Socrates in Russia

Alyssa DeBlasio is John B. Parsons Chair in the Liberal Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of Russian at Dickinson College. She is the author of two monographs: The End of Russian Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and The Filmmaker’s Philosopher: Merab Mamardashvili and Russian Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Together with Mikhail Epstein, she edits Filosofia: An Encyclopedia of Russian Thought, an online English-language resource dedicated to contemporary Russian philosophy. Victoria Juharyan is a Visiting Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Advisor in the Department of German and Russian at UC Davis. She received her PhD from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton in 2018. In addition to revising her dissertation, “The Cognitive Value of Love in Tolstoy: A Study in Aesthetics,” she is also completing her book manuscript, German Idealism and Russian Realism: Hegel’s Philosophy in Goncharov, Turgenyev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors



Introduction

 Alyssa DeBlasio and Victoria Juharyan



1 Socrates in the Philosophy and Intellectual Culture of the Russian Enlightenment

 Tatiana Artemyeva



2 The Poet Hryhory Skovoroda: Knowledge as a Process

 Erica Camisa Morale



3 Elenchus from Other Shores: Alexander Herzen’s Dialogue in Absentia

 Arpi Movsesian



4 Writing the Russian Socrates: Dostoevsky, Skovoroda, and the World of The Brothers Karamazov

 Brian Armstrong



5 A Symposium with Vasily Rozanov

 Irina Erman



6 Anti-Socratic Attitudes in Russian “Nietzscheanism”

 Andrea Oppo



7 Gustav Shpet and the Greek Renaissance of Russian Thought

 Liisa Bourgeot



8 “Skovoroda’s Way” in the Russian Symbolist and Post-Symbolist Tradition

 Vadim Besprozvany



9 Between a Satyr and an Eccentric: Nikolai Bugaev as a Russian Socrates in Andrei Bely’s Works

 Daria Solodkaia



10 Conversations with Socrates: The Image of Socrates in Russian and Soviet Philosophical Literature

 Olga Lyanda-Geller



11 The Fear of the Word: Socratic Subtext in the Yershalaim Chapters of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita

 Ksenia Radchenko



12 Maieutics for Socialist Children: Nikolai Nosov’s Neznaika and the Epistemology of Know-Nothingness

 Denis Saltykov



13 Socrates as Symbol: Alexander Herzen, Merab Mamardashvili, and Alexander Pushkin

 Alyssa DeBlasio



14 Socrates the Greek Teacher

 Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandra Kalmykova



15 Grigory S. Skovoroda

 Leo Tolstoy



16 All-Divergence: The Teachings of Iakov Abramov as Interpreted by His Disciples

 Mikhail Epstein



Index