Pub Date : 2022-03-04DOI: 10.1080/10611967.2022.2085480
Irina F. Shcherbatova
ABSTRACT Using material from contemporary scholarly debate, the author shows that the term “early Russian liberalism” remains conceptually vague both in content and in its chronological sense. In the strictly conceptual approach, the beginnings of liberalism correlate with its doctrinal form, which corresponds to the liberalism of the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. There is no unanimity in modern historiography on the question of criteria for liberalism, but there is an understanding that the simple imposition of Western models is methodologically wrong, since it would ignore a national specificity for which the main feature is the integration of the liberal worldview with the principle of autocracy. This article considers early Russian liberalism in the chronological sense as a response to the challenges of the time. The historically conditioned diversity of liberal forms allows us to demonstrate the complexity and ambiguity of Russian liberalism as a phenomenon and its syncretic nature. Early liberal ideas were generated among the upper nobility as a means of protecting them from the tyranny of those in power. The main obstacle to the development of political-legal discourse in Russia was paternalism. Alexander I’s encouragement of a liberal agenda contributed to the temporary liberalization of the political system but did not change the essence of the legal situation. Nicholas I’s usurpation of the political discourse began the process of marginalizing political liberalism’s ideas and led to the transformation of liberal discourse into an essentially latent liberal one and a formally ethical one, which prevented full implementation of a liberal agenda.
{"title":"The Ambivalence of Early Gentry Liberalism in Russia","authors":"Irina F. Shcherbatova","doi":"10.1080/10611967.2022.2085480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10611967.2022.2085480","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Using material from contemporary scholarly debate, the author shows that the term “early Russian liberalism” remains conceptually vague both in content and in its chronological sense. In the strictly conceptual approach, the beginnings of liberalism correlate with its doctrinal form, which corresponds to the liberalism of the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. There is no unanimity in modern historiography on the question of criteria for liberalism, but there is an understanding that the simple imposition of Western models is methodologically wrong, since it would ignore a national specificity for which the main feature is the integration of the liberal worldview with the principle of autocracy. This article considers early Russian liberalism in the chronological sense as a response to the challenges of the time. The historically conditioned diversity of liberal forms allows us to demonstrate the complexity and ambiguity of Russian liberalism as a phenomenon and its syncretic nature. Early liberal ideas were generated among the upper nobility as a means of protecting them from the tyranny of those in power. The main obstacle to the development of political-legal discourse in Russia was paternalism. Alexander I’s encouragement of a liberal agenda contributed to the temporary liberalization of the political system but did not change the essence of the legal situation. Nicholas I’s usurpation of the political discourse began the process of marginalizing political liberalism’s ideas and led to the transformation of liberal discourse into an essentially latent liberal one and a formally ethical one, which prevented full implementation of a liberal agenda.","PeriodicalId":42094,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY","volume":"60 1","pages":"96 - 113"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48763186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-04DOI: 10.1080/10611967.2022.2085483
V. V. Vostrikova
ABSTRACT This article analyzes the change in interpretation of the principles of freedom and equality in liberal thought in Russian in the early twentieth century. From the classical negative understanding of freedom as noninterference of the state in a person’s private life, the new liberalism transitioned to a positive interpretation of freedom as the state’s ensuring of conditions for citizens to enjoy equal freedom. The classical liberal interpretation of equality as the absence of various social privileges and restrictions was supplemented by the idea of equality of opportunity. Thus, formal-legal equality was balanced with social equality. With that in mind, this article devotes special attention to the new liberals’ defense of the right to a decent living as a complex of personal social rights, as a rights claim that allows every citizen to demand a minimum of social benefits from the state. This article shows that early-twentieth-century liberals proposed a qualitatively new interpretation of the relationship between the state and the individual, one that affirmed the mutual rights and obligations of the individual and the state and entailed the expansion of the latter’s social functions. The author concludes that early-twentieth-century liberalism substantiated the idea of a legal social state for which implementation has proven the most important task of the current stage of social development.
