The collection Landmarks [Vekhi], published in the spring of 1909, was destined to have an amazing fate. Devoted to the Russian intelligentsia, the book was the subject of almost unanimous criticism that often degenerated into defamation and abuse. For several months, the entire periodical press of Russia, both newspapers and magazines, published responses to Landmarks on their pages; the number soon exceeded a hundred, but the reviews in which an attempt was made to penetrate the authors' arguments and come up (...) with a substantive criticism of them were a negligible minority. Articles by E.N. Trubetskoi, V.V. Rozanov, and A. Belyi were among the positive responses. (shrink)

One of the factors characteristic of bourgeois thinking today is the effort to create a "third trend" in philosophy, to "overcome" the conflict between materialism and idealism, and to replace this with some "higher" principle. Such attempts usually conceal outright subjectivism. The effort to find a higher, more "primordial" reality, antecedent to the division into matter and mind, into object and subject, amounts in essence to elevation to an absolute of forms of subjective experience in which awareness of the difference (...) between existence and thought is still lacking. It is consciousness that is declared to be primary, as was the case in earlier, more or less open varieties of idealism, but was not the case in its developed and conceptualized forms . This consciousness is found in non-differentiated, randomly appearing, "directly given" states. (shrink)