I. A. Ilyin (1882 - 1954)- a prominent professor at Moscow University, was expelled from Russia in 1922 along with other philosophers, worked for a long time at the Religious Philosophical Academy in Berlin. Ilyin's views were largely formed under the influence of Hegel's philosophy.

Ilyin believed that philosophy is an experimental science. However, experience in his understanding is, first of all, speculation, contemplation of an object.

Ilyin considers the “subject” to be the source of knowledge. But the objective world is understood by him in the traditions of Hegelian philosophy. Objects embody ideas, they are merged with them, do not exist without each other. The task of a person is to reveal the content of ideas contained in the objects of the surrounding reality, to understand their meaning, purpose, and, in accordance with this, to build their own life strategy. But the process of comprehending an idea in Ilyin's understanding cannot be reduced to the cold and prudent logic of the mind. It is a deeply passionate whirlpool that captures a person. According to Ilyin, if a person's soul establishes itself in an object, it becomes its dwelling. In the world in which a person lives, the object and the spirit are identical, intertwined with each other. Therefore, a cognizing person is obsessed with an object, the object takes possession of his soul, a person, as it were, identifies himself, his personality with the objective world that he cognizes.

Cognizing the ideas embedded in the objects of the surrounding world, a person thereby cognizes God as the creator of the world and ideas, cognizes the Cosmos. This mission of philosophical knowledge partly coincides with religion. But religion gives such knowledge in sensible images, and philosophy - in abstract concepts. Faith and knowledge in the concept of Ilyin are closely merged. Knowledge is based on faith, and faith must absorb knowledge. With such an interpretation, God, Divine power are laws that exist objectively, standing above man. Even if he knows them, he submits to them as a necessity, as fate. It is not in his power to cancel them or disregard them. However, if a person, having recognized objective necessity, subordinates his life to it, he becomes a true subject of spiritual culture, communicates with the “divine element of the world”, and cognizes all its greatness. Life in harmony with the objective world, with other people opens the way for a person to happiness, joy and mutual understanding. Using religious terminology, Ilyin writes that at the same time, human passion begins to shine with divine rays penetrating it, and the person himself becomes a particle of divine fire.

Ethical views occupy a significant place in Ilyin's works. The very interpretation of God in the concept of Ilyin has primarily an ethical meaning. God is the embodiment of truth, beauty and goodness. Knowing the objective world, a person not only gets acquainted with its structure, but at the same time becomes morally rich, begins to treat people better, learns to see beauty and grandeur even in everyday life. However, the mission of a person in this world is not to blindly and passively adapt to it, motivating their inaction and patience with objective necessity, but to actively act and fight evil. Ilyin's work "On Resistance to Evil by Force" was of great importance. He sharply criticized the teachings of Leo Tolstoy about non-resistance to evil by force. According to Tolstoy, the fate of another person is in the hands of God, and violence is seen by him as an attempt to interfere in fate. Ilyin believes that not every human act can be associated with God. A person is always responsible for his actions, he always has the opportunity to choose between good and evil, and human dishonesty cannot be explained by references to objective necessity, to fate, or even more so to God.

Ilyin believes that not every use of force in relations between people should be regarded as violence. Violence is coercion emanating from an evil will or aimed at evil. A person can consciously strive for good, not become a victim of an irreparable mistake or a bad passion. To prevent this from happening, it is necessary to look for spiritual strength to fight evil.

But if this does not help, the person must resort to mental or physical prevention of evil, including coercion. Ilyin believed that it was fair to push the absent-minded traveler from the edge of the abyss, snatch the vial of poison from the hands of an irritated suicide, at the right moment hit the arm of a political assassin aiming at his victim, knock down the arsonist in time, drive the shameless desecrators of shrines out of the church. At the same time, a person who commits violence must himself not succumb to evil, not become an executioner, a cold-blooded killer, an embittered avenger. To do this, it is important to use the methods of violence not when it is possible, but only when all other means have already been exhausted and there is no other alternative. The thesis that the end justifies the means, according to Ilyin, is false. Physical coercion is a fair way in relation to evil, but from this it does not turn into good.

In order to always act within the framework of goodness, a moral measure, a person who commits violence against others must be a model of justice, treat the best people. A person must remember that the path of violence against others, although necessary, is fraught with excesses and dangerous spiritually. Therefore, politicians and officials, for whom the commission of violence is a duty, are very unhappy people. Their actions often cause inner spiritual torment, great moral suffering. But this is a necessity. Ilyin believes that in politics and in society as a whole, ““dirty work” can only be done with “clean hands”. The allegorical image of state coercion, the fight against crime is a warrior, and the image of conscience is a monk. Therefore, the union of the state and religion is necessary in the system of government.

In the works of Ilyin, much attention is paid to the ethics of economic life and, in particular, to the problems of property. Ilyin considers the possession and disposal of property in the context of a holistic lifestyle of a person, the development of his personality, his individual destiny. The most important quality of a person is the ability to love. The concept of love is transferred by Ilyin to the problems of property. A person who owns property should not only look for economic benefits, but take care of the objects of property and love them - take care of the land, animals, take care of the house inherited from his parents, in which he spent his childhood and where every corner reminds of happiness. Just as the owner of a dog loves and takes care of it, the manufacturer must love his factory, repair the building, take care of the workers and their working and living conditions. Only then will economic efficiency be combined with social efficiency, and not only wealth, but also justice will triumph. If the owner has the motives of a money-grubber and there is no love, the object of property quickly becomes scarce and the short-sighted owner, who dreams only of money, quickly goes bankrupt. The economic ethics of Ilyin is relevant in the light of the problems that Russian society faced during the reform period.

Ivan Alexandrovich ILYIN was born on March 28 (Old Style), 1883, in a noble family of a sworn attorney of the District of the Moscow Court of Justice, provincial secretary Alexander Ivanovich Ilyin and his wife Ekaterina Yulyevna Schweikert. The Ilyins lived at the corner of Ruzheiny Lane and Plyushchikha. The parents of the future philosopher were educated, religious people and sought to give their son a good upbringing.

Ivan studied first for five years at the 5th Moscow Gymnasium, and then for three years at the 1st Moscow Gymnasium, among whose pupils were Tikhonravov, Vl. Solovyov, Milyukov. According to the memoirs of a classmate, Ilyin was “light blond, almost red, lean and long-legged; he was an excellent student ... but, apart from his loud voice and wide, unconstrained gestures, he seemed to be nothing remarkable at that time. Even his comrades did not assume that philosophy could and did become his specialty. he graduated from the gymnasium with a gold medal, having received an excellent classical education, in particular knowledge of several languages: Church Slavonic, Latin and Greek, French and German. On July 15, 1901, Ilyin filed a petition with the rector of Moscow University to enroll him in the Faculty of Law, a brilliant certificate gave him such an opportunity. At the university, he received fundamental training in law, which he studied under the guidance of the outstanding legal philosopher P.I. Novgorodtseva3.

Here he developed a deep interest in philosophy. This is evidenced by his Ph. "," Schelling's Doctrine of the Absolute", "The Idea of ​​the Concrete and Abstract in Hegel's Theory of Knowledge", "Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Idea of ​​the General Will", "The Metaphysical Foundations of Aristotle's Doulos Fysei Doctrine"4, "The Problem of Method in Modern Jurisprudence ".

Upon graduation from the university, Ilyin was awarded a diploma of the first degree, and in September 1906, at a meeting of the Faculty of Law, at the suggestion of Prince. E.N. Trubetskoy, he was left at the university to prepare for a professorship5.

In the same year, Ilyin married Natalia Nikolaevna Vokach, who was spiritually close to him (she studied philosophy, art history, history) and shared with him all the hardships of his life.

In 1909, Ilyin passed the exams for a master's degree in state law and, after trial lectures, was approved as a Privatdozent in the Department of the Encyclopedia of Law and the History of the Philosophy of Law at Moscow University. From 1910 he became a member of the Moscow Psychological Society; in "Questions of Philosophy and Psychology" the hundred and first scientific work "The Concepts of Law and Force" was published.

