This Anthology provides the English-speaking world access to post-Soviet philosophic thought in Russia for the first time. We believe readers will find contemporary Russian philosophy interesting for a number of reasons. First, it addresses local, regional and global aspects of the most pressing issues of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Readers will find themselves facing the vastness of contemporary Russian philosophy that is of importance not just to Russia, but to the whole world. Second, it represents the best traditions of Russian philosophy that, historically, has always been closely tied to Western philosophy and has had a certain influence upon it.
Third is the fact that the history of the Russian philosophy is not only a chronicle of spiritual quests, borrowed ideas and those of indigenous original thinkers; it is also a record of the dramatic events endured by Russia over the last couple of centuries. Indeed, having experienced a series of great trials, tribulations and watershed moments in Russian history, Russian philosophy reflects the social and political collisions and transformations of Czarist, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.
In the early stages of its development, Russian philosophy encountered fundamental problems; for example, in 1850, Prince Platon A. Shirinskii-Shikhmatov, Public Education Minister of the Russian Empire, suggested removing philosophy from the list of disciplines taught in universities, maintaining that “the good of philosophy is yet to be proven whereas it is perfectly capable of causing the harm.” Ultimately, the teaching of philosophy, most notably that of Western European philosophy, was discontinued, since this discipline was considered the source of sedition and free thinking.
Following the termination of philosophy departments, philosophic discussions moved to the sphere of publicist writings and literary works. However, the authorities retained a thoroughly hostile attitude towards philosophy—the discipline capable of inspiring free thought. Consequently, when after the new 1863 University Statute the departments of philosophy started coming back to life, the focus remained on the works of Plato and Aristotle. Early in the 1900s, Russian philosophy rode the wave of intensifying social and political activity toward its renaissance. A lot of philosophic organizations, groups and assemblies sprang to life, and the professional practice of philosophy became popular and even fashionable.
In the early 1920s, philosophy entered a new period of bans and persecution. Almost immediately after seizing power in 1917, the Bolsheviks aggressively set about establishing the ideological and intellectual supremacy of
Materialism of the Marxist and Leninist variety set down firm roots in Soviet Russia and was perceived as the “true” and “scientific” philosophy, whereas idealism was dubbed a “throwback” “bourgeois” philosophy. But Russian thought took yet another sharp turn after the decline of the USSR, when philosophic pluralism prevailed once again, and Marxism became just one of many philosophic trends. When the Iron Curtain fell, a certain group of Russian philosophers moved abroad in a wave of voluntary emigration. Even though Russian philosophers having relocated all over the world do not represent any integral or even common philosophic trend, one still can attribute them to yet another constellation of cross-border Russian philosophy—a modern one. When selecting the contributors to this collection, the compilers of this Anthology considered all these philosophers who now live and work in Russia and abroad.
Indeed, not every thinker deserving our attention appears in this Anthology. We, however, never intended to present all of contemporary Russian philosophy in a single book. Our first concern has been to present the fundamental range of contemporary philosophic problems in the works of famous Russian philosophers. Consequently, in contrast to the “single-mindedness” of Soviet-era philosophers and the bias toward Orthodox Christianity of emigrant philosophers, this Anthology offers to its readers a plurality of positions different from each other and widely diverse texts by undoubtedly quite exceptional authors. Here you will find strictly academic philosophic works and those in an applied, pragmatic format—secular and religious—dedicated to severe social
Given the many systems for transliterating Russian, we have chosen the one adopted by the Library of Congress, which has many of the same characters that are in the one used by the US Board on Geographic Names. However, for the sake of the general audience that may also use this anthology, diacritics and ligatures that are commonly found in works for Slavic studies have been avoided. Here also the overarching character ties for Romanizing ц as in ts is absent, and palatalizing vowels, such as я and ю do not appear over ia and iu because these are generally sometimes omitted possibly due to their self-evident nature. Similarly, й as in the ending ий is rendered not by iy nor by ij, but by ii, to simplify what appears odd to English readers in order not to complicate pronunciation for them. Тhe Russian sounds for the palatalizing e and the hard э both remain e. Finally, it seems unnecessary to represent in English the hard sign ъ in transliteration; but the soft sign ь must still be conveyed by an apostrophe because in some words its absence would change the meaning.
This system prevails except (1) in quoted material where naturally the spelling in the original is retained, (2) in transliterating names that have become part of common usage, such as Tolstoy or Nicholas II as per listings in Merriam Webster dictionaries, and (3) in the case of a contributor’s preference for the spelling of his or her own name.
Capitalization of Romanized titles observes the conventions in Cyrillic although the English translations of these titles follow the conventions of that language; therefore, readers should take note of which titles are in italics to determine whether the cited work has been published in English, Russian, Ukrainian or another language.
Generally, the authors’ preferences have been respected for different translations of a philosophical term, such as Superman versus Overman for Nietzsche’s enlightened superior human being. The Index’s cross-referencing system should mitigate any confusion here. English equivalents, when they exist, are provided for Russian philosophical terms, or the terms are given sufficient contextualization to clarify them. Some terms, however, are not translated from other languages to maintain the integrity of the concepts, as for instance, in the case of Dasein. These remain open invitations to the wonderful world of classical and postclassical philosophy.
For one of the editors of this anthology, Mary Theis, who has specialized primarily in Russian and French literature and not in philosophy per se, the editing of this philosophical project has taken her on an amazing journey into the minds of more than twenty contemporary Russian thinkers. For specialists
While preparing to publish this Anthology, we were actively and fruitfully engaged with the authors to whom we are deeply grateful for their responsiveness and creative participation. Much to our regret, Pavel Gurevich, Vadim Mezhuev, Valery Podoroga, and Sergey Horujy passed away before this work could be completed. We hope that the texts they provided for this Russian Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century: An Anthology will further contribute to richly deserved fond memories of these honorable men.
Finally, we give heartfelt thanks to the editors and the staff at Brill, whose support and high professional standards have made it possible to realize the production of this book.
Mikhail Sergeev
Alexander Chumakov
Mary Theis