Russian Philosophers Quotes

But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. . . . As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. . . . The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

All my tendencies are deadly ones, he once said to me, everything in me has a deadly tendency to it, it's in my genes, as Wertheimer said, I thought. He always read books that were obsessed with suicide, with disease and death, I thought while standing in the inn, books that described human misery, the hopeless, meaningless, senseless world in which everything is always devastating and deadly. That's why he especially loved Dostoevsky and all his disciples, Russian literature in general, because it actually is a deadly literature, but also the depressing French philosophers.

at one time, a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conceptions of religion, law and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed... In the old days, you see, if a man - a Frenchman, for instance- wished to get an education, he would have set to work to study the classics, the theologians, the tragedians, historians and philosophers- and you can realize all the intellectual labour involved. But nowadays he goes straight for the literature of negation, rapidly assimilates the essence of the science of negation, and thinks he's finished.

I am aware of many things being quite as important as good writing and good reading; but in all things it is wiser to go directly to the quiddity, to the text, to the source, to the essence—and only then evolve whatever theories may tempt the philosopher, or the historian, or merely please the spirit of the day. Readers are born free and ought to remain free.

Evil people don’t have songs.”13—How is it that the Russians have songs?

I wanted to be her north star. I wanted to be her map. I wanted to drink coffee with her in the cafes in the morning and do things, as you do, as she did, instead of just philosophizing about them and deconstructing their endless Russian-doll layers of meaning. I was alone before I met her. I wanted to disappear with her, and fold her into my life. I wanted to be her compass. I wanted to be her last speaker, her interpreter, her language. I wanted to be her translator, Zed, but none of the languages we knew were the same.

To talk nonsense in one’s own way is almost better than to talk a truth that’s someone else’s

the Russians did not have philosophers, but they did have Dostoevski and Tolstoy; and the substitute was perhaps not a total loss.

the elaboration of a religious philosophy of history would appear to be the specific mission of Russian philosophical thought

Other feelings too can be philosophical—pain, grief, tedium, delight, exultation—if they are experienced on behalf of humankind. “I looked around me, and my soul became wounded by the suffering of mankind” is the opening of Alexander Radishchev’s “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” (1790), which laid the foundation of all subsequent Russian philosophy. It is a philosophy shaped by feelings of suffering and compassion, by the Karamazovian question of how to justify a child’s tears. The range of philosophical feelings is wide.

I am aware of many things being quite as important as good writing and good reading; but in all things it is wiser to go directly to the quiddity, to the text, to the source, to the essence—and only then evolve whatever theories may tempt the philosopher, or the historian, or merely please the spirit of the day.

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, moral thinker, and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. As a fiction writer Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Wikipedia

A Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin said that "the self is the gift of the other" It seems to me most true now. The genes I carry, the clothes I wear, the food I eat all have come through the hands of others. Even those words I write now, my vocabulary, are not only mine. They are an agreement, a social contract between the two of us.

I had no idea my wife was a philosopher.” “Is a Russian thing. Sit around, drink too much, talk about death.” She pushed her empty plate away. “It makes us cheerful.

Ayn Rand, the Russian-American novelist and would-be philosopher, needed such boring heavy tomes full of bloodless characters to make her case. Her main point was that we are unalloyed individualists, but she had to work hard to convince us, because deep down everyone knows that this is not who or what we are. Rather than a description of our species, Rand offered a counterintuitive ideological construct.

Liberalism has been degraded into liberality. Men have tried to turn "revolutionise" from a transitive to an intransitive verb. The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but (what was more important) the system he would not rebel against, the system he would trust. But the new rebel is a sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

A mama's boy, loner, intellectual, voracious reader and gourmand, Dimitri was a man of esoteric skills and appetites: a gambler, philosopher, gardener, fly-fisherman, fluent in Russian and German as well as having an amazing command of English. He loved antiquated phrases, dry sarcasm, military jargon, regional dialect, and the New York Times crossword puzzle — to which he was hopelessly addicted.

