The “Philosophy Steamer.” A Dialogue Returns to Russia

Abstract

Today, the centenary of the “Philosophy Steamer” does not feel like a hundred-year-old event. Most contemporaries learned about it little more than thirty years ago from Literaturnaia gazeta, which, in October 1988, began printing portraits of hitherto forbidden philosophers in a new column entitled “From the History of Russian Philosophical Thought.” The name “Philosophy Steamer” appears for the first time in articles of that title in the same journal by Sergei S. Horujy on May 9 and June 6, 1990. The author describes the events preceding the expulsion and the names of the actual philosophers who were expelled, a surprisingly small number, only nine in all. The name “Philosophy Steamer” would then come to refer to all the steamship passengers and, furthermore, anyone forced to leave the country and who disagreed with the authorities, not just philosophers, but also scholars, writers, community leaders, and those who, generally speaking, represented the intelligentsia. The “Philosophy Steamer” as a proper noun would become a symbol of the authorities’ intolerance toward dissent and the unwillingness of the dissidents to abandon their freedom of speech. In a brief annotation to his articles, Sergei Horujy writes about the expulsion of the country’s “greatest religious thinkers.” However, it seems the evolution of “Philosophy Steamer” as a proper name for the exiled intelligentsia became possible primarily because the designation “religious thinkers” allows for a broader interpretation, since they too represented philosophical idealism. This provided the grounds for attaching a more widespread designation to them: “religious-philosophical thinkers.”