8/12/07

Marburg in Russia

Russian Neo-Kantianism: Marburg in Russia. Historical-philosophical sketches.
Moscow, 2007 (ISBN 978-5-8243-0835-8) 511 pp., in Russian, with a table of contents and a six page summary in German; including also an appendix of letters, an extensive bibliography, and twelve pages of photographic images between text pages 256 and 257. By Nina Dmitrieva. Review by Michael Zank.

The beginning of the review:

"Based on meticulous archival research, Nina Dmitrieva’s monograph documents the intellectual biographies of a group of hitherto neglected Russian philosophers whose work constituted an alternative to the materialism that, for most of the 20th century, was the dominant philosophical doctrine of Stalinist Russia. It so happens that many of these thinkers received their training in Marburg, Germany, a place that in the first decades of the 20th century was a Mecca for philosophically inclined youths from across Europe and the US, among them such well-known figures as Ortega y Gasset, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, T.S. Eliot, and Boris Pasternak. Whereas critical idealism was obliterated in Marburg after Heidegger replaced Paul Natorp in 1924, the Russian reception of Marburg neo-Kantianism was profound and of lasting import, as Dmitrieva documents."

Click here for the full text of the review

Click here for Dmitrieva's brief summary of the work (English)