Just as Marx’s methodological method provides an objective analysis of capitalist development, the materialist concept of history developed by Marx and Friedrich Engels provides an objective analysis of how to reach communism. Therefore, by tracing the historical (as in necessary) development of the productive forces, we shall see that the ‘Leninist’ road – of revolution, proletarian dictatorship and centrally planned ‘state’ socialism – remains necessary. By drawing on the work of the Soviet Russian philosopher Genrikh Volkov, we shall see that the Leninist road opens up the path to a Single Automated Society – fully automated production in a de facto one-state world, the final stage of the socialist transition to global communism. We shall establish precisely why this road is the solution that must be pursued if humanity is to combat the climate crisis and survive to realise its full potential in what Marx called “the beginning of human history”.

The most striking characteristic of the Russians is their conscientiousness and love of justice. There is no false vanity, no sly ambition to rise without merit: such faults are alien to our people. Take them from their rough shell, and you will perceive, if you study them closely, attentively, and without prejudice, qualities which you would never have suspected. Our philosophers have very little to teach the common folk. I will go further and say that those sages might even take lessons from them.

I just want to tell my story. Because this is what I do. I play Russian roulette with Fate, knowing someday a therapist will break confidentiality and turn me in. It’s like when I was a child, weighed down by guilt over some wrongdoing but fearing the punishment too much to confess outright. I’d drop clues, reasoning that if I was meant to be caught, those hints would chamber the round. Magical, childish thinking, but it’s what I do now. I tell my story and reason that if I’m truly meant to be punished, a therapist will turn me in.

With a very few exceptions, all liberal-minded creative forces—poets, novelists, critics, historians, philosophers and so on—had left Lenin’s and Stalin’s Russia. Those who had not were either withering away there or adulterating their gifts by complying with the political demands of the state. What the Tsars had never been able to achieve, namely the complete curbing of minds to the government’s will, was achieved by the Bolsheviks in no time after the main contingent of the intellectuals had escaped abroad or had been destroyed. The lucky group of expatriates could now follow their pursuits with such utter impunity that, in fact, they sometimes asked themselves if the sense of enjoying absolute mental freedom was not due to their working in an absolute void. True, there was among émigrés a sufficient number of good readers to warrant the publication, in Berlin, Paris, and other towns, of Russian books and periodicals on a comparatively large scale; but since none of those writings could circulate within the Soviet Union, the whole thing acquired a certain air of fragile unreality.

Future generations will struggle to understand how philosophical reactionaries such as Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty and Foucault, working with concepts rummaged from the “basement of bourgeois thought,”27 came to exert such an unwarranted and dangerous influence in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. I would be very pleased if the lectures and essays in this volume that deal with philosophical issues help future scholars understand the political and social pathology of the postmodernist pandemic.

At a nearby table, two men in suits were discussing the gymnastics final in booming voices. “She never would have won if the Russians hadn’t boycotted,” the man insisted. “It’s not a victory if the best players aren’t there.” Sam asked his mother whether she thought the man with the loud voice was right. “Hmm.” Anna sipped her iced tea and then she rested her chin in her hands, which Sam had learned to recognize as her philosophizing gesture. Anna was a great talker, and it was one of the most profound pleasures of young Sam’s life to discuss the world and its mysteries with his mother. No one took him, and his queries, more seriously than she did. “Even if what he says is true, I think it’s still a victory,” she said. “Because she won on this day, with this particular set of people. We can never know what else might have happened had other competitors been there. The Russian girls could have won, or they could have gotten jet-lagged and choked.” Anna shrugged. “And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.

Grigoryevich...Not that he had any real talent himself—but what a lot of deaths of talented people he had witnessed. Young physicists and historians, specialists in ancient languages, philosophers, musicians, young Russian Swifts and Erasmuses—how many of them he had seen put on their “wooden jackets.” Prerevolutionary literature had often lamented the fate of serf actors, musicians, and painters. But who was there today to write about the young men and women who had never had the chance to write their books and paint their paintings? The Russian earth is indeed fertile and generous. She gives birth to her own Platos, to her own quick-witted Newtons—but how casually and terribly she devours these children of hers.

