Boris de Schloezer on the Early 20th Century Russian Philosophy

Abstract

The publication highlights the period of cooperation between the music and literary critic, translator and writer Boris Fedorovich Schloezer with the critical and bibliographic department of the St. Petersburg “political, social and literary” liberal newspaper “Birzhevye Vedomosti”, which from the middle of 1916 was headed by A.L. Volynsky. In 1916 Schloezer published reviews of a collection of articles by V.I. Ivanov “Furrows and Boundaries”, on the books of N.A. Berdyaev “The Meaning of Creativity (The Experience of Justifying Man)” and S.L. Frank “The Subject of Knowledge”. If the works of Berdyaev and Ivanov provoked criticism of the author of the reviews, the book of Frank (along with the works of N.O. Lossky (“Justification of Intuitionism”, “Introduction to Philosophy”) and P.B. Vysheslavtsev (“Ethics of Fichte”)), according to Schloezer, testifies to a new trend in Russian philosophy – a turn towards ontology and the revival of metaphysics. In addition to the published articles this publication presents a response to Ivanov’s collection “Native and Universal” and the article “Russian Philosophical Thought”, written by Schloezer in 1917–1918. They, apparently, never appeared on the pages of the newspaper, but were preserved in the Volynsky archive (RSALA, fund 95). Schloezer’s article on modern Russian philosophy is a review of the latest philosophical literature: S.L. Frank’s “Man’s Soul”, N.O. Lossky’s “The World as an Organic Whole”, E.N. Trubetskoy’s “Metaphysical Assumptions of Cognition”, I.A. Ilyin’s “Philosophy of Hegel as the Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity”, as well as the collection “Thought and Word” edited by G.G. Shpet. The publication sheds light on the un known pages of Schloezer’s intellectual biography.