At the end of the year, together with his wife, Ilyin leaves for a scientific mission and spends two years in Germany, Italy and France. He works at the universities of Heidelberg, Freiburg, Göttingen, Paris, gives presentations at the seminars of G. Rickert, G. Simmel, D. Nelson, E. Husserl (in communication with whom Ilyin comprehended the phenomenological method); at the University of Berlin is preparing a dissertation on the philosophy of Hegel. Working on the dissertation, Ilyin went far beyond the usual requirements for such texts. “I don’t want to approach it,” he wrote, “as an academic test and relegate its scientific and creative nature to the background. I would like it to be Leistung, and not a blurry master's compilation. I dream of publishing it later in German; for I know well that, like my last work on Fichte, no one will need it in Russia. And in Germany, maybe someone will fit.

My main striving is to curb in my work the formal-methodological approach that disintegrates everything and disperses everything in analysis, which is easy and peculiar to me, and to do what is more difficult and more important: to give a synthetically constructive opening”7.

Upon returning to Moscow, Ilyin continues to work at the university. His philosophical works are beginning to appear: “The idea of ​​personality in the teachings of Stirner. “Experience in the history of individualism” (1911), “The crisis of the idea of ​​the subject in the science of Fichte the Elder. An Experience in Systematic Analysis (1912), Schleiermacher and his Speeches on Religion (1912), On Courtesy. Socio-Psychological Experience" (1912), "On the Revival of Hegelianism" (1912), "Fichte's Philosophy as a Religion of Conscience" (1914), "The Basic Moral Contradiction of War" (1914), "The Spiritual Meaning of War" (1915), “Philosophy as a spiritual activity” (1915), “Fundamentals of jurisprudence. The General Doctrine of Law and the State” (1915). Six large articles on Hegel's philosophy were also published, which were later included in the famous two-volume monograph published in 1918 and which became his dissertation ("Hegel's philosophy as the doctrine of the concreteness of God and man"), which he brilliantly defended, receiving two degrees: master and doctor of state sciences.

The February Revolution of 1917 posed a serious problem for Ilyin, the state system of his Motherland collapsed; he is a legal scholar; what is his attitude to everything that happens? Ilyin defines it in five small but important pamphlets published between the two revolutions of the seventeenth year in the publication Narodnoye Pravo.

They formulated his views on the foundations of the rule of law, on the way to overcome the revolution as a temporary social disorder in the pursuit of a new, just social order. “Every order of life,” he writes, “has certain shortcomings, and, as a general rule, the elimination of these shortcomings is achieved through the abolition of unsatisfactory legal norms and the establishment of other, better ones. Every legal system must unfailingly open this possibility to people: to improve the laws according to the law, i.e. improve the legal order without violating the legal order. A legal system that closes this opportunity for all or for wide circles of the people, depriving them of access to legislation, is preparing for itself an inevitable revolution.

After the October Revolution, Ilyin lectured at the Faculty of Law of Moscow University and at other higher educational institutions in Moscow. He actively opposes official policy, defends the principles of academic freedom, which were trampled in those years. His position was clearly defined; later he wrote: “Do people leave the bed of a sick mother? Yes, even with a sense of guilt in her illness? Yes, they leave, except for a doctor and medicine. But, (when leaving for medicine and a doctor, they leave someone at her headboard. And so we stayed at this headboard. We believed that everyone who does not go to the whites and who does not face direct execution should remain in place " nine.

In this tragic situation, I.A. Ilyin continues to work: he writes “The Doctrine of Legal Consciousness”10, becomes chairman of the Moscow Psychological Society (he was elected in 1921 to replace the deceased L.M. Lopatin), and continues public speaking. The last of these took place in the spring of 1922 at a general meeting. Moscow Law Society, where the main tasks of jurisprudence in Russia were discussed in the light of the revolution of 1917, the civil war that followed it and the victory of the Bolsheviks. Ilyin believed that the tasks of Russian jurisprudence could be correctly formulated by those who, from beginning to end, observing this historical process on the spot, those who saw “the old with all its ailments and in all its state power, and the immense test of war, and the decline of the instinct of national self-preservation, and the fury of the agrarian and property redistribution, and the despotism of the internationalists, and the three-year civil war, and the psycho-greed, and the lack of will of laziness, and the economic emptiness of communism, and the destruction of the national school, and terror, and hunger, and cannibalism, and death ... Of course, the experience we have gained is not just a legal and political experience: it is deeper - to the level of moral and religious; it is wider - up to the volume of economic, historical and spiritual in general11.

Six times the Bolsheviks arrested Ilyin, twice he was tried (November 30, 1918 at the Presidium of the Collegium of the Department for Combating Counter-Revolution and December 28, 1918 at the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal12), and both times he was acquitted for insufficient charges and amnestied. The last time he was arrested on September 4, 1922, he was accused of “not only not reconciling with the Workers’ and Peasants’ power existing in Russia, but not for a single moment ceased his anti-Soviet activities”13.

On September 26, Ilyin and his wife, together with a large group of scientists, philosophers and writers sent abroad, sailed from Petrograd to Stettin, in Germany.

In Berlin, a new stage in Ilyin's life began, lasting 16 years. Together with other Russian emigrants, he got involved in organizing the Religious-Philosophical Academy, the Philosophical Society and its journal. In January 1923, in Berlin, at the opening of the Russian Scientific Institute, Ilyin delivered a speech, later published as a separate pamphlet (“The Problem of Modern Legal Consciousness”). He became a professor at this institute, where he taught courses on the Encyclopedia of Law, the History of Ethical Doctrines, Introduction to Philosophy and Aesthetics in Russian and German. In 1923-1924. he was the dean of the law faculty of this institute, in 1924 he was elected a corresponding member of the Slavic Institute at the University of London.

His lectures on Russian writers, on Russian culture, on the foundations of legal consciousness, on the revival of Russia, on religion and the church, on the Soviet regime, etc., with which he in 1926-1938. about 200 performances in Germany, Latvia, Switzerland, Belgium, Czech Republic, Yugoslavia and Austria. But the central place in Ilyin's life was occupied by closely related politics and philosophical creativity. He was a member of the editorial board of the Parisian newspaper "Vozrozhdenie", edited by P.B. Struve, actively published in "Russian invalid", "New time", "New way", "Russia and the Slavs", "Russia" and other emigrant publications. In 1927-1930. Ilyin was the editor-publisher of the Russian Bell magazine (9 issues were published). He participated in the work of the Russian Foreign Congress in the spring of 1926, maintained close ties with the Russian General Military Union (ROVS), taking part in the Saint-Julien Congress, organized in 1930 by the Russian Section of the International League of Struggle against the Third International. Despite the fact that Ilyin was one of the ideologists of the White movement and was actively involved in political life, in his political philosophy he was based on the principles of non- and supra-partisanship, in particular, he was never a member of any political party or organization.

Since 1925, his major philosophical works began to appear abroad: “Religious meaning is philosophy. Three speeches” (1925), “On resistance to evil by force” (1925) (which caused a wide response to noisy controversy both in the West and in Russia), “The path of spiritual renewal. (1935), “Fundamentals of Art. On perfection in art” (1937). He is finishing his book On Darkness and Enlightenment. Book of Artistic Criticism. Bunin - Remizov-Shmelev ”, but did not find a publisher for it (it was published only in 1959). His famous pamphlets are published: “The Motherland and Us” (1926), “The Poison of Bolshevism” (1931), “On Russia. Three Speeches (1934), Creative Idea of ​​Our Future (1937), Fundamentals of Christian Culture (1937), Fundamentals of the Struggle for National Russia (1938), Crisis of Godlessness (1951), etc.

Ilyin very early managed to recognize the true face of Nazism. In 1934 (six months after Hitler came to power) Ilyin was removed from the Institute for refusing to teach in accordance with the National Socialist party program. In 1938 the Gestapo seized all his published works and banned him from public speaking. Having lost his source of livelihood, Ivan Alexandrovich decided to leave Germany and move to Switzerland. And although a ban was imposed on his departure, several happy accidents (in which he saw the providence of God) helped him obtain visas for himself and his wife, and in July 1938, the Ilyins left for Zurich. In Switzerland, they settled in the Zurich suburb of Zollikon, where, with the help of friends and acquaintances, in particular, S.V. Rachmaninoff, Ilyin tried to improve his life for the third time.

