Sergei Bulgakov: A study in modernism and society in Russia, 1900-1918

This dissertation studies the life and work of the prominent public figure and Marxist-turned-religious philosopher, Sergei Bulgakov, in the context of the spiritual and cultural flowering of the Russian Silver Age. The primary focus is on Bulgakov (later the foremost Russian Orthodox theologian of the XX century) as a representative of the widespread turn to religion among the Russian intelligentsia in 1900-1904. I propose that the discovery of religion was for him, as for a significant part of the intelligentsia, a means of resolving intellectual and aesthetic problems, i.e. that they were able to find a way out of the "crisis" of positivism in philosophy and of realism in art and literature by formulating a religious world-view and that this religious world-view, in turn, became projected onto social issues and thus helped shape the terms of political debate in this crucial period. In studying the religious "conversion" of the Russian intelligentsia, my work makes an essential and heretofore unexplored connection between the cultural and literary life of the period and prerevolutionary society and politics.The first two chapters look at Bulgakov's interest in ethical and moral problems in the early 1900's in the light of the general European rejection of positivism and the renewed interest of the Russian intelligentsia in metaphysical questions and at the interconnection of religion and politics in Bulgakov's doctrine of Christian socialism and the movement for Church reform. The remaining three chapters examine continued efforts at reform of society through the Church after the 1907 political reaction Bulgakov's contribution as a philosopher and his role in the culture of the Silver Age and the Church Council of 1917-1918 as the culmination of these attempts at a "reformation" of Church and society.