At the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo lamented in a sonnet dedicated to his beloved Vittoria Colonna that in carving sculptures he could only create dead forms and was powerless to create a living thing:My pitiful geniusIn love can call forth only death.

This history of Russian thought was first published in Polish in 1973 and subsequently appeared 2005 in a revised and expanded publication. The current volume begins with Enlightenment thought and Westernization in Russia in the 17<SUP>th century and moves to the religious-philosophical renaissance of first decade of the 20<SUP>th century. This book provides readers with an exhaustive account of relationships between various Russian thinkers with an examination of how those thinkers relate to a number of figures and (...) trends in Western philosophy and in the broader history of ideas. (shrink)

In his book, Vyacheslav P. Shestakov conducts a theoretical reconstruction of the concept of the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian culture. He highlights three typical features that this phenomenon has in common with the European Renaissance: Hellenism, aestheticism and eroticism. In an effort to disprove Omry Ronen’s claim that the Silver Age was an unsuccessful invention of literary scholars, Shestakov calls the Silver Age “a certain intention, viz. a project of the future.” The monograph includes sections on Russian (...) philosophy, painting and ballet. (shrink)

In this article I have dealt with empirical proofs for the Russian religious renaissance which came after the fall of the Soviet socialistic empire and carried on all through the nineties as a pro-religious consensus and a religious belief. Likewise, I have dealt with proofs suggesting certain limitations of the renaissance in question which manifested mainly in irregular fulfillment of religious duties. U ovom clanku autor se bavi empirijskim dokazima za rusku religioznu renesansu koja je nastupila nakon (...) urusavanja sovjetske socijalisticke imperije i kao proreligiozni konsenzus i religijsko verovanje odrzala se tokom 90-ih godina proslog veka. Takodje, autor se bavi i dokazima koji upucuju na izvesna ogranicenja pomenute renesanse, ponajvise izrazena kroz problematicnu redovnost ispunjavanja verskih duznosti. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mikhail Bakhtin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and the Rhetorical Culture of the Russian Third RenaissanceFilipp SapienzaAlthough Mikhail Bakhtin figures centrally in multiculturalism, community, pedagogy, and rhetoric (Bruffee 1986; Welch 1993; Zebroski 1994; Zappen, Gurak, and Doheney-Farina 1997; Mutnick 1996; Halasek 2001, 182; see also Bialostosky 1986) many of his major ideas remain enigmatic and controversial. The elusive aspects of Bakhtin's theories exist in part because rhetoricians know little about Bakhtin's (...) own rhetorical culture. Theorists recognize this problem and call for a reworking of Bakhtin more on his own terms. This call has been made to resolve concerns about Bakhtin's ambivalence toward rhetoric. Since Bakhtin disliked rhetoric, any use of Bakhtin in rhetorical theory is largely a hybrid synthesis of his distinct ideas on poetics, prose, satire, the epic, the novel, and so forth. John Murphy proposes a reconception of Bakhtin closely built around his ambivalence and guided by the question, "what do we [rhetoricians] mean by the concept of a rhetorical tradition?" (2001, 259). The suggestion encourages rhetoricians to take Bakhtin more on his own terms than has been done in the past. Unfortunately, as the word "we" indicates, Murphy reworks Bakhtin primarily in terms of Western ideas about rhetoric. Slavists and "Bakhtinologists" in Russia argue that when talking about Bakhtin, "we" has often meant Western, obscuring the Russian cultural roots of his theories (Kozhinov 1993; Miller and Platter 1993, 118). The privileging of Western perspectives has also been criticized by scholars of other discourse cultures. Discussing American Indian rhetoric, Malea Powell argues that "we" means a Rhetorical Tradition that begins "with the Greeks, goes Roman, briefly sojourns in Italy, then shows up in England and Scotland, hops the ocean to America and settles in" (2002, 397). Differences in interpreting Bakhtin also proceed from translation difficulties between Russian and English. The Russian reader views Bakhtin in more essentialist ways as opposed to the "post-modern give-and-take" theorist of many Western [End Page 123] interpretations (Emerson 1990, 113). Read in the Russian language and from that cultural context, Bakhtin's vocabulary contains "conspicuous" elements of Orthodox Christianity and Slavic nationalist ideas (Kozhinov 1993; Mihailovic 1997) that reveal a Russian theological subtext to his ideas about community and dialogue.In this essay, I provide a reading of Bakhtin against the background of his own rhetorical culture. More specifically, I offer an analysis of an intertextual dialogue about language and community between Bakhtin and the symbolist writer Vyacheslav Ivanov. Scholars identify Ivanov as a poet, philosopher, and teacher who profoundly impacted Bakhtin (Mal'chukova 1992, 55). The Russian symbolists upheld strong nationalist ideals and a linguistic theory rooted in metaphysics (Mirsky 1972, 188). Many Slavists and Russian readers of Bakhtin suspect that Ivanov strongly influenced Bakhtin's rhetoric even though, for reasons unknown but that are suspected to be political, Bakhtin understates his debt to him (Ivanov 2001, 3). Bakhtin was not unlike his contemporaries in sharing an interest and vocabulary that addressed the major threads of symbolism. Read side by side with Ivanov's essays in Russian, Bakhtin's rhetoric displays a mixture of the European, Slavic, and Christian ideals that were in parlance among many Russian theorists in early twentieth-century Russia. Bakhtin and Ivanov give us a glimpse of this rhetorical culture. More specifically, they help us to better understand our appropriations of Bakhtin based on an elucidation of the meaning of specific terms as they existed among Bakhtin's contemporaries.The method that I use requires translation of specific Russian passages into English. Terms and phrases are interpreted against the usage background of others in early twentieth-century Russia. Bakhtin's Slavic-theological connections become evident through the elucidation of these intertextual references. Through this method, a common and accepted practice in Slavic literary studies, the use of key words and phrases are traced in and among texts to identify a discourse among authors and explicate its meaning.1 As Steven Mailloux points out, a "rhetorical hermeneutics" focuses on "the historical sets of topics, arguments, tropes, ideologies, and so forth" that give meaning to rhetoric (1988, 15-16). The approach is necessary due to the unique political and artistic circumstances during the early... (shrink)

