Статья посвящена сопоставлению текстов двух исповедей – «Исповеди» Л.Н. Толстого и «Уединенного» В.В. Розанова – в аспекте их жанровых и содержательных характеристик. В процессе исследования был учтен момент смены литературных стилей, связанный с переходом от реализма Толстого к модернизму, отраженному в жанре «опавших листьев» Розанова. Исповедальность Толстого, созданная на основе классических традиций Августина и Руссо, становится толчком к созданию новых исповедальных форм, например, иронической философии Розанова. При этом оба автора используют прием остранения: Толстой как художественный, а Розанов – как стилистический, необходимый для проявления его иронической философии. Ключевые слова: исповедь, психология личности, остранение, ирония, Л.Н. Толстой, В.В. Розанов

The article deals with modern ethical collisions, the struggle between various kinds of utilitarian ethics and ethics of duty. The author considers Kant’s ethics as a universal and valuable basis of worldview, characteristic of domestic philo­sophy as a whole, and, at the same time, relies on the basic ideas of Abdusalam Guseynov’s ethical doctrine. The latter, at all stages of his work, develops humanistic implications of Kantian ethics. His ethics acts as a practical form of the theory of absolute morality of the subject. Humanity, in its concrete mani­festation, is the most important principle of constructing both ethics in general and the ethics of non-violence in particular. Non-violence is the most important component of moral teachings in all world religions and forms the central point of the practical philosophy by L.N. Tolstoy, M.L. King, and M. Gandhi. Despite the difference in their biographies and life activities, they all argue that the ideals of life and violent ways of achieving them are fundamentally incompatible. Also, they understood the meaning of life in a similar way – not as an abstract theo­retical postulate, but as a concrete practical action. It is practice, understood in the Bakhtinian sense that becomes a clear proof of the enduring power of ethics. The article is dedicated to the anniversary of Academician of the Russian Aca­demy of Sciences Abdusalam Guseynov, whose ethical research is the core of his creative biography.

В статье предпринята попытка преодолеть один из устойчивых научных штампов в исследованиях, касающихся взаимоотношений между Л.Н. Толстым, Ф.М. Достоевским и Н.Н. Страховым. Последний традиционно считается посредником между двумя писателями и в то же время виновником их несостоявшейся встречи в марте 1878 г. Автор полагает, что именно вэтот год данная встреча вряд ли могла состояться, вне зависимости от намерений Страхова, и предлагает обратить внимание на принципиальные различия мировоззренческих позиции Толстого и Достоевского по Восточному вопросу.

В статье показан процесс становления советской философии в 1920-е гг. на примере анализа первой книги Валентина Фердинандовича Асмуса, опубликованной в 1924 г. и ее рецензий в эмигрантской и советской прессе. Центральным пунктом стало обсуждение теории познания, уточнение ее предмета и метода в марксистской философии. Диалектический метод, как главный объект анализа, был рассмотрен Асмусом через историко-философскую реконструкцию идей от Канта и Гегеля к Марксу и Ле-нину. При этом философия Ленина, чье имя значится в заголовке книги, оказалась, по сути, не затронута в исследовании Асмуса. Попутно он коснулся проблем первобытного мышления, античной диалектики и нового времени. Асмус доказывает, что подлинным предметом философии может быть только мышление в его диалектическом развитии (30 лет спустя эту позицию примется отстаивать Эвальд Ильенков). Вторая часть статьи посвящена критическим рецензиям на первую книгу Асмуса, как в эмигрантской, так и в советской прессе. Обращение к данному материалу позволяет реконструировать пространство интеллектуальной мысли, демонстрирующее процесс становления советской философии. The article shows the process of formation of Soviet philosophy in the 20s through the analysis of Valentin Ferdinandovich Asmus’s first book, published in 1924, and its reviews in the émigré and Soviet press. The central point was a discussion of the theory of cognition, clarifying its subject and method in Marxist philosophy. The dialectical method, as the main object of analysis, was examined by Asmus through a historical and philosophical reconstruction of ideas from Kant and Hegel towards Marx and Lenin. Lenin’s name featured in the book’s title turns out to be essentially absent from the study itself. In passing, he touched upon the problems of primitive thinking, ancient dialectics and modern times. Asmus argues that only thinking taken in its dialectic development can be the true subject of philosophy (30 years later, Evald Ilienkov will assume this stance as well). The second part of the article considers critical responses to Asmus’s first books in both émigré and Soviet press. These data make it possible to reconstruct the course of intellectual thought that shaped the formation of Soviet philosophy.

