LIST OF MAIN FIGURES

Russian Idea Lecture Outline.

Read these notes and use them to answer the following questions (in combination with what you have done this semester, and drawing on what was said in the lecture too).

1. What is the connection between Left and Right Hegelianism and the Slavophile-Westernizer debate in early 19th century Russian thought? Who are the main thinkers in each camp, and what is the outline of each position?

2. What do historians mean when they refer to Russia as a self-colonizing nation? (Hint: the Russian peasant is sometimes seen as equivalent to the Indian native in the British empire).

3. How does this comparison help us understand the development of Russian thought when compared to what we have seen of 19th century Asian thought (India, China, Middle East)? What are the similarities and differences between Asian and Russian thought? Draw on some thinkers to establish your comparison (especially Leontiev, Danilevsky and Eurasianism).

4. What was inadequate about the formula "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality" as a way of creating a unified Russian identity under Nicholas I ? To what extent did a later philosophy such as Eurasianism overcome these defects?

5. How was Nicolai Fedorov's thought a bridge (as I termed it in the lecture) between Christian thought and modern secular thought?

6. What Fedorovan or other 19th century elements can you detect in Andrei Platonov's poems?

7. There were elements in Tolstoy's thought that Lenin and Asmus (a Soviet philosopher) found compatible with communism. But there are also elements which contradict Marxism. Using your own knowledge of Tolstoy and the notes here, try to determine what those elements are.

8. What is Khomiakov's idea of sobornost? How might it be given a political reading?

9. Drawing on the short notes on Dostoevsky here, any knowledge you might have of Dostoevsky, and with the help of your seminar teacher, answer the following:

- why have some seen Dostoevsky as a philosopher, what philosophical elements are apparent in his writings and ideas?

- Dostoevsky's famous "Tale of the Grand Inquisitor" has a religious and potentially political meaning: what are those meanings?

- why do you think Dostoevsky was particularly disliked by the Soviets?

NOTES

These notes are only partial, they mix some historical background and some biography, ideas of different thinkers. You don't have to read them in full, but only to answer the above questions. You can also draw on the lecture and your own knowledge.

Nicholas I:

- N was advised of the need for reform, but did not trust the ministries peopled by now distrusted aristocrats to carry it out

- he decided to reanimate the personal element in monarchy by creating a personal chancellery that he would supervise; it was a return to non-institutional 'benevolent' intervention, that Peter in theory if not practice had tried to replace by objective institutional govt

- An initial attempt to reform serfdom failed due to inefficiency, and by 1842 N had concluded that: "Serfdom in its present form is an evil obvious to all; to touch it now would of course be an even more ruinous evil."

- 1833, a circular to officials by education minister, formulating for the first time since Ivan IV a national ideology: "...the education of the people be conducted in the joint spirit of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality."

- the last (narodnost) a sort of attempt to include in Russia a European post-French rev equivalent of nationalism, then sweeping the continent. [Interesting, as the philosophers who took it up also gave it a German-romantic hue] But did it mean that only Russians were involved in empire, or that the Russian people somehow legitimated the emperor?

- the first, Orthodoxy was problematic: 1/2 the pop was non-Orthodox, and the church was weakened by Peter's and Catherine's attacks on it.

- hence, right till 1905 the only truly unifying aspect of the formula was 'autocracy'. Its main supporting institution was the army, glorified in 1812. As long as it won battles in Europe it had respect; but even so, it was expensive, did not succeed in uniting peasants, landowners or in making peasants love it, and many people thought that a professional rather than conscripted army would make it more efficient - such an ethos was dangerous: it lay behind the Decembrist revolt in fact.

- 1783 Russian Academy founded; after 1812 Russian used by aristocracy more; literary Russian being created, to replace Church Slavonic. Karamzin, History of the Russian State (1804-1826) one of the first works to be written in formal, French-syntax-like Russian language about a serious subject. It glorified autocracy; it was the first stage in the Russian attempt to create an "imagined community for an educated nineteenth century audience". (Hoskings). This audience was formed by hostesses, patrons and literary salons on the Parisian model.

- But this new Russian educated elite with its French models in reformed Russian language was separate from the Slavonic church, and the coarse Russian of the peasantry.

- Pushkin: Eugeny Onegin: "the characters ...understand and misunderstand one another through the cultural filters of Byron, German idealism and English romantic novels." But Pushkin also draws on folk elements, so there is some element of the imported W Eur culture going out to meet the native one. Pushkin "the bard of the Russian empire at its apogee."

