Abstract

The Slavophile idea in the broad sense, as the idea of the self-determination of Russian culture, was by no means born together with historical Slavophilism. It has always been an immanent component of the intellectual world and intellectual development of Russia and merely received its name, a rather random and infelicitous one, from Slavophilism. In our century it has a rich history, in which the majority of events have been of a political and polemical character. They have been much discussed, and now we will leave them aside and take up another task: to delimit and examine the great creative contributions to the idea. Under the closest scrutiny, we find three such contributions: the idea of a Slavic Renaissance, the Eurasian idea, and the idea of a Neopatristic Synthesis. All of them in their outward appearance diverge quite far from the customary textbook image of Slavophilism: [they are] "a series of magical metamorphoses" that show both the creative force of the idea and its well-known amorphousness. Let us try to see in these metamorphoses interrelated episodes that together trace out a graphic image of the whole. Earlier, people loved to view an idea in graphic form and in action, and they knew how to do so. Faddei Zelinskii was a great master of this, and at the beginning of the century he published in Petersburg a series of studies entitled From the Life of Ideas [Iz zhizni idei]. Indeed, it is with Zelinskii that our first episode from the life of the Slavophile idea is associated