Customer Reviews

Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia

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If one wanted to understand the fundamental difference in Russian and American worldviews which lies at the root of the current cooling in relations, the following passage from Lesley Chamberlain's new book on Russia's philosophical legacy would be a good place to start:

The Russian moral antipathy to Utilitarianism has been remarkably consistent... [Russia was] less prosperous, technologically less advanced, admittedly, but Russian culture was morally of a higher type because it was interested in something other than crude statements of `I want' and `this is mine'... As early as Odoevsky [1840s] the country's desire not to be Western turned into a vision of itself as a mystical world economy running on selflessness.

Idealism, uniqueness and separateness have long been central elements of the "Russian Soul," and this superb volume brings a bit of order and understanding to the eclectic and elusive topic that is Russian philosophy, making it approachable for the general reader. (Reviewed in Russian Life)

Many of the basic doctrines of philosophy escape me. I tend to think: I think, therefore I am a thinker, forever removed from the real world in which policy rules among a bunch of spiteful authoritarian thinkers who don't care what I think. Lesley Chamberlain mentions Nietzsche, Rilke, Bakhtin, Heidegger, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and other thinkers who struggled with problems that are difficult to describe. I think she mentioned a book called The Yawning Heights. Bakhtin's theories on the novel are used as an excuse to mention a novelist who claims that the absurd instances in his writing attempt to capture the kind of experiences that doctrines imposed upon people produce. The ways in which a technocratic society attempts to set things up so they will run forever turns into the problem that the entire world is facing at the end of the book.