Historiosophical reflections by Leonid Borodin in his autobiographical narrative “Without a choice”

The article examines Leonid Borodin’s historiosophical ideas stated in his autobiographical narrative “Without a choice”. It is shown that according to Leonid Borodin, the comprehension of the Russian history and the world history meaning was an existential effort rather than an abstract thought. Leonid Borodin’s historiosophical thought was hard won through his personal spiritual searches and coming to Orthodoxy. Therefore, it continued the tradition of the great Russian philosophers by becoming congenial to them and having risen up to their level. The spiritual logic of history, which requires spiritual and philosophical culture for its fundamental understanding, was discovered by Leonid Borodin thanks to the restoration of connection with the Russian philosophy of the Silver Age. The catastrophic lapse of a large portion of the people into the “satanic abyss” in the twentieth century can be explained precisely by the fact that it was basically caused by a religious deception and temptation rather than by a naive belief in the bright future. Namely, this is the obsession with pride, which does its best to “rebuild the world”. The internal spiritual and existential foundations of the philosophical understanding of the history by Leonid Borodin are also featured here. These are: 1) the thinking — free and seeking — and at the same time strict and heroic; 2) it is based on the highest spiritual comprehension of the truth, always associated with the mystical penetration into the flesh of history rather than on rational constructions of the mind (they are set up later as a result). Leonid Borodin had to resist this type of “dissidents” — Russophobes — even more fundamentally than the Soviet regime itself, since they became enemies of the Soviet regime not because of love for Russia, but, on the contrary, because of hatred for the country rather than for the regime. Leonid Borodin’s, just like Konstantin Leontiev’s, historical thinking was based not on some predefined schemes, but, first of all, on the aesthetic, full-blooded penetration into this meaning, “letting it pass through yourself”, experiencing it internally as a personal tragedy and personal fate, through which both the fate of the people in the twentieth century and the Christian meaning of the Russian history in general became clear.

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