In Russian culture, there was neither Scholasticism nor Renaissance, and the problem of faith and reason was formulated, most of all, on the ground of Patristic tradition. This collection of essays explores various dimensions of this alternative Russian account. The book shows the peculiarities of the Orthodox interpretation of faith. It traces the interrelations between Eastern and Western thinkers, and it investigates the heritage of Russian religious philosophy, with a special attention to Pavel Florensky, Sergius Bulgakov, (...) and Georges Florovsky. *** Librarians: ebook available on ProQuest and EBSCO [Subject: Philosophy, Religious Studies, Russian Studies]. (shrink)

This study is an attempt to reconstruct and sum up philosophical interpretations of Stavrogin, the main hero of the classic Dostoevsky’s novel “The Devils”, given by the outstanding Russian religious thinkers in the twentieth century. The author emphasizes that, however different can be their philosophical premises, the discussed interpretations of Dostoevsky’s hero are compatible and complementary. Confronting and, above all, synthesizing different points of view, he tries to grasp the basic historiosophical, anthropological and religious ideas of Russian (...) class='Hi'>renaissance. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to outline the geopolitical concepts of Aleksandr Dugin, the guru of Russian Eurasian geopolitics as a total ideology. After the collapse of the USSR, there was a rapid renaissance of geopolitics in Russia, which was an ideological attempt to rationalise the role and place of the post-Soviet Russian state in the post-Cold War international system. The dynamic development of geopolitics in Russia was also a way for the Russians to overcome the (...) post-imperial trauma and the post-Soviet identity crisis. Geopolitics was to define the global aspirations and goals of the Russian Federation, being the quintessence of postmodern Russian messianism and setting a new historical mission for this state. One of several geopolitical trends in Russia was neo-Eurasianism, whose main ideologist was Aleksandr Dugin. The Russian geopolitician has proceeded to formulate a total ideology based on geopolitics for Russia, which is to constitute an intellectually and conceptually attractive synthesis of all the universalist ideologies practised in this country throughout history. Dugin tries to integrate geopolitics with the metaphysics and philosophy of being, transforming it into a kind of ideocratic sacrum and ideological signpost for the contemporary Russian state. (shrink)

