Russian emigre theologians in Paris from 1920s through WWII

The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and Their Journal, 1925-1940 Antoine Arjakovsky Translated by Jerry Ryan ● Edited by John A. Jillions and Michael Plekon ● Foreword by Rowan Williams In the summer of 1922, Soviet leaders Lenin and Trotsky expelled a number of progressive intellectuals who were leaders in the […]

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

Antoine Arjakovsky

Translated by Jerry Ryan ● Edited by John A. Jillions and Michael Plekon ● Foreword by Rowan Williams


In the summer of 1922, Soviet leaders Lenin and Trotsky expelled a number of progressive intellectuals who were leaders in the renaissance of religious and philosophical thought then underway in Russia. The “philosophers’ boat,” as it came to be called, took such luminaries as Nicholas Berdyaev, Simon Frank, Sergius Bulgakov, and Nicholas Lossky first to Istanbul, then by stages to Prague, some to Berlin and Belgrade, then to Paris, with a few eventually ending up in New York and Boston. In the years between the wars, the émigrés turned their “Russian Paris” into a bazaar of fascinating creativity and dynamism in the arts, humanities, and politics. Once in Paris, Berdyaev established a journal which he named Put’—“The Way”—using the name of a progressive review back in Russia. In its pages, the legacy of pre-Revolutionary debates, in which aesthetics, politics, and theology mingled freely, was displayed in a lively philosophical mix alien to Western readers.

Antoine Arjakovsky takes The Way and its diverse contributors as the coordinates for his masterful assessment of what these Russians—many Orthodox Christians—brought from their tradition and experiences to the West. In the first sustained study of the Russian émigré intellectuals who were associated with The Way, Arjakovsky situates the entire generation in a broad historical and intellectual context. He provides assessments of Berdyzev, Bulgakov, Florovsky, Nicholas and Vladimir Lossky, Mother Maria Skobtsova, and Afanasiev, and compares their philosophical agreements and conflicts. He examines their intense commitment to freedom, their often contentious struggles to bring the Christian tradition as experienced in the Eastern Church into conversation with Christians in the West, and their distinctive contributions to Western theology and ecumenism. Arjakovsky also charts the relationships the émigré thinkers established with significant Western theologians such as Jacques Maritain, Yves-Marie Congar, Henri de Lubac, and Jean Daniélou, who provided the intellectual underpinnings of Vatican II.

“In this welcome and deeply stimulating book . . . Professor Arjakovsky has offered a treasury of material . . . as well as . . . a story of extraordinary intellectual adventure in the most challenging of circumstances.” —from the Foreword by Rowan Williams

“The journal The Way was the heartbeat of the Russian religious intelligentsia from 1925 until the end of World War II, and no more creative band of religious thinkers existed anywhere in the world at the time than this small group of Russians coordinated by the indefatigable Berdyaev. This book is an extraordinarily rich study that deserves to be widely known. Its subject is of the first order of importance for modern intellectual history.” —Paul Valliere, Butler University

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.

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

Antoine Arjakovsky

Translated by Jerry Ryan ● Edited by John A. Jillions and Michael Plekon ● Foreword by Rowan Williams

Publication Date: October 25, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-268-02040-8 / Paperback $65.00

ISBN: 978-0-268-07474-6 / Ebook Perpetual Ownership, $45.50; Ebook 30-day Ownership, $7.00

To order: http://undpress.nd.edu/book/P01526

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