In her Foreword to this book, Alyssa DeBlasio suggests that Russian philosophy has more often been a problem than a tradition. It arose late, was censored early, borrowed belligerently from western Europe to define its Russianness, and was practiced most inventively by non-professionals—at least until twentieth-century Marxism-Leninism straightjacketed whatever “official” philosophy was left. The present volume, appearing almost simultaneously with Mikhail Epstein's magisterial two-volume survey of post-Stalinist Soviet thought (1953–1991) for Bloomsbury Academic, aims to demonstrate the richness and diversity of this field in our present.
To some extent this goal is achieved. Twenty-one philosophers are represented, both in Russia and émigré, writing on topics ranging from ontology and the metaphysics of method to xenophobia, globalism, and terrorism. Some names are familiar to an English readership, including the seasoned Russian-American scholars Epstein and Boris Groys. Others created well-publicized subdisciplines in the late Soviet era: Valery Podoroga's analytic anthropology (academic postmodernism) and Sergey Horujy's synergic variant of hesychasm, or Christian energetism. But many names are new. Very welcome, therefore, is the editorial decision to preface each essay not with a mere byline but a two-page autobiography. These trajectories, wonderfully idiosyncratic in self-presentation, make it clear that only in a highly qualified sense does this constitute “twenty-first century philosophy.” Three-quarters of the contributors were born between 1930 and 1950. A given essay might have been published after the year 2000, but the past weighs heavily on both content and style of argumentation.
The essays fall into four groups. First is historiosophy, mostly grim: why Russian history repeats itself in increasingly impoverished cycles, and are there any ways out? The liberal theoretician Igor Kliamkin (b. 1941) documents Russia's half-millennium of militarization (defined as a command economy with universal service) alternating with periods of relaxation that, when discontinued in 1989, resulted in the prompt collapse of the state (231). Nikolai Rozov (b. 1958) asks whether cyclical dynamics is an “incidental disease” or Russia's “inner essence”—and opts for illness, although severe: “At the height of its power, the Russian political regime does not even try to liberalize” (343). Discussing Russia's “civilizational identity,” Vadim Mezhuev (b. 1933) urges us to outgrow the old competitive binary “Europe versus Russia,” where each side nurses its own fantasy of universalism, and be content with the genius of Russian culture. Related to these historical ruminations but less focused on Russia's exceptional fate are the sociopolitical essays. Boris Markov (b. 1946) provides an evenhanded discussion of xenophobia and xenophilia, arguing that a distinction between friend and foe is utterly natural and pleading for “a realistic plausible image of the Other that is neither a phantom nor a romantic conceit” (271). Markov concludes by recommending tourism as a benevolent, albeit trivializing, solution to the curiosities and anxieties of otherness. Two essays tie Russia into contemporary world processes: Valentina Fedotova (b. 1941) on terrorism, old and new, and Alexander Chumakov (b. 1950) on globalism.
The visual art theorist Boris Groys (b. 1947) discusses another -ism, Cosmism, from an earlier era, one in which sociopolitics intersected with religious metaphysics—our third group. Intriguingly, Groys rethinks Nikolai Fyodorov's Common Task as might a curator, in terms of sustainability (the dead must rise as artworks). Darkly echoing this theme, Vladimir Kantor (b. 1945) construes “Bobok”—Dostoevsky's parable of a temporary afterlife ending in absolute death—as a fate worse than Dante's Inferno, and “a symbol of human existence in Russia” (225). Other religiously-inflected essays include Natalya Shelkovaia (b. 1953) on Friedrich Nietzsche, Christ, and the Buddha as parallel bearers of joy, and Karen Swassjan (b. 1948) in a polemic against the folly of theological argument. More ecumenical is the comparativist Mikhail Sergeev (b. 1960), whose probing essay on the American Idea as a New-World Enlightenment project draws on his work on cyclical models in the evolution of world religions.
The final group deals with methodology and the contours of the profession. Alexander Nikiforov (b. 1940), assessing the value of science, observes that it has always been techno-science, inattentive to humanity's spiritual needs. David Dubrovskii (b. 1929) updates Thomas Nagel on the mind-body problem; more impatiently, Fedor Girenok (b. 1948) advocates a postmodernist “clip consciousness” in place of old-fashioned communication via words and concepts. Aleksei Griakalov (b. 1948) provides a dense phenomenology of the event, asking whether that key psychological state, uncertainty, “can ever be defined in epistemological terms” (147). Several essays cast a characteristically broad Russian net, with such titles as “The Theme of Man” (Pavel Gurevich, b. 1933), “Philosophy for and by Humans” (Vladimir Kutyrev, b. 1943), and “Homo Europaeus” (Anatolii Akhutin, b. 1940), on the trauma and demise of Cartesian individualism. But Gurevich, as if anticipating the irritated shrug of his more orderly western colleagues, suggests that Russians should stop apologizing for being too broad: Nikolai Berdiaev, after all, was lionized in his time by European philosophers while being ignored at home, disgracefully so. As usual the best balanced and most visionary discussion is by Epstein (b. 1950), who plots out how a responsible philosophy, both Russian and non-Russian, might move from analysis to synthesis in non-mechanical, non-aggregative, and thus transformational ways.
Finally, on the technical aspect of this huge volume. Rebuilding an idea-system so that it succeeds in translation is hard work. Still, Brill-Rodopi did no copyediting at all. Often we are not told when or where the essays were first published. Excepting the elegant Epstein, Groys, Sergeev, and a handful of others (Kliamkin, Markov, Mezhuev, Rozov), the English is only barely serviceable, often inscrutable, and exhausting to read. Simple grammatical errors account for most of the opacity, although a spot-check of the Russian originals confirms that several contributors philosophize in an ecstatic associative fashion that Russian accommodates comfortably but the logic of English resists. These accomplished senior scholars probably deserved a better debut. But the persevering reader will glimpse an energetic Russian philosophy ever more out of the box, and with many faces.
