serve, according to Kant, as a regulative idea and should not be seen as a characteristic feature of the world an sich. This was but one of many limitations Kant imposed upon human reason, which in turn came to represent a challenge to the German idealists of the early nineteenth century. Despite numerous significant differences, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel all held that not only should philosophy be “systematic” and form a system; they also conceived of reality as a (rational) system. And a central task for an idealist philosopher was to elaborate the identity between the two. In Frederick Copleston’s formulation: This notion of reality as the self-unfolding of absolute reason helps to explain the idealists’ insistence on system. For if philosophy is the reflective reconstruction of the structure of a dynamic rational process, it should be systematic, in the sense that it should begin with the first principle and exhibit the essential rational structure of reality as flowing from it.71

The three idealists had different ideas of what this first principle was. Fichte referred to the transcendental ego, Schelling (at one time, at least) to the identity of mind and nature, and Hegel, finally, to absolute knowledge (cf. his Phenomenology of Spirit). It may be argued that there is a significant difference between Zenkovskii and the German idealists, above all Hegel, in that the latter’s obsession with reason seems alien

70 On the history of “system” as a philosophical concept, see Fritz-Peter Hager & Christian Strub, 1998, “System,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 10, eds. J. Ritter & K. Gründer, Darmstadt, cols. 824–855. 71 Frederick Copleston, S.J., 1965, A History of Philosophy, vol. 7: Fichte to Nietzsche, London, p. 9.

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to Zenkovskii’s conception of Russian philosophy as deeply religious. However, the similarities are far more fundamental here. Zenkovskii adopts the idealist model of a correlation between a first principle and a systematic philosophy, except to him it is a reflexive Orthodoxy that forms this first principle, from which various “Russian systems” are developed. As he puts it at one point in the text, Russian philosophers have actively attempted to “extract” (vyvesti) a basis for philosophy from the “spirit” of Orthodoxy (irf i 404). Similarly, in his discussion of Lev Shestov’s philosophy, Zenkovskii writes that One cannot say of Shestov that he created a “system,” but he did something more: he created a firm basis for a system (for religious philosophy). [. . .] The unforgettable merit of Shestov, therefore, is contained in his anti-secularism, in his ardent advocacy of religious philosophy, based on faith and Revelation. (irf ii 328ff )

Shestov’s anti-secularism is understood here nevertheless on the basis of a secular model: German idealism. This meeting of German idealism with Orthodoxy is not accidental, it may be argued, given that Platonic and Neoplatonic aspects are central to them both. In the nineteenth century, Slavophile lay theologians—or religious philosophers—such as Aleksei Khomiakov and Ivan Kireevskii may be said to have rediscovered Orthodox theology through German idealism.72 However, Zenkovskii’s idea of philosophy as a systematic endeavour was not shared to the same extent by Russian nineteenth-century thinkers, and not even by all Silver Age philosophers. Although it is difficult to imagine a philosophy that is entirely unsystematic, philosophers do not necessarily create or even intend to create systems in keeping with the model established by the German idealists. Much of the literature Zenkovskii analyses may have been written for a different purpose than constructing a system. And I would like to suggest that the systematic character that seems to be characteristic of nearly all Russian

72 Cf. Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, 1955, “Khomiakov on Sobornost’,” Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought, ed. E.J. Simmons, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 183–196. See, likewise, Thomas Seifrid, 2005, The Word Made Self: Russian Writings on Language, 1860–1930, Ithaca, N.Y., p. 201, for a description of a similar tendency in the early twentieth century, when Russian thinkers developed their ideas within the framework of Orthodox theology, having first responded to the influences from currents such as phenomenology and Neo-Kantianism.

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philosophers, according to Zenkovskii’s interpretations, is very much the result of his own approach. Russian systems, as Zenkovskii outlines them, may consist of ontology or metaphysics, gnoseology, anthropology, cosmology, ethics and aesthetics—though the latter appears to have been less important in the history of Russian philosophy. In construing these systems, Zenkovskii’s main strategy is to translate the content of a heterogeneous body of writings into more abstract philosophical concepts (“-isms”), which may stand for the entire system or one of its parts. Tolstoi’s thought, for instance, “was a distinctive system of mystical immanentism, created by himself ” (irf i 394). Immanentism stands for Tolstoi’s rejection of all that is transcendent, above all supernatural phenomena in Christianity such as the resurrection of Christ and the Virgin birth, while mysticism refers to the religious character that his teachings nevertheless retain, for instance through his rejection of secularism. This translation into -isms is intended to have explanatory power per se. Zenkovskii rearranges philosophical ideas in a new form by subsuming them into a given set of categories, whose number, moreover, is limited. This kind of interpretation is important in his creation of Russian philosophy. Since this translation is possible, Russian philosophy may be said to exist. What we may broadly term “Russian thought”—including (lay) theology and literature (fiction), as well as various philosophical discourses—becomes philosophy proper by being translated into philosophical concepts that are taken from (Western) European philosophical discourse. This is not to say that such concepts had not been used extensively in Russian philosophy before Zenkovskii, but in the heterogeneous Russian philosophical discourse that emerged in the late nineteenth century they were complemented by the vocabulary of other kinds of discourse as well (theology, literature, science).73 However, it is above all the German idealist lexicon that forms in Zenkovskii’s history, in Jonathan Rée’s formulation, the “common currency [. . .] into which all kinds of works can be converted.”74 Let us now look more specifically at how Zenkovskii “converts” texts from the past of Russian thought into a “common currency,” 73

This point is of course indebted to Edith Clowes’ study (2004), as discussed in my previous chapter. 74 Jonathan Rée, 1991, “The Vanity of Historicism,” New Literary History 22 (4), pp. 961–983, p. 972.

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and let us begin with Petr Chaadaev. On the basis of a set of quotations from various Chaadaev texts, his philosophical texts as well as his personal letters, Zenkovskii constructs a philosophical system whose main divisions are anthropology and historiosophy. Chaadaev’s famous views on Russia’s place in world history, at first extremely negative (cf. his first “Philosophical Letter”), later somewhat more positive (cf. his “Apology of a Madman”), should not, Zenkovskii claims, be conceived as the centre of his teachings. They are only a “logical inference” from his “Christian philosophy,” i.e. his metaphysical and theological conceptions.75 Likewise, when Chaadaev writes in a letter to Pushkin (1829) that he has a “burning desire” see him initiated into “the mystery of time,” Zenkovskii takes this as a confirmation of his “theurgical perception and understanding of history” (irf i 164f ). In other words, concrete statements on political and cultural issues are never accidental but reveal something deeper: well-founded, genuine philosophical ideas. By the same token, we find no references to Byzantium or even to Byzantinism in Zenkovskii’s analysis of Konstantin Leontev, the idea for which he has become so famous. This term refers to the kind of society into which Leontev maintained that Russia should develop on the basis of Byzantine power structures, in order to counterbalance Western influence. Byzantinism, however, is not a philosophical -ism. One has to look for the key to this dialectics of ideas, not in Leontev’s historiosophical or political views, but in his anthropology, which (as a result of his new religious consciousness) proved to be in crucial opposition to the optimistic understanding of man in secular ideology, to the faith in man. (irf i 417)

Leontev’s anti-secular anthropology forms, in turn, the basis of his ethics and aesthetics, as well as of his views on history and politics. The writings of Vasilii Rozanov, similarly, are claimed to be based on a distinctive anthropology, which forms the centre of his thought. Zenkovskii’s treatment of Rozanov is particularly interesting since Rozanov may be said to have developed themes of unprecedented originality and to have treated them in a congenial style. Edith Clowes describes him as a “passionate, if idiosyncratic thinker, an original practitioner of the Russian language with a humorous, outspoken,

75 For the opposite view, see Walicki, 1989, p. 87: “The problem of Russia is undoubtedly the starting-point and central issue of Chaadaev’s philosophy.”

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and at times outlandish view of life that stood in opposition to mainstream Russian thought and its institutions.” In addition to being a brilliant writer, he held rightist political views and was an outspoken anti-Semite. “What seems immediately clear is that Rozanov is a discursive chameleon: the variety of voices in his writing makes it difficult to discern where he stands on any one issue and what he deems to be the truth.”76 Little of this remains in Zenkovskii’s interpretation of Rozanov, in which he stands out as a relatively systematic philosopher not very different from any other. One of Rozanov’s most original themes was that of sex ( pol ). In contrast to Leontev’s Byzantinism, Zenkovskii refers to Rozanov’s “metaphysics of sex,” but is mostly interested in it as an expression of his anthropology and, by implication, his metaphysics. Rozanov’s preoccupation with the problem of sex has its place within a more general framework, as it were, within the system of personalism— here lies the whole significance of his considerations. The metaphysics of man is illuminated in him through the acknowledgement of the metaphysical centrality of the sphere of sex. (irf i 464)

While other interpreters have argued that Rozanov’s philosophy of sex was an attempt to acknowledge and celebrate the concrete dimension of human life,77 Zenkovskii makes it more abstract by translating it into traditional and normalising philosophical categories (antropology, personalism, metaphysics). In this way, Rozanov’s dream of becoming recognised as a philosopher—an acknowledgement contemporaries such as Berdiaev and Gippius had not allowed him; they both claimed that he had “no thoughts”—is fulfilled, but not necessarily on his own terms.78 Here, Zenkovskii follows the doxographical tradition that emerged in the late eighteenth century, according to which “philosophers will earn their place in the history of philosophy by ‘building’ systems and ‘representing’ positions which can be identified on the historians’ prefabricated classificatory scheme.”79 By implication, 76 Clowes, 2004, p. 156. For the last point she refers to Anna Lisa Crone’s Rozanov and the End of Literature: Polyphony and the Dissolution of Genre in Solitaria and Fallen Leaves (Würzburg 1978). 77 See for instance George F. Putnam, 1971, “Vasilii V. Rozanov: Sex, Marriage and Christianity,” Canadian Slavic Studies 5 (3), pp. 301–326, p. 305: “[Rozanov’s] approach to the question of sex, while mystical and Romantic, was nothing if not concrete.” 78 Cf. Clowes, 2004, p. 156. 79 Rée, 1991, p. 970.

