The Russian idea

pp. 170-193

in: George Pattison, Anxious angels, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

Religious existentialism is sometimes portrayed as a pheqnomenon of the Protestant world: a reformulation in the context of modernity of Luther's passionate and individualistic doctrine of salvation by faith alone. Yet it was not only through Dostoevsky that Russia contributed to the development of religious existentialism in the twentieth century. This contribution was reflected chiefly in the writings of Nicholas Berdyaev (1874–1948) and Lev Shestov (1868–1938), whose work, although related in many ways to the kind of existentialism springing up in Protestant theology in the 1920s and 1930s, is also profoundly marked by its Russian origins, both with regard to the concerns and issues they address and with regard to their manner of argumentation.