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rejection of the split between men and women led him to embrace the androgyne, or man-woman, as the ideal personality. Each man and each woman would freely express both the masculine and the feminine characteristics they each embody. Merezhkovsky aimed not for the artificial merging of two selves but for an organic and indivisible sexual whole within each human being. His aesthetic sought to synthesize the polarities of the external world that reflected the splits within him (Rosenthal 1975, 36). To bridge the gap between real and ideal, Merezhkovsky embraced a form of mysticism that “absorbed all dichotomies, softened the hard edges of reality into a beautiful and harmonious unity” (226).

      Though some Symbolists opposed the Bolshevik Revolution and its Marxist materialism, their attempt to reconcile Nietzsche with Russian mysticism had contributed to the erosion of the old values and institutions. The Symbolists had uncovered a dimension in Nietzsche’s thought that served their cultic and collectivist desires to liberate the instincts and transcend the self. Their attacks on Christian slave morality would ultimately reinforce the atheism of their Bolshevik rivals.²³

      The impact of Nietzschean philosophy on Russian Symbolism was significant. But Nietzsche’s thought also influenced the Marxism of the Silver Age. The interpenetration of Nietzschean and Marxist thought was facilitated by their common Hegelian roots. Four important Nietzschean Marxists of the period were Stanislav Volsky, Anatoly V. Lunacharsky, Aleksandr A. Bogdanov, and Vladimir A. Bazarov. Even Maxim Gorky, the father of Socialist Realism, underwent a Nietzschean phase.

      The Nietzschean Marxists stressed the individual’s free will, desire, and creativity. They rejected Kant’s deontological ethics and viewed the proletariat as beyond good and evil. As George Kline (1969) explains, “The Nietzschean collectivists maintained that under socialism individuals would freely desire to subordinate their individual creativity to the creativity of the collective” (171).

      Stanislav Volsky argued that bourgeois society alienated the individual. Genuine individualism would not emerge until socialism was achieved. In the new society, “All obligatory norms … will eventually disappear” (172). Lunacharsky, Bogdanov, and Bazarov shared the same concern for the free individual. Like their philosophic predecessors, however, they embraced a Russian sobornost’ in which the individual is liberated through his dissolution “in an impersonal social collective” (177). These thinkers espoused a humanist religion in their early years and were known, appropriately, as the “God-builders.” Elevating human strength and potential to God-like status, they argued that in socialism, “man” would be the master of his own fate. Though Lenin rejected their secular religion, they had fully incorporated the Nietzschean-Dionysian principle of self-transcending collectivism into the corpus of their thought.²⁴

      NEO-IDEALISM AND THE RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS RENAISSANCE

      Nietzsche’s influence extended also to the Russian religious renaissance of the neo-Idealists. But it is more likely that the neo-Idealists absorbed Nietzschean and existentialist ideas from Dostoyevsky. Mihajlo Mihajlov suggests that Dostoyevsky had, in fact, made an impact on Nietzsche himself. Nietzsche’s notes and drafts in the winter of 1886–87 constantly refer to Dostoyevsky. Nietzsche also wrote abstracts of several of Dostoyevsky’s works.²⁵

      The neo-Idealists praised Dostoyevsky for his dialectical literary method. Each of Dostoyevsky’s characters embodies particular ideas. In their interplay, collisions, and encounters, certain of these ideas emerge victorious (Copleston 1986, 142). It is this literary method that deeply influenced Rand.²⁶

      Though traces of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche may be found in the work of the neo-Idealists, it is also true that the ideas of these two seminal thinkers were preserved in the Russian tradition of philosophical synthesis. Such thinkers as Kozlov, Shestov, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Florensky, Frank, and Lossky had all been influenced by the thought of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Solovyov. Many of the neo-Idealists studied in Germany, working in the seminars of philosophers who represented the Freiburg and Marburg schools of Transcendental Idealism. Most of them strove to overcome Kant’s phenomenalism by attempting to link the knowing subject and the world in an organic unity.²⁷ They followed Hegel in seeking the identity of thought and being.

      The neo-Idealists had attempted to provide a genuine philosophical basis for religion. They began not with religious presuppositions, but with some of the more advanced ontological and epistemological theories of their day. They had accepted Solovyov’s critique of Western positivism and rationalism and his intuitivist theory of knowledge. In the words of Father Pavel Florensky, they grasped that “Truth as a living wholeness” could emerge only through the direct rational intuition of the objects of the external world. Florensky affirmed that the essence of religious experience was love, “because love means that an entity passes from the isolated separateness of A into the other, non-A, establishes its consubstantiality with it and consequently finds itself, i.e., A, in it” (Lossky 1951, 179–80).

      The neo-Idealists included in their number two genuinely original, systematic intuitivists, Semyon Frank and N. O. Lossky. I discuss Lossky’s thought in Chapter 2. At this point, it is valuable to examine some of the contributions of Frank, who was Lossky’s colleague at St. Petersburg University from 1912 to 1915. By 1921, Frank took the position of Chair of Philosophy at Moscow University.²⁸

      Like Lossky, Frank called his philosophical system “ideal-realism,” symbolic of his attempt to integrate apparent opposites. Rather than embracing a dualistic vision, Frank saw three levels of existence: the physical world of objects, the spiritual world of ideas, and an unobservable, mysterious sphere in which both the material and the spiritual were fully united.²⁹ True to the Hegelian tradition, Frank presented this vision of the world as a “metalogical unity.” He argued that this unity encompasses both A and not-A. It does not violate the law of contradiction; the law is “simply inapplicable to it” (Lossky 1951, 267). In this organic whole, both unity and plurality are subsumed. Frank preserved the Hegelian Aufhebung by advocating an “antinomic monodualism.” He argued that in negation, we both destroy and preserve “the connection between distinct, differentiated entities, and thus ascend to the universal ‘yea,’ to the all-embracing acceptance of being, including the negative relation as well as that which is negated” (271).

      The vision of the world as an organic whole was not restricted to the religious Russian philosophers. Naturalists such as V. Karpov and K. Starynkevich saw each organism as connected to a whole. In analyzing a beehive, a forest, or a marsh, these thinkers viewed all life as part of an organic unity on earth stretching even into the cosmos (330). Other organicist visions were proposed by Gustav G. Shpet and Alexey F. Losev, who combined Hegelian and Husserlian insights to defend dialectical phenomenology and philosophical realism (Zenkovsky 1953, 834).

      RUSSIAN MARXISM

      Most significant of all the nonreligious organicist conceptions however, was Russian Marxism.³⁰ The Russian Marxist intellectual movement drew from the messianic tradition of the Slavophiles, putting forth a secularized, proletarianized version of sobornost’.³¹ This ideological amalgam had inherent problems of internal consistency but it did not depart from any of the essential organicist and antidualist characteristics of Russian philosophy.

      Part of the reason for the fundamental agreement of Marxism with its Russian counterparts is their common philosophical roots. Marx, like many Russian thinkers, was influenced by Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hegel. Bertell Ollman (1993) argues that these thinkers shared a belief “that the relations that come together to make up the whole get expressed in what are taken to be its parts. Each part is viewed as incorporating in what it is all its relations with other parts up to and including everything that comes into the whole” (35). Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hegel had differing conceptions of the parts. For Leibniz, the parts were monads. For Spinoza, the parts were modes. For Hegel, the parts were ideas. But the logical form of the relation between the parts and the whole was the same (ibid.).

      Marx inherited this dialectical tradition. But he transcended the tendency to dissolve all things into their relations. As Sidney Hook observes, Hegel had embraced a strict organicity, in which “all of existence

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