This article covers Valentin Asmus’s first book Dialectical Materialism and Logic and response thereto among émigré and Soviet intellectuals. The interest in Asmus’s first book is not only related to the demonstration of his ideas. It records and discusses the main problems that emerged in early Soviet theory of cognition, and reveals the existence of a latent Hegelian trend within it. Asmus presents the dialectical method by situating it within the development of philosophical ideas from Hegel to Marx. The article particularly focuses on the perception of Asmus’s book “on the two shores,” on the discussion of philosophy’s subject and method. Lenin’s name, featured in the book’s title, turns out to be essentially absent from the study itself. Asmus argues that only thinking taken in its dialectical development can be the true subject of philosophy (30 years later, Evald Ilyenkov would assume this stance as well). The second part of the article considers critical responses to Asmus’s first books in both émigré and Soviet press.

The article specifies the characteristics of Christian Anarchism as applied to the religious teaching of Lev Tolstoy. An attempt is made to overcome the political stereotype of his perception as an anarchist, but to consider it’s in the context of Political Theology. The article calls into question the legitimacy of considering his religious teachings in the unambiguous political discourse of Anarchism. If the concept of Christian Anarchism is a special kind of theoretical and ideological oxymoron of “religious politics”, then Tolstoy’s teaching is considered as a manifestation of his subjectivism, aimed at simultaneously overcoming the personal, animal element in man and reaching an impersonal universal spiritual principle, without any external restrictions. Freedom, as the most important category of his worldview, is presented rather in the form of religious monarchism — submission to the Divine will and life according to Christ, and not in the form of radical Anarchism. Political Theology is considered as a conscious non-participation of individual in politics — that is, refusal to stay in state structures such as courts, army, police, etc., — is the religious-subjective, peaceful destruction of the system, according to Tolstoy. On this path, he went much further than his Enlightenment teachers with their theories of social contracts, creating a model of not struggle, not reconciliation, not an agreement, but retirement from the state in the form of non-participation in its violence and atrocities. But all this is worth doing — not rebelling anarchically, not for the sake of oneself or social justice, but completely obeying the Divine will, which is a religious modification of the Kantian ethical imperative in Tolstoy’s teachings. Chertkov has named this teaching as model of theocratic monarchism.

The article examines the "American discourse" in Dostoevsky's fiction and journalism. Dostoevsky is known as one of the founders of the "Russian idea" concept, a writer who advocated the preservation of national values in the face of possible Western interventions. Alongside the West, he saw America as the most important opponent of Russian identity. If Dostoevsky's development of the idea of " native soil" functioned as a third node beyond the Slavophile-Westernizer binary, so too did America complicate the narrative of Russia vs the West. If Russia and Europe shared a common past-Dostoevsky's contemporaries had all been raised on the culture and philosophy of Europe, and many had even been educated there-Russia and America had no such shared past. Russian intellectuals and writers of the period all agreed that America was not Europe, and it was not the West. America was a new concept coming into philosophical being, a concept which would capture the literary and philosophical imagination of Dostoevsky and his contemporaries, like Nikolai Chernyshevsky. The American discourse begins with references to the name of Columbus, vividly described in the idea of fleeing or threatening flight (begstvo meaning both escape and the act of flight); it becomes synonymous with death and the mythologem of hell in Dostoevsky's literary texts. At the same time, America becomes a metaphor for the manifestation of a suffering consciousness, whose phenomenological analysis is connected in Dostoevsky's discourse with the image of the "rootless intelligentsia," the consciousness-disease of the underground man. Leaving such a person in a state of submerged consciousness, "bracketing" all the external circumstances of his life, Dostoevsky shows his doom in the search for the universal meaning of life. The room of America, where he places some of his sufferers, makes this hopelessness evident (figurative) and obvious, from the writer's point of view.