We are told that we are not to resist evil but to turn the other cheek. The world assumes that evil must be resisted by every means available. We are told to love our enemies and bless those who curse us. The world assumes that friends are to be loved and enemies hated. We are told that the sun rises on the just and the unjust alike. The world considers this undiscriminating; it would like to see clouds over evil people and is offended when they go unpunished. We are told that outcasts and harlots enter the kingdom of God before many who are perfunctorily righteous. Again unfair, the world thinks; respectable people should head the procession. We are told that the gate to salvation is narrow. The world would prefer it to be broad. We are told to be as carefree as birds and flowers. The world counsels prudence. We are told that it is more difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom than for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye. The world admires wealth. We are told that the happy people are those who are meek, who weep, who are merciful and pure in heart. The world assumes that it is the rich, the powerful, and the well-born who are happy. The great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev said that a wind of freedom blows through these teachings that frightens the world and makes us want to deflect them by postponement—not yet, not yet! H.G. Wells was evidently right: Either there was something mad about this man, or our hearts are still too small for his message.

BLUE pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit—dumps, mopes, Mondays—all that’s dismal—low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that’s empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance, or, when the sky’s turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese . . . the pedantic, indecent and censorious . . . watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it’s stood for fidelity.

On 28 June 1914 the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, a heartland of the South Slavs. Philosophers refer to ‘the inevitable accident’, and this was a very accidental one. Some young Serb terrorists had planned to murder him as he paid a state visit. They had bungled the job, throwing a bomb that missed, and one of them had repaired to a café in a side street to sort himself out. The Archduke drove to the headquarters of the governor-general, Potiorek (where he was met by little girls performing folklore), and berated him (the two men were old enemies, as the Archduke had prevented the neurasthenic Potiorek from succeeding an elderly admirer as Chief of the General Staff). The Archduke went off in a rage, to visit in hospital an officer wounded by the earlier bomb. His automobile moved off again, a Count Harrach standing on the running board. Its driver turned left after crossing a bridge over Sarajevo’s river. It was the wrong street, and the driver was told to stop and reverse. In reverse gear such automobiles sometimes stalled, and this one did so - Count Harrach on the wrong side, away from the café where one of the assassination team was calming his nerves. Now, slowly, his target drove up and stopped. The murderer, Gavrilo Princip, fired. He was seventeen, a romantic schooled in nationalism and terrorism, and part of a team that stretches from the Russian Nihilists of the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified especially in Dostoyevsky’s prophetic The Possessed and Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Austria did not execute adolescents and Princip was young enough to survive. He was imprisoned and died in April 1918. Before he died, a prison psychiatrist asked him if he had any regrets that his deed had caused a world war and the death of millions. He answered: if I had not done it, the Germans would have found another excuse.

Bakunin, on the other hand, considered himself a revolutionist of the deed, "not a philosopher and not an inventor of systems, like Marx." He adamantly refused to recognize the existence of any "a priori ideas or preordained, preconceived laws." Bakunin rejected the view that social change depended on the gradual maturation of "objective" historical conditions. On the contrary, he believed that men shaped their own destinies, that their lives could not be squeezed into a Procrustean bed of abstract sociological formulas. "No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world," Bakunin declared. "I cleave to no system, I am a true seeker." Mankind was not compelled to wait patiently as the fabric of history unfolded in the fullness of time. By teaching the working masses theories, Marx would only succeed in stifling the revolutionary ardor every man already possessed—"the impulse to liberty, the passion for equality, the holy instinct of revolt.

