Les auditeurs russes « inaperçus » (Gordin, Tarr, Poplavskij) du séminaire hégélien d’Alexandre Kojève à l’Ecole pratique des hautes études, 1933-1939

Revue des etudes slaves. 2017. Vol. 88. No. 3. P. 495–514.

Tokarev Dimitri

The article focuses on three Russian students of Alexandre Kojève’s seminar on Hegel at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, 1933-1939. If these personalities are of interest per se, the point is also to find out why the seminar, which was attended by young French intellectuals (Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, Queneau and others), seems to have been generally ignored by Russian émigré milieus. A thorough analysis of the intellectual background of these Russian students (a philosopher, a journalist and a poet) helps to clarify their personal motivation in joining the seminar as well as to enhance a better understanding of the reasons of its “unnoticedness”.

A particular attention is paid to an article that Kojève published in 1929 in the newspaper of the Eurasian movement. Approving here the repressive politics of the Bolshevist government against the philosophy, Kojève lays the foundations of a dialectics of Terror that he will further develop at his lectures.

Keywords: неогегельянство, Александр Кожев, Alexandre Kojève, Boris Poplavsky, Борис Поплавский, Neo-Hegelianism, Raissa Tatarinova (Tarr), Jacob Gordin, Раиса Татаринова (Тарр), Яков Гордин