Abstract

In order to understand what happened to Russian philosophy in our country, let us perform a thought experiment: let us imagine that the same thing happened to Russian literature. That is, that we were left with only "revolutionary democrats" and the writers in agreement with them—the materialist atheists. To keep the experiment pure and simple, let us take only the greatest names. Thus we will publish, esteem, and study only "progressive" writers in the above sense. Only two writers would perhaps remain: Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Nikolai Nekrasov, and even with these two we would be stretching the point a bit—Shchedrin is after all the author of Provincial Sketches [Gubernskie ocherki] and Nekrasov is the author of Vlas, in which there is so much love for holy Rus' with its God's fools [iurodivye] and its beggars. Now let us look at whom we would leave out, whom we would not publish or study. First, of course, there are Tolstoi and Dostoevskii; their religiosity leaves not the slightest doubt