She sat and watched the dockhand when it was sunny and she sat and watched him when it rained. Or when it was foggy, which is what it was nearly every morning at eight o’clock. This morning was none of the above. This morning was cold. The pier smelled of fresh water and of fish. The seagulls screeched overhead, a man’s voice shouted. Where is my brother to help me, my sister, my mother? Pasha, help me, hide in the woods where I know I can find you. Dasha, look what’s happened. Do you even see? Mama, Mama. I want my mother. Where is my family to ask things of me, to weigh on me, to intrude on me, to never let me be silent or alone, where are they to help me through this? Deda, what do I do? I don’t know what to do. This morning the dockhand did not go over to see his friend at the next pier for a smoke and a coffee. Instead, he walked across the road and sat next to her on the bench. This surprised her. But she said nothing, she just wrapped her white nurse’s coat tighter around herself, and fixed the kerchief covering her hair. In Swedish he said to her, “My name is Sven. What’s your name?” After a longish pause, she replied. “Tatiana. I don’t speak Swedish.” In English he said to her, “Do you want a cigarette?” “No,” she replied, also in English. She thought of telling him she spoke little English. She was sure he didn’t speak Russian. He asked her if he could get her a coffee, or something warm to throw over her shoulders. No and no. She did not look at him. Sven was silent a moment. “You want to get on my barge, don’t you?” he asked. “Come. I will take you.” He took her by her arm. Tatiana didn’t move. “I can see you have left something behind,” he said, pulling on her gently. “Go and retrieve it.” Tatiana did not move. “Take my cigarette, take my coffee, or get on my barge. I won’t even turn away. You don’t have to sneak past me. I would have let you on the first time you came. All you had to do was ask. You want to go to Helsinki? Fine. I know you’re not Finnish.” Sven paused. “But you are very pregnant. Two months ago it would have been easier for you. But you need to go back or go forward. How long do you plan to sit here and watch my back?” Tatiana stared into the Baltic Sea. “If I knew, would I be sitting here?” “Don’t sit here anymore. Come,” said the longshoreman. She shook her head. “Where is your husband? Where is the father of your baby?” “Dead in the Soviet Union,” Tatiana breathed out. “Ah, you’re from the Soviet Union.” He nodded. “You’ve escaped somehow? Well, you’re here, so stay. Stay in Sweden. Go to the consulate, get yourself refugee protection. We have hundreds of people getting through from Denmark. Go to the consulate.” Tatiana shook her head. “You’re going to have that baby soon,” Sven said. “Go back, or move forward.” Tatiana’s hands went around her belly. Her eyes glazed over. The dockhand patted her gently and stood up. “What will it be? You want to go back to the Soviet Union? Why?” Tatiana did not reply. How to tell him her soul had been left there? “If you go back, what happens to you?” “I die most likely,” she barely whispered. “If you go forward, what happens to you?” “I live most likely.” He clapped his hands. “What kind of a choice is that? You must go forward.” “Yes,” said Tatiana, “but how do I live like this? Look at me. You think, if I could, I wouldn’t?” “So you’re here in the Stockholm purgatory, watching me move my paper day in and day out, watching me smoke, watching me. What are you going to do? Sit with your baby on the bench? Is that what you want?” Tatiana was silent. The first time she laid eyes on him she was sitting on a bench, eating ice cream. “Go forward.” “I don’t have it in me.” He nodded. “You have it. It’s just covered up. For you it’s winter.” He smiled. “Don’t worry. Summer’s here. The ice will melt.” Tatiana struggled up from the bench. Walking away, she said in Russian, “It’s not the ice anymore, my seagoing philosopher. It’s the pyre.

