Abstract

All of the principal tendencies in philosophy were represented in Russia during the brief period of the "religious and philosophical renaissance." However, at that time [the early twentieth century] a quite independent philosophical movement-the metaphysics of total-unity [vseedinstvo]-stood at the focus of philosophical development [in Russia]. That metaphysics was based on one of the most essential intuitions of Russian spirituality, namely, the conviction that there is a wholeness in nature and a harmonious unity of all existence. The idea of total-unity was originally expressed in philosophical terms by Vladimir Solov'ev during the 1870s. And at the beginning of the present century, Pavel Florenskii gave a new impulse to this idea with his symbolic philosophy