{"title":"Modification of the Principles of Freedom and Equality in Early Twentieth-Century Russian Liberal Thought","authors":"V. V. Vostrikova","doi":"10.1080/10611967.2022.2085483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10611967.2022.2085483","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article analyzes the change in interpretation of the principles of freedom and equality in liberal thought in Russian in the early twentieth century. From the classical negative understanding of freedom as noninterference of the state in a person’s private life, the new liberalism transitioned to a positive interpretation of freedom as the state’s ensuring of conditions for citizens to enjoy equal freedom. The classical liberal interpretation of equality as the absence of various social privileges and restrictions was supplemented by the idea of equality of opportunity. Thus, formal-legal equality was balanced with social equality. With that in mind, this article devotes special attention to the new liberals’ defense of the right to a decent living as a complex of personal social rights, as a rights claim that allows every citizen to demand a minimum of social benefits from the state. This article shows that early-twentieth-century liberals proposed a qualitatively new interpretation of the relationship between the state and the individual, one that affirmed the mutual rights and obligations of the individual and the state and entailed the expansion of the latter’s social functions. The author concludes that early-twentieth-century liberalism substantiated the idea of a legal social state for which implementation has proven the most important task of the current stage of social development.","PeriodicalId":42094,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY","volume":"60 1","pages":"140 - 152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44758489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-04DOI: 10.1080/10611967.2022.2085479
A. Sukhov
ABSTRACT The Slavophile movement cannot be properly understood and assessed without taking into account the movement to which it opposed itself, the Westernizers. It was in close contact with the Westernizers that the Slavophiles developed a clearer embodiment of their own ideas. The Slavophile ideology that actively manifested itself over a period of more than twenty years was a milestone in the history of Russian liberalism. The Slavophiles substantiated and defended liberal values and rights. Their liberal views had an economic basis: They adopted agricultural production and strove to make it more rational, productive, and market-based. Rejecting serfdom, they participated in preparing the reforms of February 19, 1861, alongside other liberal forces, including the Westernizers.
{"title":"Could the Slavophiles Be Considered Liberals?","authors":"A. Sukhov","doi":"10.1080/10611967.2022.2085479","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10611967.2022.2085479","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Slavophile movement cannot be properly understood and assessed without taking into account the movement to which it opposed itself, the Westernizers. It was in close contact with the Westernizers that the Slavophiles developed a clearer embodiment of their own ideas. The Slavophile ideology that actively manifested itself over a period of more than twenty years was a milestone in the history of Russian liberalism. The Slavophiles substantiated and defended liberal values and rights. Their liberal views had an economic basis: They adopted agricultural production and strove to make it more rational, productive, and market-based. Rejecting serfdom, they participated in preparing the reforms of February 19, 1861, alongside other liberal forces, including the Westernizers.","PeriodicalId":42094,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY","volume":"60 1","pages":"114 - 125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47422619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10611967.2022.2064656
I. Kasavin, N. Kasavina
ABSTRACT This article analyzes the existential situation of the protagonist of The Double from the position of its manifestation in the discourse he undertakes. Dostoevsky exacerbates the problem of the crisis of self-consciousness, a complex collision of personal and social being, showing the risk of a split identity that leads to insanity, largely associated with the tension between supra-individual value constructs and the lifeworld. “Doubling” is a vivid artistic means for conveying the deep meaning of the polyphony of the Self, which can be split under the influence of insurmountable social and existential contradictions. The story suggests two forms for reconstructing a person’s consciousness of self: discourse and text. Discourse is revealed in dialogue with others and with an Other; the self-text is created by man as the author of his own life story disentangling his experiences. The protagonist fails to cope with the discursive conflict largely because he is unable to construct a story allowing him to balance the voices that speak within him, to create a personal polyphony, and to overcome existential and ontological disaster. The protagonist’s dialogue with the doctor is an attempt to disentangle his existence and create this kind of story through an appeal to a real Other. However, Dostoevsky cannot see the proper cultural ground for this disentangling in the protagonist and his environment; he proposes no cultural resources, showing the “little man” as rootless, “without portents,” at the mercy of fatal chance, of an ill-starred mundanity, of spiritual chaos, “abandoned in the world.”