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Zenkovskii’s history, too, does not present the reader with anything alien, unfamiliar or unforeseen. Every philosopher represents a variation on the same scheme.80 His interpretations of Russian thinkers as systematic philosophers are clearly formed by the requirements inherent in the genre he himself has adopted. The tendency to translate more abstract philosophical concepts is also present in Zenkovskii’s rendering of Evgenii Trubetskoi’s magnum opus The Meaning of Life (1918): But for Trubetskoi from quite early on, under indisputable influence of Vladimir Solovev, this theme of the meaning of life was raised not just as a need for finding harmony in the subjective world, in general, not as a moral theme, but as a theme of ontology. “Meaning in its essence (should be) invariable and eternal” Trubetskoi claims, and this Platonic setting is extremely characteristic of him—here we find the key to an understanding of his philosophical quests and constructions. (irf ii 345)

In conceiving of “meaning” as “eternal,” Trubetskoi has said something about what “exists,” i.e. he has formulated an “ontology.” It could be argued, therefore, that the “Platonic setting” that is allegedly characteristic of Trubetskoi, is equally characteristic of Zenkovskii himself. He “Platonises” Russian thought by describing its history as successive variations on a few underlying topics, of which the numerous philosophical discourses are merely expressions. Philosophical texts as responses to contemporary issues and problems do not interest him.81 Vladimir Solovev as a Systematic Philosopher Vladimir Solovev holds a central place in Zenkovskii’s narrative. He is the first philosopher to be treated in the part called “The Period of Systems,” and he is more extensively analysed, over two chapters, than any other figure in this book. Comprising metaphysics, cosmology, anthropology, gnoseology, ethics and aesthetics, Solovev’s “genuine

80 Cf. Rée, 1991, p. 971: “The history of philosophy is constitutionally unprepared for the possibility that there are unforeseen ways of thinking and imagining in philosophy, or of talking or writing or hearing or reading it.” 81 For a study of Trubetskoi’s book as precisely a response to the First World War and the Revolution, i.e. as “an attempt at theodicy in the midst of so much suffering and evil,” see Randall A. Poole, 2006, “Religion, War, and Revolution: E.N. Trubetskoi’s Liberal Construction of a Russian National Identity, 1912–20,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7 (2), pp. 195–240, p. 225.

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system ( podlinnaia sistema)” was the first of its kind in the history of Russian philosophy. In fact, hardly any other Russian philosopher is said to cover so many fields—with the possible exception of Semen Frank (see below). The canonisation of Solovev began after his death in 1900 and was accomplished through a series of biographies, separate articles, histories of Russian philosophy as well as miscellanies such as On Vladimir Solovev (1911), which included contributions by Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Viacheslav Ivanov, Evgenii Trubetskoi, Aleksandr Blok (1880–1921) and Vladimir Ern (1882–1917). One year later, in 1912, Ernest Radlov wrote that “Solovev is the most important figure as to the development of Russian philosophy; his influence on subsequent thought has been extraordinary significant.”82 A year before Radlov had started to publish Solovev’s collected works, while in 1913 he published a monograph on the philosopher. What more can be said about this reception, however, apart from its extensiveness?83 One widely held opinion was that Solovev was a truly systematic philosopher and a creator of systems. In an article of 1903 entitled “What Vladimir Solovev’s Philosophy Gives to the Contemporary Consciousness,” Bulgakov argues that Solovev’s system provides us with a synthesis of religion, metaphysics and science, and herein lies his most outstanding achievement: “Solovev’s system is the most sonorous ( polnozvuchnyi) chord that has ever been heard in the history of philosophy.”84 Certainly, to claim that Solovev wanted to create a philosophical system corresponds to his own intentions, at least at an early stage. In the introduction to The Critique of Abstract Principles (1880), Solovev wrote that this critique was intended to consist of three parts: ethics, gnoseology and aesthetics. The Critique of Abstract Principles contained the two first parts, while aesthetics was to be dealt

82

Radlov, 1991, p. 139. On the reception of Solovev, see Goerdt, 1984, pp. 471–476; Jonathan Sutton, 2000, “Vladimir Solov’ëv as Reconciler and Polemicist,” Vladimir Solov’ëv: Reconciler and Polemicist, eds. W. van der Bercken, M. de Courten & E. van der Zweerde, Leuven, pp. 1–11; Evert van der Zweerde, 2000, “Deconstruction and Normalization: Towards an Assessment of the Philosophical Heritage of Vladimir Solov’ëv,” ibidem, pp. 39–62. 84 S.N. Bulgakov, 1903, “Chto daet sovremennomu soznaniiu filosofiia Vladimira Solov’eva?” Ot marksizma k idealizmu: Sbornik statei (1896–1903), St Petersburg, pp. 195–262; p. 196. 83

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with in a later work.85 And although Solovev never wrote the part on aesthetics, his project clearly aspires to the creation of a “system” with an all-embracing character, where different kinds of knowledge should be systematically interrelated to one another in a new “theosophy.” However, the notion of Solovev as a systematic philosopher striving for and even providing syntheses was not the only one that emerged from 1900 onwards. To most of the writers in the religious circles of St Petersburg and Moscow (where religious philosophers played a prominent role), Solovev was first and foremost the great prophet, who expressed himself through his mystical poetry, his speeches, and even his enigmatic personality.86 We have an indication from Blok’s short portrait, “Vladimir Solovev and Our Times” (1920), that there was a virtual contest going on for Solovev’s legacy during the Silver Age. Solovev the philosopher was a “mask” (lichina), Blok claims, and so was Solovev the publicist, the Slavophile, the Westerniser, churchman, poet and mystic. And while Solovev himself was troubled by a seeming discrepancy between the theoretical and practical sides of his activity, Blok suggests that these two dimensions had to continually stimulate each other in order for his philosophy to remain purposeful and alive.87 Blok’s view is clearly opposed to the idea that there is an underlying systematic design in everything Solovev wrote. In contrast, Zenkovskii’s chapters on Solovev undoubtedly side with the tradition represented by Bulgakov, according to which Solovev’s philosophy provides us with a “sonorous system.” Zenkovskii’s text is an indirect critique of those who did not accept the systematicity of Solovev’ thought, not only poets such as Blok but also Boris Iakovenko. In his history of Russian philosophy (1939), Iakovenko presented a negative view of Solovev’s philosophy—precisely because of its unsystematic character: “Solovev not only did not leave behind a complete system or even some kind of thoroughly completed, genu-

85 Cf. V.V. Solov’ev, 1988, “Kritika otvlechennykh nachal,” Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Filosofskoe nasledie 110–111), vol. 1, eds. A.F. Losev & A.V. Gulyga, Moscow, pp. 581–756, p. 587. 86 On Solovev and the religious circles, see Scherrer, 1973, pp. 202–226. On his reception by Blok and other symbolist poets, see Armin Knigge, 1973, Die Lyrik Vl. Solov’evs und ihre Nachwirkung bei A. Belyj und A. Blok (Bibliotheca Slavonica 12), Amsterdam. 87 A.A. Blok, 1962 “Vladimir Solv’ev i nashi dni,” Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 6: Proza 1918–1921, eds. V.N. Orlov et al., Moscow & Leningrad, pp. 154–159, p. 159.

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inely philosophical conception, he did not even exhaustively work out, in a philosophical sense, any of the main problems of philosophy.”88 A major challenge for Zenkovskii was the changes that Solovev’s ideas and philosophical projects continually underwent. Nevertheless, his readings aim first and foremost to represent Solovev’s philosophy as a synchronic system. In practice, this means that the Solovevian texts he discusses most thoroughly are those from the 1870s, including Lectures on the Humanity of God and The Critique of Abstract Principles. In surveying Solovev’s gnoseology, Zenkovskii also includes the third part of Russia and the Universal Church (1889), whereas the main source for Solovev’s ethics is the late work The Justification of the Good (mid-1890s). In this way Zenkovskii constructs a philosophical system on the basis of extracts from different texts and fuses them into a new, coherent whole. By giving priority to Solovev’s earliest and most “systematic” period, Zenkovskii is able to ignore Solovev’s texts as responses to contemporary issues, a tendency that became even more pronounced in his writings of the 1880s and 1890s. The political and ecumenical problems to which Russia and the Universal Church was a response, for instance, interest Zenkovskii less. In Zenkovskii’s decontexutalising interpretations, Solovev’s philosophy emerges as the construction of a system centred on the eternal problems of metaphysics, gnoseology, cosmology, anthropology and ethics. To Zenkovskii, temporal variations on an individual level are basically irrelevant. Parts of individual philosophical systems may have been formulated at different stages, but these are to be conceived of as partial expressions of a complete system that is gradually realised or uncovered. Like in the Aristotelian conception of dynamis and energeia, the goal (the system) is inherent in the development from the beginning. While Zenkovskii’s narrative is constructed out of individual systems (such as Solovev’s), which form its events, developments within these systems are either ignored or (mostly) seen as manifestations of one final system. Without this “freezing” of individual systems in order to construct events that can be fitted into a narrative structure, it would probably have been difficult for Zenkovskii to write his doxography. This genre does not account for individual variations. We may also perceive an implicit critique here of the periodisation with which previous literature on Solovev had been preoccupied.

88

Iakovenko, 2003, p. 212.

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The most comprehensive achievement in pre-revolutionary Solovevian scholarship was without doubt Evgenii Trubetskoi’s two-volume Vladimir Solovev’s Worldview (1913), a through exposure of Solovev’s writings in chronological order, where his life and works are divided into three main periods. In his representation of Solovev’s dynamically evolving philosophy, Trubetskoi was particularly interested in Solovev’s gradual abandonment of utopianism, which Trubetskoi conceived of in terms of improvement. This Auseinandersetzung with Solovev was clearly a part of Trubetskoi’s own, anti-utopian philosophical project, and he understood the relationship between himself and his “master” as comparable to the ways in which German idealists had succeeded Kant.89 In contrast to Trubetskoi as well as to the émigré scholar Dimitri Strémooukhoff, who in his 1935 book on Solovev operated with a four-fold division of his life and work, Zenkovskii claims that the differences highlighted by such periodisations are superficial. Instead, he sides with Konstantin Mochulskii’s wish to avoid dividing Solovev’s “inner life” into periods. Mochulskii, Zenkovskii argues, “succeeded in showing the unity in Solovev’s spiritual approach in different periods of his life” (irf ii 20). This unity, however, is not, as Mochulskii (as well as Strémooukhoff ) believed, brought about by the notion of Sophia. To Zenkovskii, the theme of Sophia is “secondary” (“vtorichnaia”, quotation marks in original); it is a part of Solovev’s cosmology, and he treats it under this heading. As far as I can see, Zenkovskii does not return to the question of what this monothematicity (odnotemnost’, Mochulskii’s term) in Solovev’s thought might be, but I would suggest that to Zenkovskii it is precisely the systematic design of his philosophy that represents this unity. The alleged unity depends on everything being united within a system.90

89 Cf. E.N. Trubetskoi, 1913, Mirosozertsanie Vl.S. Solov’eva, vol. 1, Moscow, p. viii: “Kant verstehen heisst über Kant hinausgehen.” For a comprehensive discussion of Trubetskoi’s anti-utopian project and his treatment of Solovev, see Randall A. Poole, 2000–2001, “Utopianism, Idealism, Liberalism: Russian Confrontations with Vladimir Solov’ev,” Modern Greek Yearbook Studies 16/17, pp. 43–88. 90 For an opposite view, formulated already before the Revolution, see Thomas G. Masaryk, 1913, Russland und Europa: Studien über die geistigen Strömungen in Russland, Part One: Zur russischen Geschichts- und Religionsphilosophie: Soziologischen Skizzen, vol. 2, Jena, p. 252: “die Freunde und Anhänger wollen in ihrem Lehrer und Meister [i.e. Solovev, KJM] eine Einheitlichkeit finden, die ich nicht zu finden vermag.”

