VOLUME 2 (2018/2019) A myth is always created about revolution, and the revolu- tion is moved by the dynamic of the myth. The astounding thing is that it is not only the imagination of the masses of the people that creates a myth, scholars creates it also. Nicolas Berdyaev VOLUME 2 (2018/2019) IFiS PAN Publishers Warsaw 2019 CONTENTS From the Editor 5 AFTER REVOLUTIONS Janusz Dobieszewski The revolutionary nature of the Russian Revolution 8 Vladimir Kantor Revolution as the sleep of reason: the total reduction of ideas 30 Marcin Król Revolution and tradition 41 Marek Jedliński Anatomy of the Russian Revolution and the illusions of breaking with the past. Traditionalist criticism of Pitirim Sorokin 47 Leszek Augustyn The shocks of history. The phenomenology of revolution as emerging from Leo Karsavin’s views 59 Marci Shore Philosophy in the Time of Revolution 87 Sławomir Mazurek Self-limiting catastrophism. Russian religious thought and the problem of the Revolution as unprecedented evil 96 Igor I. Evlampiev The religious teachings of the later Fichte as a source of anarchism and revolutionary ideas 108 Inga Matveeva Leo Tolstoy and the Russian Revolution: a modern look 120 Dorota Jewdokimow The never written history of a Moscow existence of 1919. The Warsaw School of the History of Ideas in the light of Marina Tsvetaeva’s notes 133 Katarzyna Kremplewska A story of disillusionment: George Santayana’s views on the Russian Revolution and communism 147 Jacek Migasiński The evolution of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s views on marxism – an inspiration for polish marxism revisionists 162 Szymon Wróbel What is the history of philosophy? 183 BOOKS Andrzej Gniazdowski Waldemar Bulira, Teoria krytyczna szkoły budapeszteńskiej. Od totalitaryzmu do postmodernizmu [The Critical Theory of the Budapest School. From Totalitarianism to Postmodernism] 206 About the Authors 211 Published by The Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences Editorial Staff Sławomir Mazurek (Editor-in Chief) Andrzej Gniazdowski (Co-Editor) Paweł Grad (Assistant) Małgorzata Kowalska Andrzej Leder Grzegorz Pyszczek Andrzej Waśkiewicz Advisory Board Michał Bohun (Cracow) Andrzej Mencwel (Warsaw) Stanisław Borzym (Warsaw) Jacek Migasiński (Warsaw) Natalia Danilikina (Gröningen) Karel Novotny (Prague) Mădălina Diaconu (Vienna) [ Zbigniew Ogonowski ] (Warsaw) Janusz Dobieszewski (Warsaw) Hans-Rainer Sepp (Prague) Danilo Facca (Warsaw) Marci Shore (Yale) Ludger Hagedorn (Vienna) Olga Shparaga (Minsk) Vakhtang Kebuladze (Kiev) Paweł Śpiewak (Warsaw) Marcin Król (Warsaw) Wojciech Starzyński (Warsaw) Joanna Kurczewska (Warsaw) Andrzej Walicki (Warsaw) English language copy editor Jan Burzyński Zachary Mazur Guy Torr Agata Tumiłowicz-Mazur Illustrations on the cover: three aquarelles by Diego Rivera painted in Moscow, 1927-1928 Praca naukowa fi nansowana w ramach programu Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego pod nazwą „Narodowy Program Rozwoju Humanistyki” w latach 2012–2016 Wydawnictwo Instytutu Filozofi i i Socjologii PAN 00-330 Warszawa, ul. Nowy Świat 72, tel. (22) 65 72 861 e-mail: publish@ifi span.waw.pl FROM THE EDITOR The majority – if not all – of adult Europeans still remember a time when the Russian Revolution rather than belonging to the past was part of the distant present, as long as its ideological and social heritage formed a part of everyday experience. This was the case, obviously, not only in countries of the Soviet bloc, but equally in the West, then subject to the threatening proximity and impact of the post-revolutionary empire along with its ideology and myths. When speaking about the Russian Revolution I mean, fi rst of all, the proletarian revolution or, in other words, the Bolshevik turnover and its exceptionally brutal period of social restructuring. It was this event rather than the preceding ‘democratic revolution,’ that was to become the paradigmatic revolution for the twentieth century. It became paradigmatic both in a symbolic dimension, as a source of revolutionary images and artifacts, and in a realistic dimension, as the fi rst element in a long chain of twentieth-century revolutions and reactions. The Russian Revolution seems to have moved within the last decades from the sphere of a distant present to that of a historical past. For historians of ideas and philosophers it remains a vital problem; while the discussion concerning its meaning – or its absurdity – is far from conclusive. The current issue of our journal is – to a large extent – the outcome of an international conference entitled ‘The Russian Revolution and the History of Ideas,’ which took place in the autumn of 2017 at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of Polish Academy of Sciences. The authors of the essays present a variety of