Russian Thinkers

by Berlin, Isaiah (Author); Hardy, Henry (Editor); Kelly, Aileen (Introduction by)

• ISBN13: 9780141442204
• ISBN10: 0141442204
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-03-25
• Publisher: Penguin Classics

Summary

Required reading for fans of Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia—the landmark investigation into Russian history and thought Few, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. Russian Thinkersis his unique meditation on the impact that Russia’s outstanding writers and philosophers had on its culture. In addition to Tolstoy’s philosophy of history, which he addresses in his most famous essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Berlin considers the social and political circumstances that produced such men as Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Belinsky, and others of the Russian intelligentsia, who made up, as Berlin describes, the largest single Russian contribution to social change in the world.”

Author Biography

Isaiah Berlinat, at Oxford, was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory and founding President of Wolfson College.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Complex Vision
Russia and 1848	p. 1
The Hedgehog and the Fox	p. 24
Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty	p. 93
A Remarkable Decade
The Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia	p. 130
German Romanticism in Petersburg and Moscow	p. 155
Vissarion Belinsky	p. 170
Alexander Herzen	p. 212
Russian Populism	p. 240
Tolstoy and Enlightenment	p. 273
Fathers and Children	p. 299
Glossary of names	p. 353
Concordance to the first edition	p. 383
Index	p. 393
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