ROSYJSKIE IDEE I WOJSKA
RUSSIAN IDEAS AND TROOPS

Summary/Abstract: The article is a modified and slightly expanded version of the introduction to the book From Chaadayev to Solovyev. Russian Modern Thinkers between East and West, to be published in autumn 2022 by Peter Lang. Due to the exceptional circumstanc- es in which this introduction-article was written — and I mean, of course, the criminal war against Ukraine, unleashed by Putin on February 24, 2022 — in the above text, I try to present the general history of 19th-century Russian philosophical thought from the perspective of their attitude to both the universal humanist tradition of Europe and to militarist nation- alism in Russia, often with a religious overtone. From this point of view that I consider in turn the essence of the worldview of Peter Chaadaey, Aleksandr Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Fedor Dostoeyvsky and — most extensively — Vladimir Solovyov. In the background of all these thinkers, I also refer to Putin’s criminal “Orthodox worldview” and consider the essence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s philosophical and political thought in general, especially with regard to Ukraine and the European Enlightenment. An important place in this article is the discussion, but also a polemic — sometimes even fundamental — with some views on Russian thought, history and politics by Andrzej Walicki, who died in July 2022.

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