‘Speech on the War' by Nikolai Berdyaev in 1940

Abstract

We publish the translation of Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev's “Speech on the War” that took place on March 3, 1940, as well as a subsequent discussion with the participation of G. Marcel, J. Val, G. Fedotov, B. Vysheslavtsev and others. The translation from French was made according to an authorized typewritten transcript (with some typewritten and handwritten corrections), stored in Berdyaev's fund in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (Fund № 1496). A brief preface provides an overview of Franco-Russian meetings of the pre-war period, one of which could have included the talk being published, and also indicates Berdyaev's main texts on the oncoming of World War II — for example, the articles “Christian Conscience and the Dialectic of War” (1938), “War and Eschatology” (1939), “Soviet Russia and the World War” (1940), two of which will be published for the first time in Russian only this year. “Speech on the War” contains Berdyaev's reasoning about the end of the old world, about totalitarian state regimes, about Hitler and Stalin, about the opposition of fate and reason, about the nature of war, about the need for the growth of Christian movements, etc. — including, of course, thoughts about freedom and personality. During the discussion, French and Russian colleagues asked Berdyaev questions and offered their own arguments, partly in conflict with the position of the speaker. The text should be considered in conjunction with the mentioned articles in order to create a more complete picture of the beliefs and ideas of Berdyaev in the late 1930s and early 1940s.