In search of the foundations of the Russian Enlightenment in Pyotr Chaadayev and Ivan Kireevsky: the history of Pyotr Chaadayev’s “Note” to Alexander von Benkendorf

Abstract

This article analyses Pyotr Chaadayev’s “Note” (1832), a message addressed to Alexan­der von Benkendorf, who served as head of the secret police under Nikolas I. “The Note” is essentially a letter that supports Ivan Kireevsky’s article entitled “The 19th Century”, which Kireevsky published in his magazine – “The European” – and which provoked the secret police to close the magazine right after the publication of the article in 1832. “The Note” is a somewhat enigmatic text because it was signed with Kireevsky’s name, which for a long time made researchers believe that it reflected Kireevsky’s position. However, in the 1930s, researchers proved that the actual author of “The Note” was Pyotr Chaadayev, and that “The Note” contained his thoughts. “The Note” shows that it was the July Revolution of 1830 that temporarily undermined Chaa­dayev’s belief in Europe and made Chaadayev shift from the negative philosophy of Russian history and the Eurocentrism of his “Philosophical Letters” (1829–1830) to­wards the idea of Russia’s historical mission, despite Russia’s backwardness. This back­wardness was later presented in the text “Apology of a Madman” (1837) as the idea of Providence guiding Russia through history. The present article argues that in the early 1830s, Kireevsky did not share Chaadayev’s belief in Providence. “The Note” reads as a very ambivalent text because Chaadayev used it to both vindicate Kireevsky’s article, and to set forth his own philosophy of history. In the present paper, the author separates these two types of arguments and concepts which were tightly interwoven in “The Note”, but were in fact reflections of two different, although unstable and somewhat overlap­ping, positions of two philosophers.