Russian-Philosophy

Russian philosophy is one of Europe’s great national traditions — and one of its most singular. It was born late, in the nineteenth century, and not in the academic, systematic mold that shaped Germany from Kant to Hegel, but interwoven with literature, theology, and political urgency. Its central problems are not primarily epistemological but existential and ethical: the meaning of history, Russia’s destiny between East and West, human freedom in the face of evil, the possibility of a just community. It is no accident that its most influential philosophical texts include novels — those of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy — and essays written by exiles, prisoners, and priests. ...

Mikhail Bakhtin Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (16 November 1895, Oryol — 7 March 1975, Moscow) was a philosopher of language and a theorist of literature and culture. Marginalized and almost unknown during his lifetime in the Soviet Union — arrested and sent into exile in 1929, he taught for decades at provincial universities — he was rediscovered from the 1960s onward and became one of the most influential Russian thinkers in the world across the humanities. He was the center of the so-called Bakhtin Circle, which also included Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (the authorship of some works signed by them is a matter of scholarly debate). ...

Nikolai Berdiáev Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (18 March 1874, Kyiv — 24 March 1948, Clamart, France) was a Russian religious and political philosopher, often described as a “Christian existentialist.” Of aristocratic origin, he began as a Marxist — he was even internally exiled under the tsarist regime for his activities — but broke early with materialism toward idealism and Orthodoxy. He took part in the critical collection Vekhi (1909). Expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922, in the episode of the “philosophers’ ships,” he lived in Berlin and then in Clamart, near Paris, where he edited the journal Put and became the best-known voice of Russian thought in exile. He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. ...

Vladímir Soloviov Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (28 January 1853, Moscow — 13 August 1900, the Uzkoye estate near Moscow) was a philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic — the first Russian thinker to build a comprehensive metaphysical system and the founder of the tradition of Russian religious philosophy. The son of the great historian Sergei Solovyov, he was a friend of Dostoevsky and a central figure in the intellectual life of his time. His work cast its shadow over the entire following generation — from Berdyaev and Bulgakov to Russian poetic Symbolism. ...