In Switzerland, Ilyin was banned from political activity, so 215 issues of correspondence reading bulletins, only for like-minded people, which he had been writing for ROVS for six years, had to be signed. After his death, these political articles were published in the two-volume Our Tasks (1956). At the end of his life, Ivan Aleksandrovich managed to complete and publish the work on which he had been working for more than 33 years - "Axioms of Religious Experience" (1953), two volumes of research on religious anthologies with extensive literary additions.

His numerous works in German are published. Among them, it should be noted “a triptych of philosophical and artistic prose - works connected by a single internal content and plan: 1. “Ich schaue ins Leben. Ein Buch der Besinnung ”(I peer into life. A book of thoughts). 2. Das verschollene Herz. Ein Buch stiller Betrachtungen" (Fading heart. The book of quiet contemplation) (1943), 3. "Blick in die Ferne. Ein Buch der Einsichten und der Hoffnungen" (Look into the distance. A book of thoughts and hopes) (1945). “These three books,” wrote his student R.M. Zile, “represent a completely original literary work: they are, as it were, collections of either philosophical sketches, or artistic meditations, or enlightening-in-depth observations on a wide variety of topics, but imbued with one single creative act of writing - "IN EVERYTHING TO SEE AND SHOW THE GOD'S RAY"14.

Ilyin gave other names to the Russian versions of these books: 1. “Fires of life. The book of consolations”, 2. “Singing heart. The Book of Quiet Contemplations” and 3. “On the Coming Russian Culture”. He completely finished the second book, worked on the third one, but did not find publishers during his lifetime - "The Singing Heart" was published by his wife only in 1958.

Ilyin also tried to finish the book “On the Monarchy”, prepared for publication “The Way to Obviousness”, put other works in order, but after frequent and prolonged illnesses on December 21, 1954, he died before he could finish what he had planned. Natalia Nikolaevna, who outlived him by eight years, and later the researcher of his work N.P. Poltoratsky15 did a lot to publish new and republish old works of the remarkable Russian philosopher.

Ivan Alexandrovich was buried in Zollikon near Zurich. On the slab standing on the grave of Ilyin and his wife (she died on March 30, 1963), an epitaph is carved:

so viel gelitten

In Liebe geschauet

Manches verschuldet

Und wenig verstanden

Danke Dir, Ewige Gute!

The life of the philosopher was thorny, but bright. “His philosophical path was difficult. His life path is probably even more difficult. And it seems to me that faithful to her companion Natalia Nikolaevna Ilyina, to the bitter question: “How much longer to suffer?” he could answer like a frantic Habakkuk: "Until death, mother!"

Yu. T. Lisitsa

NOTES.

1. On the maternal line, I.A. Ilyin - German blood; his grandfather, Julius Schweikert (von Stadion, Wittenberg), was a collegiate adviser. Ilyin chose the name of his grandfather as a pseudonym for some of his works in German.

2. Vishnyak M. Tribute to the Past. New York. 1954. P.40.

3. About his teacher after his death, I.A. Ilyin wrote full lines of gratitude. See: In memory of P.I. Novgorodtseva. - "Russian Thought". Prague-Berlin, 1923/24, Book. IX-HP. C 369-374. About the spirit that reigned in the school of P.I. Novgorodtsev, he recalled: “He took care of everyone individually, getting scholarships, lessons, developing topics, generously putting his signature on library cards. Essay after composition was given; the edifice of spiritual individuality slowly grew” (Ibid., p. 373).

4. Aristotle's doctrine of "bondage by nature" (Aristotle, Politics, I).

5. See TsGIA of Moscow, f. 418, op. 463, d, 36, l. 119.

6. Evgenia Gertsyk, a relative of Natalia, recalls. “The cousin was not close to us, but - smart and silent - she shared her husband's sympathies all her life, a little ironic to his ardor. He was in awe of her wise calmness. The young couple lived on the pennies they earned by translating: neither he nor she wanted to sacrifice the time they devoted entirely to philosophy. They bound themselves with iron austerity - everything is strictly calculated, up to how many two kopecks can be spent per month on a cab driver; concerts, the theater is banned, and Ilyin passionately loved music and the Art Theater ”(Gertsyk E. Memoirs. Paris, 1973. P. 153-154). Together they translated the work of G. Simmel "On Social Differentiation" (Moscow, 1908), as well as Elszbacher's book "Anarchism" and two treatises by Rousseau, which could not be published. Ilyin devoted his main works to his wife.

7. Letter to L.Ya. Gurevich dated 13 August. 1911 - TsGALI, f. 131, op. 1, unit 131, l. 2-4. Leistung - strictly, thoroughly done work (German).

8. See: Order or Disorder? Publishing House "People's Law", ser. “Problems of the moment., No. 3. M., 1917. S. 4-5.

11. The main tasks of jurisprudence in Russia. - "Russian Thought". Book. VIII–II, Prague, Dec. 1992, pp. 162-188.

12. See: Central Archive of the KGB of the USSR, File No. 1315. Archive R-22082, fol. 7; case No. 193. archive H-191, l. 314-320.

13. Central archive of the KGB of the USSR, case No. 15778, archive H-1554, fol. 15

15. Poltoratsky Nikolai Petrovich (1921-1990), professor at the University of Pittsburgh (USA), the last manager of the legacy of I.A. Ilyin. He wrote about Ilyin in monographs: “Russian Religious and Philosophical Thought of the 20th Century” (1975), “Russia Revolution” (1988), “Ivan Aleksandrovich Ilyin. Life, works, outlook” (1989).

16. Everything is felt

So much has been gained

Seen in love

A lot is taken to heart

Little has been achieved

Thank You, Eternal Kindness!

(Translated from German by A.V. Mikhailov).

17. Redlich. R. In memory of I.A. Ilyin. - "Sowing". Munich, 1955. No.

Ilyin Ivan Alexandrovich (1882-1954), Russian philosopher and jurist. Born in Moscow on March 16 (28), 1882. In 1906 he graduated from the Faculty of Law of Moscow University and was left at the university to prepare for a professorship.

In 1910-1912 he trained at the universities of Heidelberg, Freiburg, Berlin, Paris, where he listened to lectures by major European philosophers - G. Rickert, G. Simmel, E. Husserl and others. From 1912 he taught at Moscow University. In 1918 he defended his thesis Hegel's philosophy as a doctrine of the concreteness of God and man.

In 1921 he was elected chairman of the Moscow Psychological Society. In 1922, together with a large group of cultural figures, Ilyin was expelled from Russia. Participated in the organization of the Russian Scientific Institute in Berlin, published the journal "Russian Bell", published a number of books: The Religious Meaning of Philosophy. Three speeches, 1925; On resistance to evil by force, 1925; The path of spiritual renewal, 1935, etc.

After the Nazis came to power in Germany, he lost his job, and in 1938 he emigrated to Switzerland, where he lived in the Zurich suburb of Zollikon. Ilyin died in Zurich on December 21, 1954.

Being a major jurist, a student of P. I. Novgorodtsev, Ilyin, in his fundamental study of Hegel's philosophy as a doctrine of the concreteness of God and man, considered the Hegelian doctrine of law and the state as an element of the "holistic" metaphysics of the German philosopher.

This metaphysics, according to Ilyin, was based on religious experience, which became the source of Hegel's main philosophical idea - the idea of ​​"speculative-concrete" ("everything real is subject to the law of speculative concreteness - this is the content of that cardinal experience and that basic idea to which the entire philosophy of Hegel is devoted. ").

Although Ilyin was never a consistent Hegelian, he, like Hegel, was inclined to emphasize the unity of legal and moral consciousness. In his work On the Essence of Legal Consciousness (1956), he defined the "axioms of legal consciousness" that underlie public and state life: "the law of spiritual dignity, the law of autonomy and the law of mutual recognition."

