From Chaadayev to Solovyov

Introduction: Russian Ideas and Russian Troops

Russian philosophical thought of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, so closely related to the spiritual culture and history of not only Russia but also Central and Western Europe, has been the subject of my research and intellectual explorations since the early 1980s.¹ In June 1983, I graduated from the Jagiellonian University in Russian Philology, having experienced an intellectually fruitful time, and having prepared my MA thesis, entitled “Aleksander Sołżenicyn: pisarz i myśliciel wobec tradycji słowianofilstwa rosyjskiego” (“Alexandr Solzhenitsyn: Writer and Thinker on the Tradition of Russian Slavophilism”), under the supervision of Professor Ryszard Łużny (1927–1998). The martial law was underway in communist Poland then, imposed on 13 December 1981 by General Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923–2014), and the name “Solzhenitsyn” was completely forbidden by censorship. Thus, when two years later, I made my debut in the Znak Catholic monthly in Krakow with the article “Włodzimierz Sołowjow i idea teokracji ekumenicznej” (“Vladimir Solovyov and the Idea of Ecumenical Theocracy,” the communist censorship removed even the brief comment I made at the end of the text on the intellectual tradition of Solovyov – as a religious thinker – being continued at the end of the twentieth century by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008).

Dostoyevsky’s religious thought – reflected both on the pages of his great novels in the years 1860–1881 and in the monthly magazine Writer’s Diary, which ←8 | 9→he published intermittently in the period 1873–1881 – ruled out in principle any agreement between Orthodox Russia and Europe, regardless of whether it was a Catholic, socialist, or liberal Europe. This genius writer, incidentally, considered Roman Catholicism to be even worse than socialism and atheism, which he hated with all his heart and soul. This is why, his prince Lev Myshkin from The Idiot, otherwise gentle as a lamb, once has a terrible fit of anger and, in the Yepanchins’ drawing room, in the presence of St. Petersburg’s high society, cries out his thoughts on the “essence of the papacy” hitherto hidden at the bottom of his soul:

On 11 November 2021 – exactly on the bicentenary of Dostoyevsky’s birth – the contemporary Russian writer and thinker Dmitriy Bykov (born in 1967) wrote an article, soon to be widely known, entitled “Dvesti let zhesti” (“Two hundred years of horror”), where he named Dostoyevsky “the father of Russian fascism”:

Bykov then defended the same belief about Dostoyevsky on 10 March 2022 – two weeks after Putin’s armed invasion of Ukraine by Russia – in an online lecture for the Jagiellonian University and the Carpathian State University in Krosno in the sub-Carpathian region. Of course, this is nothing surprising, since the invasion was carried out from the very beginning under the banner of Russian fascism, also embellished with religious slogans, often drawn from Dostoyevsky.⁵ The lecture and the discussion that followed took place as part of the newly created series of meetings at the Institute of East Slavic Philology of the Jagiellonian University, entitled “A Ray of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness.” The title of this series refers to a once very well-known article from 1860 by Nikolai Dobrolubov (1836–1831), who wrote apologetically about the famous drama The Storm by Alexandr Ostrovsky (1823–1886), published in 1859. Today, this “ray of light in the kingdom of darkness” may mean a revolt of Russian intellectuals against Putin’s military archaism, rooted in nationalist ideologies, that had been created and developed over the last two hundred years in Tsarist Russia, the USSR and the Russian Federation.⁶

Naturally, Bykov is not the first to recognize the inhuman face of contemporary Russian “religious ideology,” rooted in classical and then degenerated ←10 | 11→Slavophilism. Such Slavophilism rejected the basic cultural heritage of Europe, and often treated the history of its native Russia as subsequent volumes of The Sacred History. This is what was claimed with all seriousness by Konstantin Aksakov (1817–1860), one of the three pillars of (regrettably) classical, Slavophilism, next to the above-mentioned Kireyevsky and Khomyakov. Aksakov also wrote that “Russian history has the meaning of a Worldwide Confession and can be read as the lives of Saints.”7

