1 Introduction: On Russian Thought and Intellectual Tradition
Part I Russian Philosophical Thought
2 Politics and Enlightenment in Russia
3 Russian Religious Philosophy: The Nature of the Phenomenon, Its Path, and Its Afterlife
4 Russian Political Philosophy: Between Autocracy and Revolution
5 Between Aristocratism and Artistry: Two Centuries of the Revolutionary Paradigm in Russia
6 Kant and Kantianism in Russia: A Historical Overview
7 Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Russia
8 Vladimir Solovyov: Philosophy as Systemic Unity
9 Natural Sciences and the Radical Intelligentsia in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
10 Lev Shestov’s Philosophy of Freedom
11 Nikolai Berdyaev’s Philosophy of Creativity as a Revolt Against the Modern Worldview
12 Lenin and His Controversy over Philosophy: On the Philosophical Significance of Materialism and
Empiriocriticism
13 Russian Marxism and Its Philosophy: From Theory to Ideology
14 Between East and West: Russian Identity in the Émigré Writings of Ilya Fondaminsky and Semyon Portugeis
15 Ivan A. Ilyin: Russia’s “Non-Hegelian” Hegelian
16 Gustav Shpet’s Path Through Phenomenology to Philosophy of Language
17 Evald Ilyenkov: Philosophy as the Science of Thought
18 The “Men of the Sixties”: Philosophy as a Social Phenomenon
19 The Activity Approach in Late Soviet Philosophy
20 A Return to Tradition: The Epistemological Style in Russia’s Post-Soviet Philosophy
Part II Philosophy in Dialogue with Literature and Art
21 The Russian Novel as a Medium of Moral Reflection in the Long Nineteenth Century
22 Nikolai Gogol, Symbolic Geography, and the Invention of the Russian Provinces
23 Belinsky and the Sociality of Reason
24 The Vocations of Nikolai Grot and the Tasks of Russian Philosophy
25 Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky: Together in Opposition
26 Tolstoy’s Philosophy of Life
27 “Teaching of Life”: Tolstoy’s Moral-Philosophical Aesthetics
28 Osip Mandelstam’s Poetic Practice and Theory and Pavel Florensky’s Philosophical Contexts
29 Future-in-the-Past: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Thought Between Heritage and Reception
30 Bakhtin, Translation, World Literature
31 Alexei F. Losev’s Mythology of Music as a Development of the Hermeneutics and Sociology of Music
32 The Young Marx and the Tribulations of Soviet Marxist-Leninist Aesthetics
33 Mikhail Sholokhov, Andrei Platonov, and Varlam Shalamov: The Road to Hell in Twentieth-Century
Russian Literature
34 Yuri Lotman and the Moscow-Tartu School of Semiotics: Contemporary Epistemic and Social Contexts
35 Art as an Instrument of Philosophy
Part III Afterword
36 Russian Thought and Russian Thinkers
Marina F. Bykova is Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University, USA, and editor-in-chief of the journals Studies in East European Thought and Russian Studies in Philosophy.
Michael N. Forster is Alexander von Humboldt Professor, Chair in Theoretical Philosophy, and Co-director of the International Center for Philosophy, North Rhine Westphalia at Bonn University, Germany.
Lina Steiner is a Research Associate at the International Center for Philosophy, North Rhine Westphalia and a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Literature at Bonn University, Germany.
This volume is a comprehensive Handbook of Russian thought that provides an in-depth survey of major figures, currents, and developments in Russian intellectual history, spanning the period from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. Written by a group of distinguished scholars as well as some younger ones from Russia, Europe, the United States, and Canada, this Handbook reconstructs a vibrant picture of the intellectual and cultural life in Russia and the Soviet Union during the most buoyant period in the country's history. Contrary to the widespread view of Russian modernity as a product of intellectual borrowing and imitation, the essays collected in this volume reveal the creative spirit of Russian thought, which produced a range of original philosophical and social ideas, as well as great literature, art, and criticism. While rejecting reductive interpretations, the Handbook employs a unifying approach to its subject matter, presenting Russian thought in the context of the country's changing historical landscape. This Handbook will open up a new intellectual world to many readers and provide a secure base for its further exploration.