N.M. Karamzin and P.Ya. Chaadaev: historiographical and historiosophical heritage in context of problem of Challenge and Response

Extraordinary public resonance, which accompanied the appearance of ''Vekhi'' in 1909, compels to pay attention to texts that created the high-power polemical field too, which may be compared with the collected articles about the Russian intelligentsia in intensity and continuance of effect. The significant two are The History of the Russian State by N.M. Karamzin and Philosophical Letters by P.Ya. Chaadaev. Two problems unite these texts: the problem of faith as the moral base of society improvement and the problem of peculiarity of the historical way and the future fate of Russia. N.M. Karamzin created the most read research about the history of his country, P.Ya. Chaadaev produced the most loud refutation of its significance in the context of the world history. Both Karamzin and Chaadaev supposed that without knowledge of history self-determination is impossible not only for an individual, but for whole nations. Chaadaev's theses about the necessity to understand the moral sense of the distinguished historical epochs exactly define features of each century according to laws of practical reason, which reproduced the terminology of I. Kant, may be imagined in The History of the Russian State. The problem of retardation of Russia in the sphere of civil education was the central both for the historian and for the philosopher. In Karamzin's and Chaadaev's systems of values the ethical values occupied higher place, than political ones. But if Karamzin had no doubts in positive influence of Orthodoxy for the Russians and the Russian state, Chaadaev accused Orthodoxy of being unable to direct the moral formation of his compatriots. Both Karamzin and Chaadaev attached great significance to the ethical foundations of everyday life, to the organization of private life of each member of society. At the beginning of the 20th century in the book devoted to Chaadaev historian M.O. Gershenson attempted to oppose religious and ethical values his hero formerly wrote to the political revolutionism. Gershenson's article ''Creative self-consciousness'' published in ''Vekhi'' was composed under the influence of Chaadaev's criticism of the contemporaneity and contemporaries. Gershenson's characterization of the style of life, which was inherent in the Russian intelligentsia at the threshold of the centuries, was a keen contrast with Karamzin's style of life and was apprehended as ''reductio ad absurdum'' of imperfections described by Chaadaev. ''Vekhi'', which was created owing to the initiative of M.O. Gershenson, was an attempt to measure the realities of the contemporaneity according to Karamzin's and Chaadaev's ways. In this interaction of texts each Response was a Challenge and each Challenge was a Response.

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