18 March 2022, the day when, running amok with its fascism, Putin’s Russia celebrated in Moscow the eighth anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, coincided with the 90th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Gorenstein (1932–2002), an outstanding Russian writer who was born in Kiev in a family of Ukrainian Jews and from 1980 on lived in exile in West Germany until his death. And it was in 1986 in Munich that he published his novel masterpiece Psalom: roman-razmyshleniye v chetyrekh kaznyakh Gospodnikh (The Psalm: Novel-Reflection about the Lord’s Four Punishments), written in the years 1974–1975 back in the USSR. I was lucky to get to know this book, also in Munich, soon after it was written, as I spent the years 1987–1988 there, writing my doctoral dissertation Włodzimierz Sołowjow wobec historii (Vladimir Solovyov on History, 1992) and developing contacts with Russian émigrés in Bavaria. And at the very appropriate moment, the publisher and writer Boris Khazanov (1928–2022) presented me with the first edition of Gorenstein’s Psalm. The publisher, who rightly considered this novel a masterpiece, recommended it to me with conviction as a creative continuation of The Master and Margarita. After reading The Psalm, I saw the universal themes of Solovyov’s in it as well.

In the last three chapters of the present volume, I argue that this greatest and most universal Russian thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century was always very firmly opposed to what he calls “zoological patriotism” in Russia.⁸ He was especially indignant when that “patriotism” adopted a quasi-religious face. Gorenstein, who in the 1970s observed the revival of this very nationalist Orthodoxy in the officially atheistic USSR, referred to it in his novel with the deepest concern. Here is the fictional scene at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow:

In the context of similar considerations, it is worth recalling the opinion about Dostoyevsky and the “eternal problems” he raises which was presented in 1990 by another eminent writer and thinker of contemporary Russia – Viktor Yerofeyev (born in 1947). His volume of essays on literature entitled In a Maze of Cursed Problems is already an absolute classic of the genre. And his comments on Dostoyevsky are, in my opinion, among the best passages of all critical world literature on the author of The Brothers Karamazov. Having dealt with the works on Dostoyevsky for decades, I have noticed already long ago that his religious world of ideas not only excludes any kind of agreement between Russia and Europe, but also endorses an exclusion of humanistic ethics that does not need religious rooting, which is threatening for humanity, even in the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, Yerofeyev– in opposition to both Dostoevsky and his demonic hero Ivan Karamazov – confidently formulates the following ethical credo, which implies an urgent need for secular ethics:

Both Yerofeyev and Bykov, of course, recognize the multidimensionality of Dostoevsky’s work and its timeless value when it comes to, for example, criticizing – of course potentially – the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. They support the writer’s noble compassion for the “insulted and humiliated.” They also cannot but respectfully bow to the vision of a “pink Christianity” by Dostoyevsky, so sharply criticized by Leontiev, the proclaimer of Christianity of the sword and fear, as is discussed in more detail in the first chapter of this volume. Nevertheless, it is both Dostoyevsky – as an apologist of the Russian nationalist religion that stands in opposition to Europe and its rationalism – and Leontiev – as a defender of the state religion of the whip of a mystical hue – that remain favourites of the political regime in Russia in the twenty-first century and the masses of ideologues and hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church that support it, under the lead by the Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia, Cyril I (born in 1946).

The next two protagonists of this study – Herzen and Chernyshevsky – have been presented in separate chapters only in passing. However, a considerably detailed analysis of very important extracts of their work reflects the general nature of both worldviews quite adequately. Regarding Herzen, most generally speaking, he built his absolutely secular ethics and a critical attitude toward Western Europe (although still hopeful for the future) on the basis of the belief completely opposite to Dostoevsky’s. Namely, Herzen believed that any religion could only hinder such a desirable rapprochement between Russia and Europe, and, that is why, the Eastern and Western man should build their future on heroic anti-theism. He considered “semper in motu” (“always on the move”) the motto of his times, but in this panta rei of his there was always one constant value – the belief that one must create one’s fate completely independently, without regard to any extra-terrestrial forces from above or below. First, Herzen was a Hegelian cabinet revolutionist who placed his hope in the social ratio of history, and then – in the face of the defeat of the 1848 revolution in Europe – he ←13 | 14→announced that each individual man should only save himself. Before 1848, he had seen a chance to fulfil his Faustian dreams in Europe, while after 1848, he hastily transferred his hope to “peasant Russia,” building just then an unfulfilled vision of “Russian socialism.” He had always fought against all providentialism, as he saw the essence of history only in itself, and man was for him the only active spiritual and material subject of history.

