The issue of unconsciousness, correlated with the topic of a human’s sexual life, is one of the most significant philosophical trends in Nikolai Berdyaev. Focusing on this issue, the Russian thinker perceives the ambiguous assessment of psychoanalysis as the groundbreaking phenomenon of his times. Berdyaev’s attitude towards Sigmund Freud’s and Carl G. Jung’s theories oscillates between approval and negation, and is shaped on the plane of ontological deconstruction. According to Berdyaev, psychoanalysis allows people to realize the presence of gender energy as well as indicates the need for sublimation. However, the transformation of sex drive into the source of production is not possible without the spiritual principle – something that is not taken into consideration in psychoanalysis, which is, as Berdyaev claims, its greatest weakness.

Thinking of the earth as feminine derives from the oldest ideas as to the four rudimentary elements. Bipolarity, which is present in the take on the earth as an archetypical element, one giving life and finally absorbing it back, has not lost its relevance to this day. It is therefore myths, followed by philosophical considerations valuing the distinction between divine and human qualities, which have always been in conflict and cooperation, and these have marked the path Nikolai Berdyaev, the Russian religious thinker, takes. The problem of the nature of man’s gender is the fundamental issue of his philosophical anthropology. The stance represented by the author of The Meaning of the Creative Act is based on the conviction that the structure of the world constitutes two opposing elements, two opposing forces: good and evil, with good being linked to the male and evil to the female. The male to him is anthropological and personal, the female – cosmic and collective. One of Berdyaev’s most important beliefs is that the earth should be treated in a mystical sense as a principle female in matter and body. The driving force behind the world is the clash of both principles, the contact and interaction between the solar male and the terrestrial female. Through the prism of the cosmic battle of the genders, Berdyaev explains Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex, giving it a mystical- ‑symbolic dimension.

The article deals with two issues: (1) the research method of father Georges Florovsky used in his study entitled The Ways of Russian Theology (1937), which is regarded a classic in its genre, and (2) the practice of scientific research conducted with the use of this method. The article is supplemented with Florovsky’s opinions, expressed in letters to his brother Anton, a professor at the Charles University in Prague, concerning the scientific achievements of the authors and scholars whom he met with or whom he came to work with after his departure to the USA (1948). The content of this correspondence has remained hitherto unpublished.

The article discusses little-known facts from the lives of two great representatives of the Silver Age of Russian philosophy – Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov – referring to the period when both were ardent Marxists. It discusses the beginning of the academic career of both thinkers, the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the archives of Karl and Luise Kautsky in Amsterdam (International Institute of Social History) there are two Berdyaev’s letters to Kautsky regarding polemics about Marx and Marxism, which unfolded between them after Kautsky’s decision to publish in the pages of Die Neue Zeit an article by Berdyaev “F.A. Lange and Critical Philosophy in Its Relation to Socialism” (1900). This correspondence has probably become the catalyst for Berdyaev’s transition from ‛orthodox’ to ‛critical’ Marxism. On the other hand, Bulgakov’s letters to Kautsky (and those of his wife, Helena Tokmakova, to Luisa Kautsky) refer to the time of a research internship of Bulgakov in Berlin in the years 1898–1900. He then met Kautsky and Bernstein families, and engulfed himself in theoretical problems of Marxism. The text of the speech is accompanied by a translation into Polish and provided with comments on two Berdyaev’s letters to Kautsky (February and May 1900).

The starting point of the article is V. Ivanov’s epistolary statement and an expression included in it: “me, semper idem” as important for reflections on the question of “person and time.” Ivanov’s expression, considered within its context, was analysed taking into account other texts by the same poet (the poem Fio, ergo non sum, as well as others from the Prozrachnost’ cycle, author’s commentaries etc.), and S. Frank’s philosophical reflection and his idea of a person as a unity which encompasses continuing in time (“vremiaoblemlushcheje jedinstvo licznosti”). In analogous interpretation (lecture analogique) of both expressions included in the title of the article, two Paul Ricoeur’s conceptual categories were used: the idem identity and the ipse identity, as well as the thinker’s notion of their dialectic relationship. Referring to the European model of thinking about time (St. Augustine), taking into account its presence in Frank and Nikolai Berdyaev, author of the article considers two types of conceptualisations of the category of becoming, in its relation to the category of Being and the problem of transcending time in the reflections of the above- mentioned thinkers and in V. Ivanov’s poetry. Therefore, the article discusses situations in which a human as a person transcends the order of “horizontal” time, and in their existential experience enters the vertical dimension of Eternity (“moment-Eternity”). In relation to that, what turned out to be useful was another notional analogy: the concept of the “poetic moment” and “metaphysical moment” in Gaston Bachelard.