The scope of Russian studies in Poland has grown considerably since 1989. Many texts in this field published in the present decade are pioneer works on such writers as V. Solov’ev and K. Leont’ev, others present synthetic results of recent and current research, such as A History of Russian Thought from Enlightenment to Marxism , Russian Religious - Philosophical Renaissance. An Attempt at a Synthesis . Research centers publish regular series: “Jagiellońskie studia z filozofii rosyjskiej,” “Almanach (...) myśli rosyjskiej,” “Idee w Rosji”. A multi-volume Russian–Polish–English dictionary “Idee w Rosji,” fruit of research by Polish scholars has enjoyed considerable interest. (shrink)

During the intense philosophical and theological renaissance of the Russian Silver Age, the German Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) received a unique appraisal in the work of Semyon Liudwigovich Frank (1877–1950), hailed by some as ‘the greatest Russian philosopher’. This paper will show that five of Frank's central philosophical arguments can be traced directly to Cusa's writings. Once these key arguments are taken together with Frank's own comments about Cusa, it can be concluded that Frank saw himself (...) as Cusa's modern successor, presenting his ideas in a different intellectual context. In this sense, we can speak of Frank as the ‘Russian Cusanus’. The arguments in question include Cusa's docta ignorantia, our knowledge of being, the recognition of absolute being as ‘non‐other’, the identity of possibility and actuality in the absolute, and finally the coincidentia oppositorum. (shrink)

I should like to supplement somewhat the interpretation of the data presented by D.E. Furman. It seems to me that to understand current processes, we must have a clearer idea of the starting point of the present intellectual movement—the "mass atheism" of the preceding period. What was this mass atheism?

The present paper is devoted to the relation between changing historical identity of Russian Formalists in the second half of the 1920s and their individual evolution — as writers, members of society, figures of culture. Formalists with their aggressive inclination to modernity are opposed here to structuralists, the bearers of a conservative, traditional ideology (relating to the idea of Revolution). It could be explained by the specific “romantic” identity of Russian Formalists whose purpose was to appropriate cultural values (...) renamed and renewed by their revolutionary theory. As a revolutionary ideology, formalism was imported from the West. But the Stalinist “Renaissance” made the idea of Revolution both in mind and society senseless at the end of the 1920s. That is why Russian Formalism lost its mainstream positions and began to work out a new, adapted form of intellectual resistance (private life, domestic literature) in the next decade. (shrink)

The current stage of the development of amateur stayer running practices can be characterized as personality-building, since the main goals of runners (especially marathon runners and super marathon runners) are not so much related to strengthening health, as to the sphere of personal improvement and self-knowledge: the development of will, character, testing yourself in an extreme situation, testing previously inaccessible emotions and states of consciousness. The object of the study is ego texts (books for a wide audience, including the online (...) "samizdat") of modern Russian running enthusiasts. The method of studying these texts is the biographical method, which makes it possible to determine the multidimensional influence of running activity on fundamental changes in personality development and the formation of her life path. The analyzed biographies inherit both the confessional tradition of Augustine (the contrast of the aimless and vicious "pre-race" life, as well as the traumatic experience of running neophyte and significant achievements in many areas of personal development after the adoption of the values expressed through running Coubertin's "religio athleticae"), and the adventurous and heroic biographical tradition noted by M. M. Bakhtin, inherent in the Renaissance, as well as romanticism and Nietzscheanism with their focus on the formation (in our case, through a stayer run) of a new (or "super-") person. The qualitative result of running activity is the achievement by the subject of a new stage of development – a person running (homo currens), which is characterized by activity, mobility, heroism, asceticism, striving for maximum self-realization, achieving harmony of body and spirit. Homo currens opposes both virtual pastime and the fetishization of comfort culture, suggesting, referring to the concept of Viktor Frankl, filling life with new meanings and values through overcoming the inevitable suffering for a stayer run. Amateur running is considered by writers as a publicly available and effective means of gaining physical, mental and social well-being, which expresses its humanistic essence and gives philosophical and anthropological significance to the works under study. (shrink)

