Slawomir Mazurek

Andrzej Walicki, the last Polish world-renowned humanist of the 20th century, passed away in August this year. The article offers a concise description of his personality and work, which partly undermines some aspects of his autobiography published in 2010. Walicki, who, like Leszek Kołakowski, was a member of the 56’ generation, also known as the “thaw” generation, became famous, first and foremost, as an expert in Russian thought. His publications, devoted to, among other things, retrospective utopianism and liberalism in the 19th and 20th century Russian philosophy and social thought, were novel on a world scale. Equally novel were his works on the history of Marxism, where he challenged Kołakowski’s standpoint. Moreover, Walicki signifi cantly contributed to research on the history of Polish romantic philosophy, which had previously been overshadowed by great poetry. Walicki is considered to be one of the personalities who, in the 1960s and 70s, the time when Poland was part of the Soviet empire, made Polish humanities flourish. However, no matter how highly one estimates Walicki’s achievements, the impression that humanities were thriving in the communist Poland aft er de-Stalinization is an illusion. The illusion is an eff ect of the crisis in which humanities in Poland found themselves aft er the change of the regime, under neoliberal and populist governments.

This study is an attempt to reconstruct and sum up philosophical interpretations of Stavrogin, the main hero of the classic Dostoevsky’s novel “The Devils”, given by the outstanding Russian religious thinkers in the twentieth century. The author emphasizes that, however different can be their philosophical premises, the discussed interpretations of Dostoevsky’s hero are compatible and complementary. Confronting and, above all, synthesizing different points of view, he tries to grasp the basic historiosophical, anthropological and religious ideas of Russian renaissance.

The article constitutes an attempt to answer one of the most important questions that arises during research into Russian religious philosophy namely to what degree it remained dependent on Marxism. The author endeavours to settle this matter by confronting and analysing the ideas of eminent Russian thinkers including Fyodorov, Berdyaev, Frank and Vysheslavtsev. On the one hand he reconstructs their arguments against Marxism, while on the other he searches for parallelisms amongst their conceptions – in particular the critique of capitalism formulated by them – and the Marxist stance. Ultimately he comes to the conclusion that the currents parallel to Marxist ones were ingeniously incorporated by them into conceptions which as an entirety remain in evident opposition to Marxism

The article constitutes an attempt at reconstructing the views of Aleksander Radishchev, the 18th and 19th century Russian writer and thinker. In considering his most famous work, the novel A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, the author questions the validity of the decade-long held opinion of Radishchev as the precursor of Russian intellectual consciousness. In analysing various motifs within his thought – his political programme, historiosophy, and moral philosophy he shows that Radishchev was at the same time an advocate of modernisation and a pessimist aware of its very limitations. This determines the difference between his position and that occupied later by intellectual progressivism and allows one to consider him as the precursor of contemporary post-Enlightenment consciousness

Experts are unanimous that there are many affinities between gnostic thought and Russian religious philosophy of the first half of XXth century and that the latter was in different ways influenced by the former. So far, however, there are not many studies on this particularly subject. The paper, in an attempt to fill this gap, gives a comparative description of the ancient gnosis and the Russian religious philosophy. The author points out similarities and differences between these two great spiritual movements, taking into consideration many aspects – poetics of writings, language and terminology and, certainly, ideas. He sums up, among others, the Russians historiosophical debate about valuable and destructive elements of gnosis – its truths and lies – and role played by it in the course of human history. Finally he comes to conclusion that the Russian renaissance absorbed from gnosis as much as it could absorb without losing its Christian identity. Thus the Russian renaissance turns out to be a typical counterreformative reactionagainst the gnosis and gnostic tradition

The paper is a reconstruction and an analysis of eschatological conceptions formulated in the Russian religious philosophy during the first half of the 20th century. Among the representatives of this trend in the Russian philosophy were N. Berdyaev, L. Shestov, L. Karsavin, S. Frank, M. Łosski, and S. Bułgakov, who were preceded by the late 19th century writers like V. Soloviov, and M. Fedorov. Most of the Russian conceptions of eschatology of that time expressed variously understood conception of an universal redemption, and were supplemented by a variety of ontological, anthropological and ethical ideas. The author stresses the differences between them by means of a typology proposed by him. The initial reconstructions and analyses serve him as a context within which he poses the question of the consequences of crisis of eschatology which he takes to be one of the main factors determining the present condition of culture. Key words REDEMPTION, ESCHATOLOGY

This study is an attempt to reconstruct and sum up philosophical interpretations of Stavrogin, the main hero of the classic Dostoevsky’s novel “The Devils”, given by the outstanding Russian religious thinkers in the twentieth century. The author emphasizes that, however different can be their philosophical premises, the discussed interpretations of Dostoevsky’s hero are compatible and complementary. Confronting and, above all, synthesizing different points of view, he tries to grasp the basic historiosophical, anthropological and religious ideas of Russian renaissance.