Onasch, Konrad, and Schneiper, Annemarie. (1995). Icons: The Fascination and the Reality. New York: Riverside Book Company.
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Ouspensky, Leonid, and Lossky, Vladimir. (1982). The Meaning of Icons, 2nd. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
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The debates regarding Russia’s national identity and historical destiny were always vital to the work of the prominent Russian thinkers, who were also preoccupied with moral issues and closely involved with literature. Due to its location between Europe and Asia, Russia belongs to both cultural worlds, having inherited different and often contradictory value standards that played a significant role in the course of its history. This marginal cultural situation of the country resulted in two competing approaches to its role in world history: national isolationism and openness to Europe, both trends still present in the national consciousness. During the Kievan Rus period, affiliation with Europe was a strong feature of culture. The Tatar invasion and the development of the Moscow Kingdom generated a strong tide of alienation from the West. After the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Moscow Kingdom was the proclaimed “the third Rome” (by monk Filotius)-the vanguard force in world history inheriting the grandeur of the Roman Empire and at the same time opposed to the declining West. Peter the Great made a radical attempt to bridge the gap between Russia and the West by assimilating European values and life standards on Russian soil. However, his attempt to create a new cultural synthesis brought about contradictory results: superficial reception of the Western standards in economic, social, political, and cultural spheres on the one hand, and reinforcement of traditional non-European Russian values on the other. As Nikolai Berdyayev noted, Russia never knew the Renaissance and never accepted the humanism and individualism produced within this cultural paradigm. Although European civilization created the disciplinary society (Michel Foucault) in the modern period, it preserved the sphere of individual rights and liberties that was gradually expanding in parallel with rational standards of social control and coercion. Communal and authoritarian tendencies of Russian culture had no real counterbalance in personal values such as those commonly accepted in Europe. Even in the period of Russian Enlightenment that started under Catherine II, the critical efforts of such leading intellectuals as Nikolai Novikov, Mikhail Shcherbatov, or Alexander Radishchev did not bring radical change to tsarist rule and the prevailing cultural climate of the country.
The understanding of national history throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was considerably influenced by the Enlightenment, German idealism, and the philosophy of Romanticism. Whatever their value systems, Russian thinkers of the first part of the nineteenth century interpreted history in view of the tragic events of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. This is the reason why, as Vasily Zenkovsky pointed out, Russian thinkers were highly critical of the results of Western historical development. The structure of Russian thought from the Enlightenment to the beginning of the twenty-first century was based on binary oppositions lacking synthetic reconciling units. Oppositions deeply embedded in Russian thought included communitari-anism and democracy versus imperial autocracy; egalitarianism versus social hierarchy; progress versus traditionalism; and so forth. The deficiency of synthesis of contradictions inherent in Russian thought constitutes its difference from the Western intellectual paradigm.
RUSSIA AND THE WEST: THE DILEMMA OF NATIONAL SELF-IDENTITY
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Westernized Russian thought found its expression in two different trends: the moderate conservatism of historian and writer Nikolai Karamzin, who defended autocracy of the Catherine II variety against the chaos of the French Revolution, and the Decembrist movement, which idealized the democratic traditions of Novgorod and Pskov republics and intended to put constitutional limits on the autocracy of the tsar. Famous poet Alexander Pushkin (according to Berdyayev, the only Russian man of the Renaissance) vigorously supported the ideas of the Decembrists. At the opposite pole, Vladimir Odoyevsky, Dmitry Venevitinov, and other members of the Wisdom-lovers society, who represented the anti-Enlightenment trend and were convinced followers of Schelling, believed in the leading role of Russia and its mission to save European civilization. Although Pyotr Chaadayev’s thought was also nourished by Schelling and other representatives of German idealism, he took a more critical approach to Russia. According to Chaadayev, Russia lacked a true heritage of historical tradition and should therefore assimilate the European cultural
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legacy before assuming a leadership role in tackling humanity’s problems.
These discussions evolved into the debate of the Slavophiles and the Westernizers. Despite their criticism of serfdom and the existing political order, Ivan Kireyevsky, Alexei Khomyakov, Konstantin Aksakov, and other Slavophiles, highly disparaging of Catholicism and Protestantism, European individualism, and the rationalist culture of the Enlightenment, proclaimed the necessity of finding a particularly Russian path of cultural and political development. While critical of the West, German idealism, and Hegelian doctrine as its utmost expression, the Slavophiles were nevertheless nourished conceptually by Schelling’s philosophy. They believed in the superiority of Russian civilization based on the Russian Orthodox vision of the unity of human and God, the special harmonic order of relations existing among the believers (sobornost), and the peasant commune organization of social life as a paradigm of organic relations that should replace the external coercion of state power.
In contrast to the Slavophiles, the Westerniz-ers believed in the productive role of humanity’s rational development and progress, the positive significance of the modernization process initiated by Peter the Great, and the necessity to unify Russia with the European West. Unlike the Slavophiles, this movement had no homogeneous philosophy and ideology, representing rather a loose alliance of different trends of literary and philosophical thought that were strongly influenced by German idealism and, in particular, by Hegel. Radical democrats, such as Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, or Nikolai Ogarev, proposed ideas that differed from the liberal persuasions of Timofei Gra-novsky, Konstantin Kavelin, and Boris Chicherin. Moderate criticism of the European West and nascent mass society, common to many Western-izers, found its utmost expression in the peasant socialism of Herzen and Ogarev, who, like the Slavophiles, idealized the peasant commune as a pattern of organic social life needed by Russia.
Nikolai Chernyshevsky and other revolutionary democratic enlighteners of the 1860s, who further developed the Westernizers’ ideas while upholding the value of the communal foundations of Russian peasant society, paved the way for the radical populist ideology of Pyotr Lavrov, Pyotr Tkachev, and Mikhail Bakunin and the liberal populism of Nikolai Mikhailovsky. Radical populist ideology influenced the Russian version of Marxism considerably. The “return to the soil” movement, headed by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Strakhov, and Apollon Grigoriev, was a reaction to this trend of thought. In the 1870s, Nikolai Danilevsky developed his philosophical theory of historical- cultural types inspired by the ideal of Pan-Slavic unity with the leadership of Russia. Skeptical of both the Pan-Slavic ideal and the contemporary stage of European liberal egalitarian society, Konstantin Leontiev proposed, in his version of the conservative theory of historical-cultural types, the ideal of Byzantinism preserving the communal and hierarchical traditional foundations of Russian culture and society in isolation and opposition to the liberal- individualistic European West. THE SEARCH FOR THE UNIVERSAL VISION OF HISTORY AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century were marked by the growing popularity of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, and Vladimir Soloviev in Russian intellectual circles. As one of the prophets of his time, Tolstoy, in the tradition of Rousseau, put forward a criticism of industrial civilization and state power in the capitalist age and proposed his utopian ideal of Christian anarchism glorifying the archaic peasant way of life as a radical denial of the existing social order and alienation. Based on the ideas of Plato and the neo-Platonists Leibniz and Schelling, Soloviev’s doctrine of absolute idealism interpreted history as a field of human creativity, a realization of Godmanhood-that is, the permanent cooperation of God and human. In his philosophy of history, Soloviev moved from the understanding of Russia’s role as the intermediary link between the East and West to the ideal of theocratic rule unifying the Church power (the pope) with earthly rule of the Russian tsar, and finally came to a profound criticism of theocratic rule. On the final stage of his philosophical career, he gave a very critical evaluation of the autocratic tradition of the Moscow Kingdom and the Russian Empire