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The Systematic Design and its Content According to Zenkovskii, Solovev succeeded in constructing a complex philosophical system, and it is this achievement that confers upon him the central place in the history of Russian philosophy. However, the content of Solovev’s system is not accepted by Zenkovskii in all its parts. Not unlike Schelling’s system, Zenkovskii maintains, Solovev’s metaphysics of “Pan-unity” (vseedinstvo) suffers from a dual notion of the absolute, the outcome of which is pantheism. But why is Zenkovskii so critical of the idea of Pan-unity and its pantheism? This is never said explicitly in his History of Russian Philosophy—so we have to consult other sources such as his short “Outline of My Philosophical System” (published posthumously) in order to see why.91 Here, Zenkovskii presents his own system as consisting of gnoseology, metaphysics and anthropology (uchenie o cheloveke). In outlining his own metaphysics, he notes that a “break with Vladimir Solovev’s constructions leads to a radical rejection of all kinds of Neoplatonism.”92 His own metaphysics, in contrast, recognises the “createdness of being” (tvarnost’ bytiia), which implies that creation is seen as separate from its creator. By introducing this kind of metaphysics, Zenkovskii claimed to avoid the pantheism of Solovev and other representatives of Pan-unity. The metaphysics of Pan-unity became one of the central themes in Russian pre-revolutionary religious philosophy from Solovev to Florenskii and Bulgakov, a current that Sergei Khoruzhii has recently termed “the Moscow School of Christian Neoplatonism.”93 It is closely related to sophiology, although there were also philosophers of Pan-unity, such as Frank and Karsavin, who were not sophiologists. These thinkers created a new religious philosophy whose sources included NeoKantianism, German idealism, Orthodox theology, and Neoplatonism. While the themes of Pan-unity and Sophia prevailed in Russian prerevolutionary religious philosophy, in exile this current gradually fell into serious disrepute, a process culminating in 1935 when Bulgakov was accused of heresy because of his sophiology—simultaneously by

91 V.V. Zen’kovskii, 1962b, “Ocherk moei filosofskoi sistemy,” Vestnik russkogo studencheskogo khristianskogo dvizheniia 66–67, pp. 37–39. A more thorough discussion is found in Zen’kovskii, 1996, pp. 148ff. 92 Zen’kovskii, 1962b, p. 38. 93 Khoruzhii, 2005, pp. 287–308. Neoplatonism in modern Russian thought is also thoroughly discussed in Seifrid, 2005.

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the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (the Karlovci Synod). Orthodox Neopatristic theologians such as Florovskii and Vladimir Lossky saw Pan-unity and its alleged pantheism as incompatible with the Orthodox dogma of creation, i.e. that God and Creation, or created being (tvar’), are separate. We can see, accordingly, that one of the most significant theological debates of the Russian diaspora, described by John Meyendorff also as “probably the most interesting episode in the history of Orthodox theology in the twentieth century,” is reflected in Zenkovskii’s work.94 Zenkovskii clearly sides with the Neopatristic theologians, despite the fact that he is otherwise assumed to belong to the opposite current. Schmemann and Valliere’s distinction between a Russian school of theology and a Neopatristic one does not, in other words, embrace all the significant theological differences evident in this period. In Zenkovskii’s interpretation of Solovev, the idea of Pan-unity is not the only one that is criticised. He is also sceptical of Solovev’s tendency to make ethics autonomous. Certain aspects of his metaphysics are even characterised as “muddled” ( putanitsa), and when Solovev’s idea of androgyny is discussed (under the heading of anthropology), Zenkovskii inserts ironic comments like “as if that wasn’t enough” (malo etogo). These examples clearly show how critical Zenkovskii could be of Solovev. In his historical narrative, however, these criticisms are only of minor importance. When summing up Solovev’s system, Zenkovskii begins by claiming that we should acknowledge the “great value” of Solovev’s constructions—whose system is an “attempt at a synthesis of religion, philosophy and science with the metaphysics, anthropology and historiosophy that Solovev had developed. [. . .] The greatest value of Solovev’s constructions consists precisely in their synthetic conception (zamysel)” (irf ii 69). Since Solovev’s highest achievement is on the level of “conception,” it becomes possible for Zenkovskii to judge positively his system as such (which, he emphasises, was not even fulfilled) and yet to criticise

94 John Meyendorff, 1983, “Creation in the History of Orthodox Theology,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 27 (1), pp. 27–37, p. 33. See also Klimoff, 2005, which contains further references to literature on this subject. For a critique of Florovskii, see Robert Slesinski, 1995, “The Metaphysics of Pan-Unity in Pavel A. Florenskij: A World-View,” P.A. Florenskij i kul’tura ego vremeni, eds. M. Hagemeister & N. Kauchtschischwili, Marburg, pp. 467–474. On pantheism in Bulgakov, see Valliere, 2000, pp. 334ff.

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its content. This criticism is based, naturally, on his own philosophy, even though it is not discussed in this work. Solovev did not raise new themes for the Russian philosophical consciousness (even in the most original part of his system—the doctrine of Sophia—Solovev merely adopts a new name for a complex of problems, raised several times by Russian thinkers before him), but he brought to the forefront the question of system in philosophy, with staggering force and undoubtedly enormous talent. The way in which he built his system has several deficiencies and weak places, but the systematic task of philosophy was confirmed by him with exceptional force. (irf ii 70)

In Zenkovskii’s History of Russian Philosophy, the content of systems is less important than their actual existence. His evaluations of different systems are irrelevant to his construction of a historical narrative of their history, a circumstance that supports my introductory claim about the unphilosophical nature of doxographical history. It is striking how often Zenkovskii interrupts his own discussion of a given topic by inserting a new paragraph introduced by the phrase “we will not go into this any further.” He thereby implies that there is more to say on a given issue, but that the questions left behind are not relevant in the given context. It is “Solovev” or “Frank” as systems that form the “events” of this history. The goal of the individual chapters is first and foremost to demonstrate the existence of such systems and their increasing complexity over the course of time. This paradoxical combination of praise and criticism is also present in Zenkovskii’s discussion of Semen Frank. Frank’s writings on Panunity are likewise accused of pantheism. Discussing Frank’s notion of “primordial unity” (iskonnoe edinstvo), Zenkovskii concludes: “The elevation of a ‘primordial unity’ of a sphere of ideas into Pan-unity is [. . .] precisely the imprisonment of Frank’s thought by the conception of Pan-unity—and nothing more!” (irf ii 398).95 Irrespective of his metaphysics of Pan-unity, however, Zenkovskii finds Frank’s system to be “successfully constructed” (udachno postroena, irf ii 399). He opens the chapter on Frank by commending the systematic and stylistic brilliance and the clarity of his writings, as well as his extraordinary capacity for philosophy.

95 The exclamation mark is Zenkovskii’s own, and it is characteristic of him to amplify his critical remarks in this way.

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chapter six By virtue of his philosophical vision Frank may be called without hesitation the most outstanding Russian philosopher of them all, not only among those who represent similar ideas. In Frank’s work we find a wellcomposed, well-considered system (stroinaia, produmannaia sistema)— only on the questions of aesthetics and of the philosophy of history did he confine himself to incidental remarks. But logic, gnoseology, metaphysics, anthropology, ethics are all elaborated very deeply by him (in the spirit of Pan-unity), with an outstanding knowledge of the main literature. (irf ii 392)

Again, we see that it is Frank’s construction that is the object of Zenkovskii’s praise, while the remark in parenthesis anticipates Zenkovskii’s criticism of the central part of Pan-unity in Frank’s thought. This praise is repeated at the end, where he again emphasises the difference between the content of Frank’s philosophy and its systematic design and foundation: The entire originality of Frank, however, is not in the metaphysics of Pan-unity itself, which he found in Solovev, Plotin, Nicholas of Cusa, and which was developed simultaneously by Karsavin, Florenskii, Bulgakov—the originality and philosophical strength of Frank lies in the way in which he developed the foundation (obosnovanie) of this metaphysics in his works. (irf ii 411)

By imputing an historical dynamics to the emergence and construction of systems, Zenkovskii is able to both celebrate the achievements of Russian philosophy and to criticise its prevailing tendencies—without undermining his dialectical narrative. The Dialectics of History As should be clear by now, the conception of philosophy as the construction of systems is fundamental to Zenkovskii. In Skovoroda, the “first genuine Russian philosopher,” he finds a system that is “original and independent” (irf i 64f ). Karamzin constructed a “system of aesthetic humanism,” which represented a move towards a “secular understanding of life” (irf i 137). Both Vladimir Odoevskii (1803–1869), the author of the philosophical novel Russian Nights (1844), and Chaadaev created systems; so did Tolstoi and Dostoevskii. One might get the impression that for Zenkovskii, “system” is simply synonymous with philosophy. But this is not quite so. Herzen is an example of a philosopher who failed to “bring his philosophical views into a system” (irf i 285). He became too absorbed by his publicistic activities. Philosophy

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and system are thus not synonymous, but the striving for systematicity is inherent in philosophical activity, according to Zenkovskii. However, the men mentioned above all belong to the period entitled “On the Threshold of Philosophy,” and it is only the subsequent period that is referred to as “the period of systems.” So what is the difference between these “systems before systems” and those that emerged later? The short answer is that only the latter are “genuine” (podlinnye). The main tendency among philosophers before Solovev is that they do “construct” but their constructions consist mainly of separate part(s) that are not seamlessly integrated into a whole. Before the “period of systems,” we have a series of parts or components which have systematic potential, but out of which no one had yet created a “genuine system.” The teleological development that Zenkovskii hereby projects onto the history of Russian philosophy is, as repeatedly noted, “dialectical.” We encounter this term already in the first sentence of the work: “The task of the present book is to introduce the readers to the history of Russian philosophy—all the material belonging to it in its plenitude, in its inwardly dialectical connection (dialekticheskaia sviaznost’ ) and historical sequentiality ( posledovatel’nost’ )” (irf i 13). In other words, Zenkovskii reads a series of dialectical movements into the temporal relationship between the systems he construes, and it is these movements that form the narrative structure of his work. Furthermore, this imposition of a dialectical development onto the past is not only a means of making history teleological; the presence of dialectics itself is taken to testify to the originality of Russian philosophy: Thus in the history of Russian philosophy one has to deal extensively with the “influences” of Western philosophy. If in spite of this, however, Russian philosophers begin at an early stage (without always fulfilling their plans) to pave their own way, thus dialectically preparing for the emergence, at a later period, of original philosophical systems; this represents of course the dialectical and historical unity of Russian philosophical thought, and thereby sufficiently testifies to its independence and, consequently, also its originality. [. . .] There is nothing that confirms the independence and originality of Russian philosophy so definitively as the development inherent in it (kak nalichnost’ ee razvittia). All development can only be organic, i.e. it should be possible to trace the dialectical connection within it and not just the historical sequentiality. (irf i 22f )

