Introduction

Abstract

Vasilii Fedorovich Malinovskii represents one of the most significant voices on the Russian cultural scene between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. His passionate concern for political and social questions was constantly inspired by a belief in the primacy of reason and morality in the conduct of individuals and societies and by the rejection of a number of cultural conventions characteristic of his age. He left posterity a rich and original body of thought, condensed in a few hundred pages, many of them still unpublished. His published work appeared in those crucial years between the French Revolution and the defeat of Napoleon, and exerted an influence on the successive development of Russian thought which is yet to be recognized in its true proportions.