NICHOLAS ALEXANDROVITCH BERDYAEV (1874-1948) was a Russian political and Christian religious philosopher who emphasized the existential spiritual significance of human freedom and the human person....mehr sehenNICHOLAS ALEXANDROVITCH BERDYAEV (1874-1948) was a Russian political and Christian religious philosopher who emphasized the existential spiritual significance of human freedom and the human person. He published his first book, Subjectivism and Individualism in Social Philosophy, at the age of 26 and became one of the most prolific and widely read contemporary Russian writers.
Born at Obukhiv, Kiev Governorate in 1874 into an aristocratic military family, Berdyaev attended Kiev University in 1894, but was expelled when he became a Marxist and was arrested at a student demonstration. In 1897 his involvement in illegal activities led to three years of internal exile to Vologda. He married Lydia Yudifovna Trusheff in 1904 and the couple moved to Saint Petersburg, the Russian capital and centre of intellectual and revolutionary activity.
Having criticized the erastianism of the Governing Synod of the Orthodox Church in his country, he was again threatened with banishment just before the fall of the imperial government. After the revolution, he became chair of philosophy at the University of Moscow, but after two terms of imprisonment was expelled by the Bolshevists in 1922 as an upholder of religion. He subsequently moved to Paris, where he directed the Academy of the Philosophy of Religion, which he founded in Germany, and edited a review called Putj (“The Way”).
In the years that he spent in France, Berdyaev wrote 15 books, including most of his most important works. During the German occupation of France during WWII, Berdyaev continued to write books that were published after the war, and some after his death. He died at his writing desk in his home in Clamart, near Paris, on March 24, 1948.weniger sehen