I always had trouble with the feet of Jón the First, or Pre-Jón, as I called him later. He would frequently put them in front of me in the evening and tell me to take off his socks and rub his toes, soles, heels and calves. It was quite impossible for me to love these Icelandic men's feet that were shaped like birch stumps, hard and chunky, and screaming white as the wood when the bark is stripped from it. Yes, and as cold and damp, too. The toes had horny nails that resembled dead buds in a frosty spring. Nor can I forget the smell, for malodorous feet were very common in the post-war years when men wore nylon socks and practically slept in their shoes. How was it possible to love these Icelandic men? Who belched at the meal table and farted constantly. After four Icelandic husbands and a whole load of casual lovers I had become a vrai connaisseur of flatulence, could describe its species and varieties in the way that a wine-taster knows his wines. The howling backfire, the load, the gas bomb and the Luftwaffe were names I used most. The coffee belch and the silencer were also well-known quantities, but the worst were the date farts, a speciality of Bæring of Westfjord. Icelandic men don’t know how to behave: they never have and never will, but they are generally good fun. At least, Icelandic women think so. They seem to come with this inner emergency box, filled with humour and irony, which they always carry around with them and can open for useful items if things get too rough, and it must be a hereditary gift of the generations. Anyone who loses their way in the mountains and gets snowed in or spends the whole weekend stuck in a lift can always open this special Icelandic emergency box and get out of the situation with a good story. After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of

The symposium was a closed-doors, synod-style assembly of people who would never have mixed otherwise. My first surprise was to discover that the military people there thought, behaved, and acted like philosophers—far more so than the philosophers we will see splitting hairs in their weekly colloquium in Part Three. They thought out of the box, like traders, except much better and without fear of introspection. An assistant secretary of defence was among us, but had I not known his profession I would have thought he was a practitioner of skeptical empiricism. Even an engineering investigator who had examined the cause of a space shuttle explosion was thoughtful and open-minded. I came out of the meeting realising that only military people deal with randomness with genuine, introspective intellectual honesty—unlike academics and corporate executives using other people's money. This does not show in war movies, where they are usually portrayed as war-hungry autocrats. The people in front of me were not the people who initiate wars. Indeed, for many, the successful defence policy is the one that manages to eliminate potential dangers without war, such as the strategy of bankrupting the Russians through the escalation in defence spending. When I expressed my amazement to Laurence, another finance person who was sitting next to me, he told me that the military collected more genuine intellects and risk thinkers than most if not all other professions. Defence people wanted to understand the epistemology of risk.

After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of the world. But their wallets always waited cold sober in the cloakroom while the Icelandic purse lay open for all in the middle of the table. Our men were the greater Vikings in this regard. “Reputation is king, the rest is crap!” my Bæring from Bolungarvík used to say. Every evening had to be legendary, anything else was a defeat. But the morning after they turned into weak-willed doughboys. But all the same I did succeed in loving them, those Icelandic clodhoppers, at least down as far as their knees. Below there, things did not go as well. And when the feet of Jón Pre-Jón popped out of me in the maternity ward, it was enough. The resemblances were small and exact: Jón’s feet in bonsai form. I instantly acquired a physical intolerance for the father, and forbade him to come in and see the baby. All I heard was the note of surprise in the bass voice out in the corridor when the midwife told him she had ordered him a taxi. From that day on I made it a rule: I sacked my men by calling a car. ‘The taxi is here,’ became my favourite sentence.

More daring, though, was Jung’s uninhibited interest in spiritualism, which by this time had become a controversial topic on both sides of the Atlantic, ever since 1848, when the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, discovered they could communicate with the spirit of a dead man. Soon after this, mediums, table turning, floating tambourines, ectoplasmic limbs, and a variety of other otherworldly phenomena became the focus of an international craze; the flood of disincarnate appearances led one investigator to speak of an “invasion of the spirit people.”7 Colorful characters like the Russian medium and mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky were involved, but also scientists and philosophers like William James, Oliver Lodge, William Crookes, and Frederick Myers. It is difficult for us today to realize that at the time, many of the most famous men and women in the world were involved in spiritualism, to one degree or another. Thomas Edison, for example, who joined Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, hoped to be able to record spirits on his “Spirit Phone.” Yet, for all this, the reductionist thought that dominates the academic world today was already securely in place, and Jung was risking his future career by openly advocating the unbiased study of the paranormal.