The first of them fixes the spiritual and personal status of a citizen, his inalienable right to self-respect, dignity of the individual, upholding his own position (intellectual, religious, moral, aesthetic). The second point reflects the complex dialectics of freedom and responsibility of a citizen who can retain his own “autonomy” only if he is a true subject of law and “internally freely” fulfills the duties assigned to him by society and the state.

The third principle recognizes mutual respect for citizens and their understanding of the unconditional value of civil and state institutions as the most important condition for civil life. Being a supporter of the monarchy, Ilyin at the same time believed that the monarchical ideal could not and should not always be put into practice.

Thus, reflecting on the prospects for the development of Russia in the post-Soviet era, he considered it expedient to combine monarchical, republican and aristocratic (elite) elements in its state organization. Rejecting any form of anti-state, anarchist ideology, Ilyin sharply criticized the moral anarchism of L. Tolstoy in his work On Resistance to Evil by Force (1925). In the religious and metaphysical constructions of Ilyin, the decisive role is assigned to spirituality (spirit) in man and in society.

The level of spirituality determines the quality of individual and social life and ultimately depends on the volitional, creative efforts of individuals. “Each of us must find and affirm in himself his most important thing - and no one else can replace him in this finding and affirmation.

The spirit is the power of personal self-affirmation in a person, but not in the sense of instinct and not in the sense of a rationalistic awareness of the state of one’s body and one’s soul, but in the sense of a true perception of one’s personal self-essence, in its standing before God and in its dignity. A person who did not realize his future and his dignity did not find his spirit.

An exceptional place in the work of Ilyin during the period of emigration is occupied by his numerous articles about Russia, its past, present and future. On October 3, 2005, Ilyin's ashes were reburied at the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow.

On May 26, 2006, an extensive archive of Ilyin's correspondence and letters was transferred by Michigan State University to the library of Moscow State University. These materials were taken to the USA by Ilyin's student Professor N. P. Poltoratsky in 1965 from Zurich.

Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin was born on April 9, 1883 (died December 21, 1954), philosopher, writer and publicist, supporter of the White movement and consistent critic of the communist government in Russia, ideologist of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS).

The emigrant philosopher Ivan Ilyin has now become "the favorite thinker of the supreme power." At least, it is to him that the president and other government officials quite often refer in their public speeches.

At one time there were some fluctuations. Casting (in Russian - choice, selection - our "elite" loves foreign terms) for the role of "beloved thinker" was held by both Berdyaev and Konstantin Leontiev, by the way, a participant in the first Crimean campaign of 1853.

But everything turned out to be different. The candidates were ill-suited to address the pressing ideological challenges and displayed dangerous freethinking. And therefore, the supreme power as the main ideologists, since the Constitution of the Russian Federation contains a ban on state ideology, determined for itself I. Ilyin and A. Solzhenitsyn in this role.

In his messages to the Federal Assembly in 2005 and 2006, the head of state quoted from the work of the white émigré philosopher Ivan Ilyin "Our Tasks" and the book "How We Should Equip Russia" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Who is Ivan Ilyin and what are his views, we will consider in our article.

To understand why such philosophers and writers as I. Ilyin, A. Solzhenitsyn came to the fore in the post-Soviet period, why their views and ideology are popular today, it is necessary to turn to the Constitution of the Russian Federation.

Ideologies differ from each other formally - by certain ideals and values ​​that are proclaimed in it, but in fact - by the concept that they cover up with their announcements.

An ideology that declares the highest value of human rights and freedoms, but in its inner essence, containing financial slavery, is the ideology of liberalism.

Article 2 of the RF Constitution thus formally establishes the liberal state ideology in Russia. There is a conflict between Article 13, which prohibits the state ideology, and Article 2, which approves it.

Each civilization appears in the world with its own ideal (from the ideals carried by civilizations) project. This ideal project is reflected in the constitutions of the respective states.

Today there is only one civilization-forming state for which the promotion of its own ideal project is prohibited. This state is Russia.

Is it a coincidence that the two most dynamically developing countries in the world today in terms of economic parameters, China and India, directly declare their adherence to certain ideological teachings? Isn't a publicly declared ideology a development factor in this case?

After all, when any ideology is announced, at least the specific goals that the ideology proposes to achieve become visible. And if ideals come to the fore, then such a society will begin to realize its civilizational destiny.

And in Russia, at the highest level, a single civilizational idea has not yet been announced, and therefore our officials, in search of at least some kind of Russian surrogate, turned their attention to the works of I. Ilyin, A. Solzhenitsyn.

As a result of the implementation of the ideas of the latter, we have a state concept for de-Sovietization, as a result - monuments to the victims of political repression, the Wall of Sorrow and the constant denigration of our historical past in the media.

What ideas of I. Ilyin make their way through the activities of some politicians of our state? These are the church, private property, capitalism, freedom, criticism of the Soviet past...

IVAN ILYIN IS A DOGMATIC RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHER WHO HATES SOVIET RUSSIA

Philosophers in general are difficult people for power, they rarely manage to be included with giblets in the current Machiavellian game. In this sense, Nikita Mikhalkov, who has long been promoting the legacy of Ilyin, did everything right.

Certainly, none of the Russian intellectuals of the 20th century is better suited to justify the current political order than Ivan Ilyin, the most dogmatic of our religious philosophers.

The trick is simple: when you can't directly refer to the Orthodox creed as the basis of your power, use secular interdependence with it. We say Ivan Ilyin, but we mean the church.

If not for the revolution of 1917, Ivan Ilyin would probably have become a good professor of jurisprudence and philosophy and occupied his niche among other professional philosophers of his era - Lossky, Shpet, Frank.

The revolution turned Ilyin first into an active political dissident, then into a prisoner, and then into an exile, a passenger on the famous "philosophical ship".

But Ilyin's transformations did not end there either. In exile, he took a more or less empty place as an ideologist of the veteran organizations of the White movement, dreaming of revenge.

During his life, the philosopher in Ilyin mutated more and more into a propagandist, the author of combat leaflets against Soviet Russia. Short texts infused resentment and bile, Ilyin has accumulated a huge amount.

INSERT

It is worth noting that the concept of resentment was first introduced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his work On the Genealogy of Morals (1887).

Resentment, according to Nietzsche, is a feeling of hostility towards what the subject considers the cause of his failures (the "enemy"), impotent envy, "a painful consciousness of the futility of trying to raise one's status in life or in society."

The feeling of weakness or inferiority, as well as envy towards the "enemy" leads to the formation of a special value system that denies the value system of the "enemy". The subject creates the image of an "enemy" in order to get rid of guilt for his own inferiority.

END INSERT

Back in the 90s, an attempt was made to publish his complete works, which could not be completed, so that in the end it consisted of 10 main and 16 additional volumes.

After the default of 1998, this hefty pack of "spiritual heritage" was given away for free, including to all federal officials who were recommended to study them.

At the beginning of his career, Ivan Ilyin managed to write a devastating review of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, published for the first time (by Lenin) under the pseudonym V. Ilyin.

The evil irony is that Professor Ivan Ilyin eventually became the antipode, a caricature copy of Lenin. In addition to purely superficial similarities and conspiratorial activities in neutral Switzerland during the world wars (take note of this point), they were united by an uncompromising hatred of political opponents.

The difference was that Lenin was for the workers and peasants, relied on the ideology of Marxism and won the Civil War. Ivan Ilyin, on the other hand, was in the camp of the losers, to whom, moreover, he joined after the end of the fight.

He advocated for the landowners and priests and relied on a kind of "Russian", but in fact nationalist (if not Nazi) ideological basis.

So it is very easy to accept Ilyin as the “chief” in a country that is used to worshiping dogmatic “Marxism-Leninism”.

An academic philosopher who became a poet and tribune of the White Cause is a unique figure.

Other white poets like Roman Gul or Ivan Solonevich do not have the professorial respectability of Ilyin. Ivan Ilyin, on the other hand, combined incompatible qualities at first glance.

On the one hand, he mastered the technique of philosophical argumentation, perfected at Moscow University.

