Sergei N. Bulgakov and His Philosophy of Russian Literature: The Spiritual Experience of Writers

Abstract

The article considers the views of Sergei Bulgakov on Russian literature in the light of his assessment of the religious views of Russian writers. Being philosopher and religious thinker, Bulgakov also often acted as a literary critic, paying attention not so much to selected works but to the worldview of the writers. S. Bulgakov shares vision that the faith is an integral element of all the main writers of Russian literature. This vision is largely due to the fate of Bulgakov himself, who returned to the bosom of Orthodoxy during this period. The philosopher reflects on the conflict between the artist and the religious personality, which is unfolding in the soul of a writer. Obviously, one can see here the echoes of Bulgakov’s personal experience. Speaking about national literature, Bulgakov emphasizes that the ethical in it dominates over the aesthetic, and literature’s main occupation is the formulation and solution of moral problems – an area that in the West was engaged in philosophy in the proper sense of the word. The primacy of ethics stems from the national features of the Russian man, fully inherent in writers who are accustomed to ask metaphysical questions. That is the cause of the attention paid by Russian writers to metaphysics. The Russian writers embedded their own spiritual quests into the speeches of the characters of their stories.