1. Ivan Ilyin became a white emigre journalist, aligning himself with Slavophile beliefs and emerging as a key ideologue of the Russian All-Military Union.
89 Facts About Ivan Ilyin
1. 2.
Financial support from Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1938 allowed Ivan Ilyin to remain in Switzerland albeit barred from work or political engagement.
3.
Ivan Ilyin's writings echoed calls for heroism and moral aristocracy, while cementing his role as a proponent of Western Russophobia.
4.
Ivan Ilyin opposed federalism and neutrality, and disdained Western analytic philosophy.
5.
Ivan Ilyin was born in an aristocratic family claiming Rurikid descent.
6.
Ivan Ilyin's grandfather was a military man who moved to Moscow, where he became a civil engineer.
7.
Ivan Ilyin's father, Alexander Ivanovich Ilyin, was born and raised in the palace and a lawyer at the Moscow District Court.
8.
Ivan Ilyin was brought up in the center of Moscow in Khamovniki District.
9.
Ivan Ilyin was educated at the 1st Moscow Gymnasium in 1901 and entered the Law faculty of the Moscow State University but would rather have studied history.
10.
Ivan Ilyin wrote as well in German as in Russian and mastered Church Slavonic.
11.
Ivan Ilyin became a political radical during his student days and supported the freedom of assembly.
12.
Under influence of Pavel Novgorodtsev Ivan Ilyin became interested in the philosophy of law.
13.
In 1906, Ivan Ilyin graduated and married Natalia Nikolaevna Vokach in Bykovo.
14.
Ivan Ilyin was a translator, art-historian and niece of Sergei Muromtsev, a Kadet and chairman of the First Duma.
15.
Ivan Ilyin worked with Natalia on a translation of "Anarchism" by Paul Eltzbacher and a treatise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau which were never published.
16.
Ivan Ilyin moved to Western Europe studying the latest trends in European philosophy including: philosophy of life and phenomenology influenced by Husserl, who concentrated on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness; Scheler, who published "The Nature of Sympathy"; Fichte and Schelling on Absolute idealism.
17.
Meanwhile, Ivan Ilyin worked on his thesis "Crisis of rationalistic philosophy in Germany in the 19th century" which he never finished.
18.
Ivan Ilyin was known as being extremely intolerant towards Andrei Bely, who called him "mentally insane".
19.
Ivan Ilyin began to develop a career as a writer and public figure.
20.
Ivan Ilyin contributed to this with several lectures, the first of which was called "The Spiritual Meaning of the War".
21.
Ivan Ilyin believed that since Russia had already been involved in the war, the duty of every Russian was to support his country to the end.
22.
Ivan Ilyin warned the audience, about 2,600 people, "The revolution turned into self-interested plundering of the state".
23.
In February 1918 Ivan Ilyin gave a public lecture on patriotism: the lack among the Russian people of a mature legal consciousness.
24.
The money he had received, Ivan Ilyin said, was destined for publishing: "The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity".
25.
Ivan Ilyin was in the Butyrka prison dungeons for about a week but developed serious health problems; Ilyin seems to have developed bronchitis that needed treatment.
26.
Ivan Ilyin was released for lack of evidence and allowed to give lectures and defend his thesis.
27.
For three weeks Ivan Ilyin was bedridden; Novgorodtsev's apartment was searched on the eve of the defence.
28.
Ivan Ilyin was an opponent of the Russian spelling reform of 1918 and continued to use pre-reform spelling.
29.
Ivan Ilyin was again imprisoned in 1919, February 1920 and September 1922 for alleged anti-communist activity.
30.
Ivan Ilyin delivered a topical speech "Problems of Modern Legal Consciousness".
31.
Ivan Ilyin briefly cooperated with Nikolai Berdyaev on Russian Religious Renaissance but the philosopher of love moved to Paris and Novgorodtsev moved to Prague.
32.