What Zenkovskii suggests here, is that we must search for the originality of Russian philosophy in the way in which it unfolds temporally

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and even in the fact that it possesses development (nalichnost’ ee razvitiia). Development testifies to life, individuality, and thus to originality. This is Zenkovskii’s historicist argument, which finds a striking parallel in Friedrich Meinecke’s definition of historicism (see Chapter Two). In other words, the originality and uniqueness of Russian philosophy, which it has been a major task for Zenkovskii to demonstrate, lie in its chronotope, in the coherent narrative structure constructed by Zenkovskii himself. Zenkovskii applies the term “dialectics” frequently in this work. Dialectics may be seen in the philosophical activity of an individual thinker, such as Khomiakov, Gogol, Bakunin, and, more than anyone else, Dostoevskii: “Dialectical strength is highly characteristic of Dostoevskii’s thought—he reveals antinomism where another finds comfort in some one-sided proposal, illegitimate and unresolved” (irf i 434). However, Dostoevskii also represents a dialectical movement in history: “In Dostoevskii, Russian historiosophical thought returns to a religious understanding of history, but in such a way that man, in accordance with the divine plan, forms the foundation for the dialectics of history” (irf i 435). These are the two basic usages of the term “dialectic” in Zenkovskii’s work, and it is, naturally, the dialectics of history that is the most fundamental to him in this context. Such historical-dialectical movements are identified as responses to a certain absence or alienation, two factors that provide history with direction: the next stage, the overcoming of a given situation, is implicitly anticipated in the present. This dialectical structure, which is clearly inspired by Hegel, is reinterpreted by Zenkovskii as a temporal and chronological process that is embodied in Russian philosophers and their successive systems. Correspondingly, Russian philosophical systems from Vladimir Solovev onwards are not constructed arbitrarily. On the contrary, this is the “formal dialectics” of Russian philosophy: “the task for a system was not a new interpretation of themes, but their conversion into an integral system ( pretvorenie v tselostnuiu sistemu)” (irf ii 12). Such a synthesis, Zenkovskii claims, had been in the making for a long time, but its development had been hindered by factors such as, for instance, potential philosophers’ devotion to journalism ( publitsistika)—Herzen has already been mentioned as an example, but this was also a general tendency, he argues. With Solovev, however, the time had come for an “organic synthesis” of previous efforts:

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What was needed were not new ideas, but an organic binding together (sviazyvanie) of what had already been said. Hence, for Russian thought the time had now come for systems: the materials were already there, the main question was simply what building it was possible to erect from these materials. (irf ii 11)

The “construction” (postroenie), which is how Zenkovskii repeatedly describes philosophical activity, uses as its materials components that are already present. It is conceived of as a continual, systematic reworking of past achievements. In addition to the “formal dialectics,” Zenkovskii speaks also of an “inner dialectics.” This notion is defined less precisely than formal dialectics, but it is used to describe the role played by secularism in the history of Russian philosophy. Secularism determines only the line of development (liniia razvitiia) and by no means thwarts the various “contents,” which flow into consciousness from various spheres of culture demanding “harmonic” combination with the main theme of thought and consciousness. The dominating power of secularism brings into the passionate and creative work of the spirit only the determining line of development. This is why the fundamental movers (dvigateli) of Russian philosophical creativity, often hidden but also sometimes recognised, appear precisely in this living, troubled theme that may even have been thrust forward (naviazannaia) (by the entire tradition of Russian spiritual life): with the Church or without it, or even against it? (irf ii 13)

That Russian philosophy is inconceivable without the encounter with secular thought, is one of the most fundamental premises in Zenkovskii’s History of Russian Philosophy. He describes secularism as a “mover” bringing about philosophy. Towards the very end of the second volume he repeats this point once more: “One has to search for the key to the dialectics of Russian philosophical thought, to my mind, in the problem of secularism” (irf ii 463). Zenkovskii’s twofold notion of dialectics seeks to unite the two narrative components—which correspond to his two conceptions of philosophy (as reflection on faith and as system)—of which his history consists: the return to Orthodoxy with help from secularism, and the development towards the period of systems, towards greater complexity in philosophy. The latter presupposes the former in that it is only with a return to Orthodoxy that the genuine “Russian systems” are able to come about. As noted earlier, this model of the emergence and development of Russian philosophy does not always conform to

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historical chronology (Rozanov “prepares” for Solovev). What “happens” is seen rather in terms of dialectical movements, where “events” are often lifted out of their concrete time and place and fitted into the dialectical scheme. Here we encounter Zenkovskii’s reliance on doxographical historiography, to which “knowledge of particular texts or particular problems became less important to philosophical culture than familiarity with a general historical scheme that was supposed to cover the whole of philosophy’s past.”96 At one point, Zenkovskii even admits that his schemes do not necessarily correspond precisely to reality. Yet he hopes that his examination will gain “clarity and dialectical coherence (sviaznost’ )” (irf ii 14). Still, it is first and foremost Zenkovskii’s formal dialectics that are doxographical, i.e. they represent philosophy as a variation on a given set of themes. However, Zenkovskii also activates cultural contexts as a means to explanation, and this contextualisation represents an argumentative strategy rarely used by his Western doxographical predecessors. Neither is it present to the same extent in the earlier histories of Russian philosophy that I discussed above.97 The cultural dimension is present above all in Zenkovskii’s idea of an inner dialectics between Orthodoxy and secularism. And while it is claimed that the formal dialectics of Russian philosophy actually reached its goal with Solovev, this claim is more equivocal when it comes to its inner dialectics. As we turn the final page of Zenkovskii’s history, we are presented with two possible ways in which Russians relate themselves to the West. There is the way in which “we carry [. . .] the West in ourselves,” determined by the West’s spiritual quests and leading “us” up its “blind alleys.” This is where “we” are today. However, there is also the way of “our Orthodox perception of culture, life, man, and nature,” in which “we” also participate to a degree: It is as if we are standing on the threshold (maybe we have even partially crossed this threshold) to philosophical constructions defined by

96

Rée, 1991, p. 968. Cf. Seebohm’s (1977) distinction between philosophy as Wissenschaft (Shpet, Iakovenko and others) and as Weltanschauung (above all Zenkovskii and Losskii), referred to above. Zenkovskii could thus be said to inaugurate the tradition of situating Russian philosophy in a national, cultural and religious framework, a strategy which, according to Andrzej Walicki, 1994b, “Po povodu ‘russkoi idei’ v russkoi filosofii,” Voprosii filosofii 1, pp. 68–72, p. 69, has remained popular in the historiography of Russian philosophy ever since, in contrast to that traditionally practiced in Western Europe, where cultural aspects have mostly been ignored. 97

zenkovskii

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the illuminations given to us by Orthodoxy . . . It is thus not accidental that in the history of Russian philosophy the solution of some problem related to secularism is a kind of watershed that directs our thought to one side or the other. I cannot develop these reflections, which contain only a few hints, any further,—[. . .] (irf ii 466)

Does this mean, then, that the goal is to overcome secularism entirely? The imagery of “threshold” ( porog) and “watershed” (vodorazdel ) does indeed signal an impending exit from a liminal situation. However, it is also possible to read these unfulfilled thoughts as an expression of the idea that Russian philosophy, brought about by the encounter with Western thought, is destined to remain on this borderline, continually oscillating between East and West. At least, this is what Russian philosophy—with all its extraordinary achievements—has done so far. And Zenkovskii apparently hesitates when it comes to proclaiming the possibility of a “pure” Russian philosophy, liberated from the secular component that was so decisive in bringing it about. Rather, I read his own interruption (“I cannot develop . . .”) as an expression of his dialectics having reached an aporetic point, to which there is no solution except for an ongoing encounter between Orthodoxy and secular thought. If the threshold may be crossed in order to “return” to Orthodoxy, it has to be crossed again and again in order for Russian philosophy to remain vital. Secularism cannot simply be left behind as a necessary phase in the historical dialectics. Taken as a whole, therefore, Zenkovskii’s History of Russian Philosophy emerges as an acknowledgment of the indebtedness of Russian philosophy as Russian to Western philosophy. Herein lies Zenkovskii’s implicit rejection of Florovskii’s programme of a “return to the fathers,” i.e. of the reconstruction of a pure Orthodox theology free from Western “influences.” On the contrary, Zenkovskii’s History of Russian Philosophy is, as suggested by Paul Valliere, the “most impressive work of the Russian school after Bulgakov’s death” (1944).98 The theology of the Russian school, as Valliere sees it, “grew out of the need to relate the Orthodox faith to what is usually called a modern or free society, that is to say, a society consisting of relatively autonomous unharmonized spheres of activity operating outside the tutelage of church or state.”99 What Zenkovskii’s history

98 99

Valliere, 2000, p. 374. Valliere, 2000, p. 2.