On the other hand, his attitude turned out to be quite primitive in order not to notice that the real tragedy of Russia lies not at all in the Bolsheviks alone, and the revival of Russia is not in anti-Bolshevism.

In this he disagreed, for example, with Bulgakov, Gaito Gazdanov and even with Nikolai Berdyaev. Academic emigre philosophers did not follow the activist Ilyin, who seemed to be their colleague, at all. Neither Lossky, nor Frank, nor Sergei Bulgakov felt so confident in the role of conductors of a clear political course.

In this sense, the controversy that unfolded around Ilyin's book "On Resistance to Evil by Force", relating to his early emigre period (1925), is very indicative. Ivan Ilyin, with all his fury, falls upon the preachers of ethical Tolstoyism, unacceptable and impossible, in his opinion, at the time of the struggle for the fate of the Motherland.

In fact, we have before us the application of the apparatus of German classical philosophy to denounce their political opponents at the current historical moment, for which the Bolshevik theorists have always been so famous.

Berdyaev reacted with an extremely vicious review of The Nightmare of Evil Good, where he declared from the first lines that:

"Cheka in the name of God is more disgusting than Cheka in the name of the devil."

Zinaida Gippius stated that Ivan Ilyin became a "former philosopher", and his text is "military theology". However, Ivan Ilyin then found allies even among representatives of the moderate wing of emigration like Pyotr Struve, and he himself did not go into his pocket for a word.

In a letter to ROCOR Metropolitan Anastasia Ilyin, he smashes his “heresiarch” rivals:

“... I am trying to weave the fabric of a new philosophy, thoroughly Christian in spirit and style, but completely free from pseudo-philosophical abstract idle talk. Here there is absolutely no intellectual "theologizing" like Berdyaev - Bulgakov - Karsavin and other amateurish heresiarchs ...

This is a simple, quiet philosophy, accessible to everyone, born of the main organ of Orthodox Christianity — the contemplative heart…”

The justification of philosophy and at the same time of the political course lies not simply in faith, but in faith sanctioned by the institution of the church. The main theoretical works of the late Ilyin, Axioms of Religious Experience and The Path to Evidence, are built on similar principles.

In the first of them, Ivan Ilyin proposes a draft description of religious experience, understood as the foundation of human existence in the world and, at the same time, social relations. Whoever does not believe in God will not be able to understand the nature of Russia.

In the second, it sets its own methodological program: philosophy is looking for ways to revive the spirit, the goal of philosophical knowledge is evidence, the latter is revealed in traditional values.

In general, Ilyin can be characterized as a typical conservative philosopher of his time. Hermetic, full of metaphysics and even mysticism, Ilyin's texts are built around axioms, the acceptance of which automatically means recognition of the persuasiveness of his conclusions.

The concepts with which he operates - "ascended spirit", "creative heart", "living breath of God on earth" - could easily find their place in the texts of any, let's be careful, right-wing thinker of the 20th century, for example, Baron Julius Evola ( Italian philosopher, ideologist of neo-fascism - our note).

Ilyin had no serious disagreements with fascism at all, but quite a lot has already been written about this. The point is not who Ilyin sympathized with, but that his worldview is, in principle, typologically a radical worldview.

In political works, Ivan Ilyin spoke quite definitely. In The Way of Spiritual Renewal (1937), he states that for this very renewal of Russia, faith, love, freedom, conscience, family, homeland, nationalism, legal consciousness, state and private property are necessary.

If we do not count the freedom that accidentally crept in here, understood, of course, primarily as freedom from Bolshevism, then we have a list that is ideal for immediate absorption into the ideology of the current Russian “elite”.

The "dean's Leninist" Ilyin, the "philosopher of the censer and the whip," is brilliantly suited to answer the questions that really worry our new conservatives.

Why do they need to be in power whenever possible, why everything around should belong to respected people, and why, finally, the people should humbly accept their fate, "in love, faith and humility."

To quote Ilyin as an undeniable justification, as Marx and Engels were quoted in Soviet textbooks, is to take sides in the civil war and declare it unfinished. In an early essay, The Motherland and Us (1926), Ivan Ilyin writes bitterly about the loss of the Motherland.

Now, through his quotes, the motherlands want to deprive all of his ideological opponents: Bolsheviks, liberals or atheists.

WHO WAS IVAN ILYIN REALLY?

On September 2, 1922, the collegium of the Main Political Directorate under the NKVD of the RSFSR decided to expel citizen Ilyin "from the RSFSR abroad" in connection with anti-Soviet activities, after which he settled in Germany, where he became a teacher at the Berlin "Russian Scientific Institute", which in in turn, he was a member of the so-called "League of Aubert", the full name of which sounded like the "International League of Struggle Against the Third International" (which included the NSDAP and other extreme right-wing nationalist organizations of that time).

All this didn't bother me at all. "Russian patriot" Ilyin.

“Professor I. Ilyin, the founder of the Russian Bell magazine, openly called himself and his associates fascists ...”(Okorokov A.V., Fascism and Russian emigration (1920 - 1945). M. 2001. P. 21).

In October 1933, when the Russian Institute came under the wing of the Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, and NSDAP member Adolf Erth was appointed its director, Ivan Ilyin was appointed vice president of the institute.

It is noteworthy that while the remaining employees of the “institute” were fired by the Nazis due to “disloyalty to the ideas of the Führer and the Reich” or “non-Aryan origin”, the “Russian patriot” Ivan Ilyin remained to work in it as one of three Russian employees (two others are white emigrants Alexander Bogolepov and Vladimir Poletika).

According to the German historian Hartmut Rüdiger Peter, the activities of the propagandist Ilyin received explicit recognition from the first head of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. And Ivan Ilyin, until 1937, delivered reports of anti-communist content on the territory of the Third Reich.

On May 17, 1933, in the white émigré newspaper Vozrozhdenie, published in Paris, Ivan Ilyin, the idol of the entire current “elite,” published an article “National Socialism. New spirit”, quotes from which you can evaluate yourself:

“What did Hitler do? He stopped the process of Bolshevization in Germany and by doing so rendered the greatest service to all of Europe”;

“While Mussolini leads Italy and Hitler leads Germany, European culture is given a reprieve”;

“And the European peoples must understand that Bolshevism is a real and fierce danger; that democracy is a creative dead end; that Marxist socialism is a doomed chimera; that a new war is beyond Europe's strength, neither spiritually nor materially, and that only a national upsurge can save the cause in each country, which will dictatorially and creatively take up the "social" solution of the social question";

“Until now, European public opinion has only been repeating that extreme racists, anti-Semites have come to power in Germany; that they do not respect rights; that they do not recognize freedom; that they want to introduce some kind of new socialism; that all this is "dangerous" and that, as Georg Bernhard recently put it,<…>, this chapter in the history of Germany, “hopefully, will be short” ... It is unlikely that we will be able to explain to European public opinion that all these judgments are either superficial, or short-sighted and biased”;

How about this:

“What is happening is a great social stratification; but not property, but state-political and cultural-driving (and only to this extent - service-earned) ”,

“Everything involved in Marxism, Social Democracy and Communism is being removed; all internationalists and Bolsheviks are removed; many Jews are removed,

“The spirit of National Socialism cannot be reduced to 'racism'. It does not come down to denial either. He puts forward positive and creative tasks. And these creative tasks are facing all peoples. It is imperative for all of us to look for ways to solve these problems.

It is foolish and ignoble to boo other people's attempts in advance and gloat over their anticipated failure. And didn't they slander the white movement? Wasn't he accused of "pogroms"? Wasn't Mussolini slandered?

And what, did Wrangel and Mussolini become smaller from this? Or perhaps European public opinion feels itself called upon to interfere with any real struggle against communism, both purifying and creative, and is only looking for a convenient pretext for this? But then we need to keep that in mind…”

Anti-Soviet and frankly fascist Ilyin's views are so strong that even after the defeat of the Reich by the Red Army and the Allies, after the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal, after making public the truth about the crimes of the Nazis, in the article "On Fascism" (1948), Ivan Ilyin writes that:

“Fascism is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon and, historically speaking, is far from obsolete (we note that he is very right here - IAC note). It has healthy and sick, old and new, state-protective and destructive. Therefore, in assessing it, calmness and justice are needed. But its dangers must be thought through to the end.

