Education
An ardent admirer of Hegel and Khomyakov, Samarin attended the Moscow University, where his teachers included Mikhail Pogodin.
An ardent admirer of Hegel and Khomyakov, Samarin attended the Moscow University, where his teachers included Mikhail Pogodin.
He came from a noble family and befriended Konstantin Aksakov from an early age. He later joined the government service and settled in Riga, where the well entrenched influence of Baltic German nobility exasperated him to such a degree that he urged the government to step up Russification activities in the region. This outburst of chauvinism led to his brief imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress.
(Samarin"s Slavophilism passed for Pan-Slavism, which was viewed by Nicholas I as a "rebellious doctrine").
In his latter years, Samarin continued to write copiously on national and "peasant" questions, advocating the step-by-step abolition of serfdom. After the January Uprising he advised Nikolai Milyutin to support Polish peasantry as the embodiment of "the Slavic soul" of Poland at the expense of "the forces of Latinism", id est (that is), rebellious nobility and Catholic clergy.
He died in Berlin of sepsis and was buried next to Khomyakov in the Danilov Monastery.