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does, more specifically, is to arrange a meeting between Russia and Western Europe, not only by emphasising the importance of secular thought to Russian philosophy, but also by interpreting Russian thought in a common philosophical language, i.e. by paraphrasing it in “Western” concepts and in accordance with “Western” ideas of what philosophy is. He thus constructs a philosophical tradition as the field in which this encounter takes place. Having described the synthesis of Russian philosophy on one level, Zenkovskii therefore concludes his work by suggesting that this synthesis presupposes another dialectics, which must necessarily remain unresolved. The inner dialectics of Russian philosophy cannot reach a synthesis, at least not a harmonising and conciliatory one. Russian philosophy is destined to live on the border between East and West— we may even say that Russian philosophy is what marks this boundary, a boundary which, in Iurii Lotman’s words, “both separates and unites. It is always the boundary of something and so belongs to both frontier cultures.”100 Paraphrasing Zenkovskii by means of Lotman, I would like to conclude that Zenkovskii presents us with a history of Russian philosophy, where its “external component,” Western secular thought, has been internalised, and where these foreign texts have been transformed to such an extent that they have “become part of the semiosphere’s internal semiotics, while still remaining foreign (inorodnye).”101

100

Lotman, 1990, p. 136. Lotman, 1990, p. 137. Translation adjusted in accordance with Iu.M. Lotman, 2000, Semiosfera, St Petersburg, p. 262. 101

CONCLUDING REMARKS Russian émigré historiography as it appears in the works of Fedotov, Florovskii, Berdiaev and Zenkovskii presents us with a variety of modes and narratives for configuring and representing the past—tragic, eschatological, hagiographical and dialectical. Fedotov describes a gradually unfolding tragic conflict, out of which emerge the seeds of a “new life” for Russia. In contrast, Florovskii’s use of an evolving narrative seems to have first and foremost a pragmatic and didactic purpose, serving to substantiate his eschatological idea of history as well as his experience of crisis. Berdiaev is basically concerned with the underlying “deep structures” of Russian mentality, though not even his hagiographic pattern of responsive, self-inflicted suffering is believed to have been present from the beginning of time—it “emerged historically.” Even more dynamic is Zenkovskii’s narrative describing the twofold dialectical development of Russian philosophy; to Zenkovskii, it is this chronotope itself that represents the differentia specifica of Russian philosophy. But the three other thinkers are similarly concerned with the distinguishing characteristics of Russian intellectual and spiritual culture, and they all impute an assumed coherence to their material. This coherence is constructed through the deployment of allegedly unique Russian forms of spirituality, such as the notions of freedom and social service (Fedotov), Byzantinism (Florovskii), responsive suffering (Berdiaev), and the philosophical encounter between Orthodoxy and the West (Zenkovskii). In his Metahistory, Hayden White suggests that the grounds for preferring one historiographical mode over another are “ultimately aesthetic or moral rather than epistemological.”1 The preference of all four Russian authors for a given mode is arguably “moral” in that their conceptions of the past, often indebted to their philosophical and theological ideas, are normative, axiological, and at times didactic. White’s contention seems also to be confirmed by the fact that it is futile to discuss these narratives in terms of epistemology. We may raise the question of veracity on the level of singular “events” (even though these

1

White, 1973, p. xii.

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are also interpreted in accordance with the narrative of which they are seen to be a part)—suffice it to mention Fedotov’s questionable antiByzantine approach to early Kievan culture or Florovskii’s prejudiced treatment of early Ukrainian culture; but the question as to whether Russian history “really” has a tragic, eschatological, hagiographical or dialectical dimension, is not subjected to confirmation or denial. The question therefore remains as to what the function of these different narratives might possibly be—if they are neither “true” nor “false”— beyond their “moralism” and aesthetic qualities, neither of which is the most compelling feature of these four works. In my opinion, there is a positive side to this use of historical narratives that is not captured by White’s alternatives (aesthetic/moral or epistemological). As suggested in the theoretical part of the Introduction, narrative is a cognitive tool for constructing a coherent and meaningful past. But the past may only become truly significant in relation to a present situation and its “needs for orientation,” to which historical thinking and writing, according to Jörn Rüsen, always respond directly or indirectly. Although academic and professional historical studies have their own logic of methodological rationality, they are inconceivable, as part of historical thinking and writing in general, without taking into account the life-world and its practical needs for temporal orientation, on which they are grounded.2 What is overlooked in White’s dichotomy, therefore, is a broader recognition of the role of historical narratives in providing guidance in a given situation—in this case of disruption and exile. The social life-world out of which Fedotov and Florovskii’s works emerged was the active émigré milieu of the 1920s and 30s, in which there was a deep and commonly held conviction that the Bolshevik regime would fall and that Russia Abroad would be instrumental in the rebirth of Russia. Berdiaev and Zenkovskii, on the other hand, completed their works in the post-war phase, when the Soviet Union, having defeated fascist Germany and massively extended its geopolitical sphere of influence, appeared more solid than ever. Russia Abroad was dissolving, while exile had apparently become permanent at the same time. The four authors nevertheless have in common an attempt to make their present exile meaningful here and now. What this present looked like was very different in the 1930s and 1940s, a fact that

2

Cf. Rüsen, 1983, pp. 24ff. See also Chapter One.

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is reflected in their works. Florovskii and Fedotov both see the goal of history as a return to an initial state, brought about by human efforts. Berdiaev, in contrast, foresees an imminent exodus from terrestrial, temporal history, irrespective of human beings’ attempts to intervene in it. The situation of exile is seemingly not reflected at all in Zenkovskii, except implicitly as a permanent state. With his view of Russian philosophy as inconceivable without the West and as continually oscillating between “home” and “abroad,” he seems to be alien to the whole to the idea of history as exodus or return. What is nonetheless common to Berdiaev and Zenkovskii in this period, is that neither makes any appeal to their fellow émigrés by referring to a shared task—in contrast to what they had both done in the 1920s. In observing these conspicuous changes, we should not forget that not all Russian firstwave émigrés ceased to proclaim such tasks after the Second World War. In 1956, Anton Kartashev issued a collection of his own articles bearing the title The Recreation of Holy Russia, while Ivan Ilin, with his characteristically uncompromising attitude, continued to write right up to his death in 1954 his short proposals for reconstructing the Russian pre-revolutionary state, church and society. These were published posthumously in 1956 as the two-volume set aptly entitled Our Tasks.3 I would claim nevertheless that my four works, taken together, bear witness to a fundamental change in the self-awareness of Russian firstwave émigrés. Herein lies my own narrative understanding of the Russian emigration. This is not to say, however, that such external circumstances should be regarded as the single “cause” of the use of various modes and narratives. Political, social and cultural changes alone cannot explain the differences between Fedotov’s tragedy and Florovskii’s eschatology, on the one hand, and Berdiaev’s hagiography and Zenkovskii’s dialectics on the other. They all had their own idea of what Russia had been and should become, and they shaped their ideas differently in words. But this illustrates another point that has been decisive to my own way of approaching these texts: While they may be unimaginable without the Russian émigré discourse within which they emerged, they cannot be properly understood as a simple manifestation of it. The individual text is not merely a reflection of a monolithic “code” or “structure.”

3 Cf. A.V. Kartashev, 1956, Vossozdanie Sv. Rusi, Paris; I.A. Il’in, 1956, Nashi zadachi: Stat’i 1948–1954, 2 vols., Paris.

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Each text represents rather a new variety that enriches as well as redirects the discourse that they all presuppose.4 Appealing to common notions, these historical works also intervene in them. They do not simply reflect the situation of exile; they refract it as well. By the same token, the four texts present us with a deliberate remaking of the past as it had been transmitted to this generation of the Russian intelligentsia, now in exile. To invoke once more Castoriadis’ concept of a social imaginary, the notion of an imaginary émigré society forms an indispensable condition for this kind of historical thinking and writing to emerge. These works testify to their authors’ common identity as Russian émigrés, united in their concern and care for Russia. On the other hand, they aim at substantiating the collective memory and identity of their fellow émigrés by means of historical writing. In modern times, the project of constructing collective identity has often been seen—from Ernest Renan to Maurice Halbwachs to Pierre Nora—in opposition to scholarly research, but as Aleida Assmann points out, this dichotomy is not so clear-cut in practice. In the nineteenth century, even professionalised historiography became instrumental in the creation of national identity and of belonging to imagined communities.5 In the works that I have analysed here, similarly, these two dimensions are above all complementary. Émigré historiography attempts to define more properly or even rework the social imaginary significations (imaginary referents), i.e. the collectively created meanings that formed the point of reference for Russia Abroad. According to Castoriadis, this is the work of the individual but also of socialised radical imagination, which is capable of interrogating inherited meanings.6 In their reworking of these significations, Fedotov, Florovskii, Berdiaev and Zenkovskii engage in meaning-generating processes in the interests of their cultural activity and identity. However, it was precisely in their attempts to reformulate Russia that their ideas of Russianness came into conflict.

4 For a Bakhtin-inspired discussion of this issue, see Jostein Børtnes, 2007, “Seeing the World through Genres,” The Poetry of Prose: Readings in Russian Literature (Slavica Bergensia 8), Bergen, pp. 192ff. 5 Cf. Aleida Assmann, 2006, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik, Munich, p. 47. 6 On the relationship between the individual “radical imagination” and the collective “social imaginary,” see Cornelius Castoriadis, 1994, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, eds. G. Robinson & J. Rundell, London & New York, pp. 136–154.

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INDEX 1922 expulsions, 27, 28, 29, 203, 204, 210 Adamovich, Georgii, 45, 48 Adelung, Johann Christoph, 66 agent, agency, 13, 16, 85, 115, 142, 143, 144, 148, 187, 196, 228, 238 Aizlewood, Robin, 56, 222 Aksakov, Konstantin, 241–242, 243 Aksenova, Elena, 159 Aleksandrov, Sergei, 19 Alexander 1, emperor, 184, 229 Amaral, Miguel de Salis, 162 Anan’ich, Boris, 92, 108, 145 Anderson, Benedict, 34 Andreyev, Catherine, 23, 28, 31, 32, 33, 45, 49 Andreyev, Nikolay, 176 Ankersmit, Frank, 10, 17–18, 74–76, 146 Anselm of Canterbury, 271–272 Antonii, saint, 132, 135–136 Antoshchenko, Anton, 3, 20–21, 23, 94, 107, 139, 142, 144 Antsiferov, Nikolai, 91 Ariès, Philippe, 145 Aristotle, 13 Artemii the Elder, archimandrite, 178 Artz, Frederic, 191 Assmann, Aleida, 300 Assmann, Jan, 49, 51 Athanasius, saint and hagiographer, 129 Avksentev, Nikolai, 38–39 Avramii of Smolensk, saint, 117, 138–139 Avvakum, archpriest, 54 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 59, 92, 131, 274, 300 Bakunin, Mikhail, 234, 292 Barabanov, Evgenii, 218, 219–220, 230–231, 265 Baranovich, Lazar, 181 Basil the Great, 132, 198 Bassin, Mark, 81 Beaune-Gray, Danièle, 20, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 101, 102, 105–106, 108, 114, 132 Belinskii, Vissarion, 131, 148, 234–235, 252 Berberova, Nina, 46 Berdiaev, Nikolai, 1, 6, 7, 8, 19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 29, 39, 40, 43–44, 50, 55, 57,

