On Slavery and the Freedom of Man

The Russian religious and political philosopher, representative of Russian existentialism and personalism, Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) is one of the significant figures in the history of Russian philosophy. An active figure of the Silver Age, and then an inconvenient figure for the Soviet authorities, he was exiled from Russia on the "philosophical barge" in 1922 and lived in Europe thereafter. Towards the end of his life, in 1942-1948, he was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His philosophy of freedom remains a source of hope for us to this day, and the concept of a new medievalism, which Berdyaev was one of the first to develop, was discussed by the greatest thinkers throughout the 20th century and has not lost its relevance.
Freedom for Nikolai Berdyaev is the original state of man, having neither foundation nor limits, not subject to anyone, including God; freedom is what man needs to fulfill his essential callings - creativity and knowledge. "The personality is in its essence unyielding and disobedient; it is resistance, a continuous creative act," Berdyaev writes in his treatise "On Slavery and the Freedom of Man" - "the most radical, the most spiritually revolutionary of my books," as he explained himself. In addition to this work, the present collection includes the article "Salvation and Creativity" - Berdyaev's attempt to correlate Christian humility with the natural, necessary, and needing unconditional freedom impulse of man to create.