Few books could be a better, more incisive and captivating guide to the intellectual richness of an important historical period than Mikhail Epstein's history of Russian thought in the late Soviet period. While histories of philosophy can tend toward over-generalization or an immersion in detail from which there seems to be no gentle escape, Epstein's account strikes a sure balance throughout and evinces care and concision regarding the intricacies of the philosophical scene he sets out to describe and to recover for an international scholarly audience. This latter intention shines forth throughout the book, which shows commendable equanimity regarding the differing varieties of thought it covers.

The book is divided up into four principal sections, each dealing with a major aspect of Russian thought of the late Soviet period: 1) Vicissitudes of Soviet Marxism; 2) Neo-Rationalism, Structuralism, and General Methodology; 3) the Philosophy of Personality and Freedom; and 4) Culturology, or the Philosophy of Culture. Given that the book emphasizes, no doubt as a response to clichéd accounts of the Soviet intellectual scene, the latter's sheer heterogeneity, if not vibrancy, no matter how furtive, it is one of Epstein's signal achievements to have found an effective organizational structure for the book. Of course one might quibble with the categorization; still, Epstein's choices are well-grounded, generally convincing and illuminating. Indeed, one of the most variegated sections, by its very nature—that on the philosophy of personality and freedom—is eminently successful because Epstein shows at every turn a scrupulous awareness of the difficulty of the task he sets himself, and he subdivides the section with precision so as not to efface or distort the plurality of approaches discussed therein. I should add in this connection that Epstein also succeeds on this basic organizational level at building a bridge to a non-Russian audience trained in the standard histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy without sacrificing the original aspects of Russian thought, the contexts in which it arose and to which it responded.

As to specific thinkers, Epstein gives due place to those typically most known outside Russia, like Mikhail Bakhtin, Evald Ilyenkov, Alexei Losev, and Iurii Lotman. The absorbing fascination of the book, however, comes with Epstein's breadth of reference to other important figures who are far less well-known, though deserving of attention. Here Epstein's book becomes a treasure-trove of discovery, opening up a vault of riches that is vast and multi-leveled. While Merab Mamardashvili is gathering increasing attention outside of Russia, as evidenced by Alyssa DeBlasio's recent book, fascinating figures like Sergei Averintsev, Iakov Druskin, Georgii Gachev, and Mikhail Prishvin are given fine and sensitive treatments that do honor to the richness of their thought as well as the difficulties occasioning that thought and impelling it into specific generic choices. I name merely a few intriguing figures here, but there are many more: Genrikh Batishchev, Vladimir Bibler, and Georgii Shchedrovitsky are just a few examples with Bibler influencing Vladimir Bibikhin, another thinker gaining increasing attention outside Russia. In this sense, Epstein's book implicitly provides the outline of an immense research and translation project for an international group of scholars and thinkers seeking to expose original streams of thought whose orientations frequently depart from those dominant in the European philosophical tradition.

In this respect, Epstein's book shows the value of Russian thought as a creative response to European philosophy that does not feel bound by its conventions. This difference is particularly evident on the surface in the generic diversity of Russian philosophy, an observation that is by now virtually a commonplace. An arguably more interesting distinction arises from the stubborn love for and mistrust of philosophy that characterizes so many of the Russian thinkers. Epstein puts the point succinctly: “Russian philosophy may have been ‘derivative’ and ‘secondary,’ but what it was derivative of was not so much imported Western thought as the ideologically fabricated and fantastical reality of Russia herself. In Russia thought tried to confront the triumph of thought” (235). Epstein adds that this “self-contradictory movement of thought, shattering its own foundations, is what lends Russian philosophy its unprecedented, at times ‘suicidal’ character” (235). If one may associate this quality with the most daring experiments of Martin Heidegger and his acolytes in the west—itself a controversial thesis—there is little doubt that in this sometimes gentle, sometimes violent equivocation about the very virtue of thought as seeking a final account of the whole, lies the enduring fascination of Russian thinking.