Starting with …show more content…
In an anecdote given during his presentation at the “Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It” conference held in Copenhagen in early May 1996, András Nagy depicts a student expressing interest in Kierkegaard and Kierkegaardian issues. The professor points the student towards Voprosy filosofii (Questions of Philosophy), specifically towards a study conducted by D.I Zaslavskii titled «Iurodstvo i iorodivye v sоvremennoi burzhuaznoi filosofii» (Idiocy and idiots in Contemporary Bourgeois Philosophy) (Nagy 1997, 107). Kierkegaard, for the most part, was rejected and ignored by the Soviet …show more content…
Along with the rest of Europe in the Nineteenth century, Russia and Russian philosophy was obsessed with Hegel and drew heavy influence from Hegelian philosophy (Makolkin 2002, 80). With the major Russian philosophers of the time, such as Belinsky, Hertzen and Chernyshevsky, all following Hegelian philosophy, Kierkegaardian philosophy found few readers, as it held staunchly anti-Hegelian positions (Nagy 1997, 110-1). Also, Kierkegaardian religious philosophy was largely protestant. With Russian Orthodoxy as the major religion of Russia at the time, and the negative connotation “Protestant” held, as “the Lutheran type of freedom and individuality became a symbol of the extreme of European thinking, religious cul-de-sacs, so frightening for Slavic believers,” Kierkegaard remained largely unpopular (Nagy 1997, 113). However, eventually Kierkegaard was translated into Russian at the tail end of the Nineteenth century. Partially due to the rise in popularity of Ibsen’s Brandt in Russia and partially due to connections to Rainer Maria Rilke and his newfound interest in Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s works began translation in the late 1880’s. The first Russian publications came in the mid 1890’s, as discovered by Piama Gaidenko’s study of Kierkegaard (Malkolkin 2002, 80, 87; Nagy 1997, 119-20). In the 1902 entry