Landmarks Revisited The Vekhi Symposium 100 Years On C u lt u r a l r e v o lu t i o n s : r u s s i a i n t h e 20 t h C e n t u ry s e r i e s e d i to r Boris Wolfson—Amherst College e d i to r i a l B oa r d : Anthony Anemone—The New School Robert BiRd—The University Of Chicago eliot BoRenstein—New York University Angela BRintlingeR—The Ohio State University Karen evAns-RomAine—Ohio University Jochen HellBeck—Rutgers University lilya KAgAnovsKy—University Of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Christina KiAeR—Northwestern University Alaina lemon—University Of Michigan simon morrison—Princeton University eric NaimAn—University Of California, Berkeley Joan neuBeRgeR—University Of Texas, Austin ludmila Parts—Mcgill University ethan Pollock—Brown University Cathy Popkin—Columbia University stephanie SandleR—Harvard University Landmarks Revisited The Vekhi Symposium 100 Years On E di t E d b y R o b i n A i z l E w o o d A nd R u t h C oAt E s BOSTON / 2013 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A bibliographic record for this title is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2013 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-618811-286-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-287-3 (electronic) Book design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press in 2013 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com Effective December 12th, 2017, this book will be subject to a CC-BY-NC license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. The open access publication of this volume is made possible by: This open access publication is part of a project supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book initiative, which includes the open access release of several Academic Studies Press volumes. To view more titles available as free ebooks and to learn more about this project, please visit borderlinesfoundation.org/open. Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com In memory of Oliver Smith (1979-2013) ContEnts Preface 8 Introduction 10 by Robin Aizlewood, Ruth Coates, and Evert van der Zweerde Part I: Vekhi and the Russian Intelligentsia 1. Word Games? The Russian “Intelligentsia” 49 as a Question of Semantics by Frances Nethercott 2. Perversions and Transformations: 69 A. S. Izgoev and the Intelligentsia Debates, 1904–22 by Stuart Finkel 3. The Intelligentsia Fights Back: 86 The Left-wing Response to Vekhi and its Significance by Christopher Read Part II: Vekhi and Political Philosophy 4. The Rise of the People and the Political Philosophy 104 of the Vekhi Authors by Evert van der Zweerde 5. Individual Freedom and Social Justice: 128 Bogdan Kistiakovskii’s Defense of the Law by Vanessa Rampton 6. Russian Political Theology in an Age of Revolution 146 by Randall A. Poole Part III: Vekhi and the Russian Intellectual Tradition 7. Chaadaev and Vekhi 171 by Robin Aizlewood 8. Lev Tolstoi, Petr Struve and the “Afterlife” of Vekhi 192 by G. M. Hamburg 9. Aleksei Losev and Vekhi: 214 Strategic Traditions in Social Philosophy by Elena Takho-Godi Part IV: Vekhi and the Russian Religious Renaissance 10. Inside Out: 243 Good, Evil, and the Question of Inspiration by Oliver Smith 11. D. S. Merezhkovskii Versus the Vekhi Authors 263 by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal 12. Feuerbach, Kant, Dostoevskii: 287 The Evolution of “Heroism” and “Asceticism” in Bulgakov’s Work to 1909 by Ruth Coates List of Contributors 308 Index 311 Preface The present collection of essays arose out of theVekhi Centenary Conference 1909–2009, held in July 2009 at the University of Bristol, and below we list our grateful acknowledgement to those who supported the conference and made it possible. The conference, of course, could not have taken place without the presence of all who attended it for some or all of the three days. We would also like, therefore, to thank all the participants at the conference for their invaluable contributions to the event in terms of papers presented and discussions engaged in, all of which have fed into and enriched this volume. We have adopted the Library of Congress transliteration system for the rendering of Russian names and terms, including the names of Russian authors familiar to an English-speaking readership. We have opted to give titles of Russian and other foreign-language works in the original on first mention, and thereafter in English translation, except in the case of theVekhi symposium itself, which we refer to consistently as Vekhi, partly to avoid having to make the difficult choice between its translation as Landmarks or Signposts, but also in acknowledgement of the widespread