T HREE
Th e three pessimists
As the First World War dragged on, the Russian “spiritual intelligentsia”
was divided as to what meaning it held for the future of their country. Many believed a victory would lead to a reassertion of Russia and its deepest values. A new Russian era in European and world history would be initiated. Th e defeat of Germany would be a defeat of militarism, materialism and positivism. What values Russia would off er in its place depended on where the intellectual stood on the philosophical-political spectrum. However, not everyone was so convinced of the benefi ts of war.
Th e writer Yevgeniya Gertsyk in her Recollections1 divided her circle into two groups: pessimists and optimists. Th e latter included symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, Sergei Bulgakov and philosopher Vladimir Ern. Th e former included historian-critic Mikhail Gershenzon, philosopher-writer Lev Shestov, and the Christian philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev.
Lev Shestov lost his son in the fi ghting. For him the War was thus a time of personal loss and world-shaking gloom. Berdyaev, too, though he had started off in synchrony with the jingoism of his circle also began to see the destruction as senseless and to doubt the possibility of a Russian victory. In particular, he began to fear that a defeat by Germany would mean a disastrous victory for Bolshevism.
By 1916, Gershenzon – a sensitive, deeply intelligent and generous man whose house on the Arbat hosted a cultural salon for all manner of cultural fi gures – had become disenchanted in quite a diff erent way. He went from optimism about the fi ghting to stark rejection of it. On one occasion, he blurted out to the poet Bely: “Down with the war!” He expressed the view that deserters should be welcomed back, that Russia should pull out of this capitalist farce.
Gershenzon had been the editor and organizer of the sensation-producing Landmarks anthology of 1909. His own contribution had contained a phrase that provoked a minor uproar: “In our current situation, we [the intelligentsia]
cannot even start dreaming of merging with the people – we should fear them more than all the punishments handed out by the authorities and bless the powers that be, who alone with their bayonets and prisons are still protecting us from the wrath of the people.”
Th is was taken by the left -leaning intelligentsia to be some sort of reactionary-conservative blessing of tsarist autocracy, and it sounded very strange coming from a Jew – especially one born in Kishinev, scene of two devastating pogroms in 1903 and 19052, that had been stirred up and condoned
1 Yevgeniya Gertsyk, Vospominaniya. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1973.
2 It is true that Gershenzon left Kishinev in the late 1880s, but he continued to visit his mother and one can assume he continued to feel touched by events in his home-town.
by populist right-wing papers and political organizations.
But in 1917, it was the turn of his fellow Landmarks contributors to be shocked when – in a seemingly inexplicable volte-face – he came out in favor of the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks, throwing himself into cultural activity in support of the new Soviet state (among other things, he organized the Union of Writers). Th e following year, under the editorship of Piotr Struve, all the former contributors produced a new collection condemning the Revolution, From the Depth3. Gershenzon was noticeable by his absence.
Berdyaev, who had been a regular visitor to Gershenzon’s house, became estranged from him. Gershenzon’s daughter and granddaughter testifi ed in their memoirs that the main reason for the fall-out was Berdyaev’s anti-Semitism4.
Lev Shestov, meanwhile, had been approached by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the new Soviet minister of culture with an off er to publish his latest book. A symbolic half-page in the preface outlining his support for Marxism would be mandatory, but other than that the book would be off the press in no time.
Many thought that Shestov (born Lev-Judah Shwartzmann) would agree.
His rebellious spirit, his nihilistic rejection of old values, his belief in the
“Scythian” nature of Russia, and his indiff erence to the War made him seem like a perfect potential neophyte for the new Soviet cultural reality. But Shestov turned Lunacharsky down in a blink and moved back to his native Kiev to escape unpleasant repercussions. Bulgakov found him a job teaching at the University alongside him.
All three of the “pessimists,” Berdyaev, Shestov and Gershenzon had been close friends before the Revolution. While Gershenzon and Berdyaev fell out, relations remained untouched otherwise. As we saw, in 1923 it was Gershenzon who wrote to Shestov in Berlin expressing disbelief about reports of Bulgakov’s anti-Semitic activity in the Crimea. And Shestov continued to enjoy a deep friendship with Berdyaev – and this despite the fact that Berdyaev oft en reproached him with Jewish nihilism, and urged him to solve his problems through conversion to Christianity.