- Pushkin wondered why Decembrists had failed, was Russia so different? He founded Sovremmenik, the leading thick professional (it paid) literary journal for the next few decades.

- monthly journals: could be up to 700 pages an edition: natural science, literature, art, scholarly books in serial, political and social commentary. Cp English journals, which were exclusively literary. In Russia, to evade the censor, much political and social thought was couched in artistic language; the censor, a member of polite society himself, had a harder time objecting.

- to avoid N's 3rd Department, gatherings were small, intimate: student garrets, a small room in an aristocratic townhouse: friendship, honesty, sharing of feelings united these kruzhki even over and above social class (the formation of a new classless intellectual class). Annenkov even compared kruzhki to the village obshchina! But also bitterness and competition.

- Vissarion Belinsky, the son of a provincial army doctor and hence of lower social standing, in Otechestvennie Zapiski and Soveremmenik, in 1840s put his view of literature not as entertainment but as a moral force capable of forming and saving the nation. Literature was the vehicle through which the World Spirit would shape the Russian nation into self-consciousness, and help Russia make its unique contribution to mankind and world culture. A Hegelian.

- One q dominated all: What is Russia? [The Russia Question]. Chadaaev's answer: suspended between Asia and Europe, Russia is a loss and has contributed nothing to either.

- the Slavophiles came up with their own answer in the persons of Ivan Kireevsky and Alexei Khomiakov: studying the Greek fathers, Kireevsky argued that Russia did have its own native culture, it derived from Orthodoxy and the Byzantine church. The popes' greed for secular power and Protestants' excessive rationalism had eroded Christianity in the West, and Russia was the guardian of the Christian faith.

- Khomiakov: sobornost - unity in multiplicity vs Western rationalism, secularism, economic utilitarianism.

- Konstantin Aksakov pointed to the village mir as the best exemplar of sobornost: "a moral choir in which one voice is not lost but is heard in the harmony of all voices."

- but though conservatives did not support autocracy as is: objected to interposition of Germanized bureaucracy between people and tsar. the bureaucracy also replaced the necessary posmestny sobor for the church; also wanted to reinstate parish council, elected priest, run own finances etc.

- the Westernizers were also Hegelian, looking to see Russia become highest incarnation of European culture. Both were steeped in ressentiment against a superior West they wanted to compete with. Herzen, an ambivalent Westernizer: "nos amis les ennemis".

- Konstantin Kavelin in 187, long paper: 'A Brief Survey of the Juridical Way of Ancient Rus.' Asserted that the rodovoi (kinship) principle as the basis for legal consciousness had long ago been replaced by the individual principle, thanks to Xty and to reforms carried out by the state, esp Peter the Great. The strong state responsible for progress, civilization, and paradoxically, individual liberty in Russia.

- Slavophile rebuttal by Moscow landowner Yuri Samarin. Debate involved in sharpening q about eman of serfs: Kavelin spoke out for gradual social change impelled by a benevolent reformist monarchy, designed to protect private economic enterprise and the position of the landed gentry as the guarantee of culture and civilization (like Greyvs? Russian liberalism).

- Herzen led the extermization of the Westernizer position, rejecting autocracy, serfdom and police arbitrariness. However his journey to Europe in 1848 coincided with the bourgeois revolutions there. The high Provence walls topped with glass to keep out people "affronted my Slavic soul" showing the Frenchman's attachment to private property. He saw Republican General Cavaignac crushing a workers' uprising in Paris - this convinced him that bourgeois freedom was mercenary, egotistical and repressive - more or less as the Slavophiles contended.

- He turned to praise for the commune too (before he had scorned the Slavophiles for this): "The commune saved the people from Mongolian barbarism and from imperial civilization, from the gentry with its European veneer and from the German bureaucracy. Communal organization, though severel shaken, withstood the interference of the state. It has survived fortunately until the development of socialism in Europe." Contact with European socialism would be beneficial for the commune and for workers' artel, rigidified by "lifeless Asiatic crystallizations".

- he became the founder of a distinctive type of Russian socialism, which combined Westernizing and Slavophile elements, and he preached "land and freedom" (later Lenin's call). Disillusioned by the revolutions he had seen in Europe he did not preach revolution for Russia but hoped, like Kavelin, that the monarch would launch gradual reforms that would bear fruit. He lost the support of radicals for that position.

- he set up The Free Russian Press in London in 1852, and published Kolokol, said to have been reading for high officials who wanted to know what their subordinates were concealing from them.