“Fascism arose as a reaction to Bolshevism, as a concentration of state-protective forces to the right. During the onset of left-wing chaos and left-wing totalitarianism, this was a healthy, necessary and inevitable phenomenon.

Such a concentration will continue in the future, even in the most democratic states: in the hour of national danger, the healthy forces of the people will always be concentrated in a protective-dictatorial direction. So it was in ancient Rome, so it was in the new Europe, so it will be in the future.”

“Coming out against left totalitarianism, fascism was, furthermore, right, because it was looking for just social and political reforms. These searches may or may not have been successful: it is difficult to solve such problems, and the first attempts may not have been successful.

But to meet the wave of socialist psychosis - with social and therefore anti-socialist measures - was necessary. These measures have been brewing for a long time, and there was no need to wait any longer.

“Finally, fascism was right, because it proceeded from a healthy national-patriotic feeling, without which no people can either assert its existence or create its own culture.”

There is only one conclusion that can be drawn from all this - everyone should understand “who” the authorities are quoting, “who” is being imposed on the citizens of Russia as a kind of “landmark”, the founder of the notorious “national idea”.

All this looked especially cynical against the backdrop of the 70th anniversary of the Victory, when the same people who presented Ilyin as a “Russian patriot” and “sovereign” began to talk with hypocritical rapture about the feat of the Soviet people and how important it is to fight Nazism and fascism currently.

WHO REPRESENTS IVAN ILYIN IN RUSSIA?

Russian President Vladimir Putin once called the collapse of the Soviet Union a "geopolitical catastrophe." But today, the greatest influence on modern Russia is not the founder of the USSR Vladimir Lenin, but the political thinker and preacher of fascism Ivan Ilyin.

This brilliant philosopher died more than 60 years ago, but his ideas have been revived in post-Soviet Russia. After 1991, Ilyin's books are reprinted in large numbers. President Putin began quoting him in his annual Address to the Federal Assembly.

To complete the rehabilitation of Ilyin, Putin secured the return of his ashes from Switzerland, and the archive from Michigan. The Russian president was spotted laying flowers at the Moscow grave of the philosopher. But Putin is not the only one using Ilyin among the Kremlin “elite”.

One of the main Russian propagandists, Vladislav Surkov, also considers Ilyin an authority.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who served as president from 2008 to 2012, recommends Ilyin's work to Russian students. The name of Ilyin appears in the speeches of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia, the head of the constitutional court and the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

WHAT ARE THE IDEAS ENGAGED SO “DEEP RESPECT”?

Ivan Ilyin believed that individuality is evil. For him, "human diversity" was a demonstration of God's inability to complete the work of creating the world, and therefore he considered such diversity to be essentially satanic.

Accordingly, the middle class, political parties and civil society are all the same evil, because they contribute to the development of a personality that goes beyond the boundaries of a single self-identification of the national community.

According to Ilyin, the goal of politics is to overcome individuality and establish the "living totality" of the nation.

His main philosophical works date back to the 1920s and 1930s, when he became the leading émigré ideologue of the anti-communist white movement.

He looked to Mussolini and Hitler as exemplary leaders who had saved Europe by dissolving democracy. Therefore, the article of 1927, which he called completely unreasonably - "On Russian fascism" was addressed to him "to my white fascist brothers."

Later, in the 1940s and 1950s, he drafted a constitution for a fascist Holy Russia to be ruled by a "national dictator" "inspired by the spirit of the multitude."

And this man is presented to us as a prophet.

WAS A PROPHET?

Maybe the wrong prophet was chosen, which is why his prophecies do not “warm” his contemporaries, locking themselves, as before, on a narrow stratum of creative intelligentsia and government officials who are far from their people?

Perhaps the point is both in the prophet and in the Fatherland, as well as in the inaccuracies of the ideas themselves, which Ivan Alexandrovich tried to implement all his life, being outside of Russia?

With all due respect to the legacy of Ilyin, his role in Russian philosophy, one cannot fail to notice that the ideas of Ivan Alexandrovich did not take root even in the minds of the most radical emigrants who categorically denied the Soviets, before which the philosopher lectured about Russia and the hated Bolshevik regime.

The views of Ilyin, a staunch monarchist and nationalist, are based on remaining faithful to pre-revolutionary foundations. In his view, Russian society should be built on the rank and hierarchy of estates.

“We must revive in ourselves the ancient ability to have a king,” wrote the philosopher.

His lack of understanding of everything that was happening in the country was reduced to criticizing the Soviet government, instilling hatred for the Bolsheviks.

Having spent 5 years in revolutionary Russia before his expulsion, for the rest of his life he fixed in his mind the negative experience that later became evident in his writings. It is sometimes impossible to read them without a smile, without asking the question:

“If everything in the USSR was as Ivan Alexandrovich describes, then why didn’t it crumble earlier, but survived and almost independently defeated the more correct (according to Ilyin) fascism in a difficult war?”

It affects the isolation from genuine historical events that will remain hidden from Ilyin by the iron curtain, information hunger, and scooping knowledge from the Western press and emigre newspapers.

Of course, Russia has come a long way since the collapse of the USSR. To a certain extent, Ilyin's prophecies came true. Only Ilyin in his works does not blame those who contributed to the pulling to pieces of a huge country.

He accuses all the same Bolsheviks, who, in his opinion, emasculated his spirituality from the people. By spirituality, Ivan Alexandrovich understands the dogma helping the powerful of this world to manage, restrain, educate the population.

The Soviet ideology also brought up. Under its influence, Soviet people gave their lives for the liberation of mankind., and not a single group of exiles.

The geopolitical changes brought about by revolutions and wars in young Soviet Russia could not but affect the psychology of the people, who for the first time felt their collective unconscious, felt themselves to be “everyone”.

What can we say about the generations that grew up in another, new country, about those who heard the name of the philosopher himself for the first time several years ago.

How to explain Ilyin's philosophical thoughts about the priority of Russians among the peoples of Russia, which today are clearly not actively used for the purpose of consolidating the state, those whose fathers and grandfathers fought in the Civil War for universal happiness on earth, built Magnitogorsk, created a superpower from a backward patriarchal state without regard to nationality?

How to explain to the descendants of General Karbyshev that his feat of confrontation was in vain, that the expansion of space by Yuri Gagarin, the first Soviet man who paved the way to the stars, is a bluff? How can you cross out everything that the country has lived for 70 years and in which continuity has not yet been lost, and start searching for the “Russian idea of ​​​​revival” where everything has died a long time ago?

So political scientists and other ideological treasure hunters, rushing from one extreme to another, hope to pull out of the philosophical works of the ideologist of the White Guard movement Ivan Ilyin, who laid down his life to resist the Soviets, the “national idea” of the revival of modern Russia.

The question here should be asked: “The national idea should be what kind of nation? Great Russians? If the answer is “Russians”, then this is a belittling of our spiritual power, since the concept of “Russian” has long been a designation not of a nation, but of a civilizational community.

Therefore, an attempt to restore the Orthodox faith is also becoming a dead end, erroneous direction in the search for a “national Russian idea”.

No renewal of Orthodoxy will lead to anything, unless it is a return to the Teachings of Christ, for which a lot of things will need to be reviewed and canceled, for example: the fact of execution, the Trinity, the creed, priests, icons, crosses, etc., but then little will remain of Orthodoxy itself.

It is possible to introduce the law of God into the curriculum, to teach the dogma in schools, to introduce it without asking the consent of the parents, in kindergartens, but it is impossible to restore the “true faith” if the clergy themselves, in the past graduates of secondary and higher Soviet educational institutions, are not able to think former categories.

Now they want to get the idea of ​​reviving the state for free, without really straining.

So they are looking for it in philosophical treatises 60-100 years ago and trying to find it among those who, if Russia was dear, then obviously not enough to find a way out of the crisis for the whole country.

