The cross & the sickle

by Catherine Evtuhov

Catherine Evtuhov resurrects the brilliant and contradictory currents of turn-of-the-century Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg through an intellectual biography of Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944), one of the central figures of the Silver Age. The son of a provincial priest, Bulgakov first served as one of Russia's most original and influential interpreters of Marx, and then went on to become the century's most important theologian of the Russian Orthodox faith. As Evtuhov recounts the story of Bulgakov's spiritual evolution, she traces the impact of seemingly opposed philosophical and religious worldviews on one another and on the course of political events. In the first comprehensive analysis of Bulgakov's most important religious-philosophical work, Philosophy of Economy, Evtuhov identifies a "perceptual revolution" in Russian thinking about economy, a significant contribution to European-modernist thought which both shaped and grew out of contemporary debates over land reform. She recons