59–60, 62, 65, 69, 71, 86–87, 93, 96, 97, 99, 139, 153–154, 155, 158, 162, 169, 173, 183, 192, 193, 203–250, 256–257, 268, 270, 275, 281, 283, 297–300 Berdiaeva, Lidiia, 221 Bering, Dietz, 49 Berlin, Isaiah, 62, 127 Bestuzhev-Riumin, Konstantin, 108 Bethea, David, 139, 249 Beyerly, Elisabeth, 19 biblical rhetoric, 41–43, 46–47, 105, 107, 123–124. 126, 167–170, 211 Billington, James, 176 binarism, see dichotomisation Bitsilli, Petr, 20, 91, 106 Black, Joseph, 73, 75 Black, Max, 16–17 Blane, Andrew, 154, 160, 161 Blank, Ksana, 223 Blanke, Horst Walter, 76 Bloch, Marc, 145 Blok, Aleksandr, 283, 284 Bohn, Thomas, 18, 72–73, 83, 84 Boldt, Frank, 6 Bolotokov, Vitalii, 21 Bolsheviks, 2, 3, 7, 27, 28, 30, 31, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 43, 105, 169, 210, 211, 298 Boris and Gleb, saints, 101, 112, 115, 117, 118–122, 124, 127, 128, 129, 147, 221, 227 Børtnes, Jostein, 101, 109, 123, 126, 150, 172, 237, 300 Böss, Otto, 35, 158 Braudel, Fernand, 15–16, 84, 230 Breuillard, Sabine, 36, 45 Brezhnev, Leonid, 34, 247 Brinkjost, Ulrike, 73 Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedia, 71, 112 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 29 Brucker, Johann Jakob, 61, 66, 261–263 Buddeus, Johann Franz, 189 Bukharev, Aleksandr, 98, 255 Bukshpan, Iakov, 93 Bulgakov, Sergei, 131, 160, 192, 205, 235, 239, 252, 255, 268, 270, 283, 284, 287, 288, 290, 295 Bunin, Ivan, 28–29, 41–43, 249

320

index

Burbank, Jane, 244–245 Burchardi, Kristiane, 155 Burckhardt, Jakob, 11, 66–67, 69, 77 Burke, Kenneth, 11 Burke, Peter, 61, 65–66 Bushkovitch, Paul, 111–112, 226 Bychkov, Sergei, 91 canon, 2, 4, 49–51, 113, 204, 239, 267–268, 283 Cantinori, Delio, 61 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 37, 130, 300 Catherine the Great, empress, 231 Chaadaev, Petr, 56, 70, 176, 203, 265, 275, 280, 290 Chamberlain, Lesley, 27, 29 Changing Landmarks Movement, 35 Chartier, Roger, 60–61 Chelpanov, Georgii, 252, 267 Cherniaev, Anatolii, 58, 154, 163, 190, 192 Cherniavsky, Michael, 116–117 Chernobaev, Anatolii, 19 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 235 Chicherin, Boris, 78–79 Christiansen, Palle Ove, 69 chronotope, 274, 292, 297 Chyzhevskyi, Dmytro, 4, 182 Cicero, 68 Cieszkowski, August, 240 circles (kruzhki), 32, 92, 156, 213, 284 civilisation, see culture Clark, Katharina, 92 Clemens of Alexandria, 198 Clément, Olivier, 207 Clowes, Edith, 203–205, 206, 214–215, 264, 279, 280–281 cognitive function, of narrative, 10, 18, 298 coherence, by means of historical narratives, 10, 13, 76, 80, 85, 146, 212, 297 Collie, R.L., 67 Collingwood, Robin, 80, 173 Collins, John, 170 commemoration, see memory Comte, Auguste, 80, 144 Contemporary Annals, émigré journal, 38, 39, 45, 53, 100, 106 context, 4–8, 43, 190, 273, 277, 294 Copleston, Frederick, 277 Cousin, Victor, 61 Creativity, creative act (tvorchestvo), 44, 48, 95–98, 115, 130–131, 155, 157,

163, 171–173, 176, 184, 190, 192–194, 199, 206–207, 225, 230, 238–240, 250, 255, 270–272, 274, 276, 293 Crone, Anna Lisa, 281 cultural history, historiography of, 1, 4, 20, 65–67, 71–72 culture, concept of, 2–3, 43–44, 47, 53–57, 67–72, 95–97, 100, 110, 130, 133–134, 163, 175–176, 178–179, 203–204, 243, 252, 258–260, 296 culturosophy, 55–57 Cyril Scythopolis, hagiographer, 129 Danilevskii, Nikolai, 70–71, 159, 195–196, 199–200, 259 Dante Alighieri, 29 Danto, Arthur, 9 Darnton, Robert, 61 Darwin, Charles, 195 de Certeau, Michel, 86–87 Debolskii, Nikolai, 268 Demandt, Alexander, 78 Demidova, Olga, 23, 32, 37, 48, 49 dialectics, dialectical mode of representation, 256, 260–261, 270, 272, 274–276, 290–296 dichotomisation, 56, 68–69, 71, 110, 121, 123, 135–137, 158, 163, 177, 222–223, 259–260 Diderot, 124, 261 Dietsch, Volkmar, 73, 75 Diogenes Laertius, 61, 261 Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaia, Olga, 145 Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 236 Dodd, C.H., 171 Doronchenkov, Askold, 21 doxography, 262–263, 285 Dray, William, 9 Drozdov, Vasilii, see Filaret of Moscow Duncan, Peter, 245–247 ecclesification (otserkovlenie, votserkovlenie), 104, 259 Eco, Umberto, 104 ecumenism, 92, 159–160, 285 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 66 Emelianov, Boris, 263 emigration, see exile Emmons, Terence, 18, 64–65, 80, 82, 83 emplotment, 8, 12–13, 15–16, 77–78, 138, 142, 173, 187 enlightenment historiography, 72–77, 134–135 Epifanii Premudryi, 126

index Ermishin, Oleg, 251, 254–256, 259, 263, 266 Ern, Vladimir, 154, 283 Ershov, Matvei, 264, 267–268 eschatological mode of representation, 7, 98, 107, 165–172, 173, 187, 230–231, 276, 297, 298, 299 Etkind, Aleksandr, 228–229 Eurasianism, 2, 3, 19, 20, 35, 51, 82–83, 107, 154, 156–158, 259 events, historical, 8–17, 118, 137, 142–143, 172, 175, 228, 230, 276, 285, 289, 294, 297 Evtuhov, Catherine, 70, 131, 192 exile, 6, 7, 18, 28–30, 33, 38, 39–49, 58, 87, 95, 100, 103–105, 151, 157, 169, 199–201, 211–212, 250, 256, 259, 298–300 Febvre, Lucien, 145 Fedotov, Georgii, 1, 6, 7, 8, 19, 20, 21, 22, 39, 40, 46–48, 50, 53–57, 59, 65, 69, 71, 72, 86–87, 91–151, 153, 154, 162, 166, 167, 173, 176, 192, 197, 200, 206, 207, 221, 233, 249, 259, 297–300 Fedotova, Elena, 91 Felmy, Karl-Christian, 162, 188 Feodosii Pecherskii, saint, 96, 101, 115, 117, 118, 123, 127–130, 132–133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143 Feofan of Jerusalem, patriarch, 181 Feofilakt Lopatinskii, 276 Fichte, Gottlieb, 38, 158, 277 Filaret of Chernigov (Gumilevskii), archbishop, 185 Filaret of Moscow, metropolitan, 184, 185, 187, 188–190 Finkel, Stuart, 27, 40, 44, 93 first-wave emigration, 1–2, 31, 34, 39, 169, 247, 250, 298–299 Fleishman, Lazar, 6 Florenskii, Pavel, 187, 223–224, 239, 255, 268, 270, 287, 290 Florinsky, Michael, 19 Florovskii, Georgii, 1, 6–8, 19, 20, 21, 39, 50, 51, 55, 57, 58–59, 60, 62, 65, 69, 86–87, 93, 99, 106, 107, 143, 153–201, 230–231, 242, 252, 253, 255, 272, , 275, 276, 288, 295, 297–300 Fondaminskii, Ilia, 45, 97 Foucault, Michel, 5–6, 63, 117–118, 224 Frank, Joseph, 246 Frank, Semen, 27, 44, 55, 93, 205, 268, 269, 270, 275, 283, 287, 289–290

321

Franklin, Simon, 120, 123, 224 Frede, Michael, 263 freedom, concepts of, 99, 101, 127–129, 139, 141–145, 151, 162–163, 173, 205–206, 209–210, 215, 237, 238–239, 297 Frye, Northrop, 11, 143, 173 Fulsås, Narve, 9, 14, 77, 78, 146 Gajdenko, Piama, 207 Galakhtin, Mikhail, 95, 99, 116 Gallaher, Brandon, 200 Gallie, W.B., 9 Gaman, Lidiia, 209 Gavriil, archimandrite, 263–264 Geffert, Bryn, 160 Geistesgeschichte, see intellectual history Gennadii of Novgorod, archbishop, 177 genre, 55, 59, 62–64, 139, 143, 212, 218, 261, 262, 282 Gershenzon, Mikhail, 62, 153 Gibbon, Edward, 74 Gilbert, Felix, 60–61, 66–67 Ginzburg, Carlo, 145 Gippius, Zinaida, 40, 45–46, 213, 221, 281 Glad, John, 31, 33 Göbler, Frank, 49, 250 Goerdt, Wilhelm, 263, 265, 283 Gogol, Nikolai, 204, 222, 236, 246, 253, 256, 271, 292 Golubeva-Monatkina, Natalia, 36 Golubinskii, Evgenii, 99, 111–113, 119–120, 136, 182, 185 Golubinskii, Fedor, 271 Gombrich, E.H., 69 Gordon, Daniel, 137 Görgemanns, Herwig, 191 Gottlieb, Christian, 209–210 Gousseff, Catherine, 39 Gradovskii, Timofei, 79 Gregory of Nazianzus, 198 Grevs, Ivan, 91, 108, 144 Grigorev, Apollon, 273 Gromov, Mikhail, 253–254 Grot, Nikolai, 267 Groys, Boris, 56, 257, 273 Grübel, Rainer, 55–56 Grzybek, Peter, 69 Guizot, François, 70, 81 Gul, Roman, 28 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 20 Gurevich, Aron, 145

322

index

Hackel, Sergei, 1, 87 Hager, Fritz-Peter, 277 Hagglund, Roger, 48 hagiographical mode of representation, 231–238, 241, 244, 249, 297, 298, 299 hagiography, 108–111, 116, 120–122, 129 Halbwachs, Maurice, 49, 137, 300 Haliatovskyi, Ioannykii, 181 Halperin, Charles, 158 Hamburg, Gary, 78–79 Hardeman, Hilde, 35 Hartmann, Eduard von, 192 Hecker, Hans, 144 Hegel, G.W.F., 69, 81, 159, 223, 249, 260, 262, 277, 292 Heidegger, Martin, 5, 215 Heller, Mikhail, 30, 33, 35 Hempel, Carl Gustav, 9 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 68, 78, 116, 150 Herlihy, Patricia, 154 Herodotus, 62 Herzen, Aleksandr, 124–125, 160, 290, 292 Hesse, Mary, 18 Hester, Marcus, 181–182 Hildermeier, Manfred, 124–125 historicism, 72, 75–85, 145–151, 165, 225, 292 historiography of Imperial Russia, 6, 72–85, 91, 99, 108–113, 119–120, 136–137, 144, 145, 153, 182, 263–265 history of ideas, see intellectual history history of philosophy, 55, 60, 64, 261–268, 281–282 Hobbes, Thomas, 127 holiness, according to Fedotov, 103–104, 108, 111–112, 114–122, 133–134, 138–142, 144–151 Hollingsworth, Paul, 120, 123, 138 Holquist, Michael, 92 holy fools, 117, 148, 149, 221, 227, 275 Horace, 161 Horowitz, Brian, 164 Hrushevsky, Mykhailo, 51, 115, 134 Huizinga, Johan, 67 Hume, David, 261 Iakovenko, Boris, 254, 264, 265–269, 284–285, 294 Iaroslav of Kiev, prince, 119 idealism, German, 69, 166, 175, 184, 191, 254, 277–278, 287