A special place in my research on Russian philosophical thought has long been occupied by Vladimir Solovyov, mentioned above several times, who is consequently the protagonist of three extensive chapters of the present volume. The first chapter (the seventh in the volume) deals with his religious ecumenism ←14 | 15→in relation to Roman Catholics and followers of the Orthodox Church in Russia, the second chapter (the eighth in the volume) concerns Catholic Poles and followers of Judaism in the same universal context, while the third chapter (the ninth, the last major one in the volume) deals with the declining period of Solovyov’s life and work. In the decade 1891–1900, the thinker first formulated an extremely harsh critique, precisely valid even today, of the “medieval religious worldview,” then established the principles of autonomous ethics independent of religion and ended his life and work with an apocalyptic vision of the end of history, where ethics was, unfortunately, reduced by him – in the spirit of Dostoevsky and anti-Tolstoy – to the role of ancilla religionis (servant of religion).

Solovyov was the second Russian thinker, after Solzhenitsyn, to whom I devoted a few years of my early research of the ideological, cultural, and historical heritage of modern Russia. Publishing a series of articles on Solovyov in the late 1980s, in the then communist Poland, I appreciated especially highly both his ecumenism and criticism of religious nationalism and medieval Christianity as well as his prophetic description of the apocalyptic “falsifying of the good,” presented in A Short Story of the Anti-Christ. In the 1980s, the apocalyptic visions of Solovyov seemed to me extremely relevant, which resulted also from my position as a researcher living and working within a communist space, spiritually alien to me. I even argued then with Andrzej Walicki,14 who was in America and who in 1973 described Solovyov’s prophecy as “of questionable quality,” while he arbitrarily considered the opinion of others that A Short Story of the Anti-Christ was a work of genius to be excessive.¹⁵ For me, this prophecy was extremely valuable in the 1980s, as it described the communist “falsification of the good” most adequately. Today – as will be mentioned again at the very end of this introduction – the ←15 | 16→apocalyptic vision of Solovyov can also be very convenient as a tool of criticism against contemporary, criminal falsifiers of good in Putin’s Russia.

When in the second half of the nineties I wrote the above-mentioned book From Chaadayev to Berdyaev: The Dispute over God and Man in Russian Philosophical Thought 1832–1922, I tried very hard to emphasize the difference in my research approach in relation to Walicki’s assessment of Russian worldviews. Today I also see this difference, but I also notice equally clearly my spiritual ties to Walicki. They deepened in the autumn of 1998, when we met for the first time at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Back then, Walicki rated highly Russia’s religious and, at the same time, pro-European thinkers, including Solovyov, and I, in turn, was ideologically empathetic to Russian pro-European non-religious thinkers, such as Herzen or Chernyshevsky. During one of our meetings and discussions at that time, held in 1998–2004 in Krakow, Warsaw, and once even in Moscow,16 Walicki even expressed his solidarity with me for respecting Chernyshevsky as a person and a philosopher.

What I always lacked in the thinking of Walicki as a historian of ideas was, above all, a critical reflection on his own research method and a reflection on the complex issue of whether his descriptions, analyses, and syntheses regarding Russia had always been identical, regardless of place and time in which they were created. The lack of such self-reflection may create an otherwise erroneous impression of his infallibility in the affairs of Russia, even reinforced by many of Walicki’s younger successors in today’s Poland. And yet this outstanding researcher – writing his great work in the very long period of 1952–2020 consecutively in communist Poland, Australia, the USA, and then independent Poland – must have undergone an ideological evolution, in the process exploring Russian thought and Russia itself.

