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Catherine Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle. Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890-1920. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, x + 278 pp., L33.50.
SERGEI BULGAKOV'S REPUTATION HAS TENDED TO BE OVERSHADOWED by other figures in the liberal and religious philosophical circles in which he initially moved. Where Berdyaev and Struve have attracted scores of studies, Bulgakov's work has rarely even been reprinted, let alone extensively written about. For this reason alone Evtuhov's book would have been welcome. She has meticulously combed through Bulgakov's extensive oeuvre and, particularly for the English-speaking reader, made many of his ideas much more accessible. The picture that emerges shows how distinctive Bulgakov's ideas were. In particular, his early Marxismwhich, Evtuhov argues, following his autobiography, derived from his observations of the poverty and hardship of the life of peasants and the urban lower classes he observed during his childhood in the depths of Orel province-left a major imprint in that his later religious ideas were predicated on the role of labour in human society. For Bulgakov, Evtuhov claims, the 'economy was "man's struggle with the elemental forces of nature in order to defend and expand the sphere of life", . . . or, more simply, economy was the activity of labour' (p. 146). This opened up, for Bulgakov, a whole range of consequences which resulted...