Iggers, Georg, 66, 69, 74, 78 Ignatow, Assen, 214 Ilarion, metropolitan, 119–120, 123–124, 183 Ilin, Ivan, 27, 44, 213, 299 intellectual history, historiography of, 60–65, 164, 204, 212, 219–220 intelligentsia, 33, 40, 57, 92, 131, 155, 205, 228, 231–233, 235–236, 237–238, 244, 251–252 Ioann (John), metropolitan, 120 Iosif of Volotsk, saint, 113, 115, 117, 140, 141–142, 143, 225–227 Iurkevich, Pamfil, 267 Ivan 3, 177 Ivan the Terrible, 75, 94, 116 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 218, 283 Ivanov-Razumnik, 62 Ivask, Iurii, 4, 105, 155 Ivonina, Olga, 96 Jaeger, Friedrich, 69, 86 James, William, 158, 172 Jeremias, Joachim, 171 Joachim of Fiore, 240 Johnston, Robert, 23, 28, 31, 36, 37–38, 42 Jordheim, Helge, 5–6 Kadlubovskii, Arsenii, 62, 108, 110, 118 Kaganovich, Boris, 91, 144, 145 Kallash, Maria (pseud. M. Kurdiumov), 42–43 Kant, Immanuel, 98, 194, 215, 273, 277, 286 Karamzin, Nikolai, 12, 56, 72–75, 79, 134–135, 271, 290 Kareev, Nikolai, 91, 144 Karpovich, Michael, 19, 55 Karsavin, Lev, 20, 27, 91, 218–219, 270, 287, 290 Kartashev, Anton, 3, 19, 20, 32, 41, 182, 299 Kavelin, Konstantin, 78–80, 268 Kelley, Donald, 61, 64, 66 Kellner, Hans, 15, 17–18, 77 kenoticism, 101–102, 103, 106, 137 Kermode, Frank, 171–172 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 48 Khomiakov, Aleksei, 154, 184–185, 187, 189, 190–191, 207, 220, 241, 246, 271, 272, 278, 292 Khoruzhii, Sergei, 50, 192, 193, 287 Kievan Caves Paterik, 117, 135–138, 139

index Kireeva, Raisa, 78 Kireevskii, Ivan, 70, 117, 150, 153, 199–200, 259, 271, 278 Kirill of Belozero, saint, 113, 117, 140–141 Kirill of Turov, 183 Kizevetter, Aleksandr, 160 Klimoff, Aleksis, 186, 288 Kline, George, 253 Kliuchevskii, Vasilii, 53–54, 55, 56, 72–73, 84–85, 87, 108–110, 116, 119 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 67 Knigge, Armin, 284 Knight, Nathaniel, 72, 108, 148, 232 Kocharovskii, Karl, 45–46 Kodzis, Bronisław, 23 Kojève, Alexandre, 4 Kononova, Margarita, 36 Koselleck, Reinhart, 4–5, 76 Kovalevskii, Maksim, 144 Kovalevskii, Petr, 23, 32, 44–45 Koyré, Alexandre, 3–4 Kroeber, A.L., 67 Kruglov, Aleksandr, 133 Kumykov, Aues, 21 Künkel, Christoph, 154, 155, 156, 158, 160, 161, 162, 172, 173, 179, 193, 198 Kurbskii, Andrei, 116, 178 Kuznetsov, Pavel, 176 LaCapra, Dominick, 5, 113, 268 Lachmann, Renate, 55 Ladd, George Eldon, 171 Lakoff, George, 17–18, 194 Lamennais, Félicité-Robert de, 167 Landmarks (Vekhi) collection, 57, 131, 205, 208, 233, 235 Lappo-Danilevskii, Aleksandr, 62 Lapshin, Ivan, 267 Lavrov, Petr, 70, 235 lay theology, 58–59, 87, 98, 207, 251, 279 Lazarev, V., 253 Lazarevskaia, Iulianiia, 149 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 145 Lelouvier, Yves Noël, 162 Lenin, Vladimir, 27, 41 Leontev, Konstantin, 237, 268, 269, 280, 281 Leonteva, Olga, 209 Lesourd, Françoise, 219 Lettsev, Viktor, 252, 253 Lewis, Bernhard, 58 Life of Anthony, 129

323

Life of Symeon the Stylite, 129 Life of Sabas, 129 Likhachev, Dmitrii, 136, 176 Limonov, Eduard, 49 Liubutin, Konstantin, 263 Livak, Leonid, 23, 24, 40 Lobachevskii, Nikolai, 264 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 74 Lopatin, Lev, 267 Lorenz, Chris, 18 Losskii, Nikolai, 3, 27, 55, 160, 253, 267, 268, 269, 294 Lossky, Vladimir, 255, 288 Lotman, Iurii, 8, 15, 139, 223–224, 296 Lovejoy, Arthur, 60–61, 64, 164 Löwith, Karl, 107, 171, 172, 187, 188 Lowrie, Donald, 32 Lunde, Ingunn, 150 Marcion, “Marcionism,” 234, 236 Makarii (Bulgakov), metropolitan and church historian, 99, 185 Makarii, metropolitan (sixteenth century), 148 Maksim Grek, 178 Mandelbaum, Maurice, 14, 63, 64, 77 Mannheim, Karl, 11 Markovic, Marko, 238 Marrus, Michael, 27 martyrology, see hagiographical mode of representation Masaryk, Tomáš, 32, 286 Maslin, Mikhail, 218 Matich, Olga, 49 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 167 McGinn, Bernhard, 168, 170 Medvedev, Silvestr, 180 Meier, Aleksandr, 92 Meinecke, Friedrich, 76–77, 78, 80, 146, 292 memory, 36, 49–51, 58, 137, 151, 238, 300 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, 7, 28, 41, 42, 169 messianism, 159, 216, 219, 227, 228, 238, 245–250, 257–258 metaphor, metaphorisation, 11, 16–17, 18, 75, 78, 131, 134, 136, 143, 172, 176, 180–182, 194–201, 228–229, 242, 273–275 metonymy, metonymical representation, 11, 107, 116, 142, 172, 197 Meyendorff, John, 103, 186, 255, 288 Meyer, Alfred, 69

324

index

Michelet, Jules, 11, 77 Mickiewicz, Adam, 240, 246 Mihailovic, Alexandar, 131 Mikhail Chernigovskii, prince, 42 Mikhailovskii, Nikolai, 203 Miliukov, Pavel, 2–3, 20, 35, 56, 71–72, 73, 78, 82–84, 85, 87, 153, 160 Miller, Perry, 60 Mink, Louis, 9–10, 15, 17, 18 mission, of exile, 2, 31, 37, 39–51, 86, 95, 97, 100, 103–108, 150–151, 166–167, 211, 250, 258–260, 299 Mjør, Kåre Johan, 22, 85, 233 Mochulskii, Konstantin, 286 Mohyla, Petro, 180–182, 185 Møller, Peter Ulf, 222 Molven, Frode, 190 Morson, Gary Saul, 216 Moscow the Third Rome, 225–226, 275 Murdoch, Paul Champell, 210 Nabokov, Vladimir, 49 narod, narodnost’, 84, 104, 115, 125, 146–148, 149–150, 161, 180, 232–234, 244, 263, 273 narrative, historical, 6, 8–18, 21, 50–51, 59, 74, 76–80, 83–84, 103, 108, 115, 117, 119, 137, 138, 141–143, 145, 146, 148, 163, 165, 166, 170–173, 174–178, 184–185, 187–188, 189–190, 194–196, 212, 216, 219, 225, 227, 229–230, 231, 243, 256, 269–270, 275, 282, 285, 288–290, 291–292, 293, 297–300 narrativity, in historiography, 6, 8–18, 77 national identity, 37–39, 48, 86, 94, 150–151, 161, 177, 208, 221–222, 273–274, 300 nationalism, 38, 108, 114–127, 129–130, 146, 182, 219, 226, 248–249 Nechkina, Militsa, 20 Nekrich, Alexander, 30, 33, 35 Neopatristic school of theology, 255, 288 Nesmelov, Viktor, 185 Nestor, 120–126, 128–130, 136, 147 Neumann, Iver, 57, 127, 256, 257 New City, émigré journal, 97–98, 115, 130, 167 New Journal, émigré journal, 39 Nicholas 1, emperor, 184, 224, 234 Nicholas of Cusa, 290 Nichols, Aidan, 183, 207 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 75 Nikifor, metropolitan, 263

Nikoliukin, Aleksandr, 23, 34 Nikolskii, Nikolai, 136, 147 Nikon, archimandrite, 133 Nikon, patriarch, 180 Nil of Sora, saint, 115, 117, 140, 141, 143, 178, 225 Nivère, Antoine, 3 Nora, Pierre, 300 Norkus, Zenonas, 73 Novikov, Nikolai, 231–232 Obolensky, Dimitri, 115 Odoevskii, Vladimir, 290 Offord, Derek, 131 Old Believers, 180, 221, 224, 226–228 Omelchenko, Nikolai, 21 Onasch, Konrad, 58, 98 orientation, 21, 37, 50, 55, 57, 58, 151, 298 Origen, 191 othering, 57, 127, 156, 257 Orthodox anthropology, 95–96, 206–207 Orthodoxy, 4, 36, 58–59, 87, 101, 106–107, 114, 126, 147–149, 157–158, 160–161, 164, 175, 177, 182, 187, 188, 205, 207, 223, 225, 228, 255–256, 257–259, 271, 275, 278, 293–295, 297 Osipov, N., 214 Ostrowski, Donald, 12, 75 Out From the Depths collection, 205 Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, Dmitrii, 153 Palestinian saints (fifth and sixth centuries), 129–130, 147 Paneiakh, Viktor, 92, 108, 145 Paolini, Mariangela, 46 parabolic projection, 124–126 Pashuto, Vladimir, 19 Pepper, Stephen, 11 Perrie, Maureen, 148 personality (lichnost’), 84–85, 115, 130–131, 165, 205, 233, 249 Peshekhonov, Aleksei, 40 Peskov, Aleksei, 215, 225, 228 Peter the Great, emperor, 74, 75, 104–105, 116, 148, 178, 181, 183, 188, 201, 224, 231, 269, 274, 275 Philokalia, 106, 146, 150, 238 philosophy, notions of, 190–192, 270–278, 290, 293–296 philosophy, in Russia, 203–205, 264, 265 Picchio, Riccardo, 115 Pipes, Richard, 12, 29 Pisarev, Dmitrii, 235, 251