Th e question arises as to how true Berdyaev’s (and others’) belief was that Gershenzon’s Jewishness was a contributing factor in his support of the Revolution and Bolshevik ideology. Likewise, although Shestov did not support the Soviets, Berdyaev found Shestov’s self-styled philosophy of “groundlessness”
and irrationalism to be a fruit of the same Jewish rejection of values that he had detected in Gershenzon. Another question that needs answering is why Shestov and Berdyaev maintained deep respect and sympathy for each other,
3 Landmarks (Rus. Vekhi) and From the Depths (Rus. Iz glubiny) will be cited below from: A. Yakovleva, edit. Vekhi. Iz Glubiny. Moscow: Pravda, 1991.
4 As the discussion below shows, this judgment is certainly an oversimplifi cation.
However, the pressure-boiler of the Revolution and the agonizing dilemma over whether or not to support the Bolshevik coup in October 1917 certainly put an unnatural strain on the concept of Jewishness at this time, and it is telling that Gershenzon’s family chose to formulate the break in these terms.
while similar rhetoric shattered the ties with Gershenzon. 5
To answer these questions, we will start by examining the beliefs of Berdyaev and Gershenzon, and then consider the rather unique fi gure of Lev Shestov.
Berdyaev and Gershenzon Nicolai Berdyaev
Nicolai Berdyaev was born three years later than Sergei Bulgakov into a military-aristocratic family in Kiev with French and Polish roots. He followed a similar intellectual trajectory to Bulgakov, passing from Marxism through Idealism to Christian belief. Although close to Bulgakov – the two associated so closely in Moscow in the fi st decade of the twentieth century that they were known as the Dioscurus brothers – there were important diff erences between them, both in terms of their personalities and their beliefs.
Berdyaev never became a monarchist and reacted with amused skepticism to Bulgakov’s growing respect for the tsar and Holy Russia – a diff erence which caused a certain amount of tension between the two friends. In addition, the philosophical outlook he developed aft er passing through his Kantian phase was of a personalistic, existentialist variety. Christianity for him came to be a matter of deep, inner choice by each individual and the embrace of Christ was a personal liberation.
Th is can be seen in what each man took from Soloviev’s philosophy. Bulgakov was attracted by the idea of all-unity and made it his life’s task to develop and correct the doctrine of Sophia. Berdyaev, however, rejected this mystical aspect of Soloviev’s heritage with impatience – seeing it as metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.
He took instead for his inspiration the concept of the god-man, which he gave a Christian humanist reading, seeing in it an insight into the complete freedom and uniqueness of each human personality.
More attractive to him in his fi rst Christian awakening was Merezhkovsky’s reworking of Christianity: inspired by and inspiring the aesthetics of the symbolist movement, Merekhovsky’s circle believed that the twentieth century demanded a revived Christianity that would be a Th ird Testament, embracing the way of the Spirit rather than the Father or the Son. Merezhkovsky and his wife Zinaida Gippius even went to the extent of inventing a new Eucharistic ritual, where he presided over the communicants6.
5 One of the Landmarks and From the Depths contributors who remained in touch with Gershenzon aft er the Revolution was Semyon Frank, one of the other two Jewish contributors (in addition to Izgoev-Lange) to the collection – despite his conversion to Christianity in 1913 and rejection of the anti-Christian utopian nihilism of the Revolution. We will consider their relationship in the chapter on Frank. (Izgoev-Lange also subsequently converted to Christianity).
6 In one ritual, a converted Jew and Jewess mixed pin-pricks of their own blood with water and distributed it to the assembled. Th is became a plank of scandal during the Beilis trial, Russia’s most notorious twentieth century case of the blood libel against
While Berdyaev later reacted against the arbitrary and stylized nature of what he came to see as a distortion of Christianity, for the fi rst decade of the twentieth century he was an enthusiastic admirer of Merezhkovsky, and even in 1916 was writing admiringly of the liberating possibilities of Merezhkovsky’s
“chiliasm of the intelligentsia” which had introduced a thirst for “a common life in the Spirit, a collective ecstasy” into the deadened Church of the time7.
Th is emphasis on the freedom of the Spirit remained very much a part of his later more Orthodox belief. Indeed, this inspiration by the Spirit was shared by Mikhail Gershenzon and the writer Andrey Bely. Th e latter looked to Gershenzon as an intellectual mentor, and – to give an idea of the ties that bound Berdyaev and Gershenzon in the fi rst decade of the twentieth century – while Berdyaev reacted cautiously to some of Bely’s Gnostic excesses, he too hailed Bely as a prophet of the Russian soul.
