This chapter investigates another possible answer to the question posed above: that “Russian philosophy” refers to a philosophical tradition that is necessarily and essentially Russian. This is a highly mythologized view, passed down and developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It both exists and does not exist, in that it is at once a composite of real beliefs about philosophical thought in Russia and a collection of myths about its texts and thinkers. It is employed equally by those seeking an essentialist, nationalist, and religious philosophy to pair with the “Russian soul” and, conversely, by critics looking to create a straw man by which to demonize Russian religious thought on the whole.

The “Russian philosophy as necessarily Russian” narrative arises most fully during the philosophical and religious boom of the 1990s, pulling strategically from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century traditions to construct a history it never had. According to this narrative, we can identify three distinguishing features assigned to Russian philosophy. First, it is always religious, never secular. Second, its style of inquiry is literary, not analytic. Third, we are told that the Russian philosophical tradition has roots as far back as Byzantium. Deviations along the way, such as the Soviet period, are seen as a result of external or hostile forces rather than as part of a broader intellectual continuity. Nikolai Plotnikov has called this “philosophy for internal use,” in reference to the approach that treats Russian philosophy as separate from philosophy in general and seeks to “immunize its position against rational criticism.”¹ In the 1920s, Gustav Shpet referred to Russian philosophy as a psychological position rather than a legitimate philosophical approach. It is this psychological narrative that I have in mind in the title The End of Russian Philosophy. This is the tradition that was revived with scholarly enthusiasm and sometimes nationalistic fervor in the early 1990s, as previously suppressed philosophical works began to appear freely in publication for the first time. This is the tradition that in the 2000s was said to be ending, at the very same time that we could clearly see it thrive.

In the spirit of Masaryk’s reflections on Russianness, each branch of the religious/secular disjunction has historically gone hand in hand with a set of features meant to characterize and define Russian thought. The religious tradition, we are told, is transrational, with an emphasis on intuition, emotion, and unity as greater than the “iron chain of syllogism,” in the words of Ivan Kireevskii.⁴ Philosophers of the nineteenth century repeatedly imbued the discipline with messianic and essentialist overtones, giving suggestions on how Russia might “fulfill her destiny” (Konstantin Aksakov),⁵ accomplish her “mission” (Aleksei Khomiakov),⁶ or “throw off the yoke of the logical systems of European philosophy” in order to preserve her “integrity of being” (Kireevskii).⁷ For Eurasianist Nikolai Trubetskoi, “we [Russians] must get used to the idea that the culture of the Romanic-Greek world is our most bitter foe.”⁸ Given Russia’s geographical position between the European and Asian continents, Trubetskoi believed that the country needed its own intellectual path – one that could be shared with the eastern Slavs, Turks, and Finno-Ugric peoples, since they had, in his view, a common psychological constitution. For philosopher Sergey Horujy, the enforced atheism of the communist period was an anomaly and that upon “looking at Russian philosophizing as a whole, throughout its history, we are bound to admit that its main currents have been predominantly religious.”⁹ Indeed, many of Russia’s most well known philosophers have also explicitly been religious thinkers, save during the Soviet period.

The secular narrative is the more nebulous of the two but only in that it does not have its own overarching idea or clearly defined essentialist properties. Unlike religious/literary philosophy, the secular is said to deal in contingent as opposed to necessary truths, always susceptible to rupture and fragmentation as it takes an analytic or conceptual rather than spiritual form. In the crudest terms, this supposed split is very often conceived as a fracture between two ways of knowing: the religious as transcendent knowledge, the secular as material knowledge. More often than not, the secular leg of the dyad is viewed pejoratively as a catchall for everything that does not fit into the religious narrative. Charles Taylor has shown how the term “secular” is equally ambiguous in a broader philosophical-cultural-religious context, where it has come to refer to “what pertains to a self-sufficient, immanent sphere and is contrasted with what relates to the transcendent realm (often identified as ‘religious’).”¹⁰ In the West, he argues, the secular is seen as indicative of modernity and “the real,” while the religious is denied and viewed as “the invented.”¹¹ In the case of the history of Russian philosophy, we are more likely to find priority in the hands of the transcendent, where religious philosophy is seen as essentially Russian and the secular sphere is instead an imported, non-Russian modernity, a foreign language incapable of capturing Russian spiritual experience. Where philosophy in Russia is concerned, the secular often refers to university philosophy, particularly the rich tradition of Russian academic philosophy in the early twentieth century. Of course, there is a strong bias against so-called secular, or university/academic, philosophy, one that was most certainly not helped by the fact that the teaching of philosophy in the universities was forbidden through most of the middle of the nineteenth century. This bias is apparent in the words of Aleksei Malinov and Sergei Troitskii, who claim that “history shows that philosophy [in Russia] almost never ‘lived’ in the universities and that, as a rule, a university philosophy professor could be identified by his lack of philosophical talent.”¹²

