Nikolai Berdyaev 1874 – 1948

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev was a Russian religious-existentialist philosopher. After early involvement with Marxism and a brief imprisonment under the Tsar, he turned to Christianity, was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922 on the famous Philosophers' Ship, and spent the remainder of his life in Berlin and Paris. His central conviction is the absolute primacy of freedom and creativity in the human person, against any system that subordinates the individual to objectifying structures of thought, politics, or even being itself. His Slavery and Freedom and The Destiny of Man are central works.

Nikolai Berdyaev was born in 1874 in Kiev, the son of a cavalry officer of the lesser nobility. After expulsion from his Marxist student circle and a brief Vologda exile he abandoned the materialist Marxism of his youth for a Christian metaphysics of freedom, and joined the celebrated Vekhi (Landmarks) symposium of 1909 in which a group of former Marxists turned to religious philosophy.

After the Bolshevik Revolution he founded a Free Academy of Spiritual Culture in Moscow but was arrested twice and in 1922 was deported on the famous 'philosophers' steamer' with Bulgakov, Frank, and other intellectuals. From 1924 he lived in Clamart, outside Paris, edited the journal Put' and the YMCA-Press, and produced the books for which he is best known: The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916), The Meaning of History (1923), The Destiny of Man (1931), Slavery and Freedom (1939), The Russian Idea (1946), and the autobiographical Self-Knowledge (1949).

Berdyaev placed creative human freedom at the heart of Christian metaphysics, distinguishing between the objectivized world of necessity and the inner world of personality, and developed a Christian personalism that took seriously the social and cultural dimensions of redemption. He became, in Russian emigration, perhaps the most widely read Russian religious philosopher of his century in the West. He died at his desk in Clamart in March 1948.