This lack of self-reflection is, in my opinion, the greatest paradox of Walicki’s creative method, the more so because his ideological evolution is not at all difficult to notice. Around the mid-1990s, he began to write more and more favourably about the Russian universal religious thought, which culminated in the book Rosja, katolicyzm i sprawa polska (Russia, Catholicism and the Polish Question [2002]), which mainly concerned the nineteenth-century world. At the same time, but completely independently of Walicki, I wrote a somewhat related work on the figure of the Polish Pope John Paul II (1978–2005) and his pro-European religious reflection on Russia and Ukraine. Already after it was published in 2001, my book Większa Europa: Papież wobec Rosji i Ukrainy (A Greater Europe: The Pope on Russia and Ukraine) received a favourable mention in the work by Walicki: “A comprehensive reconstruction of this great vision of John Paul II is contained in the book by Grzegorz Przebinda, A Greater Europe: The Pope on Russia and Ukraine, Krakow 2001. While writing the present book, completed in 2000, I did not know this fundamental work. I am all the more pleased with the similarity in his general characteristics of the ‘Slavic teaching’ of John Paul II.”17

For the sake of completeness, I will add that my evolution in the research approach to Russian thought was somewhat opposite to the one clearly visible in Walicki’s works. While back in the 1990s, I was inclined to emphasize in my evaluative description the well-known warning of Dostoevsky: “If there is no God, then everything is allowed,” now I also try not to overlook the enormous threat that the archaic, pseudo-religious Russian thought poses for Europe and for Russia itself, which has found a very clear reflection in the present study.

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The study was completed in its main part at the end of December 2021, and I am finishing the introduction in mid-April 2022, which is more than fifty days after Putin’s Russia unleashed a war against Ukraine, and at the same time – all free Europe and the democratic world. This is neither the time nor place for a detailed analysis of the worldview of the dictator of contemporary Russia, but it must be emphasized that in this criminal action against Ukraine, unprecedented in the history of Europe after 1945, Putin uses religious categories abundantly. Here is what the ruler of Moscow announced urbi et orbi on 21 February 2022, three days before the invasion of Kyiv:

And already in the proper “war homily,” delivered on the Russian state television in the first hours of the war in the morning of 24 February 2022, Putin, in his tirade against the West, openly used Dostoevsky’s archaic language:

All the limits of genocidal cynicism were exceeded by Putin on 18 March 2022, when at the Moscow stadium in Luzhniki, during the fascist gathering of crowds on the eighth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian Crimea, he assessed the “heroism” of the invaders by referring to the phrase from the Gospel: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15, 13).²⁰ He then recalled related quotations from the holy books of other great religions – the Koran, the Torah, and the words of the Buddha, taken from the canonical book of Tibetan Buddhism Kangyur (Translation of the Word): “Never in this world is hatred quenched by hatred. By love alone is it quenched.”²¹

In February 2014, soon after the annexation of Crimea, I published a few articles in the Polish high-circulation daily press and specialist magazines, in which ←18 | 19→it was precisely this “religious” face of Putin’s imperialism that I tried to present in relation to Ukraine and countries closest to Russia: “For several years now, the ruler of the Kremlin has wanted to introduce himself to Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians as a man of ‘special faith.’ He deceives honest, but unfortunately naive Orthodox Christians with information about his baptism and conversion, or talks about Stalin’s ‘brotherly religiosity.’”22 Today, I cannot but subscribe to the recent press article of the Polish-German writer and essayist Artur Becker (born in 1968), who on 11 March 2022, in the Warsaw “Rzeczpospolita” daily, in the article “Putin and the Antichrist,” compared the current ruler of Russia to the protagonist of the apocalyptic work by Solovyov.”²³