- the kruzhki of 1830-1850 played a major role in Russian cultural life. they replaced hierarchy and patronage, with cooperation and exchange of ideas among equals. Out of the kruzhki came Russia's greatest writers, liberals, government officials, and principle revolutionary thinkers.

- Crimean War: 1853-56. Russia needs Bosphorus, trying to maintain its right to protector of Christians in the Ottoman Empire, vs establishment of a Latin patriarchate in Jerusalem. Defending that demand Prince Menshikov travelled to Constantinople, and asserted that Russia had rights over protection of 40% of the Ottoman population. The other European powers saw this as a clear intent to destroy Turkey and take over Constantinople, esp as Russia backed it up with military forces on the Danube until the claim was guaranteed. Thus Nicholas found himself at odds with Ottomans, and French and British sent troops to destroy the war ships at their base in Sevastopol. This they accomplished but only after two years of heavy fighting. The Treaty of Paris (1856) removed protection of Xians to the European powers, and R's right to maintain a fleet in the Black Sea was revoked. The ineffcient conduct of the war cast serious questions about the Russian empire's future; also, the episode showed that diplomacy based on religious fervor and the attempt to gain allies on a potential enemy's territory, which had served it well in dealing with eg the Tatars, had disastrous consequences applied to Europe.

Alexander II.

- though a conservative A II was pressured by advisors to begin reforming the system after the disaster of the C War. Ethnic and civic strategies were two policies that were in fact contradictory: one increased civil society, the other tried to create unity through Russification. The idea was to shift from a society based on hierarchy, kinship, patronage, tribute, state service to one based on merit, personal rights, rule of law, taxation.

- The Church: a priestly caste - aristocrats loss of status, peasants no education, hence an employment and social security agency for sons and daughters of priests. If sons of priests did not become priests they were demoted into a lower tax-paying order.

-1762-4, monastery lands had been confiscated so reducing church's ability to help in charitable ways; compared to the West (and Baptists, Lutherans and Catholics in the empire), it's charitable work was vanishing. (John of Kronstadt an exception).

- But there was a remarkable revival associated with the hesychasts. 1782 St Nicodemus the Hagiorite published the Philokalia on Athos, which was translated by Paisius Velichkovsky and published in St Petersburg in 1793. Paisii founded a monastery in Molodavia where hesychasm was practiced. It served as a refuge for monks whose houses had been closed, or who were disillusioned by secular nature of current monastic regime in Russian itself.

- Metropolitan Gavriil of St Petersburg founded a skete (hermitage) at Sarov. Here Serapahim turned hesychasm from a personal practice into a social teaching: "Learn to be peaceful and thousands around you will find salvation." [The goal of Christian life: the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. The uncreated light. Visit of Nicholas Motovilov.]

- Metropolitan Philaret was another active figure: he created a commission to translate the Bible into Russian and wrote an accessible catechesis. Also engaged in dialogue with Pushkin and is said to have drafted Alexander's law on the emancipation of the serfs.

- between 1828-1911 3 startsy of the Optyina Pustyna monastery (Leonid, Makarii, Amvrosii) received visitors and acted as a centre of spirituality for questing intellectuals as well as peasants. Kireevsky, Gogol, Soloviev, Leontiev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Florensky and others went.

- FMD spent 3 days in 1878 at OP after the death of his son and returned greatly comforted after talking to elder Amvrosii. He became Fr Zosima in Brothers Karamazov.

- the synod had an ambiguous attitude towards starchestvo, as FMD implies in BK.

RUSSIAN SOCIALISM:

Western doctrines, but also influenced by the Russian notion of "joint responsibility". It elevated to an ideal the egalitarian, self-contained and participatory peasant land commune and workers' artel.

Bakunin, son of a Tver landowner who came to socialism through Hegel: the urge to destroy is creative. Russian autocracy is the most oppressive in Europe and so it is there that it will be overthrown and a new manifestation of the spirit shown. Slavs are predominantly peaceable and agricultural, Germans individualistic and rationalistic. "Living in their separate and independent communes, governed according to patriarchal customs by elders, but on an elective basis, and all making use of the commune's land, they put into practice...the idea of human brotherhood." [the mir was distributive and communal, but also extremely smothering; also: Germans had their own fantasies about the communal ur-life of their ancestors, not to mention similar romantic dreams among the English, Scots and Irish.]