interpretive perspectives and tackle a broad spectrum of issues, from the specifi c to the more general. Some of them (Dobieszewski, Kantor, Król, Augustyn, Jedliński) analyze the specifi city of the Russian Revolution in the light of the nature of revolutionary mechanisms as such. Others (Shore, Matveeva, Evlampiev) consider both the broad and local ideological contexts and the intellectual sources of the Revolution. One fi nds among these equally an analysis of an individual existential experience of the Revolution (Jewdokimow). A few authors reconstruct those interpretations of the Revolution expounded by the leading Russian thinkers of that era, such as Sorokin, Karsavin, Frank, and more. One of the studies (by Mazurek) tries to capture the characteristics of the historiosophies that emerged within Russian religious thought. The two remaining texts – focusing on selected intellectual responses to the Revolution coming from beyond the Russian context, constitute an interesting completion for the volume – Migasiński juxtaposes Merleau-Ponty’s developing position towards Marxism with the evolution of Polish revisionists; while Kremplewska off ers an overview of George Santayana’s refl ections on communism. Typically for our journal, more or less direct references to the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas are evident. The Polish revisionists, already mentioned, ones whose methodology is challenged by Jewdokimow, number among its founders. Also Wróbel’s 5 FROM THE EDITOR text – as a result of its thematic scope and regardless of its lack of direct references to the Warsaw School itself - here devoted to the essence and aim of history of philosophy, may fi t within this context. Whether the articles in the volume off er any defi nitive answer to the question as to the meaning of the Russian Revolution or not, they are nonetheless rich in valuable insights that may constitute potential premises for just such an answer in the future. Today, these texts embolden memory as to the tremendous error that the Russian Revolution was to turn out to be for European humanity. Meanwhile, it is this very memory that appears seriously threatened through the lack of fear of a return to radical revolutionary utopianism. Western humanity, which fears the return of varied twentieth-century demons, inexplicably believes that the revival of utopian revolutionism is non-existent. Let us bear in mind that the twentieth century – ‘the real century and not the calendar one’ (to use Anna Akhmatova’s phrase) – began with the Russian Revolution; and without any recollection of this there can be no talk of authentic memory for this turbulent age. Sławomir Mazurek JANUSZ DOBIESZEWSKI AFTER REVOLUTIONS 7 DOI: 10.37240/TI.2018/9.2.1 THE REVOLUTIONARY NATURE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION BY JANUSZ DOBIESZEWSKI The Russian Revolution may be seen in three various ways: Firstly, as an event in the history of Russia, which was caused by its inherent properties and social and political attributes, particular circumstances, contradictions and obstacles in its historical growth; secondly, as an incident of Russian history which fi ts into a more general pattern of revolutionary events, but which also may serve as its distinct ‘sample,’ a lesson, a warning for the rest of the world; the Russian Revolution thus would reveal more general rules, threats and controversies of social development, thereby suggesting to other societies the necessary preventive acts which would allow them to avoid the catastrophe of revolution; thirdly, the Russian Revolution may be seen as a structural element of a wider revolutionary process, an element that may be indispensable and essential; this universal context is not seen (as previously) in terms of an independent, though analogous example of a revolutionary event, but as the decisive environment of the Russian Revolution; in this take, we speak of the socialist, proletarian (and before that, bourgeois) nature of the Russian Revolution, of the way it fulfi lled Marxist theory and its vision of history (though with the necessity for Western, universal adjustment), or a cruelly and irrevocably falsifi ed Marxist utopia. The article is devoted to these three interpretations of the problem. Key words: Revolution, Russia, De profundis, Arendt, Marxism 1. The Russian Revolution represents a topic particularly resistant to any attempts of refl ective formulation and comprehension. This is due, fi rstly, to the extraordinary accumulation of dynamic and interdependent historical facts. We may arrive at views in direct contrast with each other: starting from a vision of events as the inevitable, fatalistic consequence of certain causes, and ending with a conviction of the absolutely arbitrary coincidence of chance circumstances; we may