В статье рассмотрены две позиции описания противоречий сознания у Толстого в советской философии в 1950-х – 1960-х гг. С одной стороны, Толстой представлен внутри постоянной, хотя и неравномерно развивающейся дискуссии между формалистами и марксистами. С другой стороны, особый акцент сделан на оппозицию архаики и модерна, рассмотренную в статье В.Ф. Асмуса «Мировоззрение Толстого», который в качестве методологии использует программные работы Ленина о «кричащих противоречиях» Толстого. Автором представлена и позиция самого Толстого, мышление которого построено не на противоречиях, но в форме антиномии между ноуменально понятной свободой, бессмертием, этикой и феноменальной ограниченностью исторического прогресса, на манер гегелевского эволюционизма. Ключевые слова: Л.Н. Толстой, противоречия, советская философия, формализм, марксизм, остранение

This article discusses the versions of Leninist reflection theory in the Russian philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century. The very nature of the discussions made the problem of understanding the features of the theory of cognition a “hard” problem. This was facilitated by the ideological and political impurities characteristic of philosophical inquiry at the time. The “diamat” (short for “dialectical materialism”) reflection theory is compared with M.A. Lifshits’s “ontognoseology”. The task is to show the process of dogmatization of Lenin’s reflection theory in the discussions of the 30s–40s, as well as the transformation of this theory in Lifshits’s ontognoseology in the 1940–50s. The article highlights the variations of reflection theory in the Soviet philosophy of 1930–70s. This theory in Diamat is considered in comparison with the “ontognoseology” of Mikhail Lifshits. The ideological catalyst for the development of the “Leninist reflection theory” was the principle of partisanship. As its consequence, vulgar sociology and Diamat were fixed in the humanities, and only in the early 1950s they began to be gradually overcome. At the beginning of the Stalinist phase in the history of Soviet philosophy, the debates around Lenin’s book Materialism and Empiriocriticism became a landmark phenomenon. The tone was set by the students of the Institute of Red Professors, headed by Abram Deborin. The example of several works written by them in the mid-thirties shows the peculiarities of interpreting the concept of reflection, as well as the ideological conjuncture that largely determined the content and course of the philosophical discussion. The principle of partisanship demanded that class interests (as understood by the leaders of the proletarian party, of course) should come first, and in the theory of knowledge and consciousness, it meant that the dialectical-materialist position should be defended in the struggle against all varieties of idealism. It was under this sign that the discussion of Lenin’s theory of reflection took place. The article also analyses contemporary polemics, in the course of which opposite assessments of Deborin’s role in the formation of Soviet diamat and in solving the “hard problem” of Lenin’s theory of reflection are given. The postwar years of Soviet philosophy are represented in the article by Mikhail Lifshits’s “ontognoseology”. An associate and friend of Georg Lukács, Lifshits made the greatest contribution to overcoming vulgar sociology and renewing the tradition of creative Marxism. He described the dialectics of being and consciousness, of the subjective and the objective, proposing a profound and original interpretation of the theory of reflection. In Lifshits’s ontognoseology, the reflection of being in consciousness is conditioned by the property of reflectivity inherent in being itself.

The well-known epistolary conflict between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Strakhov over the latter's slander of the great Russian writer's terrible sins is considered in the article from the point of view a philosophical anthropology and relations not two but between three participants of this story: Dostoyevsky, Strakhov and Tolstoy. This conflict is presented through anthropological, existential, and class prisms of description, based on a reconstruction of Strakhov's concept of man as a controversial, dual, and undefined being reflected in Dostoevsky's work. A direct relation between the definition of the dual nature of man in the works of Strakhov and Dostoevsky and interpersonal conflicts within "boundary forms of literature" is substantiated. Special attention is paid to the class of seminarians, the object of Dostoevsky's targeted criticism. He saw their worst characteristics in Strakhov personality. Tolstoy plays the role of an arbiter in this controversy, assessing the situation both in terms of literary, existential and religious thought. In the course of his examination of this conflict, his unexpected closeness to Dostoevsky was discovered in regard to assessment of Strakhov. The point of their coincidence was the "pink Christianity" of the writers, who justify man in a quite similar manner, in terms of their religious consciousness.

