The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925-1940 - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Antoine Arjakovsky is research director at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris and founding director of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies and professor of ecumenical theology at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine. He is the author of a number of books, including Qu'est-ce que l'orthodoxie?

Jerry Ryan is a translator and independent scholar.

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The Way: A Journal of Russian Religious Thought, a journal in the Russian language, was published quarterly in Paris from 1925 to 1940 by the Academy of Religious Philosophy, directed by Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev. Scholars ranging from the French Slavist Pierre Pascal, who described the sixty-one issues of The Way as “uncommonly substantial,” to the American-based historian of the Russian emigration, Marc Raeff, who stressed its “high level of erudition,” have agreed that the journal is one of the most brilliant in all Russian intellectual history. The French theologian Olivier Clément remarked that, thanks to Berdyaev’s The Way, Orthodox thought, untiringly increased its awareness of French thought on similar subjects and, testing itself, grew more profound. Though the journal was held in high esteem by several eminent specialists in Russian philosophy, it remained little known in France and the USSR for different reasons until the early 1990s.

As for its obscurity in France, this can be explained by the fact that only six articles (out of 606), written by Berdyaev and Lev Shestov, were translated into French in the interwar period. Moreover, when they were published in French there was no reference to The Way, as their publishers wanted to present them as “new” texts. Thus, Berdyaev’s “The Truth and Lies of Communism” appeared in the first issue of Emmanuel Mounier’s Journal Esprit (October 1932) and helped set its nonconformist tone, with no mention of its prior publication in The Way. After World War II, another twenty articles from The Way, by Berdyaev, Shestov, Sergius Bulgakov, Mother Maria Skobtsova, and Georges Florovsky, appeared in French, but that was all. If the Francophone public had no opportunity to hear of the journal, the Russian reading public in France likewise had very limited access to it. In fact, except for three research libraries―the Bibliothèque Nationale, the library of the St. Sergius Institute, and the Turgenev Library― one cannot find a complete run of The Way in France.

At present, there is not a single monograph on The Way. There does exist a general index of the publications of the YMCA Press between 1941 and 1956, compiled by Fedor Pianov, which includes a chronological index of the issues of The Way. The latter was published in France by the Russian-American YMCA publishing house. In 1986, the Russian Academic Group, which held its meetings in the 1930s at the editorial office of The Way and later took refuge in the United States, commissioned A. P. Obolensky to prepare a subject index to The Way. It was published in New York that same year, prefaced by a three-page introduction.

In 1990, Marc Raeff, himself a son of Russian émigrés in Paris in the interwar period, devoted six pages to The Way in his Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration (1919– 1939). This is the first brief but comprehensive presentation of the journal. Raeff’s working hypothesis is that the Russian émigrés, who were knit together by their shared emotional experience of the Russian Revolution, formed a homogeneous society. This justifies a sociopolitical analysis of its origins, character, and cultural dynamics. Despite the many rifts within it, in Raeff’s view, the Russian émigrés of the interwar period were politically, culturally, and psychologically united. He recalls that two main questions hammered at the émigré consciousness, from New York to Vladivostok: “What brought on the Revolution? What is the future of the Communist system?” Clearly more interested in the sociopolitical aspects of the emigration than the intellectual ones, Raeff calls The Way “the most significant religious journal of the Russian emigration . . . representing the best that émigré life had to offer.” In the USSR, only the few individuals who were called upon to combat the emigration ideologically had access to The Way. It was kept in the special collections of the Communist Party, such as the Literary Archives of the Lenin Library in Moscow. Several issues of the journal turned up in Moscow during the “Thaw” and circulated secretly, primarily through ecclesiastical channels...

I want to present, for the first time, a synthesis of the articles it contained, while also providing a historical context to facilitate access not only for specialists but also for the wider public, who will now be able to consult this brilliant journal.

(Excerpted from introduction)