Customer Reviews

The Origin of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)

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The Communism that was practiced in Russia had some major differences from the way it was described by Marx and Engels.

Nicolas Berdyaev writes a very much needed analysis of where Russian Communism came from.

Although there is much to be learned about how the mindset of the average Russian was shaped over hundreds of years by Roman Law and Russian Orthodox religion, the writing style leaves much to be desired. Even though I studied Russian in college for two years and have a serious interest in Russia, I had difficulty finishing this book.

I give Berdyaev 5 stars for information and 1 star for the dry writing style. That averages out to 3 stars.

--George Stancliffe

This book, although very hard to read is very detailed and indepth. I would read Berdyaev in conjunction with other writers of Russian cultural history such as Richmond and Vassilieva. Then if you need more indepth research or understanding of a particular cultural characteristic then I would go back to Beryaev and really dissect it.

I would suggest that R.M. French's translation is not so much dry as a close translation of the Russian. In this I keep in mind the indeterminancy of translation (Quine) and that "Understanding a sentence means understanding a language." (Wittgenstein) This is a period piece and reading it, even in translation, is entering into the mind of a person living in another cultural world. What feels dry is really a "mind-shift" -- even in the structure of the English.

Notice even the structure of the sentences feels more Russian than English: (p. 7) "Already in the fourteenth century there existed" follows precisely the word order in the Russian.

Beyond this the main issue concerns the purpose of reading Berdyaev. It seems to me that this is a history of philosophy exercise. However, I am aware that many contemporary Russians consider him to be their favorite philosopher. It certainly would take reading him to find out why and doing this should give us some insights into the hopes and dreams of many of our contemporary Russian friends.