The very country that lay "from the seas to the very outskirts", whose multimillion-strong population speaks more than 180 languages ​​and dialects.

Some of the "ship philosophers", living in Europe and the Americas, introducing the ideas of liberation from the "Bolshevik yoke" and the revival of Russia in an emigre environment, among the participants in various white movements and other anti-Soviet organizations, the ideologist of which was Ivan Ilyin, at the same time thought not about yourself, but about the Russian people, about their troubles and aspirations?

Of course no. They saddened their skins about their ruined estates, lost capital and lost property. And dreamed of someday returning them.

ON THE. BERDYAEV ON I.A. ILYINA

In 1925, Ivan Ilyin wrote the book "On Resistance to Evil by Force" - he found a sponsor and published it.

The idea of ​​the book is simple - to justify from a Christian point of view the thesis that it is possible and necessary to fight the Bolsheviks by force, with weapons in hand. The book caused a great controversy in emigre circles, came to Berdyaev, and he, horrified, wrote a review “The Nightmare of Evil Goodness” (http://krotov.info/library/02_b/berdyaev/1926_312.htm). There he writes:

“I rarely had to read such a nightmarish and painful book as the book of I. Ilyin. "On resisting evil by force." This book is capable of instilling a real aversion to the "good", it creates an atmosphere of spiritual suffocation, plunges into the dungeons of the moral inquisition"...

“In the worldview of I. Ilyin there is nothing not only Orthodox, but in general Christian.<…>Completely un-Christian and anti-Christian are the views of I. Ilyin on the state, on the individual and on freedom.”

“The entire mood of I. Ilyin's book is not Christian and anti-Christian. It is imbued with a sense of pharisaic self-righteousness... The whole misfortune is that I. Ilyin is too conscious of himself as a "particle of divine fire." This is the discovery of an unheard-of spiritual pride.”

Very on point. Maybe this is too strong a word, but the fact that this person was subject to the sin of “self-righteousness”, that pride really raged in him, is subtly noticed.

AFTERWORD

Through the prism of years, the fallacy of the actions and assessments of many, as it were, “Russian” ideologists, who, due to a number of private or social conditions, have lost their correct orientation, becomes obvious.

Often they worked successfully in favor of the Western intelligence services, which used their names and popularity as their main ideological weapon in an attempt to weaken and destroy the USSR from within.

One can only regret that intelligentsia, talented writers and philosophers who, being deeply immersed in their own egocentrism, buying into university chairs and Nobel Prizes, becoming puppets, who were skillfully controlled by the bosses of the West, in vain devoted their lives to an imaginary ideological struggle for a fictional Russia, which, in fact, they never knew or understood.

In 2005, the ashes of Ivan Ilyin were returned to their homeland. This costly event was supposed to "stir up people's self-consciousness" and outline the sprouts of patriotic pride "for the Fatherland" in the hearts of young Russians. But are such “actions” capable of changing the collective unconscious of a people that has long since ground down both the idealistic atheism of all churches and the materialistic atheism of the Soviet era?

Video "Materialistic and idealistic atheism and the tasks of the future (IAC)"

Modern youth and the majority of the population of Russia were, are and will be as far from the philosophical ideas of Ivan Alexandrovich as their great-grandfathers from the slavery of ancient Egypt.

Neither the transfer of the remains of the deceased, nor the attempt by famous people to popularize the works of the philosopher, nor even the quoting of some of his sayings in their public speeches by the first persons of the state, were able to arouse mass interest in the works of Ivan Ilyin in today's society.

And none of the historians and biographers is ready to explain this phenomenon. They shrug their hands and refer to a phrase from the Bible that has set the teeth on edge:

"There is no prophet in his Fatherland."

Therefore, it is necessary to think carefully about whether it is possible to follow a person whose views on Orthodoxy, the structure of society and, in general, whose worldview is far from the best sample?

“Do they gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles?” (Matthew 7:16).

“Believe not every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1).

Why is the attention of the supreme power to such persons so closely? The answer is clear: since there is no state ideology in Russia, which is very fraught with the gradual development of the country, the ideas and views of a number of seemingly non-ideological philosophers and writers are being promoted, although this is an obvious slyness.

In fact, the ban on state ideology is nothing more than a ban on any propaganda by the state, a ban on the targeted propaganda of human ideals through the structures of state authorities, through educational and educational institutions, which causes negative consequences: despondency, apathy, lack of meaning in life for people, kaleidoscopic outlook, legal nihilism, the growth of crime, etc.

In general, the constitutional consolidation of the role of ideology has turned out to be interesting in our country. Deeply original. There is no such thing anywhere else and no one else. And whether Russia needs such originality is a question that requires serious discussion.

There should be a generally accepted system of ideals, values, views and beliefs, enshrined in the Constitution, and not what we are offered through Ivan Ilyin or Solzhenitsyn and others.

“Constitution of 1993. Time to look beyond the horizon

Publications in the Lectures section

Ivan Ilyin: exile and patriot

Russian philosopher, writer and publicist Ivan Ilyin lived abroad for more than thirty years. However, along with Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov, he became one of the iconic Russian philosophers of the first half of the 20th century. "Culture.RF" tells about the works of Ilyin, his attitude to Russian life and the return of archives to Russia.

Ivan Ilyin after graduating from high school. 1901

Ivan Ilyin's parents - Alexander Ilyin and Caroline Louise Schweikert von Stadion

Ivan Ilyin. Moscow, 1909

Becoming a philosopher

Ivan Ilyin was born on March 28, 1883 in Moscow. His father was a nobleman, godson of Emperor Alexander II, a barrister at the Moscow Court of Justice, and his grandfather served as an engineer, built the Moscow Kremlin, where he later lived with his family.

Ivan became the third son in the family. Both of his brothers were lawyers and the young man could not resist the will of his father. A “golden” graduate of the gymnasium, he did not enter the philological department, as he wanted, but the law faculty of Moscow University. By this time, 18-year-old Ilyin knew German, French, Latin, Greek and Church Slavonic.

At the university, a brilliant education continued: the prominent religious philosopher Prince Evgeny Trubetskoy and the outstanding legal philosopher Pavel Novgorodtsev became Ilyin's teachers. The latter recalled the student: “Ilyin shows an ability to work that is completely out of the ordinary, combined with the greatest devotion to his chosen specialty. He had not to be encouraged, but stopped in his studies, fearing for his overwork from excessive work.. The ideological centers of the Novgorodtsev school were Plato, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. It was Hegel who turned out to be the most important philosopher in life for Ilyin - he devoted many scientific works to him.

Since 1910, the scientific career of Ivan Ilyin began. He became a member of the Moscow Psychological Society, his first scientific work, The Concept of Law and Force, was published. At the end of the year, Ilyin and his wife went on a scientific mission to Germany and France. There he studied the latest trends in European philosophy, including the philosophy of life and phenomenology, and according to some sources, he even had a meeting-session with Freud. Ilyin met the expansion of the world and a new stage of apprenticeship with passion: “Sometimes, in anticipation, I grind my teeth from the writer's appetite. In general, I think over and think so much that in moments of fatigue or decline I seem to myself to be a fool..

In 1913, Ilyin returned to his homeland for the last time. Renewed, having established himself in his own abilities, he strengthened his reputation as a young scientist, a brilliant lecturer: his classes gathered full houses, and loving students even dedicated an epigram to him:

Any spleen can dispel
Associate Professor Ilyin.

At the same time, armed with new knowledge, Ilyin became even more ruthless towards his opponents. “Ilyin’s ability to hate, despise, insult ideological opponents was exceptional. And from this, only from this side, the Muscovites knew those who are not.”, - Evgenia Gertsek recalled.

On February 22, 1914, Ilyin delivered a report entitled "Hegel's Teachings on the Essence of Speculative Thinking." A series of six works began with him, which made up the dissertation "Hegel's Philosophy as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Man."

This scientific work is still considered one of the best commentaries on Hegel's philosophy. In it, Ilyin criticized the inability of the "reasonable concept" to subjugate the "irrational element" of the empirical world. The dissertation glorified Ilyin as a world-class philosopher, turned out to be his last publication in Russia for a long time, and also - in the end - saved his life.

