Nikolay Yakovlevich Danilevsky
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 199th anniversary of the birth of Nikolay Yakovlevich Danilevsky (Никола́й Я́ковлевич Даниле́вский; 28 November 1822–07 November 1885), who was born on this date in 1822.
Nikolay Danilevsky (which is also Anglicized as Nikolai Danilevskii) is best known as a Slavophile philosopher of the 19th century. The Slavophiles rejected Peter The Great’s campaign of Westernization for Russia, and sought to delineate a specifically Slav identity and destiny, with Russia at the head of the Slav peoples as its spiritual and political leader.
There is little information available on Danilevsky in English, but recently two of his books have been translated into English, Russia And Europe: The Slavic Worlds Political And Cultural Relations With The Germanic-Roman West (1869) and Woe To The Victors! The Russo-Turkish War, The Congress Of Berlin, And The Future Of Slavdom (1878). There is a 1967 book about Danilevsky, Danilevsky: A Russian Totalitarian Philosopher by Robert E. MacMaster, but I have not been able to obtain a copy of this. What little I have skimmed of the book suggests a rather hostile treatment of Danilevsky’s ideas. I also found a review of this book by Alfred A. Skerpan (linked below), which says of Danilevsky:
“His theory of historical-cultural types was a Russian reaction to the linear-progressive approach to history that tended to make Western civilization a terminal, universal culture. Other cultures, and thus the Slavic, had their own necessary, attractive, and defensible values. But, it transpires, for Danilevsky the Panslav civilization could be ‘pan-human,’ perhaps even universal. In Russia and Europe, then, there is linear-progressive history as well as the theory of types. As for Danilevsky’s purported Panslavism, MacMaster feels it necessary to qualify the characterization, since he finds the Russian heavily ‘western’ in his thinking and even ‘anti-Panslavist’ with only a ‘provisional and oblique commitment’ to the ideology.”
We clearly see here the confusion into which a hostile treatment of any ideas leads. MacMaster in his desire to paint Danilevsky with the blackest totalitarianism, cannot see the valuable elements in his thought, finds him to be Western and even anti-Panslavist — primarily, in my view, because Danilevsky’s Panslavism doesn’t fit with MacMaster’s pre-conceived ideas. But, again, I haven’t read MacMaster’s book, so I should reserve judgment on it. But I quote the review because it is one of the few treatments that I could find of Danilevsky in English.
Russia and Europe is a remarkable work, comparing Russian civilization to the civilizations of the West, and while part of the purpose of the book is to discuss Slav identity and destiny in such a way as to provide an aspiration for Slavic peoples, part of the book is analytical and philosophical, and well worth reading. The impact of this book is yet to be fully felt in the Western world, if indeed Danilevsky’s distinctive arguments ever get a hearing, which they should.
Below is an extract from pages 48 and 49 of Russia and Europe:
“In the cultural-historical sense, Europe is for the Germanic-Roman civilization what the whole Mediterranean basin was for the Greek and Roman civilizations. And while there are lands where it is believed, incorrectly, that Europe is the Realm of human civilization in general or at least the best parts of it, it is only the realm of the great Germanic-Roman civilization that is synonymous with it; and only from the time of the development of that civilization did the word ‘Europe’ acquire the connotation and meaning now applied to it. In this sense, does Russia belong to Europe? Unfortunately, or perhaps thankfully, for better or worse; no, it does not. It was not fed by those roots that nurtured Europe on both beneficial and harmful juices, drawn from the soil of the ancient world it destroyed; nor was it fed by roots drawing nourishment from the depths of the German soul. It was not part of the revived Roman Empire of Charlemagne, which formed a kind of common trunk, from which all the shooting branches of the European tree spread out; it did not enter into the theocratic federation that replaced the Carolingian monarchy; it had nothing to do with the single common body of the feudal-aristocratic system, which (from the time of Charles to the time of its knightly manifestation) had almost no national character, but appeared as a truly all-European institution. Then when the modern age dawned and the new order of things began, Russia likewise did not participate in the struggle against feudal constraints, which led to guarantees of civil freedom produced by this struggle; neither did it grapple with a false form of Christianity (the combination of lies, pride, and ignorance going by the name of Catholicism) and did not need the type of religious freedom known as Protestantism. Russia was neither oppressed nor educated by the Scholastics, and did not develop the freedom of thought that gave birth to modern Science, and did not live by the ideals embodied in Germanic-Roman art.”
Further Resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Danilevsky
https://slavica.indiana.edu/bookListings/history/Russia_Europe
https://www.amazon.com/Russia-Europe-Political-Relations-Germanic-Roman/dp/0893574007
https://slavica.indiana.edu/bookListings/literature/Woe_to_the_Victors
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674431201
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24440772?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
