In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

P A R T O N E A Modernist Journal (1925–1929) The formation of the consciousness of a generation is the fruit of complex processes and can be understood as a mythological phenomenon.1 Raoul Girardet has shown that in periods of historical upheaval, a society’s collective consciousness loses its traditional points of reference. That gives rise to a mythical effervescence within minority groups, which are the most threatened.2 Myth, despite its objectively refutable interpretation of reality, offers certain keys to explain the chaos of facts and events and the mobilization of these groups’energies.3 According to W. Otto, the original mythic process is such that it imperiously demands to be imitated,or,more exactly, to be re-accomplished. Man seeks through his corporal nature, through cult, and through his actions and words to incarnate his representation of the divine.4 At the end of the First World War, the French public wanted its government officials to erase the traces and aftermath of the war and lead the country back to the happy prewar epoch. S. Berstein maintains that the aspiration to return to a golden age included several myths, such as nostalgia for a stable currency and vague references to the “good life” of the Belle Époque, which the French sought anew through intoxication with 33 jazz and the new enjoyment of consumption.5 However, the blow of the occupation of the Ruhr in October 1923 and the inability of the National Bloc between 1919 and 1924 to solve the crisis in public finances forced the French to understand, despite much confusion, that the war, rather than being a parenthesis, had brought forth a new world and a new way of living. In this sense, France in 1925 was living out the last days of the postwar period. The awareness that things were different due to the structural effects of the war was first formulated by intellectuals such as Alain and Paul Valéry and was communicated gradually to society in general after Poincaré returned to power in July 1926. The devaluation of the franc in 1928, the rise of German nationalism from the summer of 1929, and finally , the Wall Street crash on October 24, 1929, destroyed the myth of a golden age. In 1929, four years after the great exposition of decorative arts at the Trocadéro, a new generation of French, born after 1900, reached the age of political and intellectual responsibility in a state of unrest but also with demands for a new realism compared to the idealist, progressive, and pacifist generation born before 1880.6 At the same time, the majority of émigrés from Russia understood that the consolidation of Stalin’s power in Russia had devastated their plans to return to their native land, and there was a palpable increase in demands for French naturalization.7 Until this point, they had lived in a nostalgic frame of mind, hoping to encounter the good old days of Imperial Russia once more.8 Such a context vindicated the modernist identity of the authors of The Way. Specifically, the common will towards a new interpretation of religious doctrine within the bosom of Orthodoxy takes on its full meaning. In effect, Berdyaev’s and Karsavin’s generation, born of the Silver Age and welded together by common emotional experience and exile, was animated by a search that was itself mytho-logic (as explained in the introduction to this volume), but with a completely new understanding of the Kingdom of God on earth. In an article about A. Gornostaev’s book on Dostoevsky and N. Fedorov , Berdyaev based himself on the “fathers” of The Way generation to define the “fundamental, unique, and central” problematic of Russian religious thought as “the Kingdom of God on earth,” and to avoid the millenarianism of the formula “the search for the truth on earth.”9 In like manner, Bulgakov, in his lecture “Concerning the Kingdom of God” at St. Albans in 1927, insisted on the Christological, antinomian, and eschatological dimensions of this symbolic figure. It indicates the possibility of 34 PART ONE encountering the spiritual world from this world,from the terrestrial world, thanks to the unity perfected in Christ (the God-man) of the two natures, human and divine. Inspired by Fedorov’s myth of the common task, Bulgakov ’s philosophy of history is profoundly dynamic.10 “The advent of the Kingdom of God on earth,” Bulgakov writes, “is an...

Share