Ivan Alexandrovich was born on March 28, 1882 in Moscow, Russia Federation. His father, Alexander Ivanovich Ilyin, had been born and spent his childhood in the Grand Kremlin Palace since Ilyin's grandfather had served as the commandant of the Palace.
Ivan Ilyin was brought up also in the centre of Moscow not far from the Kremlin in Naryshkin Lane.
In 1901 he entered the Law faculty of the Moscow State University. Ilyin generally disapproved of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and did not participate actively in student political actions. While a student Ilyin became interested in philosophy under influence of Professor Pavel Ivanovich Novgorodtsev (1866-1924), who was a Christian philosopher of jurisprudence and a political liberal. In 1906 Ilyin graduated with a law degree, and from 1909 he began working there as a scholar.
In 1911, Ilyin moved for a year to Western Europe to work on his thesis: "Crisis of rationalistic philosophy in Germany in the 19th century". He then returned to work in the university and delivered a series of lectures called "Introduction to the Philosophy of Law". In total, he lectured at various schools for 17 hours a week. His thesis on Hegel was finished in 1916 and published in 1918.
In 1914, after the breakout of World War I, Professor Prince Evgeny Trubetskoy arranged a series of public lectures devoted to the "ideology of the war". Ilyin contributed to this with several lectures, the first of which was called "The Spiritual Sense of the War". He was an utter opponent of any war in general but believed that since Russia had already been involved in the war, the duty of every Russian was to support his country. Ilyin's position was different from that of many Russian jurists, who disliked Germany and Tsarist Russia equally.
In 1918, Ilyin became a professor of law in Moscow University, his scholarly thesis on Hegel was published.
After April 1918, Ilyin was imprisoned several times for alleged anti-communist activity. His teacher Novgorodtsev was also briefly imprisoned. In 1922, he was eventually expelled among some 160 prominent intellectuals, on the so-called "philosophers' ship".
From 1922 to 1938 he lived in Berlin. He had a German mother and wrote as well in German as in Russian.
Between 1923 and 1934 Ilyin worked as a professor of the Russian Scientific Institute in Berlin. He was offered the professorship in the Russian faculty of law in Prague under his teacher Pavel Novgorodtsev but he declined. He became the main ideologue of the Russian White movement in emigration and between 1927 and 1930 was a publisher and editor of the Russian-language journal (Russkiy Kolokol, Russian Bell). He lectured in Germany and other European countries.
In 1934, the German Nazis fired Ilyin and put him under police surveillance. In 1938 with financial help from Sergei Rachmaninoff he was able to leave Germany and continue his work in Geneva, Switzerland. He died in Zollikon near Zürich on December 21, 1954.
Starting from his 1918 thesis on Hegel's philosophy, he authored many books on political, social and spiritual topics pertaining to the historical mission of Russia. One of the problems he worked on was the question: what has eventually led Russia to the tragedy of the revolution? He answered that the reason was "the weak, damaged self-respect" of Russians. As a result, mutual distrust and suspicion between the state and the people emerged. The authorities and nobility constantly misused their power, subverting the unity of the people. Ilyin thought that any state must be established as a corporation in which a citizen is a member with certain rights and certain duties. Therefore, Ilyin recognized inequality of people as a necessary state of affairs in any country. But that meant that educated upper classes had a special duty of spiritual guidance towards uneducated lower classes. This did not happen in Russia.
A number of Ilyin's works (including those written after the German defeat in 1945) advocated fascism. Ilyin saw Hitler as a defender of civilization from Bolshevism and approved the way Hitler had, in his view, derived his antisemitism from the ideology of the Russian Whites.
Although Ilyin was related by marriage to several notable Jewish families he was accused of antisemitism by Roman Gul, a fellow émigré writer. According to a letter by Gul to Ilyin the former expressed extreme umbrage at Ilyin's suspicions that all those who disagreed with him were Jews.
Quotations: "It is impossible to build the great and powerful Russia on any hatred: not on social class hatred (social-democrats, communists, anarchists), nor on racial hatred (racists, antisemites), nor on political hatred."
