LAUSR

‘Kant and the Kingdom of Ends in Russian Religious Thought’. There Poole analyses very closely Vladimir Solov’ev’s great reliance on Kantian categories. I was equally struck by the recurrence of the imagery of ‘the heart’ across some of the papers (specifically the chapters by Ruth Coates and Oliver Smith), where it is discussed in the context of Hesychast practice, for example, and of the thought of Pamfil Yurkevich, who placed particular emphasis on the role of the heart in religious and philosophical reflection. The bringing together of mind and heart in and through prayer continues to stand as a potent representation of well-integrated living, to which generations of monks, nuns and lay believers in Russia have aspired. This well-integrated living is not, of course, the end goal of monks’, nuns’ and lay believers’ aspiration, but rather, a telling external manifestation of a deepening of their inner journey to God. It is also fitting that, in any collection devoted to philosophical thought in Russia, there be at least one essay highlighting aesthetics and conflicting notions of beauty. Here, we have Martha Kelly’s absorbing analysis of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which considers in detail the way that he structured the novel so as to bring out his own understanding of the regenerative role of art and, also, for himself and in reaction to Tolstoy, the primacy of art over philosophy. The level of discussion in the essays is absorbing, consistent and very impressive. Young scholars, such as Scott Kenworthy, Vanessa Rampton and Martha Kelly, are well represented among the contributors. It is truly striking how much solid research in the field is being brought together and published. Here, it would be worth singling out the recent work of Katya Tolstaya (Free University, Amsterdam), who has carried out much recent fieldwork in Russia on contemporary religious belief and is the editor of a collection of conference papers under the title Orthodox Paradoxes: Heterogeneities and Complexities in Contemporary Russian Orthodoxy (Brill, 2014), which could well stand as a companion to the volume reviewed here. The present collection is dedicated to the memory of one of its young and uncommonly gifted contributors, Oliver Smith, who, just days after submitting his chapter to the editors, suffered a fatal fall while climbing in mountains on the Isle of Skye.