Another aspect of Berdyaev’s developing thought which makes his fall-out with Gershenzon less predictable is that aft er his discovery of Christianity, Berdyaev refused to play the role of penitent neophyte turning his back on his past and bowing to the Church’s authority in every matter. He liked to think that, in contrast to other returnees, he had not become a pious straight man8 but remained his old non-conformist self.
Certainly his emphasis on the call of the Spirit and personal freedom, as opposed to a Bulgakovian sophianic concept of the mystical body of believers, oft en made it diffi cult for him to fi t in with the hierarchical and conservative Russian Church of which he had become a member. His personality and philosophy made the idea of belonging to any collective a strain on his imagination – certainly, unlike with Bulgakov, there would be no talk of a Holy Christian Russia, or indeed of any holy nation, be it Byzantium – or as we will see later, the Jews.
Th us he frequently criticized what many believers would have seen as fundamental institutions of the Church, and was renowned for standing by his conscience over the demands of unassimilated ecclesiastical dogma: he always refused, for example, to accept the notion of eternal damnation. For this reason, the contention of a recent scholar9 that the otherwise progressive Berdyaev’s hostile Jews. Th is incident and Rozanov’s involvement in it will be discussed in the chapter on Rozanov and Florensky.
7 N.A.Berdyaev. “Tipy religioznoy mysly v Rossii”//Sobr. Soch. Paris, 1989, p.500.
Berdyaev’s praise of chiliasm in 1916 is ironic: in the following years he would link Judaism and chiliasm as a reproach to the former in the same way as Bulgakov.
8 Th e same Yevgeniya Gertsyk recalls that “he never lost his sense of humor aft er his conversion” and they would oft en share a smile over “the supremely pious Novoselov and Bulgakov.”
9 E.Y Fedotova, “Vzglyady N.Berdyaeva na ‘yevreiskii vopros’, ix sootnesenie s traditsionnym khristianskim bogosloviem i novymi issledovaniyami,” in N.A.Berdyaev i yedinstvo Yevropeiskogo dukha, edited by V.Porus, 132-142, (Moscow:
Bibleisko-bogoslovskii Institut sv. Apostola Andreya,2007).
expressions regarding Jews and Judaism were a result of a neophyte enthusiasm in Church matters are highly implausible. Other reasons must be sought.
Even well into his Christian phase he continued to buckle against conformity.
“Offi cial Orthodoxy,” he wrote on one occasion, having in mind the Russian church,
“long ago became a pernicious, anti-Christian heresy.”10 Monks, monasteries and the church hierarchy were “funereal,” and provoked melancholy and sadness in him. Th is was linked to his Merezhkovskian belief that the asceticism of historical church Christianity needed to be superseded by a new erotic ethic which would include aspects of ancient pagan fertility cults – though, like the Merezhkovskys this combined with a distaste for the institution of marriage: Berdyaev, like Bely and Blok, had a Platonic relationship with his wife11.
Not surprisingly he attracted the condemnation of church fi gures, to whom he was more of a puzzle than Merezhkovsky. Th e latter rejected offi cial Christianity in full, and believed his own (Platonic) ménage-a-trois12 and the Religious-Philosophical Society that emerged from it would form the kernel of a new church of the Th ird Testament13. Berdyaev, however, eventually came to place his hopes in the Orthodox Church, but combined this new belief with elements of his old Merezhkovskian Gnosticism.
Th us one priest berated Berdyaev for showing wholesale contempt for Russian Orthodoxy: “If in the heat of the moment you had reproved one or another hierarch, or one or another phenomenon in Russian Church life, that would not have been off ensive – righteous anger, no matter how severe, is always understandable…But your article is not full of righteous anger, but of contempt and judgment of the whole Russian Church – the question involuntarily occurs to me: are you with the Church, or are you against her?”14
Th is outspokenness – which he gave vent to in public and private – was characteristic of Berdyaev: he oft en expressed himself harshly and categorically, in a way which provoked Bulgakov to invent a verb to describe these outbursts
10 Berdyaev, Sobraniye Sochenenii 3, “Tipy religioznoy mysly v Rossii,” cited in in V.Vasilenko, Vvedenie, 267.
11 His wife, in fact, though baptized, was of Jewish origin – though this seems not to have eff ected his pronouncements on Jews and Jewry. (Of course, such a judgment is rather diffi cult to make, the more so given the distance in time and lack, for me at least, of more information about their relationship).