{"title":"The Split Existence: (An Analysis of F.M. Dostoevsky’s The Double)","authors":"I. Kasavin, N. Kasavina","doi":"10.1080/10611967.2022.2064656","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10611967.2022.2064656","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article analyzes the existential situation of the protagonist of The Double from the position of its manifestation in the discourse he undertakes. Dostoevsky exacerbates the problem of the crisis of self-consciousness, a complex collision of personal and social being, showing the risk of a split identity that leads to insanity, largely associated with the tension between supra-individual value constructs and the lifeworld. “Doubling” is a vivid artistic means for conveying the deep meaning of the polyphony of the Self, which can be split under the influence of insurmountable social and existential contradictions. The story suggests two forms for reconstructing a person’s consciousness of self: discourse and text. Discourse is revealed in dialogue with others and with an Other; the self-text is created by man as the author of his own life story disentangling his experiences. The protagonist fails to cope with the discursive conflict largely because he is unable to construct a story allowing him to balance the voices that speak within him, to create a personal polyphony, and to overcome existential and ontological disaster. The protagonist’s dialogue with the doctor is an attempt to disentangle his existence and create this kind of story through an appeal to a real Other. However, Dostoevsky cannot see the proper cultural ground for this disentangling in the protagonist and his environment; he proposes no cultural resources, showing the “little man” as rootless, “without portents,” at the mercy of fatal chance, of an ill-starred mundanity, of spiritual chaos, “abandoned in the world.”","PeriodicalId":42094,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY","volume":"60 1","pages":"74 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44176911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10611967.2022.2064659
V. Porus
ABSTRACT This article discusses the connection between the ideas of Fyodor M. Dostoevsky and Vladimir S. Solovyov on the need for cultural and moral transformation of those who would claim to participate in the historical process of Russia’s development, as well as the contemporary interpretation of these ideas. Both Dostoevsky and Solovyov believed that it was Russia who was destined to restore universal meaning to Christianity, to lead Christianity out of the impasse of national exclusivity. Russia is capable of fulfilling this messianic role on the path to a universal theocracy that would impart the necessary spiritual elevation to humanity. Solovyov’s theocratic dreams, which were based on Dostoevsky’s religious ideas, were not destined to receive public support. The Russian intelligentsia found itself faced with the question, “What do we live for and what must we do?” Dostoevsky answered this question, followed by Solovyov: We must abandon any attempt to fight for cultural ideals when such a fight leads to resorting to violence. Those who are in charge of transforming life must themselves be spiritually transformed. Any other path would lead to social and cultural disaster. These thoughts of the two distinguished thinkers - the brilliant writer and the prominent Russian philosopher - are taking on a new significance in contemporary Russia. For today’s reformers, the most important task is to restore the destroyed system of values (including, above all, values involving personal freedom of citizens). This means the cultural revival of Russia, without which social transformations will continue to be stuck in a vicious circle wherein one form of violence follows another. Fulfilling this task requires a spiritual feat akin to what the Russian thinkers were calling for in the late nineteenth century.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10611967.2022.2064662
B. Pruzhinin, T. Shchedrina, I. Shchedrina
ABSTRACT It is not by chance that the title of this article paraphrases Gustav Gustavovich Shpet’s article “The Skeptic and His Soul” (1919). Is Stavrogin a skeptic? Yes, and the novel Demons is a narrative about how self-satisfied, self-flattering skepticism (skepticism for its own sake) leads man to devastation, to the dead end of absolute nihilism, to spiritual and literal suicide. Two circumstances lead us to this interpretation both of Dostoevsky’s novel and of its central character, Nikolai Stavrogin: the striking, contemporary “recognizability” of the story, even at the narrative level (at least for contemporary Russia), and our familiarity with materials from Shpet’s archives dedicated to Dostoevsky’s work. Handwritten notes, a synopsis of Demons, and a wealth of correspondence show how Shpet (with other Russian thinkers of his time) was immersed in the theme of transformation of skepticism against the background of Russia’s revolutionary upheavals. This immersion distinctly clarifies for us today the origins of the relevance of Demons, a novel recounting how skepticism tumbles into the void of nihilism. The article demonstrates how completely modern digital forms of self-expression and forms of “conversation” unfolding online are surprisingly commensurate with the form of social structure Dostoevsky presents in Demons. The form of conversation he found to express skeptical doubt turning into nihilism has become a reality today, vividly represented in social media, where conversation is transformed into “chat rooms.”