First arrest

Ivan Ilyin. Before deportation, Moscow, 1922

Ivan Ilyin. Lecture performance in Berlin, after 1925

Ivan Ilyin. Prague, 1925

Ilyin never accepted Soviet power. He wrote: “Socialism by its very nature is envious, totalitarian and terrorist; and communism differs from it only in that it manifests these features openly, shamelessly and ferociously.. These views were formed in the philosopher quite early, but if he perceived the February Revolution as a temporary disorder, he treated the subsequent October Revolution as a complete disaster.

Ilyin's opposition to the young Soviet state was quite open: he supported the White Army in print and even financially, and according to investigators, he was a member of its southern association, the Volunteer Army, and was in charge of the Petrograd branch. Immediately after the coup, Ilyin published an article in Russkiye Vedomosti entitled “To the Departed Winners”. In it, he addressed the White Guards who fell in the struggle: “You have won, friends and brothers! And bequeathed to us to bring your victory to the end. Believe us, we will fulfill the bequeathed".

The first time Ilyin was detained in April 1918. Even then, the resonance caused by the arrest of the doctor of state sciences, a teacher in the department of the history of law and the encyclopedia of law, was significant. Up to the point that many scientists and Ilyin's colleagues in the department demanded to be taken as "hostages", if only the philosopher himself was released. Then the case ended with an amnesty.

By 1922, Ilyin had already been arrested six times. And the sixth could be the last: after his arrest, he was immediately convicted, sentenced to death - by firing squad. Then under investigation were more than 200 people - entirely creative intelligentsia. The Soviet authorities could not afford to liquidate such a number of "golden minds". The unthinkability of the execution of Ilyin was understood by Lenin himself. "It is forbidden. He is the author of the best book on Hegel."- he wrote, referring to the dissertation of the philosopher. So it was decided to replace the execution with a mass expulsion to Europe, which went down in history under the name "philosophical ship". Trotsky summed up: “We expelled these people because there was no reason to shoot them, and it was impossible to endure”.

The deportees were allowed to take with them only two pairs of underpants, two pairs of socks, a jacket, trousers, a coat, a hat and two pairs of shoes per person: all money and other property, including extensive libraries, were confiscated.

On September 29, 1922, the steamer Oberburgermeister Haken, the first of two "philosophical steamships", sailed from Petrograd. Among its passengers were the philosophers Berdyaev, Trubetskoy and Ilyin.

Berlin and the second exile

Spouses Ilyina - Natalia and Ivan. Mountains of Schünig. 1941

Ivan Ilyin in his office. 1950

Ivan Ilyin at work. 1951

Almost the first thing Ilyin did upon arrival in Germany was to contact General A von Lampe, a representative of Baron Wrangel, whom he treated with great reverence. Wrangel reciprocated: “ Many, spiritually weary from the hard years of exile, lose faith in the moral necessity of struggle and are tempted by the thought of the sinfulness of "violence", which they begin to see in active opposition to evil. Your book will open their eyes.". The White General was referring to the pamphlet On Resisting Evil by Force, in which the following quotes are found:

“Calling to love enemies, Christ had in mind the personal enemies of man himself. Christ never called to love the enemies of God who trample on the divine.”

Many emigrants were less enthusiastic about Ilyin's new radical pathos. Zinaida Gipius called the book "military field theology", and Nikolai Berdyaev noted that "cheka" in the name of God is more disgusting than "cheka" "in the name of the devil".

In Germany, Ilyin organized the work of the Religious-Philosophical Academy, the philosophical society under it, the religious-philosophical publication "Russian Bell", which had a characteristic subtitle: "Journal of a strong-willed idea." In addition, the philosopher began work at the Russian Scientific Institute, where he became the dean of the Faculty of Law. Since 1924, Ilyin was elected a corresponding member of the Slavic Institute at the University of London. In a word, his Berlin social life was almost more eventful than in his homeland. Ilyin, like many passengers on the steamer Oberburgermeister Haken, did not dissolve into the streams of emigration, but promulgated a new Russian ideological platform, previously unknown to Europe, in the European cultural field.

However, clouds were gathering over the philosopher - fascism came to Germany.

Ilyin's attitude to fascism changed in the same way as his attitude to the Russian revolution: from underestimating the threat to extreme rejection. Initially, the philosopher saw the birth of a new radical doctrine as a natural, albeit forced, measure. According to Ilyin, fascism arose “as a reaction to Bolshevism, as a concentration of state-protective forces to the right. During the onset of left-wing chaos and left-wing totalitarianism, this was a healthy, necessary phenomenon. Ilyin found the most racial theory (he was an ardent opponent of anti-Semitism) and the anti-church struggle to be unsympathetic aspects of the doctrine.

However, the Nazi system itself was much less favorable to Ilyin. Immediately after Hitler came to power in 1933, the philosopher had a conflict with the German propaganda ministry. As a result, Ilyin was fired from the University of Berlin. Then followed a ban on teaching. After - the arrest of all his printed works and a complete ban on public speaking. The philosopher was left without a livelihood.

Ilyin took a new blow from the “stepmother” country painfully: “What a terrible time has fallen to our lot, that the paths are open to scoundrels, complete liars and shameless, and to us - a stream of humiliation”. In July 1938, Ilyin was forced to leave Germany and move to Switzerland. He looked to the future without optimism: “When an egg is broken, it is poured either into a glass or into a frying pan. I feel that the egg is broken, but I do not see a glass or a frying pan.

The third attempt to improve life

Ivan Ilyin. Zollikon, 1934

Study of Ivan Ilyin in Zollikon. 1955

Ilyina's spouses - Natalia and Ivan. 1927

Trying again, for the third time, to improve his life began bleakly. In Switzerland, they did not want to grant Ilyina the right to reside and even tried to send her back to Germany. Only the personal intervention of the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who agreed to contribute 4,000 francs to the writer's "boarding house", made things easier. However, the Swiss authorities immediately stipulated a condition - a ban on any political activity. Ilyin was humiliated, he realized his role and fate as a martyr: "If only to tell- Ilyin wrote to Sergei Rachmaninov in August 1938, - how many times people deceived and betrayed me, then this is a whole martyrdom. For - I will tell you quite frankly and confidentially - my soul is not at all created for politics, for all these tenacious intrigues..

The philosopher and his wife settled in the Zurich suburb of Zollikon. A new life took place in a different capacity for Ilyin. He, a speaker, lecturer, publicist, organizer, ideologist, increasingly spent time in seclusion and - deprived of the opportunity to publish - began to write to the table. During these years, the most extensive part of the literary and philosophical heritage of Ilyin was created.

At the end of his days, the philosopher wrote: “I write and put aside - one book after another and give them to my friends and like-minded people to read ... And my only consolation is this: if Russia needs my books, then the Lord will save them from destruction, and if neither God nor Russia, then I myself do not need them either. For I live only for Russia".

Hard everyday work and frequent illnesses exhausted the philosopher. December 21, 1954 Ivan Ilyin died. A monument with an epitaph was erected over his grave in Zollikon:

In October 2005, the ashes of Ilyin and his wife Natalya Vokach were transferred to the Donskoy cemetery in Moscow. The writer Ivan Shmelev and the white military leader Anton Denikin are buried next to the philosopher, communication with whom was an important part of his life abroad. And in 2006 he returned to his homeland and Ilyin's archive. He was brought from the USA to Russia and transferred to the philosopher's alma mater - Moscow State University.

In 100 archive boxes - manuscripts, photographs, the philosopher's personal library. It also contains unique epistolary materials: Ilyin's correspondence with the famous Russian composer Nikolai Medtner, the writer Ivan Shmelev and the white military leader Pyotr Wrangel.

The digitization of the archive took more than four years. Today, 27 volumes of Ilyin's collected works have already been published. Quotes and texts from them are widely used as assignments for the school Unified State Publication, they can be found in the speeches of the first persons of the state. On June 15, 2012, the first Russian monument to Ivan Ilyin was unveiled in Yekaterinburg.