Literature into Philosophy: The Russian Alternative

Back in the early days of postcolonial studies, critics of Eurocentrism would sometimes deplore the West's devaluation of "alternative epistemologies" elsewhere in the world. Anyone aware of the polemics among German idealists, French rationalists, and British empiricists might doubt the existence of any such "central" European doctrine of knowledge, but what these postcolonialists usually meant had little to do with the philosophy practiced by philosophers. They were concerned, instead, with Foucauldian regimes of gathering and interpreting information that fed the institutions involved in Europe's empires. There was little attention to whether some alternative mode of actual philosophizing might have arisen outside Europe due to contact with Western culture.

Edith Clowes's book on the uniqueness of Russian philosophy and on its special relations to literature within what Clowes calls "Russian writing culture" represents a sharper focused, better documented, and more thoughtfully articulated outgrowth of this onetime critique. Though she does address Foucault (as will be mentioned in closing), she rightly avoids any major emphasis on postcoloniality. After all, to label Russia as postcolonial would have to allow for the paradox that, in undergoing this process of cultural transfer, it had—like imperial Japan or apartheid South Africa—dutifully internalized Western imperialism's own practices.

Still, Clowes does stress the importance for Russian philosophy of Russia's geocultural position at the edge of Europe. Thus the very existence of a writing culture in this distant northern land, cut off by the "Tartar yoke" and the fall of Constantinople from the early modern revival of classical letters, depended upon Western models. For if in encouraging European influence around 1700, Peter the Great emphasized military and technological matters, toward century's end Catherine the Great (by birth a German princess) made overtures to the Enlightenment. Along with furthering neoclassical literature, she communicated with Voltaire, Rousseau, and especially Diderot (who even came to St. Petersburg in 1773-74) to enhance her image in the age of the philosophes.

These efforts, however, proved to be mainly for external consumption. In a maneuver emulated by later Russian rulers, Catherine severely limited the activities of would-be homebred philosophers, either by closing their journals or by banishing them to Siberia. As a result, the first truly fruitful domestic involvement with philosophy came with the influx of German idealism in the 1820s and 1830s. Here Clowes devotes some illuminating pages to problems in creating a Russian philosophical vocabulary and to the so-called kruzhki, the typical venues for philosophical inquiry at that time. These "circles," or discussion groups, functioned as substitutes both for classrooms (philosophy had vanished from the universities after the abortive Decembrist Revolt in 1825) and for publications, which had to contend with a vigorous censorship. The best-known circle formed around Nikolai Stankevich (1813-40), a middleman for Schelling and Hegel whose early death gave him a special allure. Another key figure was Petr Chaadaev (1794-1856), whose Philosophical Letters represent, for Clowes, the first real achievement of Russian philosophy. Because this work included harsh comments on Russian backwardness, it was quickly banned (mention even of its title was forbidden), and Chaadaev would suffer official designation as a madman.

In this hostile environment philosophy went underground, especially after the revolutions of 1848 when Russian writing culture endured intense reactionary pressure. In a striking chapter on the displacement of speculative thought into other genres, Clowes analyzes the survival of a "philosophical urge" in three key figures who became prominent in the 1850s. Alexander Herzen, from his London exile, became the leading voice for liberalizing the autocracy. Criticizing German philosophers for ignoring the general reader, he turned to an intellectually vibrant form of higher journalism concerned with the public sphere, known in Russian as "publisistica" or "publicistic writing." With Khomiakov, philosophy reunited with theology to create what Clowes calls a "Russian Orthodox discourse" outside the official church, whose traditional forms of expression were visual and ritualistic rather than verbal or theological. Especially interesting for students of the relations between literature and philosophy are Turgenev and the rise of the Russian realistic novel. In Rudin (1856), Clowes finds a...