Russian philosophy came late and arrived in a hurry. In the 1830s, Pyotr Chaadaev’s Philosophical Letter declared that Russia had contributed nothing to humanity — and the scandal launched a century of debate between Westernizers, who wanted Russia to follow Europe’s path of reason, science and liberty, and Slavophiles, who believed Russia’s Orthodox faith and peasant commune held a truth the West had lost.
In the 1860s a new generation — Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev — embraced materialism, utilitarianism and revolution. Turgenev called them nihilists (Russian Nihilism). Against them, and against the whole rationalist project, stood Fyodor Dostoevsky; beside them, in his own way, Leo Tolstoy, who rejected both state and church for a Christianity of non-resistance.
Unusually, Russia’s deepest philosophy was written in fiction. The great question of the age — Chto delat’? — “What is to be done?” — was the title of a novel by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, of a treatise by Tolstoy and of a pamphlet by Lenin. To understand the Russian Revolution, read Demons.
At the turn of the century, the “Silver Age” produced religious philosophers — Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Lev Shestov, Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky — many expelled by Lenin on the “philosophers’ ships” of 1922.
Map of Influence
who answered whom, inside this roomThinkers & Authors
2
Nikolai Chernyshevsky
Radical critic and author of What Is to Be Done? — the utopian novel of “rational egoism” that inspired Lenin and provoked Dostoevsky’s Underground Man.
Leo Tolstoy
The Russian giant of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, who in mid-life fell into a crisis of meaning and reinvented himself as a prophet of non-violence and simple Christian love.
Works
3What Is to Be Done?
Chernyshevsky’s prison-written utopian novel of “new people” and rational egoism — badly written, enormously influential, the target of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man.
A Confession
Tolstoy’s account of his mid-life crisis — at the height of fame he could not answer “why live?” and nearly killed himself, until he found meaning in the faith of simple people.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Tolstoy’s novella of a respectable judge who, dying of a trivial injury, realizes that his correct, comfortable life was a lie — and finds, at the last moment, the light.
Ideas
1Schools & Movements
1Coming to the Library
12 pages being writtenVoices
quotations from this traditionAll happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.
Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.
The syllogism he had learnt — “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal” — had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself.
What if my whole life has really been wrong?
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.