Philosophy in Russia From Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev

Frederick C. Copleston is the highly regarded author of an authoritative nine-volume history of philosophy. He now adds a special and very comprehensive volume on philosophy in Russia, which covers in detail the 18th century up to Lenin and the post-Stalin period, in the USSR and abroad. This project was particularly difficult to achieve, and it is worth noting the care taken to structure each chapter around a stage of this globally reiterated thought. After the confrontation between the West and Russia, the starting point of the modern philosophical enterprise, we see the rise of Slavophilism, then the Decembrists, then Populism. Finally, traversing the great thoughts of Dostoyevsky and his contemporaries in the religious domain, we arrive at the momentous crisis that is the rise of Marxism from Plekhanov to Lenin and beyond. And when freedom of thought became impossible in Russia, Russian philosophy emerged amidst the challenges and the aura of exile: Lossky, Berdyaev, Schestov, and others embraced the spiritualist and Christian impulse, simultaneously stifled by the theoretical and practical atheism of the Marxist and nationalist movement. In any case, this book is both an original and classic undertaking. It assumes an astonishing knowledge of a little-known current of philosophy. As such, it renders a signal service concerning the relationship between philosophy and history in a particularly important and difficult cultural domain.