Nikolai Berdyaev
| Nikolai Berdyaev | |
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| Born |
Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev March 18, 1874 Kiev, Russian Empire |
| Died | March 24, 1948 (aged 74) Clamart, France |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Russian philosophy |
| School | Christian existentialism |
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Main interests
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Creativity, eschatology, freedom |
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Influences
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Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (/bərˈdjɑːjɛf, -jɛv/;Russian: Никола́й Алекса́ндрович Бердя́ев; March 18 [O.S. March 6] 1874 – March 24, 1948) was a Russian religious and political philosopher.
Nikolai Berdyaev was born near Kiev in 1874, in an military family. His father, Alexander Mikhailovich Berdyaev, came from a long line of Kiev and Kharkov nobility. Almost all of Alexander Mikhailovich's ancestors served as high-ranking military officers, but he resigned from the army quite early and became active in the social life of the Kiev aristocracy. Nikolai's mother, Alina Sergeevna Berdyaeva, was half-French and came from the top levels of both French and Russian nobility.
Greatly influenced by Voltaire, his father was an educated man that considered himself a freethinker and expressed great skepticism towards religion. Nikolai's mother, Orthodox by birth, was in her views on religion more Catholic than Orthodox. He spent a solitary childhood at home, where his father's library allowed him to read widely. He read Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Kant when he was only 14 and excelled at languages.
Berdyaev decided on an intellectual career and entered the Kiev University in 1894. It was a time of revolutionary fervor among the students and the intelligentsia. He became a Marxist and he was arrested in a student demonstration and expelled from the university. His involvement in illegal activities led in 1897 to three years of internal exile, Vologda, in northern Russia, a mild sentence compared to that faced by many other revolutionaries.
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