Public interest in the legacy of Russian religious philosophy, and above all in the legacy of V. S. Solovyov, reached its peak at the turn of the 1990s, after which it declined. As indirect evidence of this, we can note the remaining unrealized idea of installing a monument to the philosopher, slowing down the pace of work on the release of a complete collection of his works, and reducing the number of works dedicated to him. The year of the (...) centenary since the death of Solovyov was symptomatic, when the authoritative representatives of the Russian philosophical community, S.S. Khoruzhiy and P.P. Gaidenko made an ambiguous assessment of Solovyov's ideological heritage and its significance for the subsequent development of Russian socio-philosophical and religious-theological thought. In the article the statement that the genealogy of the critical interpretation of Solovyov's legacy goes back to the works of the philosopher and theologian G.V. Florovsky is substantiated. Florovsky influence in Russian studies, as well as in post-Soviet Russia in general is difficult to overestimate. In this regard, the author draws attention to the ideological evolution of Florovsky, which gives the key to his interpretation of Solovyov's philosophy. The analysis showed that Florovsky's critical reinterpretation of Solovyov's legacy had both a theoretical, theological, and doctrinal character, and was caused by certain socio-psychological factors related to the generational conflict between representatives and heirs of the Russian religious and philosophical Renaissance of the early XX century. It is demonstrated that the reception of Solovyov by Florovsky was very significant, influential and archetypal for Russian religious and philosophical thought, both in Russia and abroad. (shrink)

The author examines, historically and theoretically, issues related to the state and current tendencies of post-Soviet Russian philosophy. The accent falls on the meta-philosophical question, what is philosophy?, or as the Russians often say, what is philosophizing?. In the Russian case, this question has presently to be handled in a cultural context ridden with a sense of discontinuity following the Soviet collapse. The author sketches some concepts intended to shed light on the nature of the relation between a (...) philosophical culture and the wider socio-cultural context in which it is embedded. The model is applied to the case of post-Soviet philosophy in order to see if and to what extent the logic of Soviet philosophizing and its place in the Soviet socio-cultural order has affected current philosophical tendencies in Russia, above all at the meta-philosophical level. The author concludes with a summary and commentary of the views of A.S. Akhiezer. (shrink)

In the treatise “Suprematism. The World as Objectlessness or Eternal Peace” (1922), Kazimir Malevich positions himself as a “bookless philosopher” who did not consider theories of other philosophers. In fact, the treatise contains a large number of references to philosophers belonging to different traditions. A careful reading shows the extent to which Malevich’s theory is linked to the Russian religious philosophy of the early twentieth century. In my view, Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky—philosophers of “Religious Renaissance,” as (...) well as some other intellectuals—acquaint avant-gardists with Neoplatonic conceptions of apophasis. Malevich had access to ideas of fourteenth-century theologian Meister Eckhart, and I will refer to two sources to demonstrate this, including Margarita Sabashnikova’s translation of Eckhart and works of Sergei Bulgakov. Without any reference, Malevich retells the concepts of Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, and Gregory Palamas. I will demonstrate parallels between the treatise on Suprematism and Meister Eckhart’s Sermons concerning the concepts of apophaticism, Platonism, and Nothingness. I will also touch on the theme of Divine Light in the theology of Palamas (fourteenth century) to show the diversity of the avant-garde’s sources of inspiration. (shrink)

This work was originally published in 1902 & marked a watershed in the Russian Silver age, a vibrant cultural renaissance.