Only the heart knows how to find what is precious. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian novelist and philosopher

The loss of white ethno-cultural confidence manifests itself in other ways. Among the most important is a growing unwillingness to indulge the anti-white ideology of the cultural left. When whites were an overwhelming majority, empirically unsupported generalizations about whites could be brushed off as amusing and mischievous but ultimately harmless. As whites decline, fewer are willing to abide such attacks. At the same time, white decline emboldens the cultural left, with its dream of radical social transformation. ... From a modern perspective, the most important figure to emerge from this milieu is Randolph Bourne. Viewed as a spokesman for the new youth culture in upper-middle-class New York, Bourne burst onto the intellectual scene with an influential essay in the respected Atlantic Monthly in July 1916 entitled ‘Trans-National America’. Here Bourne was influenced by Jewish-American philosopher Horace Kallen. Kallen was both a Zionist and a multiculturalist. Yet he criticized the Liberal Progressive worldview whose cosmopolitan zeal sought to consign ethnicity to the dustbin of history. Instead, Kallen argued that ‘men cannot change their grandfathers’. Rather than all groups giving and receiving cultural influence, as in Dewey’s vision, or fusing together, as mooted by fellow Zionist Israel Zangwill in his play The Melting Pot (1910), Kallen spoke of America as a ‘federation for international colonies’ in which each group, including the Anglo-Saxons, could maintain their corporate existence. There are many problems with Kallen’s model, but there can be no doubt that he treated all groups consistently. Bourne, on the other hand, infused Kallen’s structure with WASP self-loathing. As a rebel against his own group, Bourne combined the Liberal Progressives’ desire to transcend ‘New Englandism’ and Protestantism with Kallen’s call for minority groups to maintain their ethnic boundaries. The end product was what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism, whereby minorities identify with their groups while Anglo-Protestants morph into cosmopolites. Thus Bourne at once congratulates the Jew ‘who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his’, while encouraging his fellow Anglo-Saxons to: "Breathe a larger air . . . [for] in his [young Anglo-Saxon’s] new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself a citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide." Bourne, not Kallen, is the founding father of today’s multiculturalist left because he combines rebellion against his own culture and Liberal Progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement – for minorities only – of Kallen’s ethnic conservatism. In other words, ethnic minorities should preserve themselves while the majority should dissolve itself.

Djugashvili had furnished evidence in writing of the theoretical learning that he was to display in the Baku prison. In a series of articles published in Bolshevik newspapers in Tiflis under the general title Anarchism or Socialism?, he defended Marxism against critical attacks that were being leveled against it by Georgian followers of the Russian anarchist philosopher Pyotr Kropotkin.

As a child, I saw a glimpse of the pre-World War I world, the last afterglow of the most radiant cultural atmosphere in human history (achieved not by Russian, but by Western culture)… Such was the level of the public’s intellectual concerns and standards. If one has glimpsed that kind of art— and wider: the possibility of that kind of culture— one is unable to be satisfied with anything less... Its art projected an overwhelming sense of intellectual freedom, of depth, i.e., concern with fundamental problems, of demanding standards, of inexhaustible originality, of unlimited possibilities and, above all, of profound respect for man. The existential atmosphere (which was then being destroyed by Europe’s philosophical trends and political systems) still held a benevolence that would be incredible to the men of today, i.e., a smiling, confident good will of man to man, and of man to life.

But humanistic learning is also an end in itself. It is simply better to have escaped one’s narrow, petty self and entered minds far more subtle and vast than one’s own than never to have done so. The Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino said that a man lives as many millennia as are embraced by his knowledge of history. One could add: A man lives as many different lives as are embraced by his encounters with literature, music, and all the humanities and arts. These forms of expression allow us to see and feel things that we would otherwise never experience—society on a nineteenth-century Russian feudal estate, for example, or the perfect crystalline brooks and mossy shades of pastoral poetry, or the exquisite languor of a Chopin nocturne. Ultimately, humanistic study is the loving duty we owe those artists and thinkers whose works so transform us. It keeps them alive, as well as us, as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini understood. The academic narcissist, insensate to beauty and nobility, trapped in the diversity delusion, knows none of this. And as politics in Washington and elsewhere grows increasingly unmoored from reality, humanist wisdom provides us with one final consolation: There is no greater lesson from the past than the intractability of human folly.

