Contemporary Russian Thought :: Russian Culture Essays

Trends of Contemporary Russian Thought (1)ABSTRACT This paper foc physical exercises on the some recent period in the development of Russian thought (1960s-1990s). consummation from the cyclical patterns of Russian intellectual history, I propose to name it the tertiary philosophic awakening. I define the main tendency of this period as the struggle of thought against ideocracy. I then suggest a categorization of main trends in Russian thought of this period (1) Dialectical materialism in its evolution from later(a) Stalinism to neo-communist mysticism (2) Neorationalism and Structuralism (3) Neo-Slavophilism, or the Philosophy of National Spirit (4) Personalism and Liberalism (5) Religious Philosophy and Mysticism, both Christian Orthodox and Non-Traditional (6) Culturology or the Philosophy of Culture (7) Conceptualism or the Philosophy of Postmodernity. The Karamazovs argon not scoundrels but philosophers, because all real Russian people be philosophers...Dmitry Karamazov, in Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers KaramazovIt is a property of the Russian people to indulge in philosophy. ...The fate of the philosopher in Russia is painful and tragic.Nikolai Berdyaev. The Russian IdeaThe fact that whizz rotter annihilate a philosophy . ... or that one can prove that a philosophy annihilates itself is of little consequence. If its really philosophy, then, like the phoenix, it willing always rise again from its own ashes.Friedrich Schlegel. Athenaeum Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow, 103.The fit period of the Soviet ideocracy, approximately from the early 1970s through the late 1980s, can be characterized as a period of philosophical awakening, to use the felicitous expression of the theologian Georgy Florovsky (1893 - 1979). Such awakening is usually preceded by a more or less complicated historical fate, the plentiful and long historical experience and ordeal, which now becomes the object of interpretation and discussion. philosophic life begins as a new mode or a new stage of national existence... One can feel in the times of that epoch some irresistible attraction to philosophy, a philosophical passion and thirst, a kind of magical gravitation toward philosophical themes and issues. (2) Florovsky refers here to the first philosophical awakening of Russia in the span of years from 1830s to 1840s roughly, the generation of Chaadaev, early Westernizers and Slavophiles, such as Belinsky, Herzen, Bakunin, Khomiakov, the brothers Aksakov, and the brothers Kireevsky. (3) Russias second philosophical awakening occurred in the first two decades of the 20th century, fol haplessing in the wake of the sunk revolution of 1905 and disenchantment of the most refined part of intelligentsia with the low intellectual level of populism, Marxism and other socialist theories.