Motherland: a philosophical history of Russia Lesley Chamberlain Atlantic Books, 331pp, £25 ISBN 1843542854

Russian philosophy is a strange beast. For a start, most of it doesn't look like philosophy in the western sense at all. The problem of scientific knowledge, which has dominated European philosophy ever since Descartes, is conspicuous by its absence. Equally absent are the mathematical and logical preoccupations central to modern analytical philosophy. Indeed, the very notion of philosophy as an academic discipline, with its own technical jargon and standards of rigour, has never taken root in Russia. Russian philosophers have been journalists, novelists, landowners, revolutionaries and monks - but almost never university chair holders.

Lesley Chamberlain, herself a novelist and essayist, is clearly in sympathy with the amateurism of her subject. Motherland was originally going to be called The Good Man in Russia, making the point that philosophy in Russia is a moral calling rather than a profession. In a land without political parties, it fell to philosophers (and, indeed, novelists) to voice the suffering of the people. But they could not be just philosophers; theoretical speculation was always subordinate to more burning questions of social justice and national destiny. Detached contemplation seemed, in a land like Russia, tantamount to complacency. "Mankind has paid dearly," wrote the populist Pyotr Lavrov, "so that a few thinkers sitting in their studies could discuss its progress."

Another reason for Russia's philosophical oddity is the lack of a developed theological tradition. This lack can be described either positively, as a deliberate reticence in the face of mystery, or negatively, as a product of intellectual stagnation. Either way, subjects that in the west fell naturally to churchmen were in Russia the province of freelance litterateurs. The result was "religious thought", an open-ended, non-dogmatic and quintessentially Russian form of soul-searching. Russian religious thought enjoyed a brief vogue in the west following Lenin's banishment of its leading practitioners, but has since vanished into dusty libraries, probably never to re-emerge. In Russia, it has enjoyed a post-Soviet revival, but in a coarsened, politicised form. This is a shame, since thinkers such as Vassiliy Rosanov and Pavel Florensky are among the most interesting that Russia has produced.

Yet at the root of Russia's philosophical exceptionalism lies the fact that it never enjoyed an Enlightenment. From Descartes through to Kant, European philosophy was above all a "critique of reason". Its purpose was to test, strengthen and refine the methods of rational inquiry. Russia never passed through this hard school. When secular thought did finally reach its shores, it was in the form of democracy, socialism and nationalism, all of which were grafted directly on to a native religious Messianism. Russian thinkers lacked or scorned the intellectual tools that might have checked the excesses of moral enthusiasm. Hence their frequently noted naivety, a quality both appealing and disturbing to western readers. Chamberlain's quote from Thomas Nagel is apposite: "Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up."

Nineteenth-century Russian philosophy was not, in strictly theoretical terms, highly original. It drew heavily on European (and mostly German) models. First Schelling, then Feuerbach, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and, finally, the neo-Kantians provided it with its intellectual substance. Yet what is really interesting is the transformation undergone by these European ideas on arrival in Russia. Even when their content remained the same, their spirit was subtly altered. Detached from their native context of argument and research, they became something like articles of faith or magic incantations. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre famously envisages a society in which science survives in fragments, endlessly recited and debated but only partially understood. Such was the state of 19th-century Russian philosophy. The ideas were second-hand and often garbled, but they were lived with incomparable passion. "I have never met people," wrote the critic Vissarion Belinsky about himself and his friends, "with such a capacity for self-abnegation in the service of the Idea."

What is the best way to approach this strange beast? Clearly not in the form of a conventional history of ideas, as the ideas themselves are, for the most part, not that original or sophisticated. Much more interesting are the thinkers themselves. All Russian philosophy is explicitly or implicitly existential; it points back to the person of the philosopher, not forward to some abstract "system". It is no coincidence that Isaiah Berlin adopted the format of the short biographical essay for his work on Russian thinkers. And the best commentary on Russian philosophy is undoubtedly Russian literature. It is in the novels of Tolstoy, Turgenev and, above all, Dostoevsky that "the Idea" comes to life, takes on flesh and blood.

All the more disappointing, then, that Lesley Chamberlain has managed to inject so little personal life into Motherland. The failing is, in part, organisational: 284 generously spaced pages are not nearly enough to house the number of thinkers discussed (some 50 by my count). Individuals flit ghostlike across the page, never assuming firm contours. Anyone new to the subject will be bewildered by the chaos of strange names; experts will be disappointed by the thinness of the treatment. Superficiality is compounded by repetitiveness. It was surely an error to run through the history of the subject twice, first from a historical and then from a thematic angle. Disorganisation is a well-known feature of Russian thought, but there is no excuse for it in a foreign commentary.

Chamberlain's chief assets are a broad knowledge of European (in particular German) thought, and a fine, if sometimes errant, philosophical sensibility. Her forte is drawing subtle connections between widely different thinkers. Vladimir Solovyov is compared intriguingly to G E Moore and Iris Murdoch. A hidden Russian dimension is discovered in Isaiah Berlin's stolidly Anglo-Saxon concept of negative liberty. Possibly the best chapter in the book deals with the influence of Russian thought on German existentialism. However, Chamberlain is not entirely to be trusted. When it comes to the detail of philosophical (particularly western philosophical) argument, she often slips up. She makes no distinction between utilitarianism and hedonism, misidentifies post-Kantian idealism as a version of Counter-Enlightenment, and is under the mistaken impression that positive rather than negative liberty is at the root of western liberal individualism.

Quibbles aside, however, the real vice of Motherland is a kind of intellectual over-subtlety or dandyism, which contrasts unfavourably with the passionate seriousness of its subject. Just imagine a biography of Tolstoy written by Milan Kundera. The idea that Russian religious thought can be seen as a prefiguration of postmodernism is a case in point. Equally lacking in tact is the description of Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov as an "epistemological idyll" and a "deliberate answer to Hegel"; no novel should be subjected to such cack-handed treatment, particularly not one as charming and unpretentious as this. And it is never quite clear to what end all this heavy artillery is being deployed. The endless weave of reference conceals a lack of firm argumentative structure. There is a whiff of preciousness, of cultural ostentation about the whole thing. Motherland is a clever, civilised, but ultimately somewhat inconsequential book.

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