Nicolas Bardyaev and the Russian Idea

Extract

The birth of an innumerable quantity of new generations I cannot reconcile us to the death of one single man.’ These words of Nicolas Berdyaev come towards the end of one of his latest works to be translated into English, The Russian Idea; and it has since transpired that they were written also near the end of his own life. They may serve as a fitting epitaph to the life and work of one who will not easily be replaced, and whose labour of interpreting the Russian world to the West was among the most pressing tasks of our generation in a field in which the labourers are still tragically few. His passing, therefore, is at once a blow and a challenge. We have lost one who undertook what few are willing, and fewer still are equipped, to do. But because the work must be done, it behoves us indeed not to be reconciled to his death, but rather to be emboldened by it.

It is difficult in the stormy moment of an historical crisis to reflect at all calmly on the deeper issues below the surface of the political and military hubbub. Thought about the Russian question is almost paralysed by the very fact that everybody is thinking about it. The temptation to reduce a complex conflict to the simple categories of friend and enemy, of ‘them’ and ‘us’, necessarily destroys that effort to find common ground or at least to understand the motives and purposes of the beloved enemy.