The Debates about Slavophilism: Some Methodological Aspects of the Study of Early Slavophilism

Interest in Slavophilism has undergone a notable resuscitation in recent decades in the Soviet literature. In the seventies and eighties, collections of works of some of the Slavophiles were published for the first time since the October Revolution.1 Books and articles on Slavophilism have appeared.2 Archival materials have been put into scholarly circulation, scholars find their attention being drawn to works of modern foreign authors on Slavophilism, and certain aspects of Slavophile views are often touched upon in current literary criticism. We can agree with the conclusion drawn by I. A. Dudzinskaia in 1983 and shared by N. I. Tsimbaev, namely, that a review of the literature in the recent period "evidences a new stage in the study of Slavophilism."3 However, various aspects of Slavophilism have by no means been dealt with equally, and there are quite a number of disagreements among scholars in their assessments.