After a long consideration, I also decided to recall in this context one more very important ideological episode, which, unfortunately, will once again confirm Putin’s enormous talent in the work of “falsifying of the good”. Andrzej Walicki, in his last book On Russia in a Different Way (2019), still managed to recall that Putin, during the winter holidays of 2013, instructed his top officials to read works on Russian philosophical thought – a collection of articles from 1948–1954 by the émigré monarchist Ivan Ilyin (1883–1954) entitled Our Tasks, The Philosophy of Inequality (written in the summer of 1918, published in 1923) by Nikolai Berdyaev, and The Justification of the Good (1894–1897) by Vladimir Solovyov. It is worth quoting Walicki's argument at length, as it is very surprising in this context:

Everything that Walicki said above with regard to Solovyov is obviously right, and at the same time close not only to his heart, but also to that of anyone who cares about the future of Europe and Russia. The more dizzying, then, is Walicki’s claim – formulated five years after the annexation of Crimea, in a situation where Putin had finally dealt with the remnants of free opposition in Russia – that these humanistic values are also endorsed by the Kremlin dictator. The only problem, according to Walicki, was that the above-mentioned work of Solovyov could not be understood by Putin’s not very bright officials: “The philosophical density of this text, however, raises doubts as to whether it was feasible for the officials burdened with the task to fulfil it.”²⁵ As is very clear, even a perfect knowledge of the world of ideas and the history of Russia does not necessarily favour – to put it mildly – a rational view of the world.

I began writing this introduction with a reflection that I owe my first serious encounter with Russian philosophical thought to Solzhenitsyn, a writer and thinker who was extremely hostile to the Soviet system. When the Soviet Union was finally about to collapse, and the hitherto forbidden classical Russian philosophy (including the works of Chaadayev and Solovyov) began a triumphant return to the country,²⁶ in September 1990 Solzhenitsyn, still in exile in America, published – at the same time in Paris and Moscow – the philosophical and political booklet Kak nam obustroit’ Rossiyu?: Posilnyye soobrazheniya (Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals). Note that the English title does not fully reflect the essence of the original. In the English translation, the question ←20 | 21→mark disappeared from the main sentence of the title, and Solzhenitsyn, who did not consider himself a prophet, used the question mark deliberately. Likewise, the translation of the Russian verb “obustroit” into “rebuild” also unfortunately obscures Solzhenitsyn’s real intentions. He did not recommend the reconstruction of a Russia that “had once been,” but postulated the way to organize the new Russia that was emerging before his eyes. The writer did not accept the postulate of the then Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–2022), to incorporate this new Russia in the “Common European Home,” as he felt much closer to “A Europe of Nations” of Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), although he never explicitly expressed it. In the face of the many myths and misunderstandings surrounding the character and ideological attitude of Solzhenitsyn in his later years, I will quote a larger excerpt from his booklet Rebuilding Russia. This paragraph clearly shows that in 1990 Solzhenitsyn had absolutely nothing to do with the ideology and practice of the restoration of the Russian Empire, which Putin is ruthlessly implementing today in his unprecedented war against Ukraine:

Therefore, it is not surprising in this 1990 context that Solzhenitsyn referred to Vladimir Solovyov as follows: “Every people, even the very smallest, represents a unique facet of God’s design. As Vladimir Solovyov has written, paraphrasing the Christian commandment: ‘You must love all other people as you love your own’.”²⁹ And yet, after the release of Rebuilding Russia, many Ukrainians accused Solzhenitsyn of being an opponent of the independence of their country and nation. It is difficult to confirm this objection with an appropriate quotation from the booklet in question. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn did appeal to both Ukrainians and Belarusians to remain voluntarily together with the Russians in the new state structure that was being formed from the USSR – let us recall that he was preparing his mini-treatise at a time when the USSR was still functioning. However, what appears to be of key importance is this clear and firm statement of Solzhenitsyn’s at that time: “Of course, if the Ukrainian people should genuinely wish to separate, no one would dare to restrain them by force.”³⁰ And it is also worth adding an excerpt from a letter addressed to the conference on Russian-Ukrainian relations organized in Toronto in April 1981: “In my heart, there is no place for a Russo-Ukrainian conflict, and if, God forbid, things get to the extreme, I can say: Never, under no circumstances, will either I or my sons join in a Russo-Ukrainian clash, no matter how some hotheads may push us towards one.”³¹

