From the history of St. Petersburg Slavophilism: N.Ya. Danilevsky and V.I. Lamansky

Abstract

The article analyzes the views of the representatives of late Slavophilism N.Ya. Danilevsky and V.I. Lamansky, notes their commonality and attempts to trace possible lines of mutual influence. It is suggested that Danilevsky began work on the book Russia and Europe after his acquaintance and conversations with Lamansky in late 1864 or early 1865. The general provisions found in the works of Danilevsky and Lamansky are traced. The analysis of Lamansky's publications of 1865–1867, in which he expressed ideas that were reflected in Russia and Europe, gives grounds to recognize a certain influence of Lamansky on the formation of Danilevsky's views. In these publications Lamansky described the two conditions necessary for the development of an original culture: political independence and a developed literary language; Danilevsky also wrote about this, formulating the first two laws of cultural-his­to­ri­cal types. Both thinkers wrote about the difference in the historical age of the two civilizations: Romano-Germanic and Greco-Slavic. The similarity of their ideas is also noted in their later works. However, Danilevsky's and Lamansky's ideas about the political organization of Slavic civilization did not coincide completely: while the former wrote about an all-Slavic union, the latter proposed to postpone the solution of the question of the political form of the new cultural-historical type until the cultural rappro­che­ment between the Slavic peoples took place. It was believed that this could only be achieved in case all Slavs agreed to use Russian as a common literary, scientific and diplomatic language. The author concludes that there was the mutual influence of the two thinkers on each other, as a result of which the theory of local civilizations was created.