But the new rebel is a sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything. It

Russian regime de jure recognition. The fork in the road for father and son, both philosophically and physically, was the New World. In the same year that saw MacDonald elected into office, the prince sailed for what he came to consider as his safe haven, the United States, a land free from the pomp and protocol that dominated the court. Here he could enjoy the semblance of a life unanchored from the restraints and restrictions imposed by his father. His experiences in America encouraged him to believe that he could pick a pathway between his private life and his public duties. It was not a distinction that the king and queen, their advisors, or the mass media would allow him to make. The reality was that his increasingly hedonistic private life intruded into the public duty pressed on him by his family, politicians, and his people. Ostensibly billing the trip as a holiday, the prince spent three glorious weeks during the summer of 1924 carousing, dancing, drinking, and playing polo on Long Island with a flashy set of Americans whom the British ambassador, Esme Howard, dismissed as “oily magnates.” A headline in the Pittsburgh Gazette Times of September 8, 1924, summarized the prince’s behaviour. “Prince Likes America; Doesn’t Want to Leave. Spends Another Night Out—Vanishes from Party. Later Seen in All-Night Stand Eating ‘Hot Dogs.’ Dances with Duchess.” While the prince resented what he called the “damned spying” of the American press, his actions served only to encourage society matrons in thinking

best evoked in The Apocalypse of Our Time by the philosopher Vasili Rozanov in 1919, who had died that same year of emaciation in the Troitse-Sergeev monastery: La divina Commedia With clanking screeching an iron curtain is lowered over Russian History.

Morosov then reminded Gabriel of his impeccable lineage. He was, to borrow the term coined by the Russian philosopher and writer Zinoviev, a true Homo Sovieticus—a Soviet Man.

Putin has no ideological commitment to anything, really, and so has no reason to try to impose totalitarianism. Ideologists are, after all, the scariest kinds of rulers, because they want to dictate what goes on inside their people's heads. Putin is, of course, willing to use propaganda and media control to mobilize support and squeeze out alternative perspectives, but he doesn't really care what people think - as long as they do what they are told. Putin is not a philosopher - and that is something for which we, and Russians, should be thankful.

Let’s pause for a moment to take stock. In the years between 1703 and 1751, as we’ve seen, the indigenous American critique of European society had an enormous impact on European thought. What began as widespread expressions of outrage and distaste by Americans (when first exposed to European mores) eventually evolved, through a thousand conversations, conducted in dozens of languages from Portuguese to Russian, into an argument about the nature of authority, decency, social responsibility and, above all, freedom. As it became clear to French observers that most indigenous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values – organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another, and hence viewing French society as essentially one of fractious slaves – they reacted in a variety of different ways. Some, like the Jesuits, condemned the principle of freedom outright. Others – settlers, intellectuals and members of the reading public back home – came to see it as a provocative and appealing social proposition. (Their conclusions on this matter, incidentally, bore no particular relation to their feelings about indigenous populations themselves, whom they were often happy to see exterminated – though, in fairness, there were public figures on both sides of the intellectual divide who strongly opposed aggression against foreign peoples.) In fact, the indigenous critique of European institutions was seen as so powerful that anyone objecting to existing intellectual and social arrangements would tend to deploy it as a weapon of choice: a game, as we’ve seen, played by pretty much every one of the great Enlightenment philosophers.

For the past two hundred years the arts in Russia have served as an arena for political, philosophical and religious debate in the absence of a parliament or a free press. As Tolstoy wrote in ‘A Few Words on War and Peace’ (1868), the great artistic prose works of the Russian tradition were not novels in the European sense.3 They were huge poetic structures for symbolic contemplation, not unlike icons, laboratories in which to test ideas; and, like a science or religion, they were animated by the search for truth.

