О литературном генезисе русского религиозного ренессанса начала XX века

On the genesis of the Russian Religious Renaissance of the early 20th century (Philological notes in the margin of N.A. Berdyaev's "Spirits of the Russian revolution")

Abstract

At the turn of the 19th and 20th century the new Russian philosophy at first was well-founded outside itself, in the adjacent fields of intellectual activity, such as psychology, politics and economy, sociology, the Orthodox Church… The particular philosophical segment emerged looking back to the more developed type of national spiritual production, i.e. the Russian literature of the 19th century, represented mainly by authors such as Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, Gogol. A unique role was played by V. V. Rozanov who tried all his life to imitate his idol, Dostoevsky, and as a thinker himself to speak the language of his negative characters.

The perception of the surrounding activity through the prism of national literature, without considering its own specifi cations and reciprocal infl uences, without taking into consideration the immanent laws underlying the development of literature, is extremely peculiar for the Russian intelligentsia of the last two centuries. According to Rozanov’s opinion, instead, this perception was far more actual than for most of his educated fellows, because of his total isolation due to his personality. Later, D. S. Merezhkovsky resumed Rozanov’s topic and developed it himself, on the basis of the artistic experience of L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It was the existentialist Lev Shestov who used the images, subject collisions and Dostoevsky’s rebels’ ideology to throw discredit upon the philosophical Rationalism. As a “great synthetizer” N. A. Berdyaev by means of his aesthetic models Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky tried to trace the origins and make sense of the Russian revolution of 1917.