Any other later views of Solzhenitsyn on Ukraine, sometimes genuinely controversial, seem to be of secondary importance in this situation. But how to explain the fact that President Putin has become an admirer of Solzhenitsyn in the last few years? When, in March 2022, I organized the meetings with two contemporary Russian writers: Dmitriy Bykov and Boris Akunin (born in 1956) at the Jagiellonian University and the Carpathian State College in Krosno, I asked them about the relationship between Putin and Solzhenitsyn. In a question to Bykov, I expressed my conviction that Solzhenitsyn would not approve of the current war between Russia and Ukraine, but I wanted to hear from the writer whether Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Enlightenment worldview32 does not contain any seeds of Putinism? Bykov replied:

In turn, asking Akunin the same question, I recalled that on 11 December 2018 – exactly on the centenary of Solzhenitsyn’s birth – I took part in a scholarly conference devoted to the author of The Gulag Archipelago, organized by Natalia Solzhenitsyn, the writer’s widow. At the same time, I was able to listen on-site to Putin’s speech during the unveiling of Solzhenitsyn’s monument in Moscow on Taganka. Before I refer to the ideological slogans of this speech, I would like to cite Akunin’s reply:

The above-mentioned three-minute speech by Putin at the unveiling of the monument did not contain any passage that would demonstrate a deeper understanding of Solzhenitsyn’s work. The commander of the armed forces of the Russian Federation did not go beyond a few banal or obvious observations. He emphasized that Solzhenitsyn had been a front officer during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, but did not mention the fact that in 1945, straight from the front, the writer had been sent to a labour camp for eight years, and then to the “eternal exile.” Putin also remained silent about the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn from the USSR in 1974 and depriving him of the Soviet citizenship. Instead, he emphasized Solzhenitsyn’s “love for the homeland” and the fact that the great writer was able to “distinguish the genuine, indigenous national Russia from the totalitarian system that brought harsh experiences to millions of people.” Putin also approved – by modulating his voice accordingly – of the critical attitude of Solzhenitsyn towards “Russophobia” in the West: “While in exile, Alexandr Isayevich never let anyone speak badly about his homeland, he was opposed to all manifestations of Russophobia.” Finally, he welcomed the fact that Solzhenitsyn, in his works, defended the moral foundations of politics and social life: “So that the most severe, dramatic experiences that have fallen on Russia would never repeat again, that our multi-national nation would live in dignity and justice.”³⁶

The very important “Solzhenitsyn-Putin” problem requires a separate study.³⁷ One cannot ignore the fact of their two personal meetings: on 20 September 2000 and 12 June 2007 in the writer’s house near Moscow – which Putin also referred to in his speech at the monument. In this context, Solzhenitsyn’s interview for the German weekly Spiegel, also published in English at the end of July ←24 | 25→2007,38 is very important in this context. However, when looking for differences and parallels between Solzhenitsyn and Putin, it should be remembered that this great writer – for many years the true “conscience of Russia” – died long before the current war, not even living to witness the war between Russia and Georgia, which broke out in August 2008. Therefore, his assessment of the greatest villain of Russia in the twenty-first century, who without any embarrassment admits his ties with the Gospel and with Vladimir Solovyov, could not, of course, be adequate. It is worth strongly emphasizing that on 11 December 2018, in front of the Solzhenitsyn monument, Putin also used the method of “falsifying of the good” mentioned several times above. In 2019, it turned out to be effective in the process of tantalizing Walicki, and now it is intended primarily to deceive the largely helpless “Russian folk,” who, under the influence of propaganda, recognized the “Ukrainian war” of Russia as a peaceful and defensive mission. Vladimir Solovyov would, of course, consider a similar “peace mission” to be the criminal culmination of “zoological patriotism” and the final outcome of “falsifying of the good,” but it is possible that the above-mentioned Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov would consider this action a “holy war” of good-natured Russia against schismatic Europe.

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