This paper analyzes the problem of Western perceptions of one of the most original branches of the Russian Philosophical Renaissance that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century: namely, the so called Russian Religious Philosophy. This problem still possesses contemporary relevance, owing to the fact that Russian philosophy continues to be engaged in a search for self-identification in respect of Western philosophical contexts. The paper shows that “Russian Religious Philosophy” is perceived by Western thinkers (...) not only as “an exotic cultural phenomenon,” but also as an equal partner in a dialogue: it is considered a significant philosophical achievement, meeting all generally accepted criteria of philosophical creativity. The German Catholic philosopher Peter Ehlen’s monograph on the subject of the religious philosophy of Semyon Lyudvigovich Frank will furnish us, here, with an example of just such an approach. The author of the monograph approaches his subject as something which he himself stands in an essential connection to—something which he, as a researcher, is in a peculiar spiritual communion with. A common spiritual experience of the religious perception of reality determines both Ehlen’s interest in Frank and the specific character of the research undertaken by him. The position of researcher, expected to maintain a certain distance from his or her subject matter, is replaced by that of a co-thinker, engaged in co-experiencing and understanding in depth the ideas of the particular philosopher under examination. The result of this approach is a new synthesis created by Ehlen on the basis of Frank’s philosophy. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the problem of Western perceptions of one of the most original branches of the Russian Philosophical Renaissance that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century: namely, the so called Russian Religious Philosophy. This problem still possesses contemporary relevance, owing to the fact that Russian philosophy continues to be engaged in a search for self-identification in respect of Western philosophical contexts. The paper shows that “Russian Religious Philosophy” is perceived by Western thinkers (...) not only as “an exotic cultural phenomenon,” but also as an equal partner in a dialogue: it is considered a significant philosophical achievement, meeting all generally accepted criteria of philosophical creativity. The German Catholic philosopher Peter Ehlen’s monograph on the subject of the religious philosophy of Semyon Lyudvigovich Frank will furnish us, here, with an example of just such an approach. The author of the monograph approaches his subject as something which he himself stands in an essential connection to—something which he, as a researcher, is in a peculiar spiritual communion with. A common spiritual experience of the religious perception of reality determines both Ehlen’s interest in Frank and the specific character of the research undertaken by him. The position of researcher, expected to maintain a certain distance from his or her subject matter, is replaced by that of a co-thinker, engaged in co-experiencing and understanding in depth the ideas of the particular philosopher under examination. The result of this approach is a new synthesis created by Ehlen on the basis of Frank’s philosophy. (shrink)

The topic of this article is the convergence of the fundamental theoretical intuitions of two independent currents of Christian philosophy at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Italian Catholic spiritualism and the internally diversified current of the Russian religious philosophical Renaissance proved to be convergent in their ontological realism based on the metaphysics of cognition. This consonance undermines the stereotype about the total difference between the Russian Orthodox and the Western Catholic mentality. The article tries (...) to show that these two denominations both drew inspiration from the Patristic heritage and that, contrary to all appearances, Russian religious philosophy owes much to the Augustinian tradition. The paper reminds the discovery of this convergence made by Vladimir Ern, and discusses certain elements of the teachings of Vladimir Solovyev and Evgenii Troubetzkoy in comparison with the basic philosophical intuitions of the Italian philosopher Antonio Rosmini. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of (...) the Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted. (shrink)

This study is an attempt to reconstruct and sum up philosophical interpretations of Stavrogin, the main hero of the classic Dostoevsky’s novel “The Devils”, given by the outstanding Russian religious thinkers in the twentieth century. The author emphasizes that, however different can be their philosophical premises, the discussed interpretations of Dostoevsky’s hero are compatible and complementary. Confronting and, above all, synthesizing different points of view, he tries to grasp the basic historiosophical, anthropological and religious ideas of Russian (...) class='Hi'>renaissance. (shrink)