Article
The artical discusses the origins of the term "libertine" and its cognate, and explores certain aspects of "libertinage" and "dandyism" in the figures of Pushkin's contemporaries P.P. Kaverin and P.Ia. Chadaev, who find themselves together in the first chapter of Evgenii Onegin. The author demonstrates their differences on the basis of autobiographical texts and memoires of such contemporaries as P.A. Viazemskii, F.F. Vigel', I.D. Iakushkin
The Russian revolution is a process of ambiguous modernization (since the end of the 19th century), which is still not institutionally completed. The key moment was the events of 2017. Their result was the coming to power of the Bolshevik Party, the Civil War, the formation of the political regime, which gave the very traumatic modernization form for socium. To explain these events, we propose a P.Chaadaev paradox about the prospect of the victory of historically untenable socialism because of the untenable of its opponents. The "Chaadaev factor" content clarified with the help of the concepts of political will and N.Taleb’s "black swans". From this point of view, the society transition into a new state is a matter of a small number of uncompromising people, who are personally interested in the transition, involved in this process. Success comes in the case of simplification of problems and solutions in combination with the accentuated uncompromising minority and sufficient tolerance of the majority, when representatives of this majority have an asymmetry in their choice. The review results are beyond the scope of Russian experience and open up new opportunities for analyzing and solving problems of passionarity and tolerance. For example, if the reciprocity in tolerance conditions will violated, the society may lose immunity in relation to the willful intolerant minority.
This paper is aimed at exploring different interpretations of English revolutions (the Great rebellion of 1640s and the Glory revolution of 1688) in Chaadaev's first "Philosophical Letter", i.e. in its French original and in Russian translation published in 1836 in the Moscow review "Teleskop". First of all, this paper anasyses the discrepancies between two versions of Chaadaev's article, then Mikhail Velizhev reconstructs a possible reaction to its "English" fragments of Russian emperor Nicholas I basing on the hitherto unpublished archival materials (the excercise books of Nicholas dedicated to the English history).
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An article from Mikhail Velizhev suggests a new interpretation of the rift between contexts that accompanied the creation and publication of Pyotr Chaadayev’s first «Philosophical Letter», as well as with the period in which the new political language Chaadayev used in his text was taking shape. The political language of French traditionalism had become fully consolidated in the political context of the Holy Alliance of European sovereigns; the ideology of this alliance was closely tied to one of the key texts of the Catholic tradition, Joseph de Maistre’s treatise «Du Pape». The foundational hypothesis of Velizhev’s article lies in the fact that, while actively using the language of the traditionalist-philosophers, Chaadayev was also reflecting upon the fate of the Holy Alliance.
The article analyses the history of madness in 19th century Russia. Mikhail Velizhev interprets the cultural and juridical context of Peter Chaadaev alleged "madness" using an almost identical case - that of a frenchman Alphonse Jobard who was accused to be mad for "political" reasons exactly at the same historical period.
This article uses the materials of the Drezdensha affair, a large-scale investigation of “indecency” in St. Petersburg in 1750, to explore unofficial sociability among the Imperial elite, and to map out the institutional, social, and economic dimensions of the post-Petrine “sexual underworld.” Sociability and, ultimately, the public sphere in eighteenth century Russia are usually associated with loftier practices, with joining the ranks of the reading public, reflecting on the public good, and generally, becoming more civil and polite. Yet, it is the privately-run, commercially-oriented, and sexually-charged “parties” at the focus of this article that arguably served as a “training ground” for developing the habits of sociability. The world of these “parties” provide a missing link between the debauchery and carousing of Peter I’s era and the more polite formats of associational life in the late eighteenth century, as well as the historical context for reflections on morality, sexual licentiousness, foppery, and the excesses of “westernization.”