In 1924, the Russian All-Military Union was founded; Ivan Ilyin met Pyotr Wrangel at Seeon Abbey, a center of anti-Bolshevik activities.
33.
Ivan Ilyin became part of Wrangel's inner circle; not every Russian was charmed by Wrangel's personality.
34.
In July 1924 Ivan Ilyin visited Italy for his health; his portrait of Benito Mussolini was sympathetic but not uncritical.
35.
Ivan Ilyin argued that war was sometimes necessary, but never 'just'.
36.
Ivan Ilyin became the unofficial ideologue of the White emigres who gathered in Paris.
37.
Between 1927 and 1930 Ivan Ilyin was a publisher and editor of the journal Russkiy Kolokol.
38.
Ivan Ilyin lectured in Germany and other European countries and would give 200 speeches.
39.
Ivan Ilyin confessed that he literally forced himself to read Lenin's works, the materials of party congresses and plenums, the Comintern, and the Soviet press.
40.
Ivan Ilyin spoke on "The World Crisis of Democracy" and lectured on the works of Remizov and Merezhkovsky.
41.
Ivan Ilyin denounced the racial policy of Nazi Germany and replied in a letter he had long wanted to retire and devote himself to science.
42.
In 1935, Ivan Ilyin spent much of the summer at a large dacha in rural Latvia that the artist Evgeny Klimov had rented.
43.
Ivan Ilyin went on to publish essays in the Berliner Kurier.
44.
Ivan Ilyin actively criticized in the press Alexander Lvovich Kazembek, a fascist or self-styled neo-monarchist.
45.
Ivan Ilyin applied for membership of the Reich Chamber of literature but he had a problem with obtaining an Aryan certificate because he did not know the identity of all his great-grandparents.
46.
From 1940 Ivan Ilyin resided stateless in the village of Zollikon near Lake Zurich and corresponded with the composer and pianist Nikolai Medtner.
47.
Ivan Ilyin published in local newspapers and lectured on Russian literature at folk high schools, which was not considered paid work.
48.
In 1946 Ivan Ilyin stated he was never a Hegelian, as he himself expressed in the introduction to the German translation of his theses, a revised version of "Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre".
49.
Ivan Ilyin did not describe this future very clearly, it is something bright, good, but blurry, according to the literary critic Alexander N Arkhangelsky.
50.
The Ivan Ilyin family owned a dairy farm 260 km from Moscow in Bolshye Polyany, where they spent the summers.
51.
Ivan Ilyin was executed and buried at Butovo firing range.
52.
Ivan Ilyin's cousin Mikhail Ivan Ilyin was an art historian, involved in the design of Dobryninskaya, a Moscow metro station.
53.
In summer 1906, Ivan Ilyin married Nataliia Nikolaevna Vokach.
54.
Ivan Ilyin's father was a Moscow attorney, and her uncle was a scholar of Roman law and an activist in the cause of constitutional government in Russia.
55.
Ivan Ilyin dedicated most of his principal works to Nataliia Nikolaevna.
56.
In exile, Ivan Ilyin argued that Russia should not be judged by what he called the Communist danger it represented at that time but should look forward to a future in which it would liberate itself with the help of Christian fascism.
57.
Ivan Ilyin thought that any state must be established as a corporation in which a citizen is a member with certain rights and certain duties.
58.
Therefore, Ivan Ilyin recognized the inequality of people as a necessary state of affairs in any country.
59.
Ivan Ilyin wrote that many Russians believed that private property and large estates are gained not through hard labor but through power and maladministration of officials.
60.
History, Ivan Ilyin believes, shows that the Russian people have always been prone to property redistribution and waited only for an opportunity to realize their aspirations.
61.
Ivan Ilyin derived the concept of law from the Hegelian idea of the spirit and asserted that:.
62.
Ivan Ilyin's ideal was a monarch who would rule for the good of the country, would not belong to any party, and would embody the union of all people, whatever their beliefs.