currency of the term Vekhi in the scholarship and teaching on the symposium. All quotations from Vekhi are taken from: Vekhi/Landmarks: A Collection of Articles about the Russian Intelligentsia, trans. and ed. Marshall S. Shatz and Judith E. Zimmerman (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994). — 8 — We would like to acknowledge the Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts (BIRTHA), which underwrote the costs of the conference and provided full administrative support in the person of Samantha Barlow, to whom we are particularly grateful for the successful delivery of the conference. Our thanks go also to the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES), the University of Bristol Alumni Foundation, the University of Bristol Faculty of Arts Research Director’s Fund, and University College London (UCL) through the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), all of which provided additional financial support. The University of Bristol Conference Office and Wills Hall also made a valuable administrative contribution to the staging of the conference. We offer our sincere gratitude to UCL SSEES for its assistance in the publication of this book. — 9 — intRoduCtion Robin Aizlewood, Ruth Coates, Evert van der Zweerde The collection of essays entitled Vekhi, published in 1909 and usually translated as “Landmarks” but also as “Signposts” or “Milestones,” is indeed one of the landmark texts of Russian intellectual history, and more broadly of Russian political, philosophical, and religious culture. It is the central text of what became in effect a trilogy, starting with Problemy idealizma (Problems of Idealism, 1902) and ending with Iz glubiny (Out of the Depths, 1918), with a substantially common set of contributors from among the leading figures in Russian intellectual life. Of the seven Vekhi authors—Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Semen Frank, Mikhail Gershenzon, Aleksandr Izgoev, Bogdan Kistiakovskii, and Petr Struve— all except Gershenzon and Izgoev appear in Problems of Idealism, and all except Gershenzon and Kistiakovskii in Out of the Depths.1 Taken together, the three works chart a trajectory from a relatively benign, constructive intellectual climate at the start of the century to the tumult of the 1917 revolution, with Vekhi, written in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, in between.2 What unites the three symposia is a critique of the “positivist” (materialist, utilitarian, crudely rationalist) ideology of the Russian radical intelligentsia, from a predominantly (though not exclusively) liberal and neo-idealist perspective that was informed by the neo-Kantian movement in German academic philosophy originating in the last third of the nineteenth century and lasting into the twentieth. While Problems of Idealism offers this critique in measured academic terms, Vekhi is more polemically directed against the intelligentsia, the bearer of “positivism,” and the role that it played in the revolution of 1905. Out of the Depths, a book that scarcely saw the light of day in its time, offers a cry of biblical despair in response to the revolutionary apocalypse of 1917, analysing its spiritual, intellectual, social, and cultural roots. — 10 — Introduction The trenchant critique of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia put forward in Vekhi did more than touch a nerve: it generated an extraordinary range of responses, mainly and from all sides critical, and within a year it had been reprinted in its fifth edition (which included a bibliography of some 200 articles and reviews provoked by the collection).3 The republication of Vekhi at the end of the Soviet period, sanctioned at the highest level, can be considered the central symbolic event in relation to intellectual history at the time in the “return of Russian philosophy”:4 if Vekhi could be published, any pretence of ideological control was at an end. As far as testaments to the seriousness with which ideas have at times been taken in Russia are concerned, Vekhi is right up there in the first rank. The scholars who have contributed to this volume, which has grown out of a centennial conference in 2009, have found it most interesting to locate Vekhi in a very wide range of contexts, in terms of history of ideas, discipline, and theory: to read it not as a “landmark” or “signpost” in an evaluative sense, but as a point of focus, intersection, or liminality, perhaps a “crossroads,” to borrow the title proposed by one of the Vekhi contributors, Frank.5 Vekhi is not, however, just any point of focus for wider and diverse analyses of Russian intellectual