Nikolai Berdiaev and the “boundless spaces” of Russia

Abstract

The article analyses the ways in which the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev understood Russian space and geography, beginning with the texts that he wrote during the First World War and ending with his book The Russian Idea (1946) The claim that some kind of correspondence exists between a specific Russian mentality (or the "Russian soul") and the vast and wide-open Russian landscape, has been described as "one of the most popular Russian autostereotypes" (Møller 1999, 11). One of the most prominent proponents of this stereotype in the first half of the Twentieth Century was the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev . Berdiaev would return to this connection time and time again in his writings on Russia and Russian thought.Berdiaev published his first book in 1901. In time Russia itself would become a central topic in his philosophical writings. Berdiaev's interest in Russia peaked for the first time during the First World War. Simultaneously with the writing of what is considered his major philosophical work, The Meaning of Creativity (1916), Berdiaev began to produce a vast output of smaller pieces on Russia. It was the war itself that prompted Berdiaev to reflect upon Russia, but his pieces were concerned not so much with the ongoing war as with Russia's history, culture and people, which he often approached from a religious, messianic-prophetic perspective. Before the war he had disseminated his views on Russia and its meaning from time to time, for instance in The Philosophy of Freedom (1911) or in his 1912 monograph on the Slavophile Aleksei Khomiakov, in which he suggested that a messianic self-awareness was something distinctively Russian. However, it was during the war that "this messianism reached its most optimistic and triumphalist peak" (Siljak 2016, 749).

More-Than-State Ontologies of Territory: Commoning, Assembling, Peopling

“…This not only implied the weakness of power mechanisms to defend the wide, open frontiers of the nation and inefficiency of border-making strategies (commonly considered under the rubric of 'territory') but also resulted in various contradictory consequences, from the inability of political technologies to stratify geographic space leaving it systematically "idle" or "empty," to the "unlimited implementation of direct violence that compensated for technological insufficiency with the accretion of extremely rigid macro technologies" of power (Korolev 1997). Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev believed that since the organization of the Russian space proved impossible, it prevented the consolidation of the "form" (Berdiaev [1918(Berdiaev [ ] 2017Mjør, 2017). Obtaining that form would present the "liberation of the Russian creativity from its physiological repression by the Russian land" (Prokudenkova 2015), as "the Russian soul is bruised by vastness" and this borderlessness "does not liberate but enslaves it" (Berdiaev [1918] 2017).…”