"VICTORY OVER DEATH-BEARING TIME has been the fundamental theme of my life," says Berdiaev in the introduction to his Spiritual Autobiography. (1) Composed during the last decade of his life, this retrospective narrative is, like everything that Berdiaev wrote, an essay in philosophical meditation. In his conception, memory is much more than the faculty of passive recollection. Instead, the act of remembrance seizes up the meaning of the lived past in a moment of creative vitality, assessing it in the urgency of a consciousness in contact with the eternal. Born in an aristocratic family in Kiev, Nikolai Berdiaev (1874-1948) lived through the cataclysmic events of the first half of a century whose aftershocks still haunt us. Witness to two world wars, he observed the destruction of established cultures in the traumatic birth of new worlds, having experienced three Russian revolutions from close-up. Four times arrested on political suspicion, first by the Imperial and then by the Bolshevik police, he died an exile after years of intense intellectual activity, at a philosophical distance from actuality. He was never more than a curious but unwelcome guest in history. He fearlessly engaged it on the level of ideas while remaining alien to its means and ends, gifted with an incurable longing for transcendence.
