Dmitry Ivanovich Chizhevsky: in two worlds

Abstract

The article is devoted to Dmitry I. Chizhevsky (1894–1977), a philosopher of Ukrainian origin who studied at St. Petersburg University in 1911 to 1913 and later graduated with distinction at Kiev University. As a young man in an epoque of crucial political changes he found himself arrested and threatened to be shot. This traumatic experience haunted him throughout his life. It also caused him to leave his country. In philosophy Chizhevsky held a cultural concept that could make a change. From his point of view national cultures are not fixed entities. They are in constant flux and strongly linked to each other. In his scholarly research Chizhevsky showed how national cultures in Europe over centuries were in a continuous process of mutual influence and relation to each other. Thus, intercultural exchange can bridge otherness as well as political differences. Chizhevsky went to Germany in 1921, he studied with E. Husserl in Freiburg, met M. Heidegger and H.-G. Gadamer and stayed in contact with influential philosophers of his time. In Prague he joined R. Jakobson’s famous linguistic circle, in The Hague and Berlin he took part in the conferences of the International Hegel Association. He became an internationally renowned scholar, expert on the history of philosophy, on Russian and Ukrainian philology and Slavic-German intercultural relations. Despite his incredible academic productivity Chizhevsky remained a foreigner in his adopted country. This intellectual-biographical essay is based on documents from German archives. Most of them have not yet been taken into account by other researchers. The article also benefits from its author’s personal acquaintance with Chizhevsky in his late Heidelberg years, 1960s and 1970s.