Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
education in Moscow, attracting students from
the urban aristocracy, clergy, and merchant fami-
lies as well as Ukrainian, Belorussian, Greek,
Macedonian, and Georgian students. One of the
academy's most famous alumni was the scholar
Mikhail
LOMONOSOV
. Ironically, the founding of
Moscow University in 1755, in which Lomonosov
played an important role, marked the beginning
of the decline of the academy's fortunes. Over the
next half century, it gradually concentrated on
the teaching of theology. In 1814, the academy
was reincorporated as the Moscow Theological
Academy and placed under the jurisdiction of the
Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery.
they insisted was intrinsic to Slavic peasant com-
munities and political traditions. Although look-
ing backward to an idealized past, the Slavophiles
also advocated substantial reforms, such as the
abolition of
SERFDOM
and the granting of civil
rights. Among the leading representatives of the
Slavophile movement were Aleksei Khomiakov
(1804-60), Ivan Kireevsky (1806-56), and the
two
AKSAKOV
brothers, Konstantin Sergeevich
(1817-60) and Ivan Sergeevich (1823-86).
The Westernizers were a less ideologically
coherent group whose identity was defined pri-
marily by their rejection of the Slavophile mes-
sage. Their social backgrounds were more diverse
than those of the Slavophiles, who hailed pri-
marily from the Moscow landowning gentry.
They admired Peter the Great and felt that Rus-
sia's backwardness was due to not having under-
gone the same intellectual path of the West, most
notably the absence of a Renaissance. They felt
that Russia needed to become more like the West,
rather than less. They also attacked other parts of
the Slavophile philosophy. The literary critic Vis-
sarion
BELINSKY
(1811-48) argued against roman-
ticizing the Russian peasant. Aleksandr
HERZEN
(1812-70) sought to adapt European socialism to
Russian conditions. The historian Timofei Gra-
novsky (1813-55) did much to introduce West-
ern ideas to students at Moscow University
through his lectures on European history. They
all rejected the emphasis on religion placed by
the Slavophiles, advocating instead a philosophy
of secularism or, in the case of Mikhail
BAKUNIN
(1814-76), atheism. Even though the terms
Slavophile
and
Westernizer
refer to a specific period
of Russian intellectual history, to the extent that
they embodied contrasting intellectual attitudes
to Russia's relationship with the West, they retain
some validity in understanding subsequent intel-
lectual and political trends in Russia.
Slavophiles and Westernizers
Two groups of 19th-century intellectuals who
articulated a fundamental dichotomy in Russian
thought that centered on different understand-
ings of the value of autocracy, religion, and Rus-
sia's relationship to the West. Both intellectual
currents developed from the endless philosophi-
cal discussions of the seminal Stankevich Circle of
the 1830s, organized in Moscow by Nikolai
Vladimirovich Stankevich (1813-40). Future
Slavophiles and Westernizers served their intel-
lectual apprenticeship in the Stankevich Circle
discussing German romanticism and the works of
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. By the 1840s,
two different orientations began to emerge in
more distinct form. The Slavophiles developed
their ideas in reaction to the Westernization and
bureaucratization of Russian society, which they
traced to the pernicious influence of the reforms
of
PETER I
the Great. Believing that Russia was
politically, culturally, and morally superior to the
West, they idealized the peasant, communalism,
Russian Orthodox Christianity, and Russia's auto-
cratic system of government, which they argued
had been altered for the worse by Peter and his
successors. They opposed the rationalism, secu-
larism, and emphasis on individualism that they
associated with western Europe. Instead they
favored the notion of
sobornost,
a harmonious col-
lective, organic type of social organization that
Solovetsky Monastery
One of the foremost Russian Orthodox monas-
teries, the Solovetsky Monastery developed as an
important cultural, economic, political, and mil-
itary center in the prerevolutionary period. Sit-
Search WWH ::
Custom Search