The First Russian Hegel Translations (1856-1868) - From Reading to Translating
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Stankevich Circle had still read Hegel in German—a prerequisite met only by the educated elite. A broader reception required translations, and these emerged remarkably late.
The First Translation: The Philosophy of Right (1856)
The first complete Russian Hegel translation was of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, translated by Boris N. Chicherin and published in Moscow in 1856. The choice of this work was no accident: it was the most politically explosive of Hegel’s books, systematically developing the concept of the state and containing the famous formula “What is rational is actual”—the very formula over which the Stankevich Circle had already split.[1]
Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin (1828-1904) was a jurist and liberal political thinker, later a professor at Moscow University. His translation was more than philological labor—it was a political statement. At a time when Russia under Nicholas I suppressed any public discussion of state constitution, the translation made Hegel’s philosophy of the state accessible to a broader public. Chicherin himself, on this foundation, developed a liberal philosophy of law that shaped Russian constitutionalism.[2]
The Logic: The Core Piece Remains Untranslated
What was not translated is notable: the Science of Logic—the systematic core of Hegel’s philosophy—received a complete Russian translation only in 1929, as part of the Soviet complete edition. For over seventy years, Russian readers who wanted to study the Logic had to master German.
This gap is symptomatic. The Philosophy of Right was politically relevant, the Phenomenology existentially appealing, the Philosophy of History historically interesting. But the Logic—the work of which Lenin would later write that without it Capital remains incomprehensible—appeared too abstract, too difficult, too far removed from the pressing questions of the Russian intelligentsia.
This translation history reflects a fundamental tendency of the Russian reception of Hegel: people received the applications of Hegelian philosophy (to the state, history, society) more intensively than its logical foundations. The systematic penetration of the Logic, which Lenin demanded in his Philosophical Notebooks, remained the exception, not the rule.
The Encyclopedia and Further Works (1861-1868)
In the 1860s, after the death of Nicholas I and during the reforms of Alexander II, further translations appeared: parts of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1861), the Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1863), the Lectures on Aesthetics (1868). These translations for the first time enabled a broader Russian reception of Hegel beyond the small circles of intellectuals who read German.[3]
Translation work nevertheless remained fragmentary. Only the Soviet complete edition, beginning in 1929—with its systematic rather than chronological arrangement, starting with the Encyclopedia as “in every respect a completed, complete system of philosophy”—created the basis for comprehensive textual engagement with Hegel. This edition was, for all the ideological distortions of its accompanying commentary, an editorial achievement matched in the interwar period worldwide only by Germany and Japan. The irony of history: precisely the regime that suppressed free philosophical discussion created the textual conditions that such study would have required.
On the history of translation, see Dmitrij Tschižewskij: Hegel bei den Slaven, Reichenberg: Stiepel, 1934, pp. 278-292. ↩︎
On Chicherin: Predrag M. Grujić: Čičerin, Plechanov und Lenin: Studien zur Geschichte des Hegelianismus in Russland, Munich: Fink, 1985. ↩︎
On the chronology of the translations, see Andrzej Walicki: A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1979, pp. 408-410 (bibliography). ↩︎