Chernyshevsky: What is to be done? A novelisation of Herzen's ideas on gradual reform. Serialized in Sovremmenik and passed by the censor in 1862. It is about an group of young women who have broken away from their patriarchal families to form a sewing artel. A shadowy group of young radicals offers them support in the background (no detail for fear of censor). "Rakhmetov, their leader, trains himself by an ascetic regime of theoretical study, body-building, moderate food and abstention from sex. One might say that in him, the Petrine ideal - the selfless official working tirelessly for improvement - combined with that of the Orthodox monastery and the socialist phalanstere." This influenced Lenin.

Revolutionary groups: date from 1860s, spurred by disappointment with emancipation edict. Karakazov attempted to assasinate A II in 1866. Nechaev: a revolutionary is one who has broken every tie with the world and every ethical committment, a nihilist. He created a vast network of cells, embroiled money out of Bakunin in Switzerland, and persuaded one cell to murder one of their members who was a traitor. His trial in 1872 was made public, the police thinking it would repel people, but it in fact inspired them with the fanatical committment of Nechaev. FMD's Stavrogin and The Devils is based on this.

Lavrov, 1869 - Historical Letters. Intellectuals owed their learning to the sweat and toil of the masses and thus owed them a duty to go out and educate them. Revolution would ultimately have to be the task of the people themselves. But no blind destruction, contra Bakunin. Instead the level of the peasants must be raised. The 1870s became the decade of xozhdenie v narod, targeting Old Believers, sectarians, as natural opponents of the regime; however, these had long become conservative. The narodniki: women wore masculine clothes, men kept their hair long, a blurring of gender distinctions, and their dress imitated peasant dress. They abandoned their student careers, sundered respectable ties, and became like missionaries in darkest Russia: the village. Often they would learn a trade that could make them useful in the villages. Generally it has been held that villagers rejected them, but there are cases where their advise was taken, especially concerning medicine. The movement culminated with the trials of 193 narodniki in 1877-8. The experience of the narodniki, the ease with which it was mopped up by the authorities, suggested that peaceful means were not enough.

Mark Natanson's Zemlia i volia party (Russia's first organized political party) split into 2: one advocated peaceful means, the other violence. The majority refounded themselves as Narodnaia Volia in 1879 and thenceforth devoted themselves to carrying out the sentence of execution they had arrived at on Alexander II.

……….

Tolstoy's(1828-1910) reading of the Russian people in War and Peace: 1812 was not a triumph of the generals but of the ordinary people. The victory was not "determined by the quantity of pieces of cloth called banners picked up on the battlefield...but by a moral victory, of the kind which convinces the opponent that they are helpless in the face of the moral superiority of their enemy." Not the calculations of the generals, but the mutual solidarity of the men in their units proves to be the decisive factor in determining the outcome of the battle. Kutuzov is wise because he accepts the limitations of his role, unlike Napoleon, who sees a battlefield as a chessboard and believes his orders determine what happens on it. [But this is not so different from Hegel's Cunning of History. Cf Grossman: one of the characters is praising Tolstoy's depiction of real war which can only be gained from deep experience; the other character points out that T never fought in a battle himself.] Pierre Bezukhov seeks various ways to save Russia and himself, freemasonry, dreams of assassinating N, but then listens to the advice of a simple peasant to follow God's will. Tolstoy founded a sect which rejected the empire, the imperial religion Orthodoxy, and was based on an ethic of peaceful mutual cooperation and self-support. A strong belief in the innate goodness of man's nature, a school for naive peasant children.

Dostoevsky.(1821-1881). His Zosima too had abandoned the army for a monastic life. Dostoevsky's intention was the Alesha would through the temptations of atheistic socialism and come out the other side to fulfill Zosima's prophecy that "The salvation of Rus will come from its people...the people will confront the atheist and defeat him, and a united Orthodox Russia will arise." Russia is the God-bearing people, imbued with sympathy for all other peoples, and so in a position to preach to them the truth of Orthodoxy. "Dostoevsky came closer than anyone to combining two incompatible Russian myths. He believed that Russia was great because its people was humble and suffering: multiethnic empire and village commune coalesced in one vision." Also: Dostoevsky on Pushkin's anniversary: the universal man - an account of humanity to compete with other universalisms (like the American, the Jewish, the Polish, the Roman Catholic).

Soloviev. (1851-1900). Godmanhood. Judaism. His various phases. In a sense he was Alyosha, having gone through 60s radicalism in his youth. But he also outgrew simple Slavophilism.

LIST OF MAIN FIGURES

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 898