NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY RESEARCH INITIATIVE IN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE, AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

Evil in Russian Thought and Literature

St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, July 31–August 2, 2025

Do we still need the concept of evil? War, atrocity, disease, and hatred are constant characteristics of human life, but different eras and cultures have offered widely different explanations for them. How a community accounts for the reality of such phenomena reveals a great deal about its beliefs and values.

Western thinking has been shaped by a Judeo-Christian inheritance that approaches “the problem of evil” as a theological dilemma, framing suffering in terms of sin and humanity’s relationship to the divine. This inherited religious framework for thinking about what is wrong with the world was challenged by the transformations wrought by the Enlightenment. Western thought since then has been characterized by a narrowing of focus. Kant altered the map by training our attention on moral rather than natural evil, reframing the issue as a task for anthropology and religion.

But there has been a broadening of focus as well. There are now multiple discourses, from medicine to social science, authorized to provide explanations for everything from war to crime to child abuse. Although they are sometimes in competition, these modern discourses seek to replace evil with other explanatory concepts, creating the impression that evil has been left behind as no longer valid or useful. But is this really the case? Have post-Enlightenment replacements for evil made the concept irrelevant? The twenty-first century has witnessed reconsideration of evil among some Western thinkers, with works such as Evil: A History (Oxford UP, 2019) outlining an “evil revivalism” in some circles.

This conference seeks to gather perspectives on how Russian thought and literature have engaged with the question of evil, specifically its continuing validity or obsolescence. We welcome papers that raise questions such as: What have Russian thought and literature contributed to our understanding of evil? How have Russian thinkers and artists reflected on the strengths and weaknesses of evil as an explanatory framework, and on the ideas and discourses that have arisen to challenge it? Are there distinctively Russian aspects to their reflections, and to what extent do these reflections on evil demonstrate engagement with other cultural traditions? What changes have Russian philosophy, religion, or literature undergone over time as they have grappled with the question of evil?

Lev Shestov: Religious Existentialism in Russian and European Thought

Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow, Poland, 2–4 June 2025

On 2–4 June 2024 the Krakow Meetings on Russian Philosophy and the Northwestern University Research Initiative in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought will sponsor a conference on Lev Shestov (Schwarzman) (1866–1938) and religious existentialism in Russian and European thought. The conference will be held at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow, Poland.

The Polish writer Czesław Miłosz used the phrase “the purity of despair” to characterize Shestov’s philosophy. He was echoing the words of Nicolas Berdyaev, who wrote that “for Lev Shestov human tragedy, the terrors and sufferings of human life, the experience of hopelessness were the source of philosophy.” In 1900 Berdyaev and Shestov became lifelong friends. After the Russian Revolution they settled in Paris, where they became the main Russian founder-philosophers of “religious existentialism.” Shestov’s book Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy (1936) appeared two years before Karl Jaspers’s Philosophy of Existence and several years before the French Catholic thinker Gabriel Marcel coined the term “existentialism” in 1943. Shestov’s preoccupation with existentialist themes began with his early works on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche (1900, 1903). It culminates with his last book, Athens and Jerusalem (1938), which contrasts biblical faith and revelation to Greek philosophical rationalism, with its ordered cosmos, made comprehensible by necessary, universal laws. His implacable critique of rationalism opened the way for an existential philosophy based on concrete personal experience.

Shestov’s work lies at the crossroads of some of the main directions in contemporary European thought: existentialism (in its religious and atheistic forms), phenomenology, and personalism. His interlocutors included Husserl, Heidegger, and Buber. Papers are invited on any aspect of his legacy and on his Russian and European contexts and connections.

Celebrating Gary Saul Morson: Humanistic Traditions in Russian Thought and Literature

Northwestern University, Evanston, April 19–20, 2024

The second annual conference of the Northwestern University Research Initiative in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought (NU RPLRT Research Initiative) will be held at Northwestern University on April 19–20, 2024. The conference, Celebrating Gary Saul Morson: Humanistic Traditions in Russian Thought and Literature, will honor a preeminent scholar, searching public intellectual, and beloved Northwestern University professor.

Gary Saul Morson is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1986. In 1995 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books include The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s “Diary of a Writer” and the Traditions of Literary Utopia; Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in “War and Peace”; Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (co-authored with Caryl Emerson); Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time; “Anna Karenina” in Our Time: Seeing More Wisely; Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us (co-authored with Morton Schapiro); and, most recently, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter.

Papers are invited on any aspect of Morson’s rich oeuvre and wide-ranging interests in Russian thought and literature and in the “perennial questions” of human existence. In addition to formal papers, other forms of participation are welcome, including roundtables, talking points, or conversation. We request that you confirm attendance via email by January 1, 2023 and submit paper abstracts by January 15, 2024. Please write to Susan McReynolds (s-mcreynolds@northwestern.edu), Randall Poole (rpoole@css.edu), or Bradley Underwood (bradleyunderwood2025@u.northwestern.edu).

Religion, Human Dignity, and Human Rights: New Paradigms for Russia and the West. A Conference in Honor of Nikolai Berdyaev at 150

Hamilton Center, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, November 1–3, 2024

The history of religious anti-humanism in the West and in Russia has led to the view that human rights both originate in and are best supported by secular humanism. Human rights, in this reading, arose in early modern Europe against the absolutist alliance of church and state and against the religious wars of the era. But there is a competing genealogy of human rights, one locating their origins in religious ideas, traditions, and institutions, whether in late medieval and early modern Europe, in Protestant North America, or in Christian and Jewish Russia.  

The Hamilton Center at the University of Florida and the Northwestern University Research Initiative in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought are jointly sponsoring a conference in honor of the 150^th birthday of Nikolai Berdyaev, a Russian émigré who brought to Europe a Russian religious philosophy of personalism extolling human freedom, dignity, and rights. His ideas were developed in engagement with European philosophers, notably the Catholic personalist Jacques Maritain. In 1937, just before Maritain’s turn to human rights (which was directly prompted by Pope Pius XI), Berdyaev’s book The Destiny of Man appeared in English translation. In it he wrote, “The only political principle which is connected with absolute truth is the principle of the subjective rights of the human person.”

We invite papers exploring any aspect of religion, dignity, and rights in Russia and/or the West, from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Conference participants should consider the option to produce papers suitable (in their final form) for publication in an eventual edited volume.

Please send paper proposals or inquiries to Ana Siljak (ana.siljak@ufl.edu), Randall Poole (rpoole@css.edu), or Bradley Underwood (bradleyunderwood2025@u.northwestern.edu). Proposals should be submitted by June 1, 2024.

What’s New about the New Atheism? The Enduring Relevance of Russian Philosophy

Northwestern University, Evanston, April 21–23, 2023

The NU RPLRT Research Initiative fosters scholarship about the global relevance of Russian philosophy, literature, and religious thought. Our inaugural conference will take place at Northwestern University in April 2023. It will focus attention on how Russian writers—artists, philosophers, and religious thinkers—have reflected on the fate of the transcendent in modernity. We invite papers exploring any aspect of this topic, including the role of faith and reason in human self-understanding, in social philosophy, and in the search for an integral worldview. Conference participants should aim to produce papers suitable (in their final form) for publication in Northwestern University Studies in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought, an online platform that will exist in two forms, an annual journal and a “research series” for works longer than journal articles.