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy’s departure from this earth took place in 1910, a year that has since become a common touchstone for Russians. The twentieth century came to a symbolic close, beginning a terrible era of changes that saw the Russian author’s humanist ideas and religious inquiries burned and melted down. The terrible age seemed to consume everything that humanity had valued over the centuries: poetry, faith, morality, freedom love; everything man lived by, to use Tolstoy’s own expression. After Auschwitz, the very thought of man as a superior and rational being created in the image and likeness of God was drained of all its blood. But perhaps, thanks to his genius, the world has gradually thawed and returned to man, gazing upon him anew, but with the loving eyes of Tolstoy. The twenty-first century is linked to certain dates in Tolstoy’s life that are important not only for us, but also for world culture. It has been exactly 120 years since the infamous Synodal Act of February 20–22, 1901, which discussed Count Tolstoy’s excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. This event was not so much religious as sociopolitical, an event with global consequences for the changing consciousness of many thousands of people in Russia and around the world. The intentions of the church hierarchs met with opposite results, as the name Tolstoy became much more attractive to inquiring minds than it had been before. This led to an axiological inversion typical of Russian ideological politics: Tolstoy gained the status of “sacrificial lamb” of the system, which served as additional confirmation that his criticism of the church was just. On June 10, 2021, we celebrated another important event linked by blood and spirit to the life world of Tolstoy, the centenary of the founding of the Yasnaya Polyana State Museum-Estate, which was then and remains now a “Russian Mecca,” a point of spiritual attraction for people all over the world.

ABSTRACT This article describes the device of enstrangement in relation to L.N. Tolstoy’s religious–political ideas. We focus on discussing the connection between enstrangement as a literary device and Tolstoy’s use of it to criticize the social and political power structure. Our research shifts the optics from politics to life, to man’s spiritual and practical world. We direct our attention not to Tolstoy’s most self-evident critiques of the power structure, but to his religious anthropology, which is aimed at returning man to the space of life’s primordial meanings, including by use of enstrangement. This article shows how Tolstoy comes to an understanding of the false artificiality, of the illusory nature, of the world of culture and man’s cultured “Self” through representation of the cultural environment as symbolic and ideological, automatizing people’s lives and manipulating their consciousness. Having lost the living substratum of life in the secular, “cultured” world, Tolstoy finds it in the new Word of God, enstranged from automatization, and in a new practice of living “according to Christ.”

In his search for the meaning of life, Tolstoy turned to Spinoza’s rationalist teaching about freedom, reason, morality, and religious faith. Spinoza created a philosophy where beliefs are in union with deeds, logic unites with ethics, and knowledge joins faith. According to Tolstoy, it is art that makes a synthesis of all the best attempts of the real, true philosophy. I argue that Tolstoy’s artistic method of linkage (stseplenie) was probably borrowed from Spinoza. Inspired by Spinoza’s “theorems of reason,” Tolstoy created his own “axiom of life” and elaborates on the concept of the “power of life” as a core of religious faith. Tolstoy endorsed Spinoza’s rationalistic critique of religion which helped to liberate true faith from the power of superstition and church dogmatics, but he criticised the geometric form in which Spinoza put the truths he discovered.

