This article will be permanently flagged as inappropriate and made unaccessible to everyone. Are you certain this article is inappropriate? Excessive Violence Sexual Content Political / Social
Email Address:
Article Id: WHEBN0000313348 Reproduction Date:
Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (;[1] Russian: Никола́й Алекса́ндрович Бердя́ев; March 18 [O.S. March 6] 1874 – March 24, 1948) was a Russian religious and political philosopher.
Berdyaev was born near Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Kant when only fourteen years old and excelled at languages.
Berdyaev decided on an intellectual career and entered the Kiev University in 1894. This was a time of revolutionary fervor among the students and the intelligentsia. Berdyaev became a Marxist and in 1898 was arrested in a student demonstration and expelled from the University. His involvement in illegal activities led in 1897 to three years of internal exile in Vologda[3]:28 in northern Russia—a mild sentence compared to that faced by many other revolutionaries.
In 1904 Berdyaev married Lydia Trusheff and the couple moved to Saint Petersburg, the Russian capital and center of intellectual and revolutionary activity. Berdyaev participated fully in intellectual and spiritual debate, eventually departing from radical Marxism to focus his attention on philosophy and Christian spirituality. In Christianity and Social Reality he tells about his journey from Marx to Christ, and he tells his disillusionment with both the revolutionaries and the Church.
A fiery 1913 article criticising the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church caused him to be charged with the crime of blasphemy, the punishment for which was exile to Siberia for life. The World War and the Bolshevik Revolution prevented the matter coming to trial. After the October Revolution of 1917 Berdyaev fell out with the Bolshevik régime because of its totalitarianism and the domination of the state over the freedom of the individual. Nonetheless, he was permitted for the time being to continue to lecture and write.
His disaffection culminated in 1919 with the foundation of his own private academy, the "Free Academy of Spiritual Culture". This was primarily a forum for him to lecture on the hot topics of the day, trying to present them from a Christian point of view. Berdyaev also presented his opinions in public lectures, and every Tuesday he hosted a meeting at his home because official Soviet anti-religious activity was intense at the time, and the official policy of the Bolshevik government, with its Soviet anti-religious legislation, strongly promoted State atheism.[3]
In 1920, Berdiaev became professor of philosophy at the University of Moscow, although he had no academic credentials. In the same year, he was accused of participating in a conspiracy against the government; he was arrested and jailed. It seems that the feared head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, came in person to interrogate him, and that Berdyaev gave his interrogator a solid dressing-down on the problems with Bolshevism. Berdyaev's prior record of revolutionary activity seems to have saved him from prolonged detention, as his friend Lev Kamenev was present at the interrogation.[3]:32
Novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his book The Gulag Archipelago (published in 1973) recounts the incident as follows:
[Berdyaev] was arrested twice; he was taken in 1922 for a midnight interrogation with Dzerjinsky; Kamenev was also there. [...] But Berdyaev did not humiliate himself, he did not beg, he firmly professed the moral and religious principles by virtue of which he did not adhere to the party in power; and not only did they judge that there was no point in putting him on trial, but he was freed. Now there is a man who had a "point of view"![4]
The Soviet authorities eventually expelled Berdyaev from the RSFSR in September 1922. He became one of a carefully selected group of some 160 prominent writers, scholars, and intellectuals whose ideas the Bolshevik government found objectionable, and who were sent into exile on the so-called "philosophers' ship". Overall, these expellees supported neither the Czarist régime nor the Bolsheviks, preferring less autocratic forms of government. They included those who argued for personal liberty, spiritual development, Christian ethics, and a pathway informed by reason and guided by faith.
At first Berdyaev and other émigrés went to Berlin, where Berdyaev founded an academy of philosophy and religion. But economic and political conditions in Weimar Germany caused him and his wife to move to Paris in 1923. He transferred his academy there, and taught, lectured, and wrote, working for an exchange of ideas with the French intellectual community.
During the German occupation of France, Berdyaev continued to write books that were published after the war—some of them after his death. In the years that he spent in France, Berdyaev wrote fifteen books, including most of his most important works. He died at his writing desk in his home in Clamart, near Paris, in March 1948.
Berdyaev's philosophy has been characterized as Christian existentialist. He was preoccupied with creativity and in particular with freedom from anything that inhibited creativity, whence his opposition to a "collectivized and mechanized society".
According to Marko Markovic, "He was an ardent man, rebellious to all authority, an independent and "negative" spirit. He could assert himself only in negation and could not hear any assertion without immediately negating it, to such an extent that he would even be able to contradict himself and to attack people who shared his own prior opinions."[3]
He also published works about Russian history and the Russian national character. In particular, he wrote about Russian nationalism that:[5]
He was a practising member of the Russian Orthodox Church, but was often critical of the institutional policies and un-Christian behavior within it. He was a Christian universalist,[6][7] and he believed that Orthodox Christianity was the true vehicle for that teaching.
The greater part of Eastern teachers of the Church, from [8]
Russian President Vladimir Putin has instructed his regional governors to read, among other philosophers, Berdyaev's The Philosophy of Inequality,[9][10] in 2015 finally available in English translation.
The first date is of the Russian edition, the second date is of the first English edition
United Kingdom, European Union, Italy, Canada, Spain
Epistemology, Aesthetics, Metaphysics, David Hume, Ethics
Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Ukrainian language, Soviet Union
Russian language, Moscow, Estonia, Alaska, Soviet Union
London, Germany, Paris, United Kingdom, Amsterdam
Epistemology, Aesthetics, Metaphysics, Logic, Ethics
Kabbalah, Freemasonry, Anthroposophy, Gnosticism, Theosophical Society
Russian Empire, Odessa, Priest, History, New York City
Google Books, Literature, Linguistics, Aesthetics, Postmodernism
YouTube, Kiev, Theology, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard