Philosophical letters

P.Ya. Chaadaev for a long time remained famous for the Russian reader for one single publication, which became a challenge to public consciousness. In 1836, the first of his “Philosophical Letters” was printed in the magazine Telescope. The Gorky Cepticism sounded in them regarding the excretion of Russia from the “worldwide education of the human race” and “spiritual stagnation, which impedes the execution of the historical mission, which was intended from above”, caused the anger of Nicholas I. The magazine was closed, the editor was exiled, the censor was dismissed from the service, and the author was declared crazy. Chaadaev’s works in Russia were prohibited to print: they were “inconvenient” for official ideology. And only at the beginning of the twentieth century his creative heritage gradually began to return to Russian readers. The unusual fate of this outstanding thinker has always attracted great attention to the historians of Russian philosophy. As Archpriest V. Zenkovsky wrote, he was more fortunate in this respect than anyone else