Presidential Library presents Nikolay Berdyayev - “a religious freethinker” in his “message” to the world

“The Russian state has long been acknowledged a great power, with which all the states of the world have to reckon, and which plays a prominent role in international politics”,  Nikolay Berdyayev’s book “The Fate of Russia” (1918), which is available in the Electronic Reading Room of the Presidential Library, reads in part. “But the spiritual culture of Russia, that core of life, in regards to which a statecraft itself is but a superficial externality and implement, still does not occupy a great-power position in the world… That which has transpired within the bosom of the Russian spirit, will cease to be something still provincial, isolated and closed-in and will become common for the world and mankind”.

The 145th anniversary of the birth of Nikolay Alexandrovich Berdyayev (1874–1948), one of the most prominent thinkers of the 20th century, Russian religious philosopher, representative of Christian existentialism, will be marked on March 18, 2019.

Electronic copies of rare publications from the Presidential Library’s collections cast light on Berdyayev’s ideas, which have entered modern philosophy.

On September 29, 1922 the famous “philosophers’ steamship” departed from the Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment in Leningrad with those on board, who were now unwelcome in their native country. Like his fellows, Nikolay Berdyayev was standing on the deck saying goodbye to St. Petersburg and Russia. He recalled a recent conversation with priest Alexey Mechyov, which, as he stated, had astonished him greatly: “When I entered Alexey’s room ... Mechyov stood up to meet me. He was dressed in white attire, and it seemed to me that his whole being was full of light. I told him how painful it was for me to leave homeland. “You have to go,” father Alexey replied. “The West needs to hear your message”, Berdyaev wrote in his large final book “Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography”, in which he summed up the results of his activities.

... Berdyaev was saying goodbye to the city on the Neva, which though was not yet as close to him as Moscow and its university, where he had taught for two years. Standing on the deck of the steamship, which was heading for the Baltic, he suddenly painfully realized that he would never see his native Kiev, where he spent his childhood. He didn’t like playing with his peers. What attracted him most was the library of his father  – marshal of the nobility in Kiev. At the age of ten, Nikolay read Dostoevsky and for a long time couldn’t read any other book - so deep was the impression made on him. At the same age, he played with an imaginary friend, Andrey Bolkonsky, for he couldn’t find a friend as noble as he was, he could talk to. And then he began to read the works authored by Schopenhauer, Kant, and Hegel.

The works of European philosophers led him to the writings of the religious mystic "Teutonic philosopher" Jacob Böhme, further developing his existentialist philosophy. Berdyaev was one of the organizers and regular contributors to such philosophical journals as “Novy Put” (The New Way), “Voprosy Zhizni" (Issues of Life), he also wrote articles for “Vekhi” (Milestones) collected works.

Berdyayev’s book “The Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia” and the monograph “The Meaning of History” (1990) are available in the Presidential Library’s collections.

In Paris, émigré Berdyayev founded the Academy of Philosophy and Religion, where he gave many lectures on philosophy, history and literature. He was also one of the co-founders of the Orthodox Culture League. During his emigration Nikolay Berdyayev had written more than 40 books and 450 articles - almost all of them were translated into foreign languages. Among his significant works are: “The New Middle Ages” (1924), “The Destiny of Man” (1931), “Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography” (1949). Berdyaev was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times (1942–1948).