Description of the attraction
The house-museum of Nikolai Berdyaev, the great Russian religious and political philosopher, is located ten kilometers southwest of Paris, in the suburb of Clamart.
The Russian idealist Berdyaev was persecuted under the tsar, was imprisoned twice in the USSR, was personally interrogated by Dzerzhinsky and expelled from the country on a "philosophical steamer." In emigration, he wrote a number of works comparing world religious and philosophical teachings. The key role in his views belonged to freedom, in which he saw the only mechanism of creativity. Freedom is pleasing to God, but it is also capable, violating the "divine hierarchy of being", to generate evil. Christianity is a "religion of freedom". “I have a conviction that God is present only in freedom and acts only through freedom,” the philosopher wrote.
The scientist was in great need of emigration. In 1938 he received an inheritance - a house in the ancient sleepy Clamart. Now Nikolai Alexandrovich had a roof over his head, but the rest of the financial situation did not improve. During the German occupation, he was interrogated by the Gestapo, but did not persecute him - in the German command there was an expert in philosophy who knew the name of the thinker.
In 1948, Berdyaev died at his desk. He bequeathed the house to the Korsun diocese. There is a memorial plaque on the house now. Behind the fence is a small garden with a pond, a statue of a boy among the well-groomed bushes. Inside, the owner's study is preserved: a bookcase with his portrait, a worn armchair and a desk. On the table is a loose-leaf calendar open for March 24, the date of the philosopher's death. The old bookcases did not survive the test of time, but on the shelves there are volumes of the journals "The Way" and "Renaissance", which the scientist edited in exile.
The grave of Nikolai Berdyaev is located three kilometers from the house at the local cemetery. Carved at the base of a simple cross: Nicolas Berdiaev. In the same small churchyard - the graves of the Trubetskoy, Gagarin, Obolensky, Lopukhins.
The last dwelling of Nikolai Berdyaev is called the house-museum very conditionally - no excursions are conducted here, a visit must be made specially. The house number 83 on the rue Moulin de Pierre has no advertisements, and to find it, you have to wander around the town.