The article gives a theoretical survey of the concepts of social consciousness and depicts the history of formation of this concept in the 1950–70s in the works of Vladislav Kelle and Matvey Kovalzon, Evald Ilyenkov, Vasily Tugarinov et al. The philosophy of this period was characterized by the antinomy between the increasing dogmatism of diamat/histmat and the tendency towards convergence with world philosophical thought. The struggle between ideological and scientific attitudes in Soviet humanities intensified. The scientific spirit permeated through the formation of sociology and its increasing influence at both empirical and theoretical levels of analysis. During this period the problems of dialectics of individual and social consciousness, forms of social consciousness and mechanics of their functioning, correlation of social consciousness with public opinion, etc., are under investigation. Much attention is given to the debate on the nature of the ideal, which Ilyenkov explicitly linked to social consciousness. The opposition of natural scientific and philosophical approaches to the study of consciousness is considered. The article draws attention to the scientific breakthroughs of the time: the problem of consciousness for the first time is discussed in the light of the achievements of computerization in the 1960s and the problem of creating artificial intelligence. Three main approaches to the study of social consciousness are considered: ontological, epistemological and sociological. The problem of social consciousness has been actively discussed in Soviet philosophical literature since the late 1950s (although some studies were conducted even in the prewar period). At this time, there appear works in which social consciousness is interpreted not only as a reflection of social being, i.e. of the socio-economic structure of society, but also as a relatively independent phenomenon that requires multidimensional study and has a reverse effect on people’s material relations. Such an approach opened up the possibility of sociological analysis of consciousness. The key concept of Soviet sociology is public opinion, understood as a peculiar state of public consciousness. Thus, the methodological foundations of empirical sociology, which aims to study public opinion, are laid. Boris Grushin discovers the specificity of public opinion in its neutrality, equal acceptability for all social classes. The scholar regards sociological research as an effective tool for the formation of civil society and increasing its self-consciousness. The article shows the specificity of the concept of public consciousness in Soviet sociology, including empirical research based on mass interviews and study of public opinion.

Russian Intelligentsia in Search of an Identity considers the problem of the Russian intelligentsia’s self-identification in its historic-philosophical and historic-cultural aspects. The monograph traces the rise of the intelligentsia, from the 18th century to the present day, problematizing its central ideas and themes. In this historical context, it proceeds to investigate the distinctive intellectual, spiritual and biographical opposition of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in relation to the character and fate of the Russian intelligentsia, with its patterns of thought, ideology, fundamental values and behavioral models. Special attention is given to the binary patterns of the intelligentsia’s consciousness, as opposed to dialogical and holistic modes of apprehension.

The paper investigates the dependence of Leo Tolstoy’s ethical, religious and political ideas on Benedict Spinoza’s philosophy. The Soviet philosopher Valentin Asmus offered a solution to this problem by attempting to emphasize rationalist elements in Tolstoy’s teachings while glossing over his religious inclinations. Asmus treated Tolstoy’s “life’s religion” as a peculiar form of humanist ethics, just like Spinoza’s idea that “God” is merely infinite Nature. Asmus compared the Spinozist and Tolstoyan understanding of the relationship between metaphysics and ethics. He also showed that the fundamental difference between Tolstoy’s and Spinoza’s doctrines, was in their different understanding of human freedom. According to Tolstoy, a “free action” goes beyond the limitations of the laws of history. Regarding their relation to “real life,” Tolstoy’s, in many ways, was polar opposite to that of Spinoza’s.

The article examines the phenomenon of the late Lev Tolstoy in the context of his religious position. The author analyzes the reactions to his teaching in Russian state and official Orthodox circles, on the one hand, and Indian thought, on the other. Two sociocultural images of L.N. Tolstoy: us and them that arose in the context of understanding the position of the Russian Church and the authorities and Indian public and religious figures (including Mahatma Gandhi, who was under his influence). A peculiar phenomenon of intellectually usL.N. Tolstoy among culturally them (Indian) correspondents and intellectually them Tolstoy among culturally us (representatives of the official government and the Church of Russia) transpires. The originality of this situation is that these im­ages of Lev Tolstoy arise practically at the same period. The author compares these images, based on the method of defamiliarisation (V. Shklovsky), which allows to visually demonstrate the religious component of Tolstoy’s criticism of the political sphere of life and, at the same time, to understand the psychological reasons for its rejection in Russian official circles. With the methodological help of defamiliarisation the author tries to show that the opinion of Tolstoy (as the writer) becomes at the same time the voice of conscience for many of his con­temporaries. The method of defamiliarisation allowed the author to show how Leo Tolstoy’s inner law of nonviolence influenced the concept of non­violent resistance in the teachings of Gandhi.

