Background
Nikolay Strakhov was born in Belgorod, Kursk Governorate in a priest family.
Nikolay Strakhov was born in Belgorod, Kursk Governorate in a priest family.
In 1851 Nikolay Strakhov graduated from Saint St. Petersburg Main Pedagogical Institute and became a teacher in Odessa.
In 1861 Nikolay Strakhov moved to Saint St. Petersburg and became a prominent publicist and literary critic. Nikolay Strakhov worked on the literary journals Time and Epoch together with Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Apollon Grigoryev. In the 1870s Nikolay Strakhov wrote his most famous philosophical work World as a Whole and was among the first (if not the first) to recognize Tolstoy"s War and Peace as one of the world"s greatest novels.
Nikolay Strakhov supported and encouraged young Vasily Rozanov to become a writer and philosopher.
Nikolay Strakhov was also one of the most prominent opponents of Liberalism, Rationalism and Utilitarianism in Russia, who contributed greatly to the development of traditionalist Slavophile ideology and its more conservative and nationalist variant known as Pochvennichestvo. Russian liberals bitterly resented Nikolay Strakhov and considered him a reactionary philosopher.
In 1883 Nikolay Strakhov wrote The Struggle Against the West in Russian Literature where he supported ideas of Nikolay Danilevsky and claimed that Western European rationalism lacks scientific grounds.