“Seven short lectures on Slavophilism” by Andrei Tesli has been published

Historian and philosopher Andrei Teslya has long been interested in the heritage of Russian thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries: in his works he repeatedly turned to the works of Konstantin Leontiev, Vladimir Solovyov, Vasily Rozanov, Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, he is the author of the four-volume book “Russian Conversations” and a biography of Ivan Aksakov . In the new book, he set out to trace the emergence, development and completion of Russian Slavophilism – not as an ideological movement, but as the history of a specific circle of people and their views. Trying to think about the advantages and disadvantages of this approach Mikhail Prorokov.

Everyone has heard about the dispute between Slavophiles and Westerners – even those who do not know about the existence of Ivan Kireyevsky, Yuri Samarin and Timofey Granovsky. The controversy, which began in the second quarter of the 19th century, is resumed with renewed vigor at each historical turn; only the labels that the disputants stick on themselves and each other change. The more significant and interesting are the attempts to return to the roots and see how and by whom it all began.

This is not the first time Andrei Teslya has addressed the topic of “the first Russian nationalism” – just remember his 2013 book of the same name or the four-volume “Russian Conversations” published three years ago. In the author’s annotation to the first volume of “Conversations,” Teslya made a reservation: ““Russian conversations” for me are a kind of conversation, a way of seeing and hearing that developed in the century before last, largely supplanted by “Russian disputes.” After all, conversation does not imply victory, defense, attack – the whole point of conversation is interest in the interlocutor.” He does not change this approach in his new work – “Seven short lectures on Slavophilism.”

Even in the preamble, the author says: “…it is no coincidence that not only a number of biographies have been written about the Slavophiles, but it is the biographies that are the most interesting and striking works about them… Slavophiles are interesting and attractive as people – even if their ideas are radically alien: a phenomenon actually not common in the intellectual world.” Important arguments in favor of this personal approach are the tone in which the dispute between the book’s heroes and Westerners was conducted in the 1840s, and the very positions of the parties in this dispute. As the book convincingly shows, the conservatism of the Slavophiles coexisted well with liberalism, and if not opposition, then certainly non-alignment with the authorities. And even more so, we were not talking about a priori personal hostility. The circles of Slavophiles and Westerners did not exist in isolation from each other; their participants visited the same places, met, had arguments, and could be friends, like Herzen and Samarin.

In order to even more clearly dissociate the Slavophiles not only from statesmen like Pobedonostsev, but from the state in general, Tesla dwells in detail on the history of Samarin’s participation in the preparation of the peasant reform of 1861. Being one of its developers, he refused the award – the Order of St. Vladimir, III degree, awarded to him upon its completion. And he explained his motives in a detailed letter: the reason for the refusal was in no way the desire to demonstrate his disagreement with government policy, but the desire not to find himself within this policy, to maintain his status.

Teslya consistently pursues this idea—about the Slavophiles’ intention to be not political or governmental, but rather public figures—in the book and emphasizes in an interview: “Slavophiles are alien to modern Russian conservatives, because they are largely about free social action. One of the key points of this activity is for them not to be associated with power.” It is unlikely that the author wants to classify all modern domestic conservatives as guardians – he would certainly agree that among them there may be people no less scrupulous than Samarin and alien to loyalism, similar to, say, the “villagers” of the 1960s–1980s. There will, of course, be a small number of such people, but there are never many of them (note that in “The First Russian Nationalism” Tesla wrote that in the political sense, the experience of conservatism is always outwardly unsuccessful).

“Seven Short Lectures on Slavophilism” examines in detail the philosophical, social, historical and aesthetic views of the members of the Slavophil circle, separately analyzes the poetry of Alexei Khomyakov, examines the causes of the crisis in which Slavophil thought has found itself since the 1860s, and presents anti-Slavophil arguments of such an atypical Westerner , like Vladimir Solovyov (who at the beginning of his career was much closer to the Slavophiles). However, the “Russian disputes” themselves, which are gradually dividing Russian society more and more into two unequal halves, largely remain outside the scope of the “Lectures” – of course, deliberately. The instigators of disputes appear in them not as potential comrades, side by side with whom they will fight the enemy, and not as opponents who need to be surpassed morally and intellectually, but as living people who have happened to be mistaken, and have great spirits, and disagree in many ways with each other—and at the same time as a model. If not for imitation, then at least for a sense of distance, so that, in addition to the Rus’-West horizontal line with a warm-cold center and flaming poles, today’s debaters could at least sometimes measure themselves along the second axis – the ordinate axis.