The research interest in the article is focused on Leo Tolstoy's four biographies in the Lives of Remarkable People (ZhZL) publishing series. The first lifetime biography appeared in 1894, and the last one in 2017. Emphasis is placed on the "public" biography, which reflects the specificity of time and the "public" opinion of the general reader. This biography includes both real and fictional components. It was written according to the laws of any creative work often with a mythological touch. The subject-matter of the study was the "mass" image of Tolstoy created by the biographers of the series. The image is analyzed through the prism of a specific ideologically loaded time that reflects the historical demand for a heroic image. The article consistently shows the transformation of this heroic image that occurs due to the change in the genre features of the biography, due to historical collisions and literary methods the biographers used, their attitudes to the public (ideological) and subjective (myth-making) reading of Tolstoy's biography. The change of genres is described: from biographical essays to popular scientific biographies. The relationship and features of the ZhZL series published by F.F. Pavlenkov and M. Gorky are shown. Each biography is constructed according to the author's methodology, becoming its peculiar "result". E.A. Solovyov relied on the biographical method, V.B. Shklovsky relied on the formal one, whereas A.M. Zverev and V. A. Tunimanov reconstructed Tolstoy's spiritual experiences through the analysis of his artistic images. P.V. Bassinsky created Tolstoy's biography maximally fictionalizing its facts and using the method of fiction. A special attention is paid to the time of the creation of Tolstoy's biographies in the ZhZL series. Apart from the pre-revolutionary edition, the publishing house addressed to Tolstoy at the critical moments of history: the Thaw, the Perestroika, and in our time. Tolstoy was always in demand during the periods of spiritual crises and the devaluation of values. Telling about Tolstoy, his biographers tried to speak "through" him about their times, about their worship of the intelligentsia. At each turn of history, Tolstoy turned out to be a "mirror" of the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet intelligentsia. Tolstoy was both a conscience, a great writer and thinker, a citizen, and even a "trivial little man". All the biographies have a common tendency to idealize and, at the same time, to mythologize his image. Tolstoy's four biographies turned out to be not only the representatives of the public and social time and taste, but also a kind of their reflection for more than a century. One should not compare which biography is better or worse. Each, in its own way, is unique and informative. And it is not just a question of genre, facts, methods or ways of analysis, but a question of the ability to speak about the eternal through the prism of the time, to reveal the universal through facts, opinions, interests, and language accessible to society. The ZhZL series is a unique edition that demonstrates not only a certain level of development of society, but also allows us to understand social interests and needs in a particular historical layer.

The article examines a topical issue in the history of Soviet philosophy -the philosophy of mind in the 1950s-1970s. The problems of the philosophy of mind are presented from the point of view of the ideas of freedom and non-freedom, discussions around the problem of the ideal, the specifics of individual and social consciousness, the opposition of philosophical and scientific discourses. An important part of the study is the reconstruction of some of the interpersonal collisions of that time. The article contains an interview with the chief research fellow of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences D.I. Dubrovsky (who started his philosophical career in the 1950s), revealing the personal and theoretical aspects of his life and work. Using biographical method, the author demonstrates that, behind the heterogeneity of views and ideas of Soviet philosophers, there is a single intellectual and life-value orientation of the generation of the 1960s. In historical retrospective, the author shows the features of Soviet philosophy and the way of life of the Soviet philosopher in that period. The article describes the processes of institutionalization of philosophical consciousness in the 1960s, shows the advanced nature of such institutions as the Institute of Philosophy and the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences (INION) of the USSR Academy of Sciences, in which worked philosophers who not only had an original vision of the problems of philosophy but also were mediators between national and world thought. In Soviet philosophy of the 1950s-1970s, there were many bright, capable individuals, for whom the truth and the strive for it were more important than political correctness and general indifference. The author reveals the advanced nature of the Soviet philosophy of mind in the 1950s-1970s, in spite of the established stereotypes and uncritical mixing of different stages in the history of Soviet philosophy into one whole. The article is aimed at overcoming ideological and mythological stereotypes around the “Soviet” phenomenon in general and the Soviet philosophy of mind in particular..