Ruth Coates - Böcker

Deification in Russian Religious Thought considers the reception of the Eastern Christian (Orthodox) doctrine of deification by Russian religious thinkers of the immediate pre-revolutionary period. Deification is the metaphor that the Greek patristic tradition came to privilege in its articulation of the Christian concept of salvation: to be saved is to be deified, that is, to share in the divine attribute of immortality. In the Christian narrative of the Orthodox Church 'God became human so that humans might become gods'. Ruth Coates shows that between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 Russian religious thinkers turned to deification in their search for a commensurate response to the apocalyptic dimension of the universally anticipated destruction of the Russian autocracy and the social and religious order that supported it.Focusing on major works by four prominent thinkers of the Russian Religious Renaissance--Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florensky--Coates demonstrates the salience of the deification theme and explores the variety of forms of its expression. She argues that the reception of deification in this period is shaped by the discourse of early Russian cultural modernism, and informed not only by theology, but also by nineteenth-century currents in Russian religious culture and German philosophy, particularly as these are received by the novelist Fedor Dostoevsky and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev. In the works that are analysed, deification is taken out of its original theological context and applied respectively to politics, creativity, economics, and asceticism. At the same time, all the thinkers represented in the book view deification as a project: a practice that should deliver the total transformation and immortalisation of human beings, society, culture, and the material universe, and this is what connects them to deification's theological source.

The work of the great Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has been examined from a wide variety of literary and theoretical perspectives. None of the many studies of Bakhtin begins to do justice, however, to the Christian dimension of his work. Christianity in Bakhtin for the first time fills this important gap. Having established the strong presence of a Christian framework in his early philosophical essays, Ruth Coates explores the way in which Christian motifs, though suppressed, continue to find expression in the work of Bakhtin's period of exile, and re-emerge in texts written during the time of his rehabilitation. Particular attention is paid to the themes of Creation, Fall, Incarnation and Christian love operating within metaphors of silence and exile, concepts which inform Bakhtin's world view as profoundly as they influence his biography.

The work of the great Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has been examined from a wide variety of literary and theoretical perspectives. None of the many studies of Bakhtin begins to do justice, however, to the Christian dimension of his work. Christianity in Bakhtin for the first time fills this important gap. Having established the strong presence of a Christian framework in his early philosophical essays, Ruth Coates explores the way in which Christian motifs, though suppressed, continue to find expression in the work of Bakhtin's period of exile, and re-emerge in texts written during the time of his rehabilitation. Particular attention is paid to the themes of Creation, Fall, Incarnation and Christian love operating within metaphors of silence and exile, concepts which inform Bakhtin's world view as profoundly as they influence his biography.

The symposium entitled Vekhi, or Landmarks, is one of the most famous publications in Russian intellectual and political history. Its fame rests on the critique it offers of the phenomenon of the Russian intelligentsia. It was published in 1909, under the editorship of Mikhail Gershenzon, as a polemical response to the revolution of 1905, the failed outcome of which was deemed by all the Landmarks contributors to exemplify and illuminate fatal philosophical, political, and psychological flaws in the revolutionary intelligentsia that had sought it. Its fame persists until today not least because the volume has been deemed by many in Russia and the West to have proven prophetic in its prediction (and urgent warning) that the realisation of the intelligentsia’s platform would bring ruin upon Russia. More than any other text, its republication in 1991 symbolically heralded the end of the ideological hegemony of Marxist-Leninism in the Soviet Union.