Berdyaev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich(1874–1948)
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 Marxism to idealism to the search for God. Berdyaev was one of the initiators of three collections of essays that became famous and provoked much heated argument: Problemy idealizma (Problems of idealism; 1902), Vekhi (Landmarks; 1909), and Iz glubiny (De Profundis, Out of the depths; 1918). Berdyaev greeted the fall of the monarchy in February 1917 with great enthusiasm, but he assessed the October Revolution differently—as the triumph of the destructive principle in the Russian revolution.
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