Catherine Evtuhov - Böcker

Is there a sharp dividing line that separates Europe into "East" and "West"? This volume brings together prominent scholars from the United States, Canada, France, Poland, and Russia to examine the evolution of the concept of Europe in the two centuries between the French Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Inspired by the ideas of Martin Malia, the contributors take a flexible view of the "cultural gradient"—the emergence, interaction, and reception of ideas across Europe. The essays address three dimensions of the gradient—the history of ideas, regimes and political practices, and the contemporary political and intellectual scene. In exploring the movement of ideas throughout Europe, The Cultural Gradient brings a new historical perspective to the field of European studies.

Catherine Evtuhov resurrects the brilliant and contradictory currents of turn-of-the-century Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg through an intellectual biography of Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), one of the central figures of the Silver Age. The son of a provincial priest, Bulgakov served first as one of Russia's most original and influential interpreters of Marx, and then went on to become the century's most important theologian of the Orthodox faith. As Evtuhov recounts the story of Bulgakov's spiritual evolution, she traces the impact of seemingly opposed philosophical and religious world views on one another and on the course of political events. In the first comprehensive analysis of Bulgakov's most important religious-philosophical work, Philosophy of Economy, Evtuhov identifies a "perceptual revolution" in Russian thinking about economy, a significant contribution to European modernist thought which both shaped and grew out of contemporary debates over land reforms. She reconstructs Bulgakov's vision of an Orthodox, constitutional Russia, shows how he tried to put it into practice in the wake of the February Revolution, and demonstrates its importance for a large and influential portion of Russian society.