Not only is the discipline of Russian philosophy seen as transrational, messianic, and religious but as necessarily literary as well. Though Plato characterized the relationship between philosophy and literature as a “long-standing antagonism,” it is impossible to speak of philosophy in Russia without at least casting a glance in the direction of literature.¹³ Literature remains one of the most fecund starting points for Russian philosophy in the twenty-first century, with novelists and poets regularly appearing as figureheads of the philosophical tradition. While the study of literature as philosophy has historically made up its own subdiscipline in Anglo-American universities, housed primarily in Continentally minded philosophy or English departments and circulated in its own specialized academic journals, Russian philosophers of all intellectual persuasions have long engaged directly and unapologetically with literary texts. In fact, it would not be an overstatement to say that literature is often the first place to which Russia’s thinkers have historically turned in their search for philosophical models and countermodels. And indeed, why contrive elaborate, fantastically improbable case studies (as contemporary philosophers so often do) when the Russian literary canon is replete with extreme examples of virtue and vice, with some of literature’s most memorable martyrs and villains? As philosopher and theologian Sergei Bulgakov saw it, the distinction between literature and philosophy was, at least in the Russian case, an artificial one. “Russian fiction is philosophy par excellence,” he wrote in 1904, in a study – fittingly – of Chekhov as philosophical thinker.¹⁴

According to Semen Frank, “in Russia, the deepest and most important thoughts and ideas were expressed not in systematic, academic writing, but in the literary form.”¹⁵ In Berdiaev’s view, Russian literary works, with their moral quality, constituted a philosophical genre that was specifically Russian. “Russian literature will bear a moral character more than all world literatures, as well as a concealed religious character,” he wrote.¹⁶ Likewise, Aleksei Losev emphasized that “Russian fiction – this is the true Russian philosophy.”¹⁷ The literary quality of Russian philosophy remains a stereotype about the tradition to this day. As philosopher Arkadii Maler has pointed out, at international philosophy conferences non-Russian participants often expect their Russian colleagues to give presentations on the philosophy of literature, on Dostoevsky or Tolstoy in particular.¹⁸

Outside the standard philosophical suspects like Berdiaev and Bulgakov, a less well known example of the amalgamation of the religious and the literary in contemporary Russian philosophy appears in the work of St. Petersburg philosopher Aleksandr Kazin, who refers to Alexander Pushkin and Fedor Tiutchev in order to express what he calls the “formula” of Russian thought.¹⁹ For Kazin, the necessity for viewing Russian philosophy according to a unique formula reveals itself not only in Tiutchev’s overquoted stanza that “Russia cannot be understood with the mind” (1866), which famously asserts that “one can only believe in Russia”;²⁰ Kazin also finds it present in a quotation from Pushkin, who observed that “[Russia’s] history requires a different idea, a different formula,”²¹ since the spiritual nature of the “Russian soul” is incompatible with the finitude of human reason – and, ultimately, with sterile, secular philosophy.²² Such appeals to a “specifically Russian” nature (often predictably citing Tiutchev) are not outdated literary musings but surfaced frequently in academic publications and at conferences in the 1990s and 2000s. For another St. Petersburg–based philosopher, Albert Sobolev, the literature-centrism of Russian philosophy is so strong that it has become its defining characteristic. It is only by limiting their attention to literature and the humanities that Russian philosophers can enjoy future successes, Sobolev asserts.²³ In this vein, it is not surprising when Kazin emphasizes the nonacademic thrust of the Russian philosophical tradition in his book Russia and World Culture (Rossiia i mirovaia kul’tura, 2004), spending the majority of his study discussing literature (Pushkin, Tiutchev, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov) and even film (Vasilii Shukshin and Andrei Tarkovsky) as the sites of Russia’s philosophical monuments.²⁴

Studies of Russian philosophical thought outside Russia just as frequently align Russian philosophy with the literary and mystical rather than with traditional philosophical genres, or else they claim that one need not broach the academic sphere in order to understand Russian th...