63.
Democratic elections, according to Ivan Ilyin, tend to elevate sneaky and evasive politicians.
64.
Ivan Ilyin repeatedly condemned the totalitarian state and emphasized the need to develop a form of 'legal consciousness' among the population.
65.
Ivan Ilyin left an unfinished work on monarchy, which used Hegel's concept of world history.
66.
Ivan Ilyin praised the Russian monarchy of the XIX century which he deemed consistent with his ideas and not absolute but essentially limited by religious and moral norms, and criticized Nicholas II for his abdication, eventually leading to the abolition of monarchy in Russia.
67.
On Monarchy and Republic was supposed to consist of twelve chapters but Ivan Ilyin died having written the introduction and seven chapters which were published in 1978.
68.
Ivan Ilyin can be exonerated of the charge of advocating holy war, although his position bears a resemblance to holy war in certain respects.
69.
One might object that Ivan Ilyin's call for an "ideologically liberal dictatorship" is a contradiction in terms because any talk of dictatorship negates liberalism.
70.
Ivan Ilyin elaborated these views in writings that were eventually published posthumously.
71.
In 1934, Ivan Ilyin stated he was "in no way sympathetic to either conversations or plans for the separation of Ukraine".
72.
Ivan Ilyin saw it as one of the reasons he lost his job at the institute.
73.
In 1938, in a short but significant article, Ivan Ilyin wrote: "Little Russia and Great Russia are bound together by faith, tribe, historical destiny, geographical location, economy, culture and politics", and predicted: "History has not yet said its last word".
74.
Ivan Ilyin disputed that an individual could choose their nationality any more than cells can decide whether they are part of a body.
75.
Ivan Ilyin looked at Mussolini and Hitler as exemplary leaders who were saving Europe by dissolving democracy.
76.
Ivan Ilyin noted the Nazi government's assault on the civil rights of German Jews but did not regard those measures as a sufficient reason for calling the entire German fascist project into question.
77.
When he was asked to join the anti-Jewish propaganda Ivan Ilyin refrained from following it.
78.
Ivan Ilyin initially saw Adolf Hitler as a defender of civilization from Bolshevism and approved of the way Hitler had, in his view, derived his anti-communism and antisemitism from the ideology of the Russian Whites.
79.
Attempts to identify him as 'Putin's philosopher' by citing selective quotations from Ivan Ilyin are usually misleading.
80.
Ivan Ilyin's thought never manifested such signal features of fascism as populism, totalitarianism, racism, anti-Semitism, thuggery, or the politics of hysteria.
81.
Ivan Ilyin considered that fascism had some positive characteristics, as well as some negative ones, but to be a Western European ideology and as such inappropriate for Russia.
82.
Sometimes his name is surprisingly absent from descriptions of events in which Ivan Ilyin was an active participant, or his role is not considered in enough detail.
83.
In Russia's political culture today, Ivan Ilyin enjoys popularity among nationalists and authoritarians who admire his emphatic patriotism and his calls for strong state power in Russia.
84.
Ivan Ilyin's views influenced Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Aleksandr Dugin, before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
85.
Ivan Ilyin authored several articles about Ilyin and came up with the idea of transferring his remains from Switzerland to the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow, where the philosopher had hoped to find his resting place.
86.
Ivan Ilyin has been quoted by Russian President Vladimir Putin in his speeches on various occasions, and is considered by some observers to be a major ideological inspiration for Putin.
87.
Putin decreed moving Ivan Ilyin's remains back to Russia, and in 2009 consecrated his grave.
88.
Ivan Ilyin was quoted or mentioned by Dmitry Medvedev, Sergey Lavrov, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, Vladislav Surkov, and Vladimir Ustinov.
89.
Under Lenin, all of Ivan Ilyin's works were removed from libraries and destroyed; under Stalin, readers of his material were shot for reading and distributing his works; under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, they were imprisoned.