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10611967.2022.2064665
G. L. Tulchinksii
ABSTRACT Analyzing the content of the parable of the Grand Inquisitor from Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov allows us to identify the root ideas and consequences of a program for reorganizing society aimed solely at transforming the external material environment. Historical experience has confirmed Dostoevsky’s warning that implementing this kind of program requires permanent violence against nature, society, and man. The temptation of the powerful by their own power can be countered by a program for forming social harmony.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10611967.2022.2101283
M. Bykova
Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose 200th birthday we celebrated in 2021, is perhaps one of the most eminent Russian thinkers. A giant of nineteenth-century literature, Dostoevsky became a symbol of Russian culture. Not only did his contemporaries view him as a Russian national prophet, but also his novels and other literary writings greatly affected the way in which Russia would think of itself in the years following his death. This manifestly points to the important place that Dostoevsky rightly holds in the cultural heritage of Russia. Hence, it is not surprising that now—in the wake of the Russian unprovoked invasion of Ukraine—he, along with other famous Russian literary and cultural figures, has emerged as a target of the growing number of calls for canceling Russian culture. The current widespread attempt at “total disengagement” from Russia has led many to boycott musicians, artists, writers, and other cultural figures who have been associated with Russia at any time in history. Even those who died decades, or even centuries, before the shaping of Russia’s current political regime and those responsible for the present-day atrocities, are openly being blamed for the war in Ukraine and accused of being instrumental to cultivating the hostile ideology of the “Russian world.” Dostoevsky and his legacy have not been spared from this predicament as well. To be sure, the recently developed dismissive attitude toward the author of widely known and loved novels such as The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment may not be fully ungrounded, and not simply because Putin happened to list Dostoevsky as one of his favorite authors. More worrisome is Dostoevsky’s own support and open advocacy for PanSlavism, a nationalistic ideology that argues for integration and unity of the Slavic peoples and states under the great patronage of Russia to counter the expansion of the West. Formed into a political movement, Pan-Slavism rose
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10611967.2022.2064667
T. Zlotnikova
ABSTRACT This article discusses the little-studied issue of the dramatic content of philosophical issues in Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s works. The polyphonic quality, the dialogism combined with the markers of the genre of tragedy, has served as the basis for numerous theatrical incarnations of Dostoevsky’s novels and stories. We note the markers of a carnivalesque worldview, the combination of the grotesque with subtle psychology in stage productions of the author’s work. The complex of existential issues correlates with social significant ones, and the choice of characters is made at different levels of life. We discuss the most notable productions during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: Georgy Tovstonogov’s The Idiot, Yuri Zavadsky’s St. Petersburg Dreams, Valery Fokin’s I Shall Go, I Shall Go, and Konstantin Bogomolov’s The Karamazovs.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10611967.2022.2064657
S. Nikolsky
ABSTRACT Fyodor M. Dostoevsky’s analysis of the theme of Russia–Europe relations, as well as the nature of Russian society, is replete with concept-metaphors like “people,” “national principle,” “soul,” “spirit,” and so forth. These concepts and terms are proposed by the writer himself, and the method of research that is based on this terminology has been present in Russian public consciousness for almost a century and a half now. This creates the illusion that these terms can be used to understand the basic differences between Russia and Europe, particularly their fundamentally different property relations and rights. The writer’s answer to the question of difference is as follows: Russia’s greatness consists in its rejection of European darkness, and its troubles derive from an inconsistency, from the insufficient firmness of that rejection. This article argues that the reason for the long-term “explanatory power” of these terms used by the polemicist Dostoevsky has been determined by the insufficient development of those economic and political relations that objectively exist in Russia. Thus, the Diary of a Writer still resonates with the reader who is gullible but distant from “strong culture” (V. Kelle) and uninclined to reflection, the reader who never abandons the dreams of Russia’s “special path” that would allow it, “in one fell swoop,” to escape the difficulties of the modern world. But these dreams never come true, and, contrary to the calls for traditionalism, Russia stubbornly tries to follow the same path as the rest of humanity. The longer this process goes on, the more the explanatory power of political polemicist Dostoevsky’s concept-metaphors wanes.
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