ABSTRACT
The polemic style was, of course, ubiquitous in Russian writing in the middle of the nineteenth century and later; Samarin’s writing, as well as much of his correspondence, bears an unmistakable argumentative tone, even when the ideas he is discussing are not original. When in the summer of 1844 Samarin decided to abandon Hegelianism for incipient Slavophil Orthodoxy he in effect substituted religion for philosophy as the ultimate source of his spiritual life, and of his ideological orientation. Samarin was also familiar with A. S. Khomiakov’s germinal The Church Is One which was circulated as an unpublished pamphlet in the mid-1840s, and doubtless discussed in the Slavophil salons. When Samarin decided after the prolonged and painful period of inner quest in favor of Slavophil Orthodoxy, he did so not as a result of a mystical conversion at an altar or in a monastic cell, but in the pangs of a private intellectual struggle stimulated in the Moscow salons.
