It has now become a legend:
Year nineteen-twenty-two, now distant,
Sails away the intelligentsia,
Leaving behind them the Soviet system.
Useless for their country,
Berdyaevs and Losevs depart.
For philosophers or historians
Revolution has no demand.
Alexander Gorodnitsky, The Last Ship, 2002
Abstract
Among those included in the lists of being sent out in 1922 as part of the “Philosophers’ Steamboat,” there was Sergei Nikolayevich (Father Sergius) Bulgakov (1871–1944). Prior to his deportation, Bulgakov, after many years of struggle, reunited his philosophical and theological journeys. This is reflected in his dialogues and essays, in particular, in At the Feast of the Gods and At the Walls of Chersonesus, and Tragedy of Philosophy. In exile, Bulgakov continued to reflect on the tragedy of a thinker facing a spiritual catastrophe, the tragedy of Russia torn by wars and revolutions, and his personal tragedies. Having regained his firm foundation and a way to overcome his uprootedness, Bulgakov makes an outstanding contribution to preserving Russian culture. This paper focuses on Bulgakov as a person, and his philosophy of religion is considered from the vantage point of how it reflects his personal struggles and humanistic worldview. The Philosophers’ Steamboat, an act of ideological repressions that followed the turbulent years of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War, bears a lesson for today when Russia is at war again, and many prominent cultural figures sever ties with their country. Sergei Bulgakov’s fate and work set an example of living and creating through tragedy.
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Notes
The term was coined by Sergei Khoruzhii in 1990 (Khoruzhii 1990). The first monograph containing a collection of essays and documents dedicated to the investigation of the deportation appeared in 2002 (Glavatskii 2002). For the most complete list of archival documents related to the events of 1922, see Deportation Instead of Execution (Makarov, 2005).
For an overview of the milestones of Bulgakov’s biography and work, see Pakhar’ et al. (Pakhar’ et al. 2015).
This resulted in Bulgakov’s collection of articles, “From Marxism to Idealism” (1903). As Bulgakov indicates in his annotation to the book, “During this time, my general outlook has undergone significant changes: I moved “from Marxism to Idealism.” This collection is also interesting, because the articles in which idealism is defended (4–10) are combined with articles written in defense of Marxism (1–3)” (Bulgakov 1903, v).
See, in particular, Evtuhov 1997, pp. 38–49 and 127–144.
Philosophy of the Name remained in manuscript form for many years, with only its first chapter being published under the title “Was ist das Wort” in Bonn in 1930. In 1942, Bulgakov wrote a post-scriptum to the still unpublished book, testifying how important this work was for him. The book was first published in 1953 in Paris. (Bulgakov 1953, pp. 5–6).
Bulgakov wrote the book 1920–1921 in Crimea and added a foreword in Prague. Sharing its fate with Philosophy of the Name, Tragedy of Philosophy also remained as a manuscript. It was first published in German (Sergij Bulgakov, Die Tragödie der Philosophie. Darmstadt: Otto Reichl, 1927). The Russian original first appeared only in 1993 as part of Bulgakov’s Works in Two Volumes. (Bulgakov 1993a, Volume 1, pp. 311–518).
The dialogue At the Feast of the Gods was first published in the collection Iz glubiny (Out of the Depths (De profundis)) in 1918. The collection was reprinted in 1990 (Bulgakov, 1990). An English translation of the dialogue appeared in The Slavonic Review, shortly before and after Bulgakov’s deportation (1922–1923). Having moved to Crimea from Moscow, Bulgakov composed two more dialogues, At Night (considered lost) and At the Walls of Chersonesus, written in 1922 and remaining as a manuscript for many years. Its parts were published much later in Russian and French. This paper uses the 1991 publication in Russian. The essay’s first French translation appeared in 1999.
Another source renders this quote from Trotsky as “we exiled these people because there was no reason to shoot them, but it was impossible to tolerate them any longer” (Osorgin 1955, p. 185).
There is an episode in Bulgakov’s expulsion that underscores the horrifying atmosphere in which the lists of future passengers of the Philosophers’ Steamboat were fabricated. Iosif Unshlikht’s telegram, received by the Crimean GPU from Moscow on August 17, contained an order to arrest the “professor-lecturer Bulgakov.” But it turned out that two Bulgakovs lived in Crimea at that time: in addition to the philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, there was Valentin Fyodorovich Bulgakov, Leo Tolstoy’s personal secretary. The Crimean Cheka was confused, and it caused discontent in Moscow. On October 13, Sergei Bulgakov was arrested and taken to a pre-trial detention center. (Kozyrev 2013, p. 26) Valentin Bulgakov shared the destiny of his namesake and was also deported by another philosophers’ steamboat two months later, in February 1923. Most likely, that saved his life.
On the debate about the date, as well as on the detailed account of Bulgakov’s arrest and deportation, see A.P. Kozyrev’s “Two Condemnations of Sergei Bulgakov” (Kozyrev 2022, especially pp. 323–328).
The majority of the deportees left Russia on two German ships, the Oberbürgermeister Haken and the Preussen, in September and November of 1922, sailing from Petrograd to then Stettin, Germany (nowadays, Szczecin, Poland). Bulgakov was exiled in December on board the Italian ship Jeanne, heading from Sevastopol to Constantinople.
On the evolution of both concepts, “heroism” and “asceticism,” in Bulgakov’s philosophy, see Ruth Coates (Coates 2013).
Bernard Marchadier describes this stage in Bulgakov’s life as “the Roman Temptation” (Marchadier 2003).
English translation: The Tragedy of Philosophy. 2020. Trans. Stephen Churchyard. Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press.
For a thorough and original reconstruction of Russian philosophy of language in the beginning of the twentieth century, see Thomas Seifrid’s The Word Made Self (Seifrid 2005).
For an introduction to the extensive field of the Western linguistic philosophy, see Richard Rorty’s collection of essays The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Rorty 1992).
Vladimir Solovyov in his Philosophical Principles of Integral Knowledge (1877) (Solovyov 1911, Volume 1, pp. 262–418) criticizes Hegel for the lack of the aspiration to find integral knowledge and for Hegel’s “pure thought, that is, the thought without the thinking subject and the object of thought” (Solovyov 1911, Volume I, p. 276), and Bulgakov inherits this line of argumentation.
On antimonies in Bulgakov’s Tragedy of Philosophy, see Pierre Hadot (French original Hadot 1957; Russian translation Hadot, 2009).
On Bulgakov’s “deeply original and controversial eschatology,” see Paul Gavrilyuk (Gavrilyuk 2006).
See, e.g., Sergei Medvedev’s interview with Elena Lukianova and Sergei Erofeev on Radio Svoboda (Medvedev 2022).
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The bard and poet Alexander Gorodnitsky wrote the song The Last Ship, in 2002, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of The Philosophers’ Steamboat (Gorodnitsky 2006, pp. 80–82).
All translations from Russian are mine, unless otherwise specified.
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Lyanda-Geller, O. Rethinking The Philosophers’ Steamboat: the tragedy of Sergei Bulgakov. Stud East Eur Thought (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09593-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09593-3