Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev, a Russian religious philosopher, was born in Kiev in a family of the old nobility. He attended the Kiev military school. In 1894 he enrolled in St. Vladimir's University of Kiev as a natural sciences student, but after a year transferred to the department of law. Infatuation with Marxism and participation in the social-democratic movement led to his arrest, exclusion from the university (in 1898), and a three-year exile to Vologda. This represented a break with the aristocratic environment to which he had been accustomed, a break that he later called a fundamental fact of his biography, not only of his external biography but also of his inner one.

Berdyaev's Marxist period did not last long; in a short period of time he underwent an evolution that was characteristic for many Russian thinkers of the beginning of the twentieth century—from...