12 Th e third member was Filosofov. Th e Platonic nature of the threesome was comprised by Merezhkovsky himself, who on at least one occasion, succumbed to the temptations of female admirers and brought them into his church of the sacred fl esh through a form of non-Platonic communion.
13 Merezhkovsky drew a parallel between pagan and Christian “trinities:” in Canaan and Egypt there was Baal (Father)/Astarte(Mother)/Adonis(Son). Christianity’s Trinity had been imperfectly realized in history, and the third member of the Trinity was looked upon by Merezhkovsky sometimes as a mother, who feminizes masculine Judaism and Christianity, or as a fi gure who contained both sexual polarities, and would thus transcend sex in a new type of love.
14 Priest S. Chetverikov, in Vasilenko (2006): 268.
of self-assertive truth-telling: berdyaevsvovat’, or to Berdyaevize.
Th is is not an accident: for Berdyaev the connection between truth and personal experience was inextricable and much of his philosophy welled up from within him. Th e uniqueness of the human personality was the cornerstone of this philosophy. He held that no institution, secular or sacred, and any fact, sociological or scientifi c or historical, can explain away or reduce the uniqueness and mystery of the human personality.
Further, it is from the human personality that the new and inexplicable springs into the world, in defi ance of any natural laws – and in defi ance, in fact, of God Himself. For both God and humans have their origins in the “pre-divine”
abyss from which freedom springs – an idea which he took from the German mystic, Meister Ekhardt.
And, in Berdyaev’s solution of the problem of theodicy, God thus has no control over the evil that freedom gives rise to. Personality, and the freedom of personality, are supreme for Berdyaev. Even “God waits for the revelation of creativity from man...,” and as a result, traditional Christian thought needs to shift emphasis away from the supremacy of God, for: “Not only does man need God, but God needs man.”15
Both of these beliefs once again owe much to his earlier involvement with Merezhkovsky. Th e latter had argued that the new religious consciousness must dialectically incorporate the opposite tendencies of past spirituality: Christianity and paganism, spirit and fl esh, heaven and earth must all be transcended in a synthesis which combines them. As late as 1916 Berdyaev had written approvingly of Merezhkovsky’s belief that the new consciousness must even mix Christ and anti-Christ, so as to give man “his fi nal religious freedom”16.
Th ese doctrines are every bit as controversial as Bulgakov’s sophiology – in fact, they clash with Orthodox doctrine in an even more obvious way. Still, Berdyaev was an inspiration to intellectuals estranged from the Church: he seemed to demonstrate that one could keep one’s integrity while being a believer.
And, for all the idiosyncracies of his philosophical declarations, Berdyaev did take his Christian faith – and its importance for his vision of Russia – with utmost seriousness.
Aft er his emigration to the West, in fact, Berdyaev found himself in the odd position of being looked to as a spokesman for the Orthodox viewpoint, and as a typical religious Russian – among Western Europeans, of course, who sometimes took his heterodoxy and wild prophetic stance as par for the course for someone from the exotic East. Th is troubled Berdyaev17, not least because
15 Quotes from Th e Meaning of the Creative Act.
16 Berdyaev, Sub specie aeternitatis, p.343, quoted in Gaidenko 2008, p.336-7. See Gaidenko for further discussion of the link between Merezhkovsky and Berdyaev.
P.P. Gaidenko, Vladimir Soloviev i fi losofi a serebryanogo veka. Moscow: Progress-traditsia, 2001.
17 Cf. on this, Gyorgy Fedotov, “Berdyaev Myslitel’,” fi rst published in Novii Zhurnal, XIX, New York, 1948. Also at: http://russianway.rchgi.spb.ru./Berdyaev/46_Fedotov.pdf
it led people to pay less attention to the content of his philosophy. Indeed, as a philosopher he sank into oblivion in the West aft er his death.
Within his own church, the reception was less warm: Anthony Khrapovitsky once called Berdyaev a “prisoner of freedom” due to his exaltation of freedom over God and the eff ects it had on his philosophy and life. On the other hand, in Russia Berdyaev belonged to the parish of Alexei Mechev, the priest-elder who founded a brotherhood in the heart of communist Moscow and always defended Berdyaev’s freedom of expression.
In emigration, he also remained a faithful parishioner of the Moscow Patriarchate. And today, the dictum of S.Levitsky that “he violated the letter of
In emigration, he also remained a faithful parishioner of the Moscow Patriarchate. And today, the dictum of S.Levitsky that “he violated the letter of