Abstract

In the article I discuss the influence of Pyotr Chaadayev’s thoughts contained in the first Philosophical Letter on Alexander Herzen’s concept. Chaadayev was openly intriguing, as despite general societal silence he spoke out against the Russian state oppressing an individual. I pay attention to the fact that Herzen’s attempt to defend an individual appropriated by abstraction (the state, God, ideology, progress) stems from the sources of Chaadayev’s concepts. Herzen revalues Chaadayev’s idea of Russia free from the burden of history, shifting the focus from historiography to philosophical anthropology. Each individual becomes part of it, as originally we are all deprived of history, its burden, every man thrown into the world is not ready, undefined, the past does not exist for him, just as the presence exists and the future opens potentially with multiple variants.