Vasilii Zenkovskii

Born July 4, 1881, in Proskurov, now Khmel’nitskii; died Aug. 5, 1962, in Paris. Russian religious philosopher and historian of philosophy.

Zen’kovskii became a professor of psychology in 1915 at the University of Kiev; in 1918 he became minister of religions in the government of Hetman Skoropadskii. In 1919 he joined the White emigration. He was a professor at the Russian Orthodox Institute in Paris from 1926. He was ordained in 1942.

Zen’kovskii’s religious views were formed entirely under the influence of the religious seekings of N. V. Gogol and L. N. Tolstoy and especially of the philosophical teachings of V. S. Solov’ev. His main works, most widely known in the West, are devoted to the history of Russian philosophy. He sees Russian philosophy’s genuineness and originality in its religious aspirations and in the predominance of historiosophic and ethicoanthropological themes. He thus reduces Russian philosophy, as a matter of fact, to its religious-idealistic tendency. He views Russian materialism as a perverted form of religious consciousness. Zen’kovskii was an ideological opponent of Marxism-Leninism.