19th century
Napoleon. Marx. Nietzsche. Three time bombs
What happened — and why
Napoleon and the end of the old world
Napoleon conquers Europe, spreads the ideas of the revolution, and topples feudalism. He is beaten at Waterloo. The Restoration follows.
The philosophical cause
Hegel — Hegel saw him at Jena in 1806: "the world-spirit on horseback." For Hegel, Napoleon is the embodiment of historical necessity.
Hegel builds a system: History moves through contradictions toward freedom. Marx will take this scheme and turn it upside down.
Marx: "A specter is haunting Europe" (1848)
The revolutions of 1848 sweep across Europe. Marx publishes the "Communist Manifesto."
The philosophical cause
Marx — Hegel: history moves dialectically. Marx: the engine is not spirit but class struggle. Capitalism carries within it the seed of its own destruction.
Lenin reads Marx. The year 1917. The Gulag. Twenty million dead in the Soviet camps.
Nietzsche: "God is dead" (1882)
Nietzsche proclaims the death of the Christian God as a moral foundation. Europe itself killed him — but is not ready for the consequences.
The philosophical cause
Nietzsche — Darwin (1859): man is an animal. Science explains the world without God. Nietzsche takes this seriously and asks: what now?
The Nazis would steal the "superman" and the "will to power." Nietzsche himself hated nationalism and antisemitism. His sister falsified his texts.
Aleksey Khomyakov
Charles Darwin
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Nietzsche
Georgy Fedotov
Herbert Spencer
Ivan Kireyevsky
John Stuart Mill
Karl Marx
Konstantin Leontiev
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Maximilian Carl Emil Weber
Nikolai Berdyaev
Nikolai Fyodorov
Sigmund Freud
Søren Kierkegaard
Vladimir Solovyov
Ambrose of Optina
Janusz Korczak
John of Kronstadt
Nectarius of Optina
Saint Anatoly of Optina (Potapov)
Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov
Theophan the Recluse
Adam Mickiewicz
Alexander Griboyedov
Alexander Herzen
Alexander Kuprin
Alexander Odoevsky
Alexander Ostrovsky
Alexander Pushkin
Alexandre Dumas
Anton Chekhov
Arthur Rimbaud
Bolesław Prus
Charles Baudelaire
Charles De Coster
Charles Dickens
Charlotte Brontë
Edgar Allan Poe
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Tyutchev
George Gordon Byron
Gustave Flaubert
Guy de Maupassant
H. G. Wells
Hans Christian Andersen
Heinrich Heine
Henry James
Herman Melville
Honoré de Balzac
Innokenty Annensky
Ivan Goncharov
Ivan Krylov
Ivan Shmelyov
Ivan Turgenev
John Galsworthy
John Keats
Konstantin Batyushkov
Leo Tolstoy
Marie-Henri Beyle (Stendhal)
Mark Aldanov
Mark Twain
Mary Shelley
Mikhail Lermontov
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin
Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Leskov
Nikolai Nekrasov
O. Henry
Oscar Wilde
Paul Verlaine
Prosper Mérimée
Pyotr Vyazemsky
Robert Louis Stevenson
Rudyard Kipling
Sholem Aleichem
Vasily Zhukovsky
Victor Hugo
Vladimir Odoevsky
Walt Whitman
Wilhelm Küchelbecker
William Blake
William Makepeace Thackeray
Yevgeny Baratynsky
Yevgeny Chirikov
Émile Zola
Alexander Ivanov
Anselm Feuerbach
Arnold Böcklin
?
Camille Claudel
Claude Monet
Georges-Pierre Seurat
Grigoriy Myasoyedov
Gustave Moreau
Henri Rousseau
Ilya Repin
Isaac Levitan
Ivan Aivazovsky
Ivan Kramskoi
Ivan Shishkin
John Everett Millais
Mikhail Vrubel
Nikolai Ge
Paul Cézanne
Paul Gauguin
Vasily Polenov
Vasily Pukirev
Vasily Surikov
Viktor Vasnetsov
Vincent van Gogh
William Holman Hunt
Édouard Manet
