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xv Acknowledgments In an undertaking as large, daunting, and time-consuming as this translation has proven to be, there have been innumerable occasions when further progress depended upon being able to reach out for a helping hand from someone with superior expertise on the puzzling question of the moment. I have been the fortunate recipient of help from many generous individuals, to some of whom I have returned over and over for advice. While laboring on this project for nearly a decade and a half, I occasionally fantasized that in an ideal world, it would have been undertaken not by a solitary scholar, but by a commission of scholars, each of whom possessed a native’s command of English, Russian, and German, an entire mastery of Hegel’s and Husserl’s philosophical projects, and an intimate knowledge of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual history, including that of Russia, plus exemplary skill at translation . Such a commission (certainly including George Kline, who among my friends and colleagues comes closest to fitting this description) would presumably have been able to complete this translation with confidence and dispatch. In the real world, however, the process has been rather different. The chain of events culminating in this translation project can be traced back to a suggestion made sometime during the mid-1980s by that same George Kline, now professor emeritus of Bryn Mawr, among whose many scholarly distinctions is an exceptionally thorough knowledge of the history of Russian philosophy. Observing that I had been working on the problem of the abstract and the concrete in Hegel’s Logic, he inquired whether I had ever run across I. A. Il’in’s commentary on Hegel. He thought it should be of interest because its central theme was the concrete universal in Hegel. The information intrigued me, but it soon emerged that there was only a single registered copy of Il’in’s work in the United States, and that copy was not permitted to circulate or be copied, rendering it inaccessible for practical purposes. Some five years went by during which I made occasional fitful efforts to locate a copy of the work. These efforts finally produced a phone number in Moscow supposedly xvi A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S belonging to a mathematician, one Yurii T. Lisitsa, who was said to be organizing the publication of Il’in’s collected works. When contacted, Professor Lisitsa generously turned over his only personal copy of Il’in’s commentary (a Xerox) to me. I devoted the following summer to a careful reading of both volumes of that original (1918) Russian text, and realized that it was a major scholarly achievement, essentially unknown in the West. (More precisely, it was known only to a rather limited circle of Hegel scholars, and only in the form of a significantly shorter German translation, a single volume, under a different title, produced by Il’in during World War II.) Eventually, with the encouragement and support of George Kline, I resolved to attempt a translation of the work. At that point the very experienced translator of numerous works of Russian religious thought and philosophy, Boris Jakim, stepped in and generously volunteered his help. Our original plan (long since abandoned) was that Boris would lead the assault on the mountain, working as rapidly as possible to produce a first draft of the translation, establishing the route along which I would then follow, pondering and refining the nuances of Il’in’s Hegel interpretation and vocabulary. The thought was that George would then further refine the results of our joint labors before turning over the whole to a publisher. In the event, Boris Jakim forged valiantly ahead just as promised, completing a draft translation of the whole of volume 1 in record time. However, I soon found my assigned task, sorting out the nuances of Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel, with its concomitant vocabulary, much more challenging than anticipated. Several questions of translation seemed unresolvable on the basis of volume 1 alone (indeed, certain crucial questions of translation were resolved only in the concluding chapters of volume 2). Il’in’s views concerning Hegel’s philosophical method, the significance of his frequent references to Hegel’s “thought act,” the intersection of Husserlian phenomenology with his reading of Hegel, the justifiability of his claim that Hegel was ultimately forced to “compromise” his philosophical project, were just a few of the fundamental questions...

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