Titanism and Russian Literature

Abstract

All Russian philosophical writers discovered and analysed inner duality and schizophrenia of the Russian personality: the conflict between the individual and Russian society, between philosophy and science, religion and Church, the intelligentsia and the people, the intellectual and the muzhik, Russia and Europe, the new Russia and the old.

Although Masaryk’s most extensive publication at the time of its appearance, Russland und Europa (The Spirit of Russia) was unfinished. A third volume, centered on Dostoevsky, was to be the culmination of the work, or, as Masaryk said, his ‘main text’. For several decades this concluding part was unavailable to the readers, presumed either to have been lost or not to have been written at all. The fate of the missing volume was clarified in the 1960s. The volume was written (but not edited) by Masaryk, and somehow survived the chaotic events of occupation, war and change of policital system, preserved in Masaryk’s personal papers. After The Second World War the manuscript found its way to the United States where it was edited by George Gibian, translated from German into English, and published in a now complete three-volume edition in 1967. The English translation is still the only available published version of the text. The following selection, Masaryk’s discussion of Russian ‘philosophical writers’ and their struggle for faith, is the fifteenth chapter of the rediscovered third volume of The Spirit of Russia.