Letter from Italy

"Die Grezensituation" of russian thought

Abstract

The paper analyzes the collective work «De Profundis» of some outstanding Russian thinkers written a century ago who searched to understand the Revolution of 1917. Each of them perceived it as a catastrophe, provoked first of all by the utopist spirit of the Russian intelligentsia. The title of the article indicates not only the temporal frontier between the old Russia and that newborn country of unlimited violence after the Revolution but also the new situation (so-called die Grenzsituation) lived from inside in the light of the philosophical and spiritual experience of crisis and hope.