ABSTRACT
A gender aspect, archetypically in terms of the mother and/or feminine passivity, has a long tradition in images of Russia. Equally, Russian identity is a recurrent preoccupation of Russian thinkers. My aim in this essay is to explore issues concerning gender and Russia through two key figures in the tradition of Russian thought and its articulation of Russian identity, namely Berdiaev and Chaadaev. There is a number of reasons for such a focus and comparison. Chaadaev, in his Philosophical Letters, set in motion the modern exploration of Russian identity in Russian thought. In the First Letter (1829) he was famously pessimistic: Russia lacked a conscious history and was “one of those nations which do not seem to form an integral part of humanity” (Chaadaev 1991a, 22); or, to rephrase with a gender slant, an integral part of “mankind”. It is in the Philosophical Letters that a gender framework, though not foregrounded, becomes inscribed, and from there may be projected on to the subsequent tradition of Russian thought. Berdiaev, on the other hand, was writing at a time when issues of gender and the feminine — Sophia, the eternal feminine — had developed a self-conscious prominence in Russian culture and thought, extending also to the question of Russia (for a detailed exposition of these issues in Silver Age philosophy, see Riabov 1997). In this context, while Berdiaev is not the only thinker to consider Russian identity on occasion in gender terms, his interpretation stands out on its own for its attempted all-encompassing scope. Moreover, his interpretation has a historical perspective too, as it draws, mainly critically, on the tradition of Russian thought going back to Chaadaev.