index Pivovar, Efim, 22 Platonov, Sergei, 108 Plekhanov, Georgii, 62 Plimak, Evgenii, 232 plot, 8, 10–17, 100, 113, 117, 142–143, 146, 151, 173, 196, 225, 244 Plotin, 290 Plotnikov, Nikolai, 131, 154, 206 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 185, 189 Pocai, Susanne, 178–179 Podskalsky, Gerhard, 136–137 Polevoi, Nikolai, 74, 75–76, 78, 79 Polotskii, Simeon, 180 Polovtseva, Kseniia, 92 Poltoratskii, Nikolai, 207–208, 213, 216–217, 220, 225, 228, 241, 244, 248 Poole, Randall, 282, 286 Posadskii, Aleksandr and Sergei, 157, 161, 162–164, 166 Priselkov, Mikhail, 119–120 Problems of idealism collection, 205 projection, see metaphor and parabolic projection Prokhorenko, Aleksandr, 21–22 Prokopovich, Feofan, 180 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, 198 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 36, 161, 237, 280 Putnam, George, 281 Radishchev, Aleksandr, 231–232, 243 Radlov, Ernest, 264–265, 283 Raeff, Marc, 20, 22, 23, 30, 31, 33–34, 36, 40, 94, 98, 106, 143–144, 145, 162, 174–175, 183 Ranke, Leopold von, 11, 68, 69, 76, 77 Read, Christopher, 57 Rée, Johnatan, 261–262, 279, 281, 282, 294 referentiality, of historical narrative, 9–10, 18 Reill, Peter Hanns, 76 Renan, Ernest, 65, 101, 300 Renouvier, Charles, 158, 172 Riasanovsky, Nicholas, 19, 35, 156–158, 278 Richards, I.A., 16–17 Richardson, David Bonner, 238 Ricoeur, Paul, 9, 12–18, 84, 200, 230, 274 Rimscha, Hans von, 23, 31 Ritter, Harry, 60, 67 Roberts, Henry, 260 Röhrig, Hermann-Josef, 102 Romanov dynasty, 75

325

Rorty, Richard, 262 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 134 Rozanov, Vasilii, 203, 218, 269–270, 280–281, 294 Rublev, Andrei, 54 Rüsen, Jörn, 9, 20, 50, 58, 69, 86, 298 Russia Abroad, 2, 20, 24, 27, 31–39, 87, 105, 150, 166, 210, 211, 212, 298, 300 Russian Christian Student Movement, 97, 252 Russian culture, émigré notions of, 36–37, 49–50, 57, 72, 100, 107, 151, 157–158, 175–176, 200–201, 257–260, 297–300 Russian idea, notion of, 213, 216–217, 217–220, 230, 237, 241–244, 249 Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, 32, 288 Russian Orthodox Church, 58, 87, 226 Russian Revolution, 1, 2, 7, 20, 27, 35, 43, 54, 91, 92, 94, 104, 106, 157, 167, 169, 208, 209, 224, 239, 244, 267, 282 Russian school of theology, 255, 288, 295 Sabennikova, Irina, 40 Saburova, Tatiana, 232 Said, Edward, 6, 38–39 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 167 sanctity, see holiness Sanders, Thomas, 19 Saunders, David, 78 Savický, Ivan, 23, 28, 31, 32 Savitskii, Petr, 20, 51 Scanlan, James, 265, 266 Schanz, Hans-Jørgen, 62–64 Schelling, Friedrich von, 187, 192, 277, 287 Scherrer, Jutta, 22, 92, 155, 251, 284 schism, see Old Believers Schmemann, Alexander, 255, 288 Schneider, Ulrich Johannes, 64, 261 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 192 Schweitzer, Albert, 171 Second World War, 2, 34, 39, 93, 212, 224, 248–249, 252, 299 Seebohm, Thomas, 269, 294 Segal, Dimitri, 6 Seifrid, Thomas, 278, 287 Selivanova, Iuliia, 102 Serafim of Sarov, 150 Serbienko, Viacheslav, 95, 253 Sergeevich, Vasilii, 78–79 Sergii of Radonezh, saint, 111, 117, 139–142, 143, 150

326

index

Sergii of Starogorod, 188 Ševčenko, Ihor, 120, 155 Shalimov, Petr, 3 Shaw, F. Lewis, 162, 163 Shestov, Lev, 203, 270, 278 Shpet, Gustav, 176, 254, 264, 265–266, 269, 270, 294 Siljak, Ana, 18, 81, 83, 159 Silver Age thought, 21, 44, 50–51, 71, 131, 154–155, 192, 239, 255, 268, 278, 284 Sinitsyna, Nina, 226 Skinner, Quentin, 164 Skobtseva, Elizaveta (Mother Maria), 97 Skoropadsky, Hetman Pavlo, 252 Skovoroda, Hryhorii, 181, 268, 269, 270–271, 290 Slaattelid, Rasmus, 8 Slavophilism, 56, 80, 83, 86, 93, 114, 116, 126, 127, 150, 154, 157, 159, 179, 241–242, 244, 245, 246–247, 258–259, 264, 266, 268, 273, 275, 278, 284 Slesinski, Robert, 288 Smirnov, Igor, 55–56 Smirnov, Sergei, 133 social imaginary, 37, 39, 130, 300 Solivetti, Clara, 46 Solovev, Sergei, 56, 72, 78, 81, 83, 84, 87 Solovev, Vladimir, 71, 126, 186, 191–192, 199, 203, 217–219, 236, 255, 256–257, 264, 268, 269, 270, 282–286, 287–289, 290, 291, 292, 294 Sophia Paleologus, 177 Spencer, Herbert, 80, 144 Spitzer, Leo, 60 St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute, 1, 3, 6, 32, 39, 87, 93, 94, 160, 252, 253 St Vladimir Orthodox Theological Seminary, 94, 161 Städtke, Klaus, 69–71 Stalin, Iosif, 27, 83 state school, 78–79 Stefan of Perm, 111, 114, 117, 125–126 Stepun, Fedor, 27, 40, 47, 93, 97, 102, 207, 213, 215 Stockdale, Melissa, 82 Strauss, David Friedrich, 101 Strémooukhoff, Dimitri, 286 Strub, Christian, 277 Struve, Gleb, 23, 44–45 Struve, Nikita, 23, 32, 36, 211, 213 Struve, Petr, 20, 28–29, 31, 40, 160, 205

Stückrath, Jörn, 12 Stupperich, Robert, 109 Suomela, Julitta, 35 Sutton, Jonathan, 283 Syromiatnikov, Boris, 78 Sysyn, Frank, 162, 164, 165, 182 Tabori, Paul, 29–30 Tareev, Mikhail, 102, 185 task, see mission Tatishchev, Vasilii, 74 Taylor, Charles, 37 text, 4–8, 299–300 Thaden, Edward, 18, 72, 74, 75, 79, 80, 83 The Way, émigré journal, 43–44, 97, 158, 211, 239, 250 Theopemtos, metropolitan, 120 Thomas à Kempis, 209–210, 238 Thomassen, Einar, 113 Thompson, John, 37 Thomson, Francis, 155–156, 162, 179, 183 Thucydides, 62 Tikhon of Zadonsk, 184 Tiutchev, Fedor, 120, 186, 217, 240, 246 Tkachev, Petr, 236 Todorov, Tzvetan, 178 Tolstoi, Dmitrii, 188 Tolstoi, Lev, 185, 215–216, 236, 268, 279, 290 Tolz, Vera, 57, 156, 257 Tønnesson, Johan, 104 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 11, 77, 143 tragedy, tragic mode of representation, 11, 13, 85, 99, 138–145, 148, 151, 173, 299 Troianov, Aleksandr, 164 Trubetskoi, Evgenii, 218–219, 270, 282, 283, 286 Trubetskoi, Nikolai, 19, 20, 51, 195–196 Trubetskoi, Sergei, 267, 270 Turner, Marc, 124, 142 Turner, Victor, 92 Uffelmann, Dirk, 55–56, 101, 127, 199 universal history, see world history usable history, 58 Uspenskii, Boris, 139, 223–224 Vaarlam, abbot, 132 Václav, saint, 122 Valliere, Paul, 58, 98, 131, 255, 271, 288, 295

index van der Zweerde, Evert, 283 Vanchugov, Vasilii, 263 Vandalkovskaia, Margarita, 19–21 Vann, Richard, 9, 14 Vasilev, Vasilii, 111–113 Velichkovskii, Paisii, 184 Vernadskii, Georgii, 2–3, 19, 20, 51, 86 Veyne, Paul, 15, 17–18, 64–65, 72, 95 Vico, Giambattista, 11, 61 Vinogradov, Pavel, 144 Vinogradov, Viktor, 273 Virgil, 7 Vishniak, Mark, 100 Viskovatyi, Ivan, 178 Vladimir Monomakh, prince, 263 Vladimir of Kiev, prince, 123, 136, 221 Vladislavlev, Mikhail, 267 Volkogonova, Olga, 1, 21, 114, 203, 205, 211, 220 Voltaire, 261 Vorozhishcheva, Maria, 160 Vucinich, Alexander, 144, 195 Vvedenskii, Aleksandr, 264–265, 267 Wachtel, Michael, 121 Walicki, Andrzej, 56, 233, 240, 246–247, 280, 294 Walker, Barbara, 92 Walther, Gerrit, 76 Ware, Timothy, 99

327

Weiss, Claudia, 24, 31, 34–35, 36 Westernism, 56, 83, 84, 159, 177, 187, 200, 201, 243, 256, 264, 268, 284 White, Hayden, 9–18, 77, 83, 143, 149, 151, 173, 297–298 Whittaker, Cynthia Hale, 74 Wiederkehr, Stefan, 35, 196, 259 Wilder, Amos, 167–169 Williams, George, 162, 193 Williams, Raymond, 67 Williams, Robert, 23, 31 Windelband, Wilhelm, 262 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 60, 181 world history, 56, 68, 71, 80–85, 98, 107, 169, 172–173, 187, 196, 209, 240, 245, 250 Wrangel, Petr, 27, 30 Yanov, Alexander, 12 YMCA Press, 1, 32, 39 Zaitseva, Nataliia, 114, 145 Zakydalsky, Taras, 182 Zelenin, Aleksandr, 28, 34, 36 Zenkin, Sergei, 69 Zenkovskii, Vasilii, 1, 6, 8, 19, 21, 39, 50, 55, 57, 59, 60, 64, 65, 69, 86–87, 154, 160, 251–296, 297–300 Zernov, Nicholas, 3, 205–206 Znamenskii, Petr, 99, 182