The author examines the philosophical discussions, especially on nationalism during the First World War, which were reported in St. Petersburg’s religious and philosophical society. Whilst most of the debates in the society were a simple refutation of the culture and religious con-sciousness of belligerents, Merezhkovskii and Hessen, as exceptions to their contemporary philos-ophers, had a similar rational sense regarding the political catastrophes in 1914-1915. The main interest of these intellectuals, who had no insistence on the ethnic and cultural predominance of their fatherland over their warring nations, was the notion of nationalism. The purpose of their reading of a paper at the meeting of the society during the war was a negation of colleagues’ total absence of proper understanding of notions of culture and religion, which are not always relevant to the contemporary social and political conditions: a cause of nationalism, according to them.
The difficulty on this topic, which is still not well known in research history, is finding an agreement rather than estimating a variety of thoughts between two different types of intellectuals: a poet and philosopher. Hessen, as a philosopher, ceased from writing a typical philosophical ex-planation of cultural and historical notions after the First World War but turned his academic inter-ests to an invention of pedagogical foundations: practical fields. On the other hand, Merezhkov-skii’s devotion to his contemporary world provoked acute criticism and assimilated the poet with a philosopher such as Hessen. It should be noted that their plans of commitment to their contempo-rary society were not rooted in an epidemic patriotism but on the intention of disturbing it, contra-ry to their colleagues.