New Publications of the Works of N.A. Berdiaev

Abstract

The restoration of "forgotten" (i.e., formerly prohibited) names to the bosom of our culture is a natural and necessary accompaniment of the political freedom beginning to make its way in our country. Free and continuous creativity is being reunited with the reader, the listener, and the participant, who had been tragically alienated from it. Our half-knowledge, intellectual arbitrariness, and opportunism are becoming clearer, more acute, and more shameful. All this is an inevitable accompaniment of one of the most prestigious and, it would seem, least labor consuming trends in contemporary publishing and journal policy. The publication of texts of Russian philosophers has marked journals as different in character and mission as Novyi mir, Voprosy filosofii, Literaturnaia ucheba, Druzhba narodov, Volga, and many others. In most cases they are more or less well known works reprinted from the YMCA Press, equipped with prefaces—some better, some worse—and devoid of any sort of real intellectual commentary.