Cathbad Bozhko’s Reviews > The Return of Holy Russia: Apocalyptic History, Mystical Awakening, and the Struggle for the Soul of the World > Status Update

Quotes from Chapter 1


Putin's Reading Suggestions
“The three thinkers Putin suggested his governors get to know were Vladimir Solovyov, a friend of the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky and, according to the late American Russian scholar James Scanlan, “the greatest and most influential of Russia’s philosophical thinkers”; Nikolai Berdyaev, the aristocratic Christian existential “philosopher of freedom”; and Ivan Ilyin, a more political thinker than either Berdyaev or Solovyov, and whose ideas for some form a kind of “Russian fascism.”

“The books Putin asked his governors to read—Solovyov’s The Justification of the Good, Berdyaev’s The Philosophy of Inequality, and Ilyin’s posthumous Our Tasks—are not page-turners, unless you like ideas. They are demanding, impassioned, philosophical texts. That a world leader should ask his governors to read works of philosophy seems reason enough to take note, but the reaction from much of the Western press has, perhaps not surprisingly, been less than adulatory. The idea, expressed by Steiner and other prophets of a declining West, that Russia has some unique historical “mission,” a special task to accomplish of planetary significance, is shared, in their own way, by Solovyov, Berdyaev, and Ilyin. As might be expected, this did not go down well with many members of the Western critical establishment. For them, these Silver Age thinkers and their thoughts about “the Russian idea,” are very badly tarnished.”


Spengler on "Dostoyevsky's Christianity and the Destiny of Russia
“With Hesse, Spengler sees Dostoyevsky as the prophet of the ominously approaching Russia. Dostoyevsky’s “passionate power of living is comprehensive enough to embrace all things,” Spengler tells us.13 “Such a soul as his can look beyond everything that we call social, for the things of this world seem to it so unimportant as not to be worth improving”—an attitude that led to Dostoyevsky being called a reactionary in his lifetime and that during the Soviet period led to his demonization and to some of his work being banned. Nevertheless, “to Dostoevsky’s Christianity the next thousand years will belong.” He is “the coming Russia.”14”


Walter Schubart critique of Spengler's "inevitable" decline and on the need for a West-East synthesis through Russia
“In 1938 he published an essay, “Europe and the Soul of the East.” In it he agreed with Spengler that Europe was in decline. But he disagreed with him that it was inevitable, and with Hesse Schubart believed that the West could experience a rebirth if it could integrate its “Promethean” character—its scientific and technological mastery—with the mystical, religious character of “Messianic Russia.” “The Russian mission,” Schubart believed, “is to liberate the world from the contagion of the Late West . . . to liberate Europe from its own terminal Western hubris, to redeem the West or to ‘replace’ it.” In 1950 Schubart’s book Russia and Western Man was published in an English translation. In it he also spoke of a new religious consciousness arising in the East.”