Culture, civilization and the “new barbarism”: the historiosophical insights of Nikolai Berdyaev

Abstract

The article examines the evolution of the philosophical and historical views of N.A. Ber­dyaev (1874–1948) in the first months of the First World War (“Second Patriotic War”). According to the general concept of the author of the article, philosophical journalism (in particular, in Russia) is not a translation, a “simplification” of a ready-made philo­sophy, but, on the contrary, a way of ascending to philosophy – due to the increasingly distinct crystallization of philosophical meanings born in journalism. In this context, the author of the article, using the method of analytical condensation of some frag­ments of Berdyaev’s intellectual work, examines his texts of 1914–1915 from the point of view of their “elevation” from the actual patriotic journalism (built on the princi­ples of Russophile cultural self-apology) to the heights of historiosophical and philo­sophical-cultural thinking based on the methods of analytical criticism and civilizational self-criticism.