Alienated from official Russia by their politics, and from peasant Russia by their education, Russia’s artists took it upon themselves to create a national community of values and ideas through literature and art. What did it mean to be a Russian? What was Russia’s place and mission in the world? And where was the true Russia? In Europe or in Asia? St Petersburg or Moscow? The Tsar’s empire or the muddy one-street village where Natasha’s ‘Uncle’ lived? These were the ‘accursed questions’ that occupied the mind of every serious writer, literary critic and historian, painter and composer, theologian and philosopher in the golden age of Russian culture from Pushkin to Pasternak. They are the questions that lie beneath the surface of the art within this book. The works discussed here represent a history of ideas and attitudes – concepts of the nation through which Russia tried to understand itself. If we look carefully, they may become a window on to a nation’s inner life.

British philosopher Alain de Botton relishes this perspective and argues that it explains a great deal. For one thing, de Botton suggests, it clarifies why some cultures are drawn to lavish, opulent decors (he cites the Russians and Saudis as examples) while others prefer clean, simple design (such as those popular in Scandinavian countries). Both are a reaction to historical conditions. The Russians and Saudis endured decades of economic deprivation, and since extravagant interiors represent the opposite of poverty, they favor ostentatious decor. (A similar case has been made for the enthusiastic display of gold chains, rings, and teeth that are fashionable among newly successful rappers.) Scandinavians, on the other hand, were raised in relative financial security and do not share a desire for visual reminders of wealth. Instead, they favor calm, peaceful interiors as an antidote to the overstimulation of everyday life.

Among those who regard Leontiev as a thinker pertinent to the contemporary world has been Vladimir Putin. In a speech in September 2013, Putin stated: ‘Russia – as the philosopher Konstantin Leontiev vividly put it – has always “blossomed in complexity” as a state-civilization, reinforced by the Russian people, Russian language, Russian culture, the Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s other traditional religions.

It's a nonsense to say that men should be Britons and Frenchmen and Russians first and communists and Christians and fascists afterwards, for it is only by making a philosophy and not a nation prevail that we shall every attain universal peace. That's why this war's decided nothing, really, because it was fought for national survival and not for philosophical penetration.

For me, the most compelling and horrifying description of an individual contemplating suicide is found in Graham Greene’s extraordinary personal essay “The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard.” Beset by unmitigated feelings of emptiness in his teenage years, Greene would steal off with his brother’s pistol to Berkhamsted Common and there play Russian roulette: He would insert a single bullet, spin the chamber, press the gun to his head, and pull the trigger. When there was only a click (and there was every time he tried it), he would experience an overwhelming feeling of happiness. “It was as if a light had been turned on . . . I felt that life contained an infinite number of possibilities.

British philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.

Dearest friend, do you not see All that we perceive Only reflects and shadows forth What our eyes cannot see. Dearest friend, do you not hear In the clamor of everyday life Only the unstrung echoing fall of Jubilant harmonies. Vladimir Soloviev, Russian Gnostic and philosopher, 1892

The soul is healed by being with children. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russian novelist and philosopher

Everything that Baryshnikov believes is consistent with the beliefs of Alexander Dugin, the influential Russian philosopher and proponent of a Russian-dominated Eurasian empire which would not only reunite ethnic Russians but dominate the West too. Dugin has chastised Putin for being too soft on Ukraine, and is a visceral opponent of anything that smacks of Western liberalism.

In any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian,” the philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford writes, “one submits to things that have their own intractable ways.

I read many books on Russian artists, writers, philosophers, and musicians in an attempt to understand [Vassy, her partner]. I seemed to be concluding that the Russian himself was saying 'We are not to be understood.' It was maddeningly challenging to me. I didn't like not understanding...at least to my satisfaction. Half savage, half saint. That seemed to be the consensus of opinion among the Russians themselves. The communist government appeared to be irrelevant, merely a continuation in a different form of a system which basically denied the importance of the individual. Vassy had told me in the beginning that the Russian people had the government they needed and understood, and in many respects he